Sophia shook her head at the cheeky rodent, then turned back to Dav and Amy. “I think I’ve found everything in this room, and I don’t see anything more that could be the problem. I’m going to go see if we missed something on the way in. There have to be storage areas around here somewhere.”
Dav looked up from his hole. He shoved the shovel deep into the soil below the dead corpsevine. It stopped abruptly with a sound like metal hitting stone, muffled by the dirt that was still in the way. “Are you sure you don’t want one of us to come with you?”
Sophia shook her head. “I’ll stay close enough to yell if I need help, but I don’t think I will. This was really remarkably linear.”
Dav looked reluctant. Sophia was pretty sure she heard him mutter something about this being another reason for telepathy as he turned back to the hole in the dirt.
Sophia wasn’t even outside the room when she realized that they hadn’t missed a storage area; instead, it was hidden from them. Directly outside the glassed room was not the broken stone walls of the corridor where Dav danced with the giant monster. Instead, a new glass wall revealed a corridor with wide windows separated by stone supports and low stone walls no more than a foot above the floor under the windows. The plants in the corridor were all situated on the windowsills. There were several doorways off the corridor on the right that led deeper into the building, as well as one at the end of the hall that seemed to lead down a set of stairs.
The first door Sophia came to was indeed a storage area, but all it held was tools and pots, several of which were half-full of soil. None were magical, so Sophia turned back to the large room. She had to tell Dav and Amy what she’d found; they had far more to search than they thought. Sophia’s guess was that this was a clue from the Guide that what they needed to find wasn’t in the room with the Juvenile Corpsevine Crown, though she wasn’t about to tell the others to stop. Burning the source of the corpsevines was a good start and was probably necessary even if it wasn’t sufficient.
"What is that?” Amy’s voice echoed down the corridor as Sophia turned around. She sounded surprised more than worried, but it was still enough that Sophia moved quickly to find out what else had gone wrong.
“Give me a moment, I’ll get it out where we can get at it.” Dav’s back was to Sophia as she hurried into the room; she couldn’t see what he was working on until she drew close. All she could see was that he was lifting something covered in green leaves out of the hole they’d dug in the ground. He set it on the undisturbed ground near the hole, then stepped back with a frown.
Why were there green leaves underground? That didn’t make sense.
As Sophia moved closer, she saw that the leaves were tightly wrapped around a rock shell that seemed to be filled with some sort of bluish-purple stone. Some of them were slightly crushed, but it looked like most had sprung back to their original positions after being lifted out of the ground. Sophia had a feeling that she was forgetting something, like she should know what she was looking at, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She was pretty sure she’d never seen vines wrap around a stone like that.
image [https://i.imgur.com/5T1LUch.jpeg]
Sophia reflexively checked it for the glow of magic. All she saw was a slight residual hint of mana deep with the shadowed blue rock. That was enough to finally make the connection. “The rock we found the first time we visited here, the one that helped plants grow. This is weaker, but the magic’s similar. Do you think this could be another one?”
“It’s a lot bigger,” Amy said doubtfully, “and it’s not nearly as colorful. This is barely two colors and basically no pattern, while that was a bunch of different colors.”
“I’m sure it is,” Dav disagreed. “One of the corpsevine’s roots was buried in that cavity in the rock. This here is a vine, but it’s not the same as the corpsevine; it has to have been helped to grow or it wouldn’t be there. I wonder.”
He reached into his backpack and pulled out a small folding knife, then cut the vine away from the rock and tossed it on the pile of corpsevine they planned to burn. “Did that change anything?”
Sophia watched with mild fascination as mana leaked out of the damaged vines. They weren’t yet dead, though they likely would be soon. When she turned her attention to the stone, it looked essentially unchanged. The mana inside was perhaps a little easier to see without the vines in the way, but that was all.
She shook her head. “Not as far as I can tell, but the vines definitely had mana in them.”
Dav nodded in easily apparent satisfaction. “Who would pay attention to a rock, even a magic rock, if everyone knows it’s supposed to be there? I think we have our culprit.”
Sophia gave Dav a puzzled look. The culprit was the corpsevine; magical rocks might help them grow, but they weren’t the cause of the situation.
Dav didn’t directly acknowledge Sophia’s confusion. “Halven told us these are usually buried unbroken to spread natural mana in the greenhouse. I found another piece of rock earlier that I think would fill in part of that opening; I bet the rest of it is here if we keep looking. My bet is that either the corpsevine actually came here inside the rock shell and broke its way out or was too close to the rock when it was planted and made its way in. They probably can’t grow large enough to be harmful without the additional mana.”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Sophia nodded slowly. That matched what they knew. It couldn’t be the whole story, but either scenario Dav presented made all too much sense. “Use your Sight skill; does it show you how much mana is still in the rock?”
Dav blinked a couple of times then smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand. “I could have been helping you search this whole time, couldn’t I?”
