Maybe I was just evil, but watching my munchkin flounder around with her newly acquired Life Magic was incredibly amusing. Luna might have borrowed the Grandmother’s affinity but it seemed that the instincts for that sort of magic hadn’t been transferred over, or maybe little Luna was simply clumsy, possibly due to her age. Either way, she had a reasonable amount of power, given that she was merely level six, without any truly extraordinary traits like Lia’s First of her Kind Trait or my own Dragon-Touched Trait, but the way she wielded that power left quite a bit to be desired. We were working on it, slowly, and until she managed to control the power she held, my entertainment would continue.

The first field we had investigated after she gained the skill was healing. It sounded like such an obvious connection, Life Magic, Healing Magic, it was almost the same, or so we thought. Alas, it was not to be and we were damned lucky that Luna’s first attempt to heal something had been on an animal test subject we had acquired. Because while she had managed to close the shallow cut I had caused the cat we had caught, her healing wasn’t really healing but more a rapid increase of the innate regeneration of its body.

In other words, the rate at which the blood clotted, before the flesh knit and new skin was grown, all were increased by more than an order of magnitude. Sadly, the effect wasn’t contained, nor was it selective, meaning that not only did the blood oozing out of the wound clot, but clots also formed all over the cat’s circulatory system. It was quite fascinating to observe the effect using my own Blood Magic. While I had caused thrombosis with my Blood Magic before, I had never managed to bring about that many events spread across such a large part of the circulatory system. I wasn’t quite sure what the actual cause of death was, but given that I observed a massive heart attack, multiple strokes and a lung embolism, each of which had the potential to be fatal, though the heart attack and the strokes were the most immediate. Given that she had also managed to give the poor creature aggressively spreading growths that started to overtake the surrounding flesh before its death put an end to it only added to the lethality of her healing.

Just looking at the state her healing had put the body in, I doubted I’d be able to heal the damage caused by her healing, making me incredibly glad that we had used an experimental subject for our testing. I was somewhat confident that my Blood Magic could clean up the clotting before it destroyed the circulatory system, but the growths were pretty much the equivalent of cancer, only magically overcharged. I might be able to selectively destroy them with my Death Magic, but I wasn’t confident in that. No, for now, Luna would be restricted to heal our enemies, even if I didn’t really feel good about having her kill small animals. Maybe using her Life Magic on the Undead would have… interesting effects. Something to test.

But before we went and started to test the effects of Life Magic on the Undead, Lia had a fairly good idea, namely to see what happened when Luna used her magic on less complex life forms. Animals were clearly too much for her, especially those with complex anatomy, if we had something like tapeworms it might be easier, but what about plants?

I could remember the video of the Grandmother and that insane fire mage who attacked Koylug. The Grandmother had simply chucked some sort of nut, no bigger than a peanut, into the massive blast of magic that guy had launched at her and the nut had somehow neutralised the entire attack. Moments later, the Grandmother had tossed another similarly sized nut at the guy with lethal results. Maybe that was the way of Life Magic, to enhance and grow plants at insane rates, so they could do what you couldn’t.

That idea caused us to visit a garden store, only to realise that it had been looted at some point in the past. There were no tools left and the area with plant seeds was thoroughly rummaged through, with all seeds that might sprout into something edible gone.

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Leaving us with a wonderful variety of flower- and garden-seeds, things that would look pretty but had no practical use. Those had largely been left behind and we managed to find a couple of bags that seemed to be intact.

And with those in hand, Luna’s training took a step forward. Not a massive leap, there was only so much she could do with her limited magical reserves but she could do something. Mainly make flowers bloom rapidly, meaning it only took her a few minutes to turn a seed into a fully grown flower, though the flowers only lasted about the same duration before rapidly withering and turning to dust.

It was fairly similar to the way I conjured up Ice, not real frozen water but a physical manifestation of Astral Power. Sure, some of the Ice could turn into real frozen water, but that took a lot more Astral Power than I normally used. The more power imbued into the physical substance, the longer it took for it to fade and more of it remained real. The same applied to her flowers, it wasn’t that she made the seed mature, but that she imbued the seed with the power to produce a physical manifestation of itself, using her Astral Power. Otherwise, she’d need to add the nutrients and everything to grow the flower, the physical building blocks that eventually became the flower.

Once we had that understanding, we began to experiment with planted seeds, still using flowers and some nutrient-rich soil for potted plants. The process was quite fascinating to observe, both with my magical Sight and by tasting the air as Luna worked. I even tried to get an idea of what was going on with my Death Magic, but that backfired pretty spectacularly, leaving a horribly wilted flower that just wouldn’t die. To my magical senses, it looked almost like one of the Undead outside, only that it was a potted plant.

That was the last time I tried that, simply because the result looked incredibly wrong to me and Luna had nightmares of it afterwards. This just wouldn’t do.

Ultimately, we managed to find something Luna could work with, something that wasn’t flowers, even if a part of me was highly amused by the idea of Luna going into combat with an army of flowers at her beck and call. Nothing but the best for my little princess, though I would need to set up my throne for that to work. Maybe I could do so in the future and have her conquer the Lands in the name of the Ice Queen. Though I might have to work on the image, having a flower-child spread the name of the Ice Queen with an army of flowers, that didn’t quite fit. Something to ponder in the future, for now, Luna had a weapon to use and that weapon was ivy. Not the poison variant but simple ivy, the stuff that readily crept up walls and climbed other plants.

Under her direction, she could spin up a strand quite quickly, though she was fairly limited when it came to the speed of growth and the strength of her creation. But she was working on it, for now, she could restrain one of the weaker Undead, or a lesser animal, though it took time and effort on her part. She still had ways to go, but she might have found a path she could walk upon. At least until Lady Hecate added her own part to Luna’s path, I highly doubted that there would be no paying back the power invested into Luna by the Lady. I could only hope that the price wouldn’t be too high. I didn’t think Lady Hecate would exploit my munchkin, but I didn’t know, couldn’t know, until the Lady made her price known.

Silva, just like Luna, had used the last few days to train her alternate form with Lia, getting some fairly impressive results. The two had gone from Lia easily taking Silva down in her new form to much more balanced sparring matches over the course of a few days. Now, Lia had to burn quite a bit of Astral Power in order to stay ahead, meaning Silva was getting quite good at fighting on two legs.

The undercurrent to all these developments was the continued presence of the Withered. Interestingly they hadn’t spread in the time we had been absent, not in a meaningful way. Maybe a few dozen metres, nothing compared to the size of their territory, and even their levels had stagnated, making me wonder if the continued combat against us had helped them, just like it had helped us. If so, I would have to make sure that the next attack, the first real attack I was planning to mount, would be as crippling and deadly as possible.

Or they might just come back from it, even stronger than before.