Shrines

A shrine is the counter at which progression is transacted. Perks cannot be purchased in the field: an unlocked node sits waiting behind an exclamation mark until Coen reaches a shrine, and the price is experience points earned by completing objectives — plus, for the node itself, a **time segment**. There is **one** experience bar and **one** pool of skill points, shared by all three trees. Objectives completed as a swordsman pay for hexes; a point spent on Vampirism is a point Swordmastery will not get. That makes the shopping list at a shrine a single budget rather than three, which is the constraint the build planner is actually working against. Shrines are also the fast-travel network, and they double as quest objectives. Not all of them work when found. The walkthrough reaches one that has been desecrated and is missing its heart; the heart turns up as loot from a nearby camp of Brencis's soldiers, and restoring it brings the shrine back into service. So a shrine on the map is a lead, not a guarantee. The practical consequence for routing: **learning is location-bound and time-costed.** Banking several unlocks and buying them in one visit does not save time — each purchase moves the clock — but it does save the walk, and it lets you see the whole shopping list at once before committing any of the budget.