Sophia tried to suppress her grin as she shrugged. She was pretty sure she failed. “Someone had to watch for monsters, and your ability takes mana to use. Mine doesn’t.”
“Now you’re just trying to make me feel better,” Dav grumbled as his eyes began to glow purple. He turned his gaze on the rock and frowned. “I see what you mean, that’s barely there at all. It’s stronger than the corpsevine, but not by much.”
Sophia frowned and took a close look at the corpsevine. She couldn’t even tell that there was more mana there than the background. There might be some residue from the spells it had used, but she couldn’t be certain. That was something else she’d want to talk to Dav about later; she wanted to know if he was more sensitive than she was or if he just didn’t see the background mana.
Either was possible, but the difference could be very important when she started to teach him to use external mana. There was no hurry; she didn’t plan to cover that until shortly before he did his own first ritual. For now, she’d handle the mana management of any ritual they worked together.
Sophia shifted her attention back to the rock. “If it needs mana to grow and act that’s stronger than what’s available here, I don’t think one nearly empty rock would be enough for it to still count as a threat important enough for this Leveled Challenge. I bet there’s something more we still need to find.”
“Does that mean we need to dig up the entire floor?” Amy did not sound pleased with that idea.
Sophia shook her head. “I hope not. There should be a plan somewhere of where the geodes are buried if we need to; that sounds like something that would fit this Challenge. A clue we have to search for that tells us exactly where to dig sounds like something that would fit everything we’ve seen so far.”
Sophia really, really hoped she was right. If they didn’t find a clue like that, her next best idea was sterilizing the entire area of the Conservatory, all of the dirt, and that would take hours, maybe days, even with tools to help. Creating those tools would take time, too, and materials Sophia didn’t have. She definitely didn’t have the ability to manage it as a ritual here, not in this mana level, so a runic inscription was the best option and that wouldn’t be easy. She was pretty sure she had the right books in her bag to figure it out, but that would have to be something they tried on a future trip if they failed here.
Sophia turned to Amy as she realized it had never occurred to her to ask how you knew when you fully completed a Challenge. She’d assumed it wasn’t until you left, like a dungeon back home, but the Guide did give all those feats out after they killed the Juvenile Corpsevine Crown.“Does the Guide let us know when we do what it’s looking for, or do we have to wait until we leave to know if we’ve finished the Challenge?”
Amy paused and frowned. After about a minute, she closed her eyes and shook her head. “I’m not sure. Some of the stories talk about it like it’s immediate, but there’s also the Mountain Fire Walk and everyone knows that one ends the moment you leave. Maybe it depends on what the Challenge is?”
Sophia sighed. Knowing when to stop probably made it too easy. “Why don’t we stop here and search the rest of the building? There might be some useful wood to burn this with or something else useful. I don’t want to start a fire in a building while we’re still searching it, and I’m worried that leaving might say we’re done with the Challenge.”
“I want to dig up the rest of the roots,” Dav disagreed, “But if you two want to go search the rest of the building, go ahead.”
Sophia couldn’t bring herself to leave Dav there working on his own. With all three of them working, it only took another half hour to dig up what was left of the giant corpsevine. There were no more geodes or large magical stones, intact or broken.
All of the rooms on the north end of the top floor were similar to what they’d already seen, glass walls and ceilings and filled with plants or half-empty storage areas with a few tools but nothing Sophia recognized as a weed killer. On the south end of the building, the storage rooms were the same, but the plants in the glass rooms were all dead and dried out.
They spent some time creating a pyre for the corpsevine from the dead plants. They didn’t light it, but by the time they went down the stairs, it was ready to be set on fire.
The next floor down was darker, but not dark. There were bright spots in the ceiling that spread light across the interior rooms; Sophia’s guess was that it was done with mirrors, since there was no sense of magic. It was an impressive feat of engineering, even though it wasn’t as bright as the top level and some of the lights were dim or even dark even though it was still daytime, probably some time in the early afternoon. Something must have damaged, blocked, or moved those particular mirrors inside the walls.
Other than the lighting, the rooms were similar until they reached the room directly under the one used by the corpsevine crown. Against the concrete west wall of the room, where Sophia was fairly certain they’d find a storage room, was a set of shelves that looked almost more grown than cut, though the lack of bark on the shelves themselves made that hard to believe. The shelves held some potted plants, but that wasn’t the important thing.
No, the important thing was that the shelves held an entire collection of small geodes and bits of crystal. Every single one of them, even the crystalline pieces, glowed to Sophia’s ManaSight. It made absolutely no sense from what she’d been told; why were so many collected together and how were they still emitting a lot of mana when they had to have been open for more than a decade?
Unless that wasn’t the whole story. Could the corpsevines have been collecting them here somehow, or breaking open sealed geodes?
image [https://i.imgur.com/rV58TqJ.jpeg]