Chapter 107: CHANGE IN AREA

CHAPTER

107

CHANGE IN AREA

JIEYUAN

—∞—

The flowers came as a surprise, and not a pleasant one.

As Jieyuan stepped into the pocket, they were the first thing that caught his eye. A little cluster of large, red-petaled blossoms circling the trunk of a tree—not an oak, thankfully, its trunk much thinner, shooting straight up past the pocket, none of its branches or leaves even visible—right in the middle of the clearing.

They were a vibrant, deep red. Crimson, blood-like. They made for the first splash of color other than green, brown, or white he’d seen in a month or so.

Meiyao had stopped too—she was by his side, hadn’t moved away from the entrance—and Jieyuan immediately put his guard up, raising the Shifting Feathers. It was their first time coming across flowers in the forest, and in a place like the Dome, new was more often than not bad news with a few letters missing.

Others might think it silly to be wary about flowers, but Jieyuan would invite these selfsame others to take a little stroll around Viridian Death City and challenge them to sing that same tune afterward.

It’d been a week since their little stroll in Viridian Death City, but Jieyuan certainly hadn’t forgotten all its remarkable wonders and sights. The shower of corrosive white petals over that abomination of a bridge had been particularly memorable.

So far none of the vegetation they’d encountered since leaving the city had been anywhere near as doggedly vicious—and thank the Heavens for that—but Jieyuan wasn’t leaving anything up to chance.

Flowers or not, if Jieyuan saw any signs of funny business, he’d be ready to dish out some emergency gardening.

Jieyuan would’ve preferred a chromal beast, even. He was already confident in Meiyao’s ability to handle them. And it’d have made things more interesting, too.

This past week, whenever they came across a beast, Meiyao would use Divine Nature Resonance on it if she thought it was safe to do so. That had let them experiment plenty with her new bloodskill, to the point they’d cleared most of the doubts they’d had about it.

Jieyuan was even getting used to seeing Meiyao transform now, though each one was still its own little surprise. They were never quite the same, even for similar beasts. Three days ago, using it on a tiger had left her with cat ears and a tail. But yesterday, with a tiger of a different race, she’d gone and grown fur all over instead. He was just glad she hadn’t decided to try it that one time they came across a giant frog.

Despite Jieyuan’s unease about the flowers, though, Huaxin kept quiet. Meiyao didn’t put up any warnings, either, and just stood there. It was as Daojue came through on his other side that Meiyao got moving, walking toward the tree and flowers.

“Meiyao?” he said, quietly, momentarily taking control of his voice back from Maeva.

“It’s fine,” she said, not bothering to keep her voice low.

Reaching the tree, she knelt down in front of it.

Jieyuan walked over, still a little wary.

Meiyao was running her fingers over one of the flowers. Her eyes were closed.

Jieyuan was even less an expert in flowers than he was in trees. Trees had at least been part of some education, at least as far as their woods were concerned. Flowers, though, weren’t. His family had many businesses, but a flower shop wasn’t among them. Amyas’s grasp on them wasn’t any better, either.

Jieyuan could tell a rose from a sunflower from a lotus, but that was about it. And these ones didn’t look like any of them.

They were large—about hand-sized—each with three, flat broad petal, and a little bud at the middle. It was chromal, of course. Its spiritshadow was tenth-shade red, so tenth-sign Redsoul—like most plants they come across around here.

Meiyao opened her eyes, glanced up at him. “These are crimsonrot violets. They grow over corpses, feeding on their blood. There should be one, buried under here. Chromal beasts don’t decompose like we do.”

“That’s a lovely little morbid tidbit.” Jieyuan squinted at the distinctly red flower. “But violet? You’re sure about that?”

She huffed. “I also said crimson. And violets aren’t necessarily violet.”

“So violets are red, roses are blue, and what-have-you?”

Meiyao gave him a weird look. “What?”

“Nothing.” Jieyuan waved it off. He’d forgotten the little poem wasn’t a thing here. And though violets not being violet didn’t quite add up as far as he was concerned, he wasn’t about to make an issue out of it. “You’re familiar with them, then, to know their name? I’d have thought the Dome’s plants were… well, only found inside the Dome.”

“And you’d be right.” Very gently, Meiyao pinched its stem near the base with her fingers, then plucked it out of the ground. “I’ve never even heard of it before. Divine Plant Intuition lets me tell its properties, however. As well as its name.”

