Today is a good day.

This morning, while I was reading people’s minds, I burned my Fate. The most I have ever burnt at any one time. Almost immediately I read the mind of someone who had recently seen a campsite pretty deep into my forest, one that my trees aren’t able to perceive. I figured that this was probably the base of the would-be assassin.

Then I hit a bit of a problem, I have not yet figured out a way to prevent teleportation entirely, if we went in all gung ho they would just teleport away. Now, I did have a bit of money in the terminal, enough to buy a plant. There were no plants for sale that were specifically designed to prevent teleportation, but asking around a bit pointed me to something that should work, even if not very well.

The plant, called Null, does exactly that, nullifies magic. Specifically, it makes the surrounding mana more uniform and does it’s best to keep it like that. The end result is that it is difficult to use magic of any kind. Of course, this can cause some problems for mana based creatures, but only if they are already depressed or injured or there is an overwhelming amount of the stuff. As a plant manipulator, it is easy to make it affect me less, but I would have to be careful when using it around others.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to refine the plant. So instead I used overwhelming amounts of mana to get it good enough to suit my needs.

And so we descended on the camp, surrounding it on all sides to prevent mundane escape while my new plant was preventing magical forms of escape. She saw me before I saw her, and she tried to teleport, spending what must have been nearly all of her mana only to appear right next to me. Before I managed to grab her she blew herself up with potions, which apparently weren’t magical enough to be suppressed by such a crude method.

Fortunately, it was nothing I couldn’t heal, it really hurt though. I did have to disable the Null in order to actually heal our new captive, who had thankfully knocked herself out in the blast. I wasn’t complaining about turning it off, it had started to give me a migraine in the short moments I had used it.

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She is the right size and shape for the person I saw before. She is a demon species known as a Greater Imp, basically just the demon version of a goblin. I used a bunch of Dead Tulip pollen on her in order to make sure she stays asleep while we decide what to do with her.

I did read her mind, she is definitely the person trying to kill Tiddol. she's an assassin, of course, she’s getting paid for this. Though she didn’t know who was paying her. Her stealth skills were not her own but rather a magic item she found in a dungeon. While she is skilled in making alchemical bombs, she has no other skills in alchemy. And there were some other bombs planted, we have removed them.

I spent some time to perfect my new plant and then made a cell using the stuff to keep her in, that took till about lunchtime. We are waiting for Par to get back, which should happen tomorrow, before deciding what to do with her.

She did try to kill my best friend, but she failed, so it isn’t too bad. I don’t want to think about what I would have done if she had succeeded. Maybe we can make use of her somehow?

So, while we waited for Par to return, I spent my time messing around with Null. It was a nice departure from the last couple days. I was too giddy to trust myself in a process as delicate as integrating a plant into Azrezel’s body, one wrong move and I could kill him. I probably wouldn’t make a mistake, but I would rather not risk it.

It has a couple glaring flaws that are fundamental to the way it works. What I thought was going to be the biggest issue, the migraine I got from being within the area it is affecting, turned out to be a nonissue, I figured out how to counter the plant pretty easily. I am not a skilled mage, well I am but not in a way that would be relevant to resisting this. It took me maybe an hour to figure out how to counter it, it would take a mage with relevant skills seconds. I can make it more complicated to counter by refining it, but that would only make it take longer, not actually make it any more difficult. Of course, I can solve that issue with sheer mana, but that quickly loses effectiveness, taking exponentially more mana for the same amount of improvement. Production isn’t an issue there, but storage is.

I’m not entirely sure what the Solar Energy version of it does as I didn’t really have a way to test it. And I haven’t yet integrated Null into my body.

Other than that Tiddol was glued to my side all day, it was kind of cute actually. She went from a whimpering twitchy mess, like anyone would when they were under frequent attempts on their lives that they couldn’t do anything to defend against, to being bright, cheerful, and a little sadistic. It’s odd seeing someone be so incredibly happy and so incredibly angry at the same time. And Tiddol generally isn’t particularly emotional, yeah she does have a lot of passion for her work, but anyone who’s anyone has the same.

Ultimately I think it will be Tiddol that decides what happens to this girl.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.