It wasn't until I had actually sat down for a proper meal back in my own kitchen / dining room that the "high" of actually having some kind of magical ability wore off and I realized just how insane what had happened to me was. The damned elvish sergeant had even told me what the risks were of what I was doing. I just hadn't clued in because I was so confident I understood how things worked, that I was on top of learning how to handle living in this new world of mine.

And I had been so very, very wrong. So… ignorant. And worse, the elves … no, the alfar, had no way of even thinking that I didn't know what I was getting myself into. I take I the talk, after all, and sounded oh so confident as I did. Talk about your double illusions of transparency. It was enough to make me want to pull my hair out. Especially considering… what I had done, letting myself get possessed by a nature spirit… unless I missed my marks again, based on what Trisaldan had told me, there was no going back. 'Once a door is opened, it cannot be closed again' after all.

Once my meal was finished, I finally stopped putting off the obligatory next step of recording what I had done during my trip back at the research bench, almost dreading what I was certain was going to occur. I, as it turned out, was only half-right.

<< Requirements met. General arcanism level unlocked: Primitive Eldritch Awakening. >>

<< Requirements met. Specific arcanism field unlocked: Internal Mana Awareness. >>

<< Requirements met. Specific arcanism field unlocked: Primitive Spirit Awareness. >>

Huh. No "trait"? But the prompts read "arcanism" levels, not "tech" levels. And no infodump of new information? I sincerely didn't know what to make of any of this, until I checked in in my homunculi and found that they had also clearly -- somehow -- gathered ishuar of their own. Which they had most certainly not done before I had recorded my experiences and added them to the library. Even the timing on that was a little odd. Every tech level I had unlocked had done so when I "researched" it, immediately. But they had also all come with new information filling in the blanks of what I'd demonstrated understanding of. Here, no filling in of blanks but I did get pop-ups, which hadn't ever happened before. This was frustratingly inconsistent!

And the worst part of it all was that I had no one to vent that frustration at. There was no way the alfar could meaningfully contribute to a discussion on the inconsistent nature of my System for the simple reason that I was almost certainly the only individual they'd ever met who actually had one. Let alone the cultural background of Earth necessary to grok digitized systems and logical operations. For fuck's sakes, these people literally lived in trees. Yes, they knew things about this world but their very lack of comprehension of the background I was coming from was how I wound up getting partially possessed by a nature spirit in the first place. As much as having company that could actually talk was pleasant, and yes there were clearly benefits to what had happened to me, this was the cooking oil incident all over again.

It just wasn't worth the risk.

It was with this thought in mind that I made my way to where the three alfar had overnighted, as my manor wasn't properly set up for that many guests. "Did you lot sleep well enough?

Trisaldan smiled easily at me, his eyes looking up to the greatoak's canopy. "I still find it difficult to believe that you built all of this in but a single season, especially so close to one of the great trees of the forest. Living so close to one… It's no wonder the ishuar responded so easily to you, Sir Vincent."

Looking up at said tree for myself, I could understand the alfar Warden's meaning. My newfound awareness made it clear why greatoaks grew so much taller than others. I wasn't sure if the tree had a spirit of its own, or if it was just "flavoring" the mana around it, but I could feel the natural … for lack of a better term, presence coming from the tree. It occurred to me at that point that I'd never really done any alchemical analysis of the trees around me. Somehow, I'd simply taken for granted that they were what they seemed to be. Yet another of many unspoken assumptions.

That very awareness, however, was also what made it clear why the alfar Wardens hadn't come to the manor even though it was overall larger. The greatoak's presence was masking the disruption from my works. Not completely, but the majority of it. I knew then and there that I would have to reassess everything in my manor, all the things I had created to date, as the disruptive nature of my farm on the flow of ishuar presence was like a minor itch in the part of me that now housed that nature spirit, but I sure as hell wasn't going to give up on being on the path of technological progress just because of some spiritual taint being irritated by it. Not when I could apply my know-how in some manner to address the issue instead.