“Its name?” Jieyuan frowned. “I thought naming was, you know, a human thing.”

“What do you—” Meiyao frowned up at him. “Oh, right. Mundanes probably aren’t taught this. There’s a true name for everything, beast and plant races included. True names. The Heavens pick them, supposedly. We don’t name things—we just discover their names. If we try to call them by anything else, we get this feeling of wrongness—and so we just keep trying until we find a name that, well, fits.”

That definitely hadn’t been part of his education. There were plenty of things a merchant needed to know, but theological or cosmological—Jieyuan wasn’t sure what this would fall under—linguistics didn’t number among them.

“Interesting,” Maeva murmured in his ear. They were still merged together, even if she wasn’t controlling any part of him at the moment. “I’d wondered at the unusual consistency of this world’s language. Does it include pronunciation, too? There’s some level of idiomatic plurality, but I haven’t noticed any distinct dialects or accents.”

Trust Maeva to be interested in that kind of stuff. He vaguely understood what she was saying—she was scrounging up all of that from his mind, at any rate—but he wasn’t sure if it was worth making the effort to really think it through

Is that something I need to be concerned about?

“No,” Maeva said, after a brief pause. “Just a curiosity.”

Then that’s that.

Meiyao stood back up, raised the flower to eye level, and slowly twirled its stem with her fingers. “Hmmm. I think this might be useful.”

“Oh?” Now this seemed like something Jieyuan could be interested in. Useful things were useful. “Useful how?”

“I might be able to refine it into something,” Meiyao said. “It’s got all sorts of properties. Even taken raw like this it’d have a healing effect, increase your natural regeneration. It’d make you a little sick, however.”

“That’ll come in handy,” Jieyuan said.

He had some healing pills with him, but not more than a dozen. Daojue didn’t have any, and Meiyao only had a couple herself. They’d taken proper stock of their pooled resources very early on, so he had a good idea of where each of them stood in that regard.

He had six Radiant Light Blast and Barrier talismans—three of each—with him and two or so handfuls of healing pills. Meiyao had as many talismans, but half as many pills. Daojue had neither pills nor talismans.

Unlike him, neither of them hadn’t taken into account the possibility of being stranded in the Dome several weeks in advance. Not like he had, after Huaxin’s first warning, almost two months ago now. Meiyao only had her talismans because her stepmother, Protector Yuyan, had forced them on her just in case, in light of the string of assassination attempts they’d faced.

Their stock was limited, then—and so the possibility of topping it up was a very attractive one indeed. That wasn’t all, either.

“You said all sorts of properties,” Jieyuan said. “What else can you do with it?”

Even if he hadn’t known Meiyao had at least some experience with refining—back in the Gleamstone Valley, she’d also picked up some plants and mentioned refining them, even if nothing had come out of it—he wouldn’t have been surprised.

He wasn’t all that clear on how any of the chromal crafts—refining, inscribing, and nurturing—worked, but he’d read up on the basics. Refining basically revolved around matching different ingredients—plants and beast parts—and merging them together through rituals. Given Meiyao’s bloodright and the intuitive knowledge it gave her over said ingredients, it was little wonder she’d be good at it.

There was also the garden she’d kept, back in her residence in the Outer Court. Which accounted for another of the chromal crafts, nurturing. Something Meiyao’s bloodskills would give her even more of an advantage with.

“On its own, only healing,” Meiyao said, as she put it away in her pouch, and then bent down down to pick up some more. “But if we came across these, we might come across others. Depending on just what else we find, I might be able to refine other types of concoctions. We’ll see.”

Meiyao’s words, as it turned out, might as well have been prophetic.

The next pocket had more of those crimsonrot blossoms, but the one after that introduced some new flowers. Not blue roses, unfortunately, but rather some yellow daises streaked with purple. Meiyao picked them up, too—as well as all the new flowers that kept popping up along the way.

They were deep in the valley now, and seemed to be entering some new zone of the forest, one that seemed much more color-heavy than the ones behind. It wasn’t just the flowers on the ground. They also started coming across flowering brushes and trees, and each and every time Meiyao would stop to pick some, adding to her quickly growing collection of ingredients.

Several hours later, they stopped for the day in a surprisingly bare, clear pocket, with grass on the ground and not much besides. An actual clearing, for once.

