Wraithwood Botanist

"True…" I grimaced. "Do you think I can hold my own next year without them?"

"Probably not," Lithco said. "You got the raw power, but the skill barrier’s still too high. They’ll be sending a senior at least. So if you wanna take ’em, you’ll need to up your game."

"So I’m fucked no matter what I do?"

"Not at all. You can make alliances and deals, set traps—organize. You know what’s coming, so you can plan for it. I’d focus on getting your tribute. By the time you finish up that, you’ll be a lot stronger than you are now… Or dead."

"Great… Well, that answers that." I sighed. "Well, time to go. I gotta write these back and go back to avoiding all this BS." I flicked my hands at him, and he scoffed.

"You’re gonna rub someone the wrong way with that attitude one day," Lithco said. "Oh wait, you have."

"Bye~" I chimed. He chuckled and left, and I made dinner, trying to clear my mind. I couldn’t, so I committed to Mental Shielding training. That did the trick.

Then I wrote Aiden, thanking him for everything he had done for me and letting him know that I was considering the Dante’s offer and would get back to Hadrian after judging my situation come next Harvest.

Once that was done, I purged the Harvest, tribute, and Melhans from my mind, crashing on my cot and committing to Mental Shielding to free myself from reflection. That worked. It always did.

Then I fell asleep before dinner and didn’t wake for what felt like a long time.

I spent a few days enjoying my winter, only to find myself going stir-crazy. To fill up the time, I drew out blueprints of an alchemy workshop, sauna, bathhouse, and meditation facility for threading and mana-shaping exercises. They would be crude, but I planned on ordering a significant amount of supplies to haul back in the fall—assuming I didn’t die.

I pushed that aside and finished my plans. Once I finished, I braved the cold to begin.

I started with the bathhouse, tunneling down a large room, then drilling a fifteen by fifteen square pool into it—leaving steps on all sides. It would be paradise once I figured out how to waterproof or tile it.

Kira didn’t want to wait. Once she finished sanding the tub, she sat on one of the steps and leaned back with this satisfied expression, and I giggled my head off. I really wondered if she’d bathe with me.

It would be a grand time.

My next project was the alchemy station, which was far more complicated.

I wanted to take part, so I used my mana drill to crudely drill through the base area, which was three feet high. Then, we crawled in like miners, drilling four feet down, leaving table-sized countertops. Once completed, we drilled up, leaving blocks above the counters.

It looked strange until we hollowed out the areas above the counters, creating massive shelves for alchemy ingredients. I did the same for the area under the block table. In just a few days, I created a space with four countertops and enough shelves to contain a thousand jars and preservation chambers.

Things were shaping up nicely.

Creating the ventilation system was the hardest. It required me to learn basic arraycraft to create suction magic that pulled in gasses like a hood and disassembled arrays for breaking harmful chemicals into their base parts. But it was a challenge and gave me something to do for the rest of winter.

The last space was the meditation chamber, which was a simple room with no counters. I built it up high, in case I wanted to drill down and create furniture, but for now, it was just a simple space with no distractions. Once I decorated it, it would be beautiful.

And then I was done—

—and that made me sad.

There was still something so… empty about the place. And I knew what it was:

The lack of people.

During the cold and distant nights when the wind would howl and pat against my door, I would think about bringing people here. My brother to train him. Felio to do alchemy.

I wondered if they would come.

Tyler was almost certain to join at one point if I promised him spells, meat, and elixirs—if only after he turned eighteen.

As for Felio… why not? She would have access to ingredients that only grew in the spring and summer and no family bullshit to worry about.

Sure, it was dangerous, but if I proved I could survive with my limbs intact, it wouldn’t be that hard of a sell. One year would make the Hellara family extravagantly rich from resource collection, and their daughter would amass power at a speed that rivaled the likes of Hadrian.

The question was whether she’d risk her life… and I wasn’t certain.

It was nerve-wracking, and I didn’t want to create a home or two that only served to remind me of my loneliness. So I pushed it off a few days until my anxiety bubbled over, and I wrote to my family.