I shook myself, very minutely, out of my reverie, and spoke to my alfar companions. "Alright, gentlemen. The homunculus beside me will assist you three in getting set up with accommodations. It understands your language as well as I do but will not be able to communicate directly with you except through hand signs and grunts, unless you care to teach it your written language.”

Eildan, the scarred of Trisaldan’s bodyguard-companions, looks at me with a slightly confused light in his eyes. “But won’t you need its services for your own ends?”

I laughed softly, waving off his concern in a gesture that I hoped conveyed the dismissal was a friendly one. “I have another four here at the manor above and beyond that one. I assure you, I’ll be able to make do.”

Orelme’s jaw dropped a little at my casual statement. “Seven…”

I grimaced at that number. “Yeah. I’d have more but … something told me going that far into mana exhaustion was a bad idea.” The three looked at each other, a glance I was rapidly coming to understand meant, ‘Vincent is missing something again.’ I took a stab at the dark on it, holding back a sigh as I did. “Let me guess. Most alchemists never manage more than one or two homunculi, if they ever manage to make one at all.”

Trisaldan nods his affirmation in silence. As that silence stretches out, I take it as an opportune moment to simply move on from the trio, and settle back down into getting some actual work and progress done. Aside from the new iron design for the homunculi’s clockwork harnesses, I hadn’t gotten anything done in the better part of an entire month -- I could almost feel the need to get progress locked in place itching at me, and it was for certain a stronger drive than any signals from my ethereal stowaway.

~~------------~~

The first thing I settled down to do was to actually use the steel ingots I’d procured to set up lightning rods with steel cabling for my buildings, as I’d originally set up the hot-spring colony for in the first place. Given the amount of material I had to actually work with, I felt that it was the best bang for the buck, as it were. Especially since I didn’t really know how much longer I had before the proper rainstorms came on beyond knowing vaguely that they were, in fact, coming. Each passing day was, on average, warmer-feeling than the day previous.

Given the small number of buildings I actually had, and their relatively small size compared to how large I was used to buildings being back on Earth, I wound up only using up about three ingots total out of the twelve I had brought back with me. The rest of them would be used for more ‘interesting’ purposes. I set about scavenging live samples of pretty much everything I could in the area around me that I hadn’t already alchemically analyzed. My intention at this point was to create a much broader library of traits to work with as compared to what I currently had in stock.

One particular material that got more emphasis would be the steel and iron I had at my disposal, as I had special hopes for that. The goal there was to isolate as many ‘relevant’ traits as I could, as well as keeping an undifferentiated essence for culturing. I didn’t have a direct means at the moment of reverting an inert substance back to its non-essential form, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t work one out in the future… or cheat through my Biopunk knowledge somehow. After all -- I literally had crystalline fungi growing in vats in chambers beneath the farm area. Would it really be that much more difficult to start growing iron mushrooms?

Another was myself. I had already been culturing an ‘undifferentiated’ sample of my own alchemical essence, in case I ever needed to replace a homunculus. But I went through the process of refining that very same essence from its “raw” materials again, and attempted to use the very same negation process I’d used in the past to obtain an antidote for the numbing moss, just to see if the ishuar possession had somehow altered my essential makeup. This resulted in an hour of my time spent on very carefully measuring proportions to exacting detail, only to wind up with a cauldron literally filled with no essence at all. Which at the very least was reassuring in the sense that it meant that whatever the nature spirit was doing in its new cozy little ethereal “me” cottage, it wasn’t altering “me” in any way that the tools at my disposal could detect … yet.

