  Dust extinction is one of the most reliable tracers of the gas distribution
in the Milky Way. The near-infrared (NIR) Vista Variables in the Via Lactea
(VVV) survey enables extinction mapping based on stellar photometry over a
large area in the Galactic plane. We devise a novel extinction mapping
approach, XPNICER, by bringing together VVV photometric catalogs, stellar
parameter data from StarHorse catalogs, and previously published Xpercentile
and PNICER extinction mapping techniques. We apply the approach to the VVV
survey area, resulting in an extinction map that covers the Galactic disk
between 295 and 350 degrees at longitude and -2 to 2 degrees at latitude, and
the Galactic bulge between -10 and 5 degrees at latitude. The map has 30
arcseconds spatial resolution and it traces extinctions typically up to about
10-20 mag of visual extinction and maximally up to Av~30 mag. We compare our
map to previous dust based maps, concluding that it provides a high-fidelity
extinction-based map, especially in its ability to recover both the diffuse
dust component of the Galaxy and moderately extincted giant molecular cloud
regions. The map is especially useful as independent, extinction-based data on
the Galactic dust distribution and applicable for a wide range of studies from
individual molecular clouds to the studies of the Galactic stellar populations.
