I didn’t actually end up deciding then and there. I had another cup of tea, then Meadow and I headed back to my dad’s house, where we cooked a spicy peanut curry. It was only then that I made my decision.

  “Synergy is important,” I said. “I don’t have anything for hudau mana, not right now, but I do have two thirds of it.”

  Dusk looked up from where she and Dawn were building a sand-castle out of flour and whistled that I was wrong. Kind of. Not entirely.

  I tilted my head and gestured for her to explain. She whistled that she had found three seeds during the falling stars. The lushloam tree now grew inside her, as did the purestar tree. Given that Dusk was the realm, and the realm was her, their power flowed deep inside her, connecting well.

  But one tree had failed to grow.

  The hollowvoid tree had all but refused to sprout, and Dusk thought it was because she couldn’t connect to the deep resolve in the tree. She was ultimately not a being of resolve. Destiny and fortune rang true to her.

  But for me?

  “The mana the tree gives off is more akin to a death heavy forest mana than pure hudau,” I pointed out. “Will it even work?”

  “It’s a tree of resolve,” Meadow pointed out. “A tree you’re going to bring within your spirit and body. Make it. Replace the power of the tree with the right mix. And besides, is your own hudau mana not ever so faintly forest and life and death? It’s not so far a jump. Though I will admit, using a set of ninelight morels, and a hollowvoid tree…”

  Meadow trailed off for a moment, then shrugged.

  “The interactions between deep mana and normal mana are finicky at the best of times. I’d advise you to only implant a small amount of your morels. In theory, integrating them should allow you to draw on their power normally, but between your legacy’s boosting of mirrored types and the deeps? It’s better to ensure you’ve got a backup, just in case.”

  I took a deep breath and nodded, the winds of resolve and fortune both blowing together in my spirit as an idea sparked in my head.

  “Alright. Let’s do this. But I’ve been saving up a lot of silver. I want an elixir. If this requires me to take in a resolve-based plant, I’m going to do it all at once – success or mana toxin hangover. Or spiritual damage if things really go badly.”

  “I can’t say I understand that, but if you think it will help, then I’ll be with you,” Meadow said. “Including with a mix of spiritbalm, healer’s heart, and some of the remaining spring water, in case.”

  We headed to the pharmacy, where I spent nearly nine thousand silver on a set of three pills. The first was a smooth black pill that would force a spell to move from the sketch stage to the mastered stage, and it was the one that least concerned me. The Beast Mage’s Soul already halfway acted that way, with its ability to form the energetic circuit inside of me.

  The second pill was a bright, glossy green pill, designed to imbue an understanding of plant spells, to help them move to the ingrained stage, and the third pill was a smooth brown pill designed to do the same for mineral magic.

  Those two had me a little more worried. Their level of mana toxicity was fairly high, and the last time I’d tried to use three advancement supplements in short order, I’d had a headache that felt like the worst bits of a hangover. I’d grown enough that I thought I could take them now, so long as I held back for the next several days, but I was still nervous.

  Purchasing them utterly destroyed my savings, and left me feeling somewhat amazed that I was able to afford it at all. The set had cost more than my second hand broom had, after all. It was… Strange. Deeply strange, and slightly uncomfortable. I resolved myself to donate at least a tenth of what I made from this point on, because I didn’t like the feeling of sitting on a hoard of money – no matter how small it may be.

  And so I found myself rolling the first pill between my fingers, staring down a withered black tree, sitting at the shore of the pond within Dusk, while Dusk and Meadow sat nearby, with the few extra Ninelight Morels that the fungal folk had managed to grow connected together, and holding the gemstone, extracted from my staff.

  “Connect your Enhance Plant Life to the tree, then pour your hudau mana in,” Meadow instructed. “These aren’t mana sources, but they have energy in them, as all plants do. These actually have mana as well, much like your healer’s heart. Then, while you alter its composition, draw it, the stone, and the morels into the spell as you sketch and take the pills.”

  I nodded, placing the pill in my mouth and flicking my spell onto the hollowvoid tree. I began pouring my beastgate mana in from my first gate, then my second, then third. I was glad I hadn’t already formed the power of the Kirin’s spell yet, because if I had, then I wasn’t sure I’d have had enough mana to even come close to the tree’s. It felt like it was weak, barely even first gate mana, but there was so much, while also having none at all. It was an incredibly strange sensation.

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  I began sketching the spell then, and pulled each of the treasures in. I placed the pills in my mouth and felt my body flood with their power, rushing through me and into my gate.

  The world around me seemed to melt, and I stood in the third gate of my hudau mana, staring as a hollow crystalline shape, almost like a cross between a hollow tree and tortoise shell, rose from the dirt.

  In my hands were three items. The first was a black seed, which I planted in the hollow, followed by a shimmering rainbow mushroom, and a deep blue sapphire.