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I went on trying to isolate specific traits for various aspects of myself, however, as my mana recovery rate permitted. After my trials with learning the alfar’s language, I knew that I could isolate out the essential aspect of things like ‘communication’, so it stood to reason that things as abstruse as that could also be teased out, however headache-inducing that process might be. After seeing what happened when I introduced my own undifferentiated essence in a certain portion of a spider’s body when I created my hunters, I knew that it had to be possible to back-hack the process as it were, and isolate those traits from my essence more directly. Most of what I was after, however, was locating three specific traits. The first was plausibly the most important to me, but also the easiest as I had the best grasp on what it was: tool-use. If communication could be an essence that could be made into a tonic and through it enable the rapid mastery and adoption of another language, then it stood to all reason that things like tool-use could also be ‘extracted’. My success in this wound up costing essentially all of my mana in one go, even after first isolating my general intelligence which also took up my full mana amount. It was clear that I was playing at the very edges of what my alchemical Biopunk knowledge permitted.

But that was where I needed to be if I was going to make any progress at all. Especially with what I needed to do next. I knew that my homunculi had been effective in serving the needs I had for them; they were faithful beyond question and while they could not exactly anticipate my needs, the use of generalized written agendas and basic practice with interacting with them had made up for so much of that gap that I barely noticed it anymore. But they just weren’t enough. If I was going to make any serious progress in moving forward, I needed to be able to make actual use of more-complex mechanisms. Take proper advantage of the Biopunk knowledge of growth-vats and so on to properly verticalize and get production density that I couldn’t get now. Have more-effective combatants, so that I would actually be able to interact with the alfar from a position of strength rather than just being too much of a nuisance to kill off given my previously unknown ‘Voidborne’ status.

Simply put, I needed to have minions that worked smarter. I’d managed to get a little bit of that through the ‘brain’ caste of the mining ants -- and their cooperation with my homunculi certainly was working far better than I’d anticipated. But the tasks that the individual worker caste ants could execute even under brain ant supervision just weren’t sufficient to the kind of on-the-spot judgements that a truly technological society needed its workers to be able to make. This was a problem that my mind had been chewing at for some time. A part of me wanted to think that even without the interactions with the alfar, I would have found a viable solution -- both practically and ethically speaking. It would’ve likely taken me a great deal longer than I would’ve liked, but I almost certainly would have accomplished it. In the meantime, however, the alfar and I had met one another. I had been possessed by a minor ishuar, and there was no point avoiding the potential benefits this could grant me. A couple of the things I’d tested out during my playing around with the interaction with plant life that my bonded nature spirit granted me was how many individual plants I could interact with, and whether or not I could get feedback from them.

As it turned out: I could manage several plants simultaneously as long as I didn’t need them to force themselves into doing things they wouldn’t readily do under normal stimuli. And while there wasn’t much in the way of feedback, I got the distinct impression that this was a result of the plants not having much in the way of feedback to give. Trying with a greatoak for example gave me a sense of warmth and wind for the entirety of the tree -- and wasn’t that an exercise in sensory overload. Not so much from complexity as from sheer quantity. I didn’t even need to be in direct line of sight with the tree in order to continue the sensory connection with the tree.

To the alfar, this was little more than a navigational aid; connect to a few greatoaks and you’d always have absolute certainty of your relative position compared to them. But for me? It would serve a purpose much, much, more useful. That use would take shape in the form of my attempts at recreating a kind of fungus from back on Earth. One named, specifically, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. I’d been fascinated by the very concept of the fungus back on Earth, which is basically the only reason I knew its name so well. It did something very, very interesting. Mushrooms grew in soil, and shelf root fungus grew in wood. But Ophiocordyceps? Ophiocordyceps grew in bugs. And more interestingly: it controlled their behaviors. The exact methods by which it did this were not exactly certain, but that was fairly irrelevant to me.

