Book 2, Chapter 60

The next three weeks were some of the most restful I’d had in months despite all the extra work I had to do. The first order of business was to expand the garden, which thankfully was handled by the adults. Then we got it seeded and I used a spell called mass plant growth to speed everything up so we could increase our food reserves to accommodate the extra mouths.

That cost me my entire first days’ worth of mana, but I considered it worth the cost. The next day, I went beyond the barrier with Talik to help him with his tree experiments. Plants were a source of mana in this environment, but not a good one. They generated it at far greater rates than humans due to sheer size, but they also used it as quickly as they made it just trying to keep themselves alive. The key to tapping into their mana was to find the biggest, healthiest ones there were, the ones with abundant water and good soil that could survive without mana supplementing their nutrients.

Those were, unfortunately, few and far between. Talik had started mapping out the valley and had found a few, but without the draw stone set up they’d used back in Alkerist, he hadn’t quite figured out how to extract the mana from those few candidates that had any.

Mana drain was far too difficult a spell for him to use right now, but I did take the time to get Talik started on enchanting work and promised to come back to combining multiple disciplines together once he’d gotten a handle on that. In the meantime, I harvested as much mana as I thought I could safely get without hurting the trees. Taking it all right now could very well mean the death of them, which would make it hard to come back and get a second round later.

After that came a second construction project to give the orphans a place to live as well as the expansion of the fields, then regular lessons in mana control. Mother finally went through the ignition ritual, an audience of strange children watching her. With more than a little trepidation, it was agreed that we needed all the mana we could get, and Senica was also allowed to ignite her core. Much to my surprise, she needed almost no help in achieving a perfect stage one core. I’d expected her to reach that point, but not without more assistance from me.

“Just like that?” Juby asked after. “You just… made two new mages like you were the chief spirit passing out blessings left and right?”

“I did,” I said. “And I’ll do the same for all of you. The more mana this little village of ours has, the safer we are and the faster we’ll grow.”

I left the mana control lessons to the adults and focused my efforts on recovering my strength. I had two teleports to make to return to Derro, and I needed a day in Alkerist to make the potion I’d promised Rouri in exchange for her information. It hadn’t been very long since I’d planted a new batch of herbs in the hopes of growing the needed reagents, and I had some concerns about not having the required resources.

Without a teleportation beacon, it would have taken me four days to generate the mana needed to return to my impromptu alchemy workshop. It cost me half that as it was, and when I appeared there, I immediately displaced a thin layer of dust. After sneezing a few times and using elemental manipulation to clean the place up, I eyed up the room. At least I knew no one had been in there while I’d been gone.

I snuck out to the arbor to claim my supplies from the greenhouse and avoided everyone as much as possible. One of the Arborists stopped in surprise when he spotted me entering the greenhouse, but he didn’t try to stop me. Still, it put a clock on my work since he was almost certainly going to tell Shel I was here. I didn’t want to deal with her questions if I didn’t have to.

I’d need to come back at least one more time for personal reasons, and I suspected I’d also be taking some homesick family members with me next time. At the moment, they still had too much to do getting our new home ready for the future, but eventually the work would be done and that would change.

I had everything I needed to make one single potion, the same one I’d promised Father. It would need to go to Rouri first, unfortunately. After going over the quality of my materials and figuring out how long it would take to refine things to the level I needed them, I came to an unhappy conclusion. Knowing that Shel would hunt me down, I left the door to my lab open so that she wouldn’t interrupt me when she came in.

It felt like a futile gesture when I made it, but to my surprise, when she strode through the doorway an hour later, she took one glance at what I was doing and sat down in the chair I’d placed in the corner specifically for her.

“Good afternoon,” I said.

“Hello, Gravin. What are you working on today?”

“Potion of mutability to allow those with lackluster ignitions a chance to smooth over some of the imperfections in their cores.”

“Interesting,” she said. “Are you going to be around for a day or two? I have some questions about a transmutation spell I’m trying to make.”

“Which one’s that?” I asked.

“I’m trying to reshape wood to sort of grow things in the shape I need.”

I glanced over at her. “While the tree is still alive?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “It’s not even close to worth the effort to transmute living things under most circumstances, and it’s certainly not going to be something you’re capable of without years of study. Even transmuting wooden planks or plant fibers is difficult to do. That’s why I’m dressed like this instead of wearing a shirt with the correct number of holes.”

“So your advice is to just hire a carpenter?”

“Or learn to make whatever it is you want from stone or metal. Those can be transmuted with basic and intermediate tier spells, depending on how complex what you’re trying to make is.”

