I've turned on Flore at full strength, at this point it's better than the pain killers. When I'm not on them my whole body itches so much that it hurts. Having Flore active on full strength does make thinking harder, but it isn't as bad as that terrible itching or as bad as some of the more potent painkillers that Tiddol can make.
Looking closer at my condition it is comparable to a fraying cloth. Tiny holes have started to form all over my body, and the itching is those holes slowly growing. Healing does reverse the damage, but the holes are still there, and healing causes new holes to form. At first I thought that was because my body was somehow in a delicate state and so any amount of roughing it up would cause holes to form, so I tried healing in a much more gentle way. It didn't make a difference, and an extreme amount of brute force healing just made things so much worse.
Next I tried to directly patch up those holes, and I did succeed. But it was a pyrrhic victory as the process of fixing one hole made two more. Trying to scale it up didn't help either, for every hole I managed to patch at least one more formed, and the places where I had patched previously formed new holes much more easily.
I wish I had focused more of my efforts on studying mana based creatures. Neither flesh manipulation nor plant manipulation are useful here, while standard healing is outright harmful. If I could patch up each hole perfectly I might be able to stop this, but I can't so it's a moot point.
With the scholars help I did manage to figure out what was causing my current condition. In a word, mana. I am suffering from acute mana poisoning. The mana in my body is a couple orders of magnitude more dense than the mana that makes up my body. The same thing that killed off the Origin, for much of the same reasons too. It might be the Flore talking but it is really funny how many parallels there are between me and the Origin. Both good at creating life, both have some relationship to dungeons, both are mana based creatures, and both are dying off because they introduced way more mana than their frail body's can withstand into their environment.
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I tried confining myself to an area with no mana, but it was too little too late. It stopped the formation of new holes, but the damage done to my body is already self perpetuating.
An Origin might be able to fix me, but they would never withstand the high amounts of mana in my forest and even then, they failed to fix themselves who's to say they would be able to fix me? An ancient dungeon would probably be able to fix me, but I don't have access to one and even if I did I would be wary about trusting one like that. The dungeons offer no solutions.
I really wanted to avoid it, since last time was so excruciatingly painful, but an evolution would almost certainly fix me. But I can't evolve. Considering how intense my last evolution was I have not done nearly enough to be worthy of an evolution, and my ability to force one can only stretch things so far. I likely will not get another evolution for several decades unless I do something truly spectacular. Assuming I live long enough.
One good thing to note is that neither the plants integrated into my body nor my dungeon core are fraying. Presumably my soul is housed in my core, but we have no way to verify that. This might not kill me. I hope it doesn't, because I'm out of things to try. There are no specialists that the scholars can call on, and even if there were they would be too far away to come to my aid fast enough.
I do have some fate built up, but I would rather save that just in case I actually do die. It always eases the transition between one life and then next in a dying or dead person, or at least it's been two for two so far.
I will spend the next couple days teaching and recording as much of my knowledge as I can. That way I at least leave something behind.
Anyway, Good Night Diary.