  The morels melted away first, and the world tortoise magic took on a shimmering rainbow sheen. Connections wove themselves through my body and spirit, made even easier by the way that the two were already a gestalt, and I felt a shimmering flower crown, made from prismatic, shifting, rainbow morels wrap around my head. My tail and eyes shimmered, my eyes burning an even brighter rainbow color.

  The power surged through the remaining two, but something… didn’t feel quite right. I felt the movements of the power, then glared at the seed, putting the full pressure of my will behind it.

  “You there. Stop that, and start acting the way I told you.”

  It strained and bucked against me, almost like when my spirit resisted me when I cast foxstep, but I was able to wrestle it down. Frankly, compared to the desperate attempt to hang on to the power of the exploding inkstone, this felt almost underwhelming. It could resist, but it was far weaker than me, and seemed… Amused. As if this part was a mere formality, and the actually difficult part was yet to come.

  That was a little concerning, but I didn’t have much of a choice, so I accepted it. Integrating the hollowvoid tree took time, enough that I wasn’t sure how long had passed, but eventually the seed seemed to melt away, dissolving into the crystal shell of the world tortoise magic. Threads of black wove themselves through the rainbow, shimmering as they took on a supporting role. In my body, I felt the veins running through my heart transform into an inky black color as the power merged with that of the crown. Though it wasn’t adding more roots, the effect looked similar, with the thick black roots of my mana channels, and the veins coming off of my heart both sharing the same inky black color.

  Life and death and my own blend of almost, but not quite, hudau mana merged.

  There was another sensation of wrongness then, and I turned to the sapphire. It was trembling, almost on the verge of breaking apart. Compared to the power of the ninelight morels and the hollowvoid seed, a spread crystal couldn’t compare. It drew on the strength of the spell to strengthen itself, but it was struggling.

  Moving on instinct, I left my beastgate and made my way into my time garden, where I found the tree for Temporal Basin, as well as the tree for Testudinal Reserve. Between them, threads of rainbow light hung, shimmering in the air.

  I knew what I had to do then.

  Time was ticking down. The two stronger pills that I'd taken were spinning through my system, giving me strength to complete this, but only if I could do it before their power ran out.

  I reached out for the Temporal Basin spell and snapped it apart. The spell exploded within my spirit, and half of the power fell into the Testudinal Reserve, as if sucked into a black hole. The spell began to warp, but in a familiar way, almost like when I activated one of my meta spells.

  I picked up the broken half of the rest of Temporal Basin and left. As I stepped into the beastgate, I felt pressure bear down on it. Within the second gate, the power began to warp and compress the shape. It wasn’t designed to be here, the design of the spell was too weak. It cracked and splintered, then crunched into a ball the size of my head

  That got worse when I arrived in the third gate. Each step fought me, crushing down on the half-spell I held, until it was the size of a grapefruit, then an orange, then a grape.

  But I finally arrived before the trembling spread-crystal, and I pressed the other half of Temporal Basin into it. The line of rainbow power shot through my gates, binding Testudinal Reserve to the spread-crystal. It was a feat of magic made possible only thanks to the world tortoise magic, which integrated into my body as naturally as breathing. It was only possible thanks to the hollowvoid seed, with hungry power that could absorb my strength. It was only possible thanks to the morels, which bound and created connections.

  Space and time joined in the power of life and death and hudau, which was already held within the crystal tree. The tether of mana that kept the spread-crysystal as my Temporal Basin snapped, dissolving away, the drain on my mana regeneration going with it. The spread-crystal melted in, and the rainbow and ink found themselves ringed in a circle of blue light.

  The power of the spread-crystal, the morels, and the seed spun into my bones, the tree-shell shifted. Its spell was similar, but the effects I’d fed into it changed the spell, same as the spell had changed them.

  My bones began to shimmer, threads of blue weaving themselves into the pattern. My nails, which had already been slightly crystalline, turned a rich, royal blue color.

  The blue was wrong, though. The spread-crystal, an artifact of time and space, was strong, but containing, tampering, and guiding powers greater than itself. Like a clay vessel filled with both freezing cold and boiling heat, it was warping, and beginning to crack under the strain.

  Then the gemstone socketed over my spatial magic, the one that Dawn was bound to, began to glow. Waves of golden starsoul magic threaded outwards from it, as her familiar bond began to activate.

  I had known that it would be soon. With her ascension to second gate, the gap between us was closing. She had paid her debt to the well for survival – whatever that meant – and so she could assist me.

  Her power rushed into me, guided by her strange mana, and it wove itself into the spread-crystal. The blue of my nails and woven through my bones began to spark, as flecks of gold appeared throughout. The world tortoise spell inside my spirit shifted, melting and spinning out of my hudau gate, until it stood, melted in equal-yet-opposite. The spell didn’t want to be there, it wasn’t meant to be there, and yet Dawn, bound to space, told it to be. A flash of gold, and it was. Equal, balanced, together they spun.

  I slowly blinked my eyes open.

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