It took me another three hours to finish up my potion, but in the end, I had a vial of golden liquid stoppered with a chunk of cork in my possession. “Huh,” I said as I held it up to the light. “Not great. The substitutions I had to make to the recipe don’t appear to have worked out well.”

“I’m surprised you’d make anything less than perfect quality,” Shel told me.

“Not enough mana in the ingredients,” I said. “If I’d had a few more weeks to wait, I could have made a better version, but I promised this one to someone in the next few days.”

“Hope it’s not someone important,” Shel said.

“Meh. I’m still doing the best I can by them, and it’s not like they could get it somewhere else. I feel no guilt over not producing the highest quality potion possible.”

“I suppose that’s fair. Could they take another one later to try again?”

“If they could find one, sure,” I said. “Good luck with that. Mages with strong alchemy skills aren’t exactly abundant around here.”

Not to mention that I’d already killed the Wolf Pack’s alchemist, and I wasn’t even sure he was good enough to make something like this. I hadn’t seen any similar recipes in the books I’d stolen from him, at least.

“Speaking of mages, I was wondering if you’d be willing to oversee an ignition,” Shel said. “Vhan has been thinking about doing it on his own for the last week, but he’s held off, hoping you’d come by again. I’ve also been working with a few other villagers, teaching them the mana manipulation techniques you showed us to enhance their control.”

“How many full storage crystals do you have?” I asked. If the mana wasn’t coming from me and I could get a top off to my own reserves, I’d be happy to spend fifteen minutes helping my last former student ignite his core, especially since Vhan was an Arborist, the only group in the village I was still on good terms with.

“Six,” Shel said.

“Standard size?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I did some quick mental math. I’d probably need two of them just for Vhan’s ignition. Three more would cover my teleportation mana, and the last one would round off what I’d burned doing alchemy. If I took all of them, I could arrive in Derro with my mana crystal more than three-quarters of the way full.

“I’ll take all of them.”

Shel recoiled. “All of them? You only needed three for mine.”

“I had more time to generate mana on my own before. I’m going directly back into hostile territory in the next hour or so this time. I had a woman trying to set me on fire when I teleported out of Derro a few weeks ago.”

Shel’s eyes widened a bit, but she remained as cool as ever. “That’s unfortunate, but I’m afraid we need those crystals, too. We can’t just give all our stockpiled mana away.”

“That’s fine. I understand. Tell Vhan I said good luck.”

“I could let you have four. That’d still be two full crystals for your own use.”

“Call it five and we’ve got a deal,” I said.

“Five and you make us ten more panes of glass,” Shel countered.

I considered that for a second and shook my head. “That’s less mana than just four. Give me all six and I’ll make you five panes of glass, but only if you’ve already got the sand for it. I don’t have time to wait around for it to be hauled in.”

She hesitated for a second, probably doing mental calculations of her own, but then she nodded and said, “Deal.”

* * *

If Karad or any of the others knew about me being in the village, they didn’t go out of their way to bother me. I walked the long way around back to the arbor while Shel went to fetch Vhan. As promised, they had a whole box full of sand gathered up to be transmuted into sheets of glass for their greenhouses.

I made the glass, then drained the storage crystals Shel had ordered be brought out to me. Vhan’s ignition ritual didn’t go as smoothly as my mother’s, not even close, but he still got a respectable fifteen times base speed increase to his mana generation. That put him a little way ahead of Shel, if I remembered correctly.

With my bargain complete, I found an out-of-the-way corner and began my teleportation spell. My shield ward was full, and I had no reason to think my original Derro beacon had been compromised, but I cast the spell fully prepared to fight for my life when I came out on the other side, if necessary.

The world faded away, then snapped back into focus inside the building I’d chosen to hide in. Immediately, I swept the area for the presence of other people. Nothing. Then I checked the wards. They were still functional, but beginning to degrade. Considering how long they’d been in use without maintenance now, that wasn’t terribly surprising.

Still, I’d need to set up a new beacon. I’d used this one too many times, and this part of the city was compromised. Now that I’d gotten everything I needed out of the outer city, the only thing left to do was go pay Velvet a visit, then set up a meeting with his boss to see if I’d need to finish killing the rest of them or if they’d gotten the message yet.

I had no plans on leaving them with their little war chest full of advanced and master tier magical toys, and I suspected Monarch wasn’t going to willingly hand it over. My money was on me having to finish wiping out the entire cabal, but we’d find out soon enough.