I told them about my life and my quirky little village. I spoke of creating a bath and a home and my fluffy, fiendish friends that kept me company. Then, I hinted at how safe the forest was in certain conditions so they wouldn’t have to worry so much.

Dad wrote back with high spirits, expressing his jealousy of the bath, and joked about coming to visit.

Mom wasn’t keen on the idea, but she was looking forward to joining me next Harvest from the safety of the Mouth. Unlike me, they would have twelve Dante guards surrounding them at all times, so they wouldn’t have to worry about anything.

As for Tyler, he just said, "Thanks for making my life hell."

The Dante were apparently shoveling resources down his throat and working him after Kalas finished beating his weakness into him. There was no rest in his life. But he was determined. I could tell he felt worthless this year and wanted to make up for it. He had a long way to go, but I was certain he would get there at some point.

All of them wished me Merry Christmas and told me Gatsby sent his love. That melted my heart a bit.

I loved them so much.

Their reply reminded me that—even if they never came—I still needed to make somewhere they could live to remind them that they were always welcome.

So when the ice on the tree bark started to melt, and sun rays pierced through the dead canopies, I went out and started building four homes for my family and future guests.

One had a simple table, a chimney, and a flat floor to sleep twenty if necessary. Then, I hollowed three tree houses like mine with different layouts. To be honest, all three were better than mine by a mile, as I had improved, but they weren’t my home. There was something special about the first, so I just smiled at the thought of my family and friends having better places to sleep than me and called it a year.

I’d furnish them in the spring.

The rest of winter was spent indoors, threading and mana shaping during the day, and then cooking and reading books on Areswood plants before storytime with Lithco and Mana Shielding practice.

And like most things you think might never end, it blinked by in a flash, and I only really noticed when the torok core crumbled to stone and the sound of distant birds chirped in the distance. The sun sparkled over the snow, and the ice thawed in areas, exposing earthy smells. It was almost spring, and I was so excited to start foraging for alchemic supplies and poisons.

I spent those two weeks before spring hiking with Kline, watching as the seeds that lay dormant during the winter began to germinate, breaking down their protective coatings and allowing the plant to sprout.

I found a patch of flowers that had already bloomed, evidence they might be geophytes like tulips, having underground storage organs like bulbs that contain water and nutrients for rapid germination in the spring. Or perhaps they were clonal propagators, like strawberries, plants that reproduce asexually and grow new stems and leaves every year but never truly die, existing dormant under the ground for winter until it’s time to reproduce.

I didn’t check because there was a certain romanticism in a forest of unknown plants, and I wanted to soak it in before my cheat skills filled my head with unlimited amounts of information.

I also didn’t want to get my hopes up because I desperately wanted there to be clonal propagators in the area, simply because what they symbolized—

—immortality.

Individual strawberry plants die every few years, but their ability to create exact clones of themselves allows them to live forever in the right environment, and they never need a sexual partner to do it.

How romantic.

Once I soaked it all in, the spring began in earnest, and the foraging and learning began. It was a wild time, with my identification skills supercharging the process—

—and I wanted it to be even faster.

So, I finally committed to using the legacy reward I got for completing Elana’s legacy quest.

It was a reward, meaning that I only got three options, but one was obviously the winning ticket. It read:

"Skill: Alchemic Scrapper

Grade: Diamond (+)

Description: While it’s nothing to be particularly proud of, the Oracle has ascertained that you don’t care about the grand pursuit of alchemic purity and instead hope to have as much fun—and fix as many problems—as you can. So, instead of providing high-level skills to make the most of the miraculous resources in the forest, this skill scans the area for plants within a quarter-mile radius of your hike zone and provides recipe suggestions based on available ingredients.

There are over 50,000 tier 1-4 recipes as part of the skill, but don’t get complacent: you must have created the general creation type previously and have used at least 25% of the key active ingredients (non-synergistic additives) for tier 1 recipes to trigger, 50% for tier 2, 75% for tier 3, and 90% for tier 4. So you’ll only gain benefit if you branch out, creating concoctions out of everything until every plant you see highlights recipe combinations, and never getting complacent with the low-hanging fruit.

Note: This skill will link to your atlas and supporting books to recommend locations to create alchemic recipes. The more books you collect, the more powerful the skill becomes.

Bonus: As a legacy reward, the Oracle is offering you the The Dronami Alchemic Codex 14: Areswood Forest (Rings 4-6) book. It provides dynamic highlighting for alchemic plants in orange."

I read the description with a wide grin. "Score."

I bought it and immediately set to work, collecting alchemic herbs as they popped up and storing them in the surplus of preservation containers I got through trades and Felio’s equipment. Since there was a lot, I foraged indiscriminately, picking poisons, herbs, and perennials, preparing for alchemic madness when I got back to my home.

And that’s what I ended up doing.

I returned to my alchemy workstation, which was now stocked with over a hundred chemicals, in addition to Felio’s dynamic heating arrays, glassware, and other supplies that I had on hand, giving me a Breaking Bad set to get that show on the road.

And oh, did I make the most of it. I crafted like a mad scientist until Kline meowed at me, demanding his dinner.

"Okay, okay…" I said, breaking focus for the first time in almost a day. I exited the flap and found the lurvines waiting for dinner as well.

"You’re spoiled—the whole lot of ya," I declared. Then I proceeded to cook them lavish portions of meat because I was totally that woman.

Then it resumed. I hit the alchemy station the next morning, working ceaselessly, creating a kaleidoscope of various medicines.

Headache medicine.

Tooth numbing remedies.

Clarity boosters.

It didn’t matter what it was. If I had the ingredients and the recipe, I would make it, making the most of Felio’s equipment. It had dynamic glassware with arrays that automatically separated different liquids, had measuring lines, and adjustable heating pads. I didn’t know what half the equipment did at first, but Lithco taught me as part of my skills. He was my full-time teacher and let me shoot the shit with him after hours.

It was nice—

—but it wouldn’t last forever.

I had less than five gallons of ethanol, a necessary ingredient—by definition—for elixirs. I also was lacking in terms of sugars for syrups. Time was running out.

The obvious solution was to make some—but that was way easier said than done.

It took about a thousand pounds of grapes to fill a cask of homemade wine.

One. Thousand. Pounds.

That was off the table.

What I needed was grain. With a single bushel (fifty-six pounds for those in the know), I could create two gallons of ethanol. And since I could distill with Separation, I would only need to wait a week for the grains to ferment into alcohol to collect pure, sweet alcohol.

But that left another problem: grains were harvested during the summer and fall.

My only hope was to find tubers like potatoes that I could harvest in the late spring. Then I’d need to plant grains if I was serious about living here—

—and I was.

So I kept going, making plans as I started concocting poisons, skillfully learning how to work with them and store them.

"And now…" I whispered, blotting a particularly nasty poison on a stick. It sizzled on contact, releasing a plume of acrid smoke.

I immediately Separated the poison from the stick, then threw the latter out of the lab to save my precious tables. Then, I stared at the corrosive droplet of liquid hovering in the air.

"I wonder…" I flicked my fingers, and the rest of the poison in the vial came out, swirling in a green dance as I created a water sphere around it.

I went outside, pulled out Nymbral, put the poison water sphere on the tip, and charged up a hurricane arrow. Then I decided against it, as I was right next to my home, so I used Separation to put the poison away. But I hadn’t even gone inside when a burning desire to test it out took root, and I found myself hiking through the forest to give it a shot.

Two miles in, I stopped before a towering tree. It was a football field’s distance from me, but when I activated Moxle Dilation and Mental Shielding, my concentration and enhanced senses made it feel like it was right beside me.

I pulled out Nymbral, popped the poison bottle, and charged up a hurricane arrow, adding the entire bottle of poison. Then I aimed at the tree—and let the arrow fly.