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But I was, and Kline was, too, so we got up and left the shelter as soon as possible, willing to face another wandering reaper over a single minute of being in that room.

That said, as soon as I felt the brisk, misty breeze of the morning on my face, smelled the aroma of fungi and herbs all around me, and heard the sound of symphony bugs playing melodies—I forgot all my worries.

"God, it feels good to be in nature…" I said, looking down at Kline. "Don’cha think?"

Kline looked up and meowed before sauntering off, ears twitching, smelling plants and fungi. Then he disappeared and reappeared fifty feet away.

"Seriously?" I whispered.

I blinked, and he was back, meowing at me with a smirk on his face.

"Well, at least it worked," I chuckled nervously, crouching and petting his ears. He purred.

I stood and looked around. "Where are we going today…?" I pulled up my map. "Oh… yeah." I frowned when I remembered what I had to do. There was a list of ingredients, and I got all of them—except one.

Lumidra—the active ingredient.

I pulled up the information on the plant.

—---

Common Name: Lumidra

Summary: Lumidra is one of the rarest flowers on this planet, and the main reason for that is that absolutely everything kills it. Too much heat? Not enough cold? Light touch? If it didn’t exist in a secluded cave full of earth piranhas that worship it for its spiritually hallucinogenic spores, it would be extinct. Thankfully, there is one in a cave near here, and it’s quite alive. As long as you can dispatch an army of the creatures guarding it without having them panic and destroy it, you’ll be fine… Good luck.

Species: Lumidra Skilasna

Type: Spirit Flower

Key Facts:

Luimida propagates using a symbiotic relationship with small spirit beasts called shalks that carry the spores to other caves.

The flower is famously sensitive to impurities. You must quickly pick it while using a purifying spell and lock it in a preservation chamber within 15 seconds.

The flowers grow deep within long caves, so directly fighting the beasts outside the cave is permissible, so long as there aren’t seismic attacks. However, magic that changes the atmosphere in the cave or destabilizes the ground will kill the plant.

The plant filters impurities so it is not affected by poisons or other chemicals, so long as they don’t cause direct damage to the roots or cause exothermic reactions.

The hallucinogenic effects help connect the user to a state of enlightenment where they temporarily understand mana at a deeper level.

Species that inhale the spores consistently agree that they saw and heard a single entity.

Warning: Shalks do not use magic and are neither fast nor strong, as they let their young eat them to obtain soul meat, but they’re the size of muskrats and attack in swarms of a few hundred to a few thousand. They are nearly blind but have sensitive noses.

—---

"Swarms… great," I chuckled nervously. "I’ll get right on that." Then I paused. "But seriously. A flower with spores…." My fascination drowned out my nervousness.

Flowers don’t spread through spores—they spread through sexual reproduction and seeds. Spores, single-celled organisms that can replicate the entire body, were hallmarks of fungi, ferns, and moss. So that was strange, but there was something else far more fascinating.

"It propagates by starting a religion… It’s like a cult."

I pulled up my killer animals book and read about shalks and found something fascinating. Their young leave when overpopulation occurs, finding new caves. Before leaving the cave, the departing shalks are compelled to take a trip to the lumidra, where they get high on the spores and then track the spores on their fur into new caves where they spawn. Every animal that the Oracle has bound with, from intelligent lizardfolk (yeah, it was a thing) to shalks, all describe meeting a single entity they pray to. That meant that this plant literally reproduced by starting a religion. It was impressive.

"Could you imagine?" I chuckled nervously, looking at Kline. "Finding god only to get eaten by a pack of ground piranhas…"

Kline meowed apathetically and went back to grooming himself. I wasn’t so apathetic. Even if Kline could understand me, he didn’t have the concept of eating hallucinogens. If he did, he’d know that those spores were the most dangerous part of the mission. One spore reaching my nose could block me out for hours and get me eaten.

"Come on," I said, pinching the tip of Kline’s ear. "Let’s go make some poisons."

2.

A god living in the floating gardens above Dranami watched Mira through an Oracle-provided feed. The Oracle often held events like these—snuff films starring idiotic neophytes whose personal requests left them in dire straights. The idea was that gods would watch it for their entertainment, but in doing so, might attract resources for the neophytes. It was the only means that the Oracle could have to save these individuals. So, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, the gods found themselves watching unique scenarios like they were common war games.

Elana wasn’t one for watching such games. Yet when she heard that there was a neophyte that survived a night in the Areswood Forest and had a class that was strangely suited to surviving, she stopped her heximedica research and watched—and kept watching.

Now, she was watching Mira creating an aphrodisiac with a fascinated expression. "That’s rather crude," she mused in anticipation. "But not a bad way."

Beside Mira were preservation boxes containing deadly—yet topically safe—poisons that she hadn’t bought a poison recipe for using. If Elana were right, Mira would make up a poison on her own to prove that she could survive without the system’s divine protection. If she did, it would be wonderful.

Elana glanced at Kline, who was grooming his paws in the shade. It’s hard to believe it’s just them…

The Oracle had a team of demigods set up barriers in the forest to protect them if Mira and Kline completed Telgan’s Legacy Quest. They also gave them resources and put them in a position to receive high-level requests.

Even then.

Mira and Kline should be dead.

Areswood Forest was designed to be unlivable. The Originators who created the Domain System—a chain of arrays under the ground that controlled soul force on the planet—placed the forest in the First Domain to prevent those in the upper domains from getting to it. They still could, but they had to curse themselves one to seven times and would sacrifice decades, centuries, or millennia of soul force to do so.

That made the message loud and clear: keep out.

The gods widely believe it was because the Originators placed it there to protect something, but the only individual to make it to the Seventh Ring, Brindle Grask—the famed "Black Botanist"—refused to tell people what was there. That drove greedy neophytes, demigods, and gods crazy. So they accumulated resources and challenged it in massive parties for tens of thousands of years, saving up requests to buy books on trap plants and poisons—but it was too expensive. It took an epic request for Pathers—those with combat classes—to obtain the poison plant book that highlighted poisons. Obtaining even a diamond request was impossible for most plant classes to accomplish. Since people didn’t have the highlighting, they eventually stepped on something they shouldn’t have and succumbed to poisoning, paralysis, or fungal disease—assuming they didn’t die from a random encounter with a third evolution beast.

Few survived.

Yet, here was a young woman who asked to be dropped into Areswood Forest—and actually planned to live there. She was competing for Elana’s Legacy and was determined to get Brindle’s—and how was she doing it? She was making poisons and aphrodisiacs in the middle of a forest with a creepy smile.

Haspel and Telgan are going to loathe me, Elana thought as she sat down, leaving her apprentices to make the facial creams that she was working on. So why not tell Brindle as well? She grinned. Tomorrow. I’ll do it tomorrow. But for now, I should call those two… Kori while I’m at it.

Brindle was the Black Botanist himself. Even if Mira were to go after the soulmancer’s legacy, he would never know it. But that just seemed too cruel. Elana felt it was her duty to fulfill her pupil’s wishes—if only to rub it in another’s god’s face. But first, she wanted to rub it in all the other gods’ faces first.

3.

Soulmancy had to be the best thing since smiling because I loved alchemy, and I couldn’t imagine turning down a legacy that let me work with it.

Look, only a scientist could truly appreciate magic. For example, suppose someone wants to create pure ethanol from alcohol. In that case, they need fermentation tanks to produce the alcohol, distillation columns with heat exchangers to separate it, and molecular sieves to selectively absorb water out of it.

Only then could you get near 100% ethanol.

With magic, I could just separate the ethanol while hovering the liquid in the air like a princess mage! No wonder fantasy worlds remained "medieval"—it was because modern equipment is completely useless in the face of magic.

And interestingly enough, I feel like I was better at this than 99% of alchemists would be. That sounds presumptuous, but with magic, it wasn’t really necessary to learn hard science. The gods, sure. Researchers, sure. But with the Guide, you had a million years of recipes that broke things down into separate this, extract that, sublimate this, measure that, and it was all prepackaged. So, if you wanted to make your own creations, it just wouldn’t be the same to think in terms of chemical reactions.

Science for the win!

As for what I was making, I was making an aphrodisiac that I was certain would turn an impotent male into a Viagra-snorting sex god. But that had a while to cook, so I moved to the main course:

Poisons.

Both required the beasts to drink it, so I needed to start with bait. To do that, I mashed trian berries and ebb root (delicacies shalks sought out) and sauteed them lightly. With any luck, they would feel like their brethren came home with food. At that very least, they would be confused.

While it cooked, I started on the poison. I grabbed some froxim weeds and used Desiccation—a spell that removed water without applying heat—to turn it into a plant that was drier than dead grass. That allowed me to grind it in a mortar with ease.

Froxim was the star of the show. It was similar to neomycin—the active antibiotic in Neosporin—which is topically medicinal but extremely lethal to ingest. It was lethal and tasteless, making it ideal—it smelled like battery acid. Since the shalks had sensitive noses, that was obviously a problem. Therefore, I chose a root that was famous for removing an animal’s sense of smell—jostle root.

I sliced some of the ginseng-like root down the center and hung it up, allowing the sap to run out like molasses. The minute I did it, my sense of smell instantly disappeared. It was like smelling pure carbon.

Well, I know it works, I thought as I continued.

To finish things off, I used Desiccation on quarlen flower pedals to separate the essential oils. I put those into an apparatus and used water vapor from a vapor array to collect the essential oil. Once in gaseous form, I let it condense and go into a large jug of water.

By that point, the original berry root mixture was ready, so I poured it into the water like a mixed drink, hoping that it smelled delicious—considering I couldn’t smell anything.

Bait that doubles as an aphrodisiac—complete.

Now, it was time to finish my poison. I mixed most of the jostle root (we’d be wearing some to mask our scent) and the froxim weed in a large bowl and added a small pinch of pramite as a catalyst to speed up the process of the jostle root turning into a liquid. Lastly, I added ethanol as both a solvent and binding agent. Once completed, I had a tasteless, topical-safe poison that removed the sense of smell and didn’t give any other indication of being a poison.

I packaged the poison in a jar, grabbed my aphrodisiac cocktail, and my bag of exploding shenai fruit. It was time to pay the shalks a visit.