So the second half of the day that Trisaldan and his companions spent setting up accomodations for themselves and I spent in my bioalchemic lab? That was spent almost entirely on stretching the limits of what I could do with my alchemic and Biopunk knowledge. Not so much going into “new frontiers” tech-level wise -- I was certain what I was going to do wouldn’t actually advance me in any meaningful sense as far as the System was concerned -- but instead, pushing the limits of what I already had under my belt in the practical sense. Closing up the tech-debt gap as it were. I went through generations of my crystalline shelfruit, reducing the size of it, and removing the “wood” trait from what I believed to be its mycelium, to replace with what I believed to be the “brain” trait of ants. It took me nine generations of tweaking before I got an acceptable hit. Each generation had consisted of between thirty and sixty trial cases. It was a scattershot approach but it was the best I could do given the means I had access to, and while it was tedious it was also effective. Or, at least, effective enough to get the job at hand done.

Just modifying the crystalline fungus however, wouldn’t be enough. I needed to make a caste of ants that would actually be acceptable for use as the hosts of said fungus. It was unavoidable that the fungus itself would routinely kill its host, so I was unwilling to use the brain caste as a base. Instead, I settled on the worker caste of ants as the base for the new ‘generation’ that the mining colony queens would need to produce for me. This new caste would be much larger in general, and would have the tool-use trait embedded in them while doubling down on the ‘domestication’ trait. I especially focused on introducing that trait to their mandibles and forelegs. The end product was a docile creature that hardly had any initiative of its own, even less somehow than the usual worker ant. But what it lacked in that regard, it more than made up for in the fact that its forelegs and mandibles were fully prehensile. I had never imagined what an ant with antler-like opposable thumbs on its mandibles would look like before, let alone one that also had them on its legs in the form of tri-clawed feet, but on that day I got to see what such a body-plan would look like. At a full two feet in length, no less.

It didn’t live very long. I managed not to slap myself across the forehead when I remembered that ants didn’t breathe the way even spiders did. It took some digging, and a few dives into headache territory, but I did eventually manage to transfer into ants the ‘book lungs’ that I half-remembered, half-rediscovered from my spiders, along with a diaphragm taken from my own essential anatomy to facilitate the dispersal of oxygenated hemolymph through my minions. I hadn’t really anticipated the hemolymph changing in color as a result of importing these traits, but that just went to show that what I was doing shouldn’t be strictly understood as genetic engineering from Earth. This was a far more “surgical” process but it did mean a total replacement was necessary for the ant colony: I needed to grow a new queen altogether to take the place of the old in order to get the new anatomy and caste deployed.

All of this effort felt a great deal like building castles in swamps. But the end result was something I found quite acceptable: tool-using minions with no indications of having any thoughts of their own. Ones that could be infected by behavior-controlling fungi. Fungi that I and my homunculi could in turn control through our bonded spirits, with exceedingly little effort. There would of course be limits to the number of manual-caste ants that could be directly overseen at any given time, but more ‘routine’ tasks could be installed in the albeit limited memory trait imbued into the controller fungi.

I spent the remainder of my time before heading to sleep that night using my spirit connection to my new biological abominations to direct them to construct new clockwork harnesses for their own use. These would be the “old” style, unfortunately, as I simply didn’t have enough steel to work with… but as I installed the manual ants into their harnesses the work went that much quicker. My limit in directing manual cast simultaneously was only five or six, given the need to constantly context-switch, but -- as I had hoped -- I was able to get more-complex sensory feedback from the ants themselves through the controller fungus’ connections inside their brains.

Taylor Hebert, I was not: I would never control Biblical Plagues of swarms this way. And getting used to compound vision and antennae-based smelling was going to be a challenge. One that was oh-so-very worth it in terms of how much this expanded what I could potentially do. Especially since each of my homunculi could do the same as I was now doing. That might only factor out to fifty or sixty total manual caste ants that I could have tasked to do complex labor, but compared to the seven minions I had previously? Oh yes.

When I passed out on my bed that evening, it was with a newfound sense of anticipation of what I could accomplish moving forward that I hadn’t had in pretty much the entire time I’d been on this new world. Finally, I was getting into territory that I would legitimately be willing to call ‘civilization’. After all -- it was the other side of what I could do with the manual caste that was really interesting.

I could now automate.