It ended up taking me three weeks to find what I was looking for, including a two-day side trip back to Ammun’s tower to place the rest of the mysteel generators. Those would take years to produce what I pulled out of Galdrisa, which was itself barely a quarter of what I’d found beneath Derro.
It was going to be a long few years of repeating this process if I couldn’t find a better way to acquire mysteel. If not for the looming threat of Ammun hanging over the world, I would have been content to devote that time to fixing the world. It was certainly worth the effort.
Senica had returned home after the first few days. Harvesting troll blood had lost its thrill almost immediately, especially once she’d learned that she was expected to process it as well. After we’d run out of all the other ingredients, I’d sent her back to New Alkerist. She’d been more than happy to leave.
“That is a lot of mysteel,” Querit said when I returned to the valley and unloaded my new stockpile into the vault.
“And yet, not nearly enough,” I replied with a sigh. “We’ll see how much I can pull out of the tower before it collapses, but I foresee a lot more digging ahead of us.”
“I’ll keep working on refining the divination spells,” the golem said.
“That… would be appreciated. The whole process would go a lot smoother if I knew where to dig in the first place.”
“This biometal lead might make your archeology adventures unnecessary, too.”
I wasn’t going to put a lot of hope in that. We didn’t even know how fast the monster could grow biometal as it stood, let alone if we could get it to grow mysteel the same way. It was an angle worth exploring, but not so likely to pan out that I was willing to devote all of my time and resources toward nurturing it.
“Let’s hope so. Keeper doesn’t have another lead for me, yet. She’s looking at three more old cities, but last I knew, she hasn’t narrowed down where to start digging at. If she can’t get me the information I need, this project and Ammun’s tower will likely be our biggest sources of mysteel.”
We stared at the vault in silence for a minute. It was so much mysteel, piled up in five-foot cubes I’d shaped it into, dozens of them, in fact. Even back in my old life, it would have been a king’s ransom. These days, it was literally priceless. Mysteel didn’t exist naturally and I doubted anyone besides me and possibly Ammun was capable of producing it.
“So much, and yet so far from being enough,” I murmured again. “Just sourcing everything needed will be the work of years. Actually placing the patch will be another level of difficulty altogether.”
“One step at a time,” Querit said. “Speaking of next steps, let’s get started, shall we?”
I gave the contents of my vault one last look before I closed things up. “Alright. Show me where we’re at.”
* * *
Without an endless supply of trolls to feed on, the plant monster didn’t seem to be able to grow the way it had back in the temple. There were only seven vines coming out of its core now, each one as thick around as my wrist. None of them had anything remotely resembling thorns, and it seemed like the only metallic part of it was the shell around its core.
“Without a constant supply of troll’s blood elixirs, I haven’t been able to get it to produce any new biometal,” Querit confirmed after I’d looked through the notes. “Even setting up a regeneration enchantment that encompasses the whole room didn’t replicate the effect.”
“Not surprising,” I said. “The elixirs don’t really work the same way. This chart shows that the monster is responding better to the elixirs than to unfiltered troll’s blood, though. So we don’t necessarily need trolls. I wonder if I could convince Hyago to maintain another field for me to make it artificially.”
I used to have a set of greenhouses in New Alkerist, but Senica and Juby had been in charge of maintaining them. The quality had been so inconsistent that half of what they’d produced had been unusable, and I’d given up on it a few months ago when I’d found Hyago again. Getting the time to actually talk to him had been a different story what with everything else I’d been working on, but that was set now. Soon, my alchemy table would receive a significant portion of my attention.
Querit and I worked through the next several nights experimenting with the plant monster core. What we learned only served to confirm my initial theory: the monster could only grow biometal if it was fed on a diet of troll blood or the alchemical equivalent of it. Even then, attempting to control what kind of metal the monster produced was currently beyond us.
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“Ah. I think I understand,” Querit said while we were studying the fifth set of samples. “The metal is based on iron. Here, look.”
The research station we were using had a mirror mounted on it to display divination results, and at Querit’s gesture, an enhanced view of one of the thorns appeared. “That’s not iron,” I said as I peered at the thorn in far greater detail than an unenhanced human eye could perceive.
“No, but it’s close.”
“Your theory then is that the iron in the troll blood is influencing the structure of the metal it grows?”
“Exactly so. If that’s true and we already know that the core will grow new thorns when subjected to your elixir instead of pure troll’s blood, then it would stand to reason we could introduce mysteel into the mix through alchemy. If the core replaces its pattern with a mysteel one, then the thorns should start growing the new metal.”
“Makes sense,” I said, scratching at my chin as I considered the problem. “Dissolving mysteel into liquid isn’t easy, though. The formula I’m using now isn’t going to cut it, not even at the levels we’re talking about.”
A tiny fingernail’s worth of metal dissolved into a full-sized barrel was the appropriate ratio, but mysteel was practically indestructible. It didn’t just dissolve on its own, which meant I’d need to invest a lot of mana into getting it to do what I wanted. That, in turn, meant altering the formula to account not only for the different material but for the dramatically increased amount of mana. Those alterations would force even more changes, all the way down until at the end, the formula was completely different than the one I’d started with.
“This is going to take some thinking,” I said. “For now, I guess let’s just focus on keeping this sample alive. I’m going to see about restocking my alchemy lab so I can run a few experiments.”
“I don’t think Hyago’s got anything ready for you quite this soon,” Querit said.
I nodded. “Likely not. I do still have my greenhouses in New Alkerist. I’m going to see if there’s anything left in there I can salvage, and then… I do know another place that grows herbs. Maybe I’ll go visit there and see what I can convince them to part with.”
* * *
It was kind of funny how, once New Alkerist had been built, the original Alkerist couldn’t just remain ‘Alkerist’ in anyone’s mind. It was now commonly known, and with some measure of affection by most, as Old Alkerist. This moniker did not please those who lived in that village, which was just fine by me.
I hadn’t made many friends in Old Alkerist. I couldn’t even fairly say that I had any left there now – just acquaintances and enemies. Though, if I was being honest, calling anyone there an enemy was a stretch. None of them were a threat. They just didn’t like me for flouting village law. That had led to an exile, which only really stuck because I’d already been planning on leaving.
The one thing Old Alkerist had that I was interested in today was a group called the Arborists. They were primarily responsible for the trees north of the village, including the fruit trees that supplemented everyone’s diets. More importantly, they had a number of greenhouses that, once upon a time, had been capable of growing the specific plants I needed.
It had been years since I’d set foot in Old Alkerist, but the leader of the Arborists was a one-time student of mine. I’d introduced her to alchemical gardening, and my hope was that she’d kept up on the process. I had no idea what I could expect to find, but I was willing to bet I could convince her to part with at least some of it.
Old Alkerist looked almost exactly like I remembered it. The mud-brick huts with thatched roofