It took me a bit of time to explain everything that had happened to Kene, and I was forced to do it again when we arrived back within the now-mostly empty village of the fungal folk.

  “Then it vanished and left a bunch of compost where the tools of war had once been, and also these,” I said, pointing to the new cluster of bright orange, trumpet shaped mushrooms.

  “Those are called spirit lanterns,” the son of the elder fungal folk said. “They’re related to the bioluminescent jack-o-lantern mushroom, but instead of producing spores that glow in the dark, their spores can be used to empower ghosts, shades, and asomatous.”

  “What about other spirits?” I asked. If I could use them to empower Dusk and Dawn, that could be amazing.

  “Not sure,” he said, adjusting his mushroom hat. “I’ve only got knowledge of them thanks to the ancestral memories we have.”

  “The spores can also be added into potions to allow ghosts – maybe shades and asomatous, I dunno – to imbibe potions,” Kene said.

  “Oh, and I thought your knowledge was breaking down now that I was moving into mushrooms?” I teased.

  “Well I knew some of the big ones!” they protested. “These only grow after a particularly old, dangerous, and powerful spirit has passed on. Grandmother insisted I recognize them, since she needed a bunch as part of some big deal with the Shining Spirits? That was a while ago though.”

  “If she still needs them, I’d be happy to provide. I know that some of the Shining Spirit’s magic was used to suppress the hag,” I said.

  “I’ll let her know. Or you can, if she pops up near you. I give even odds, honestly.”

  There was a bit more conversation as Kene and I helped move some of the knee-high mushroom houses over into Dusk’s realm. Dawn, tired after holding off someone two stages above her, flew off into the house to bunk down for a nap. She deserved it – when I’d pulled a similar feat against the war root, it had almost killed me. She had been in less physical danger, but it still had to have been taxing.

  It was odd to me that there seemed to be an entire dimension of magic that I was missing out on, which spirits used, but after considering for a bit, I let it go. Spirits couldn’t use energy in the same way I could, after all, and the reinforcement of my body through that energy was a lifesaver.

  After we finished moving the last of the houses, the leader of the fungal folk pulled us aside and let out a deep belly laugh.

  “Well, for the second time in a short few years, you’ve done us a vast favor. From the tales my son told me, you’ve treated them well, and taken in a great many of the smallfolk. You brought them to see the falling stars, even countries away, and they advanced greatly. The realm being ripe with pixies, bwbatch, brownies, and an abundance of magical plants and beasts have allowed his village and villagers to prosper.”

  He smiled and shook his head.

  “Truly, it is a wonder.”

  “I don’t know about all that,” I said guiltily, shifting from foot to foot. Kene looked even more uncomfortable than I did.

  “We just drove off an Abyssal Shambler, let you move in, and did some things that Malachi would probably have done anyways.”

  I snorted – as if Kene wouldn’t have helped however they could.

  “Don’t sell yourselves short,” the old man said. “I’ve got a couple of things I’d like to give you two. While most of our resources will be used with integrating the rest of the village, there are some things we can do for you. The smallest of them – you said you were looking for an Abyssal Shambler, right?”

  “I am!” I said.

  “Here,” the leader said, pressing his hand to my leg. His magic surged into me, and a fungal divination spell settled into place, pointing me in the direction of the shambler. “But that’s not all. Come with me?”

  We followed him out to the same spot where he’d exposed the path underground to where the war roots were. He opened it again, but this time, instead of facing north, he faced south, the staircase leading down to what looked like a different half of the same cellar.

  This side was almost entirely empty, save for two small piles of things. He pointed at one, addressing me.

  “That one’s yours.”

  I wandered over and sat down in the dirt, tail flicking as I examined it. The first thing I picked up was a burlap bag of what looked like very wet, loose mulch and other decaying plant matter. It felt odd – not like a mana source, but more like the slow, burning developmental power of a natural treasure.

  “We were actually glad that you were blasting your power out as much as you do, because it let us know this would work,” the leader said, chuckling. “It’s a soil loosening mulch. With your five gates, you’re going to have a lot of digging to do. There’s only three doses in here – it’s all we could spare – and it will only work for moving from early to mid third gate unless you want to permanently weaken yourself, but… This will loosen the soul-soil and make it much easier for you to dig beneath the mist wall.”

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  I was hoping that the steps in my beastgate would dig themselves, much like the walls had opened themselves, but even if they did, that still left me with a lot of digging to do. I thanked him for the thoughtful gift, and then moved to the next.

  “We’re not especially good enchanters, nor do we have any use for human sized tools,” the old mushroom man said nervously, “I do hope you don’t think we’re just trying to offload you with our junk. It is quite useful, but our attempts to reverse engineer it to train our own young didn’t work quite so well.”

  There was another small burlap sack, but this one had three tools in it, each of which was glowing with abnegation mana. The first was a pair of glasses, the second was a wrist cuff, and the third was a ring.

  “What are they?” I asked, turning them over in my hands.

  “Resistance training tools. The glasses will inhibit your mana senses, the cuff dampens your ability to manipulate mana, and the ring pushes back against mana meditations,” he told me. “If you just wear them, nothing happens, but if you learn to push through the enchantments, you can improve your power by a decent bit. Our enchanters just struggled – we have no abnegation.”

  “Talk to the bwbatch,” I said. “They do. But yeah, this is great! Thank you.”

  I picked up my final gift then, a black orb that looked almost like coal, but was kind of slick and oily. I looked a bit closer – orb wasn’t the right word for it. This was definitely some kind of oblong, almost heart-shaped thing, with grooves where the atriums and ventricles would be. And the oil was slowly dripping out from where the veins would come from.It gave off surges of death mana in slow but steady pulses, rhythmically releasing it out into the air.

  “That’s a coalheart. We noticed that you don’t have a harvesting spell for death mana,” the fungal folk said. “So we thought we’d give you something kind of similar. You can take this into your mana-garden, and it will eat up space like a spell. It grows like a spell as well. It doesn’t have any active effects, but it provides a constant flow of death mana. Not as much as something like a growth item would, but far more than the normal ingrained effect of a spell. It can be tempered with your own advancement – a spell that is not a spell, in a way.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “Almost like a full-gate spell, then. No active effects, but a massive passive effect.”

  “No, this doesn’t absorb your walls – that’s critical for a full-gate spell,” the old man said. “But… I take your point.”

  I contemplated it for a second, before immediately pulling it and the mulch into my mana-garden. I’d check to make sure the mulch wasn’t harmful before I used it, but I might as well stow it away in my ungated mana for now, and the coalheart was in essence a spell. It might not technically be one, but even if I wound up taking a third gate death based harvesting spell, it wouldn’t be a waste – improving my mana regeneration was well worth losing a bit of space.

  The coalheart sank into the soil of my third gate, growing rapidly in size until it was a coal statue of a heart the same size as some of the trees in the rest of my garden. It thumped, and a pulse of mana released out from it.

  I hadn’t realized just how bad my lack of a harvesting spell had been until just then. As it pulsed and filled my third gate slowly, trickling down into my second and first gates, it was like giving a man dying of thirst a glass of water.

  I sucked in a deep breath and let it out.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Thank you,” he responded with a laugh, then wandered over to Kene, explaining the assorted prepared items for Kene. They’d received a set of the training tools as well, but instead of a coalheart and mulch, they’d been given some sunset-ginseng, sunrise-turkey-tail tea blend that would help them purify and refine their spirit. It was no golden soul elixir, but it was a small, subtle step that Aerde’s diagnostics approved of. The other thing they’d been given was a bright yellow tulip that could be refined into a variety of alchemical advancement elixirs for solar or life mana.

  It was one of those ingredients that had no real meaning to me, that I would have passed without a second glance at worst, and collected as a weak third-gate mana source at best, and served as a sharp reminder of the difference between a combat alchemist and a real one.

  Still, Kene seemed delighted by the rare find, and I was happy for them.

  “Do you understand?” they said. “I can refine a sunlit pasture drop with this!”

  “I assume from your tone that’s good?”

  “Yes!” they said. “It burns away mist and surges your walls up at the same time, helping you grow out AND up, in both life and solar mana!”

  “Oh, wow, that is good,” I agreed.

  We sorted away our gifts, Kene putting the flower away in some water, and we went out to hunt down an Abyssal Shambler.

  With the help of the patriarch’s spells, tracking one down was easy, and the one we encoutntered had only just broken into third gate, making it an easy opponent for me to disable, then scan with my mana senses and copy down its armor spell.

  It was a touch anticlimactic, compared to the first time I’d fought against one, but back then, I’d been fighting up a rank, and against a much more experienced shambler. Its armor had adapted to my much more limited bag of tricks that I’d had at the time, and I’d changed a lot.

  Looking at the spell array, I could immediately see how it was both an absurd boon, and a danger.

  The spell created a medium plating of mushrooms around the user – specifically, crystal honey fungus. It created it wholesale, but much like how briarthreads could be amplified with even just a single strand of a briar plant fed into the staff, this could use the normal mushroom to improve itself.

  The normal fungus wasn’t super edible, magical, or medicinal but it seemed important, so I took a small sample from the abyssal shambler – not enough to actually hurt it, though. More like shearing excess wool from a sheep.

  The way the spell worked was then imitating some of the natural arrays within the mushroom, the arrays restructuring the energy in the plant in a way that seemed to spike normal genetic diversity. In the non-magical mushroom, it helped the fungus to adapt to unfavorable changes in environmental conditions, like a drought.

  The third gate spell took this effect and ran with it, blowing it up until it was able to adapt to attacks, and even types of attacks, storing the information about what it needed to resist and how as matter within my mana-garden.

  That was where the danger came from. I would need to make sure to regularly prune out excess stored adaptations. My gates would grow upwards with the walls, so I would be able to continually expand it some, but I did need to ensure that it didn’t adapt so fast that it would overrun the rest of my mana. I could remember what happened with the lightning vines that the assassin had used, and I didn’t want that to happen to me.

  Still, incredibly useful, and it would absolutely take up a good portion of my mid-third gate, alongside some supplementary spells.

  We released the shambler after that and headed back to the village. I spent the night at Kene’s, since we’d be seeing each other a little less while I was working in Crysite, and the following morning I departed.

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