This past week, whenever they did, he and Meiyao would first review her bloodskill a bit further, after which one of them would take the first watch. Jieyuan would also spend the rest of his time cultivating, or using Absolute Will Command to train with Maeva in his head—he hadn’t been kidding about getting her to train him, and they’d been making some good progress.

This time around, though, as they settled down, Meiyao started taking the flowers out of her pouch and laying them down on the grass in front of her.

“You’ll be refining, then?” Jieyuan said. They were sitting across each other, the growing row of flowers between them. Daojue, as usual, was in his own corner.

“Yes,” Meiyao said.

Soon they had over twenty different flowers between them, one of each race. She leaned over, started running her fingers through each, murmuring softly to herself as she did.

Jieyuan couldn’t see anything different about her, but he knew she was using her bloodskill right now.

“So what are we looking at?” he asked, after she’d gone through them all.

“Actually, I’ll let you choose,” Meiyao said. She tapped three of the flowers. “Between these, there’s a lot of options. All three types of concoctions. Augmenters, poisons, and antidotes.”

Jieyuan only had a basic knowledge of concoctions, but he put it to work. “Antidotes are meant to deal with poisons, right? We haven’t had any issues with those, but some general ones—there are general antidotes, right?—might come in handy.”

“I can do that, yes.”

“Great. Now, poisons… I don’t think we’ll have much use for them. Unless you can make one that works on higher-realm beasts, too? Because those are the ones that might be a problem. Between us three, I think we can handle Redsoul ones.”

“Redsoul plants only make for Redsoul concoctions,” Meiyao said. “Which only work on Redsouls. You’d need Orangesoul ones for Orangesoul beasts, and so on, but you’d need to be at the same realm to refine them.”

That added up, but he’d seen her picking up some higher-realm plants, and they were among the ones she’d just laid out—ones whose spiritshadow he couldn’t sense. Just as he was about to say so, though, she picked one such flower.

“That just means I can’t refine them, however,” Meiyao said. “I can still ground and work them in other, mundane ways. So poisons are a possibility. Powders, particularly. But let’s focus on the ones we can refine, first.”

She put that flower away, as well as three other ones—all of them higher-realm. All the ones left behind registered to his soulsense. Most of them at tenth-sign Redsoul, but a couple at a lower soulsign.

“For a general antidote…” Meiyao picked up five of the flowers and set them aside. “These would make the most potent one, I believe. What else? Augmenters, but what kind?”

“At least some regeneration ones, for starters,” he said.

Regeneration augmenters were the actual name for healing concoctions. They didn’t actually heal you, just boosted your regeneration rate. Jieyuan’s knowledge of concoctions pretty much started and ended there, though. He only knew as much from what the shopkeepers had said when he’d bought his.

She set another three flowers aside, forming another group. “What else?”

“What else can you make?” he asked.

“The usual types. Strength, durability, and…” She eyed the remaining plants, then nodded. “Agility augments, too.”

That last one immediately caught his attention. Again, they should have Redsoul beasts mostly in hand, so strength and durability augmenters shouldn’t make much of a difference. And no increase in strength and durability would mean anything faced with higher-realm beasts.

Agility, though—that was more promising. It was as useful for fighting as it was for surviving. And surviving was doubtlessly the priority here.

“Agility,” he said. “Definitely agility.”

Meiyao nodded. “I was thinking the same.” She set a few more plants aside in another little group. “Anything else, or that’s it?”

“What about cultivator augmenters?” he asked. He hadn’t seen any for sale, but he was fairly sure he’d heard them being mentioning at some point. “I think they’re a thing.”

“They are,” Meiyao said. “But not useful to us. All they do is increase your harvesting efficiency, for chroma. But with these the best I can do is a temporary increase to third-order, and we’re at fourth-order already. And we’re using prisms, anyway, which makes that point further moot.”

“Then I think that’s it. A general antidote, and regeneration and agility augmenters.”

“All right.” Meiyao clapped her hands, then rubbed together as she looked back down. “Let’s see…”

She closed her eyes, ran her fingers over each flower again. Then she began distributing the remaining plants throughout the three groups she’d formed.

When she was done, she looked back up at him. “You’ve never seen someone refine something, have you?”

“No.”

“I’ll talk you through it, then. I’ll start with the antidote.”

She was smiling, sounding rather excited. About refining, definitely—Meiyao wasn’t trying to hide how much she enjoyed it—but he’d also come to realize she really liked talking about the things she was passionate about.

Luckily for Meiyao, he’d always make for an avid listener as far as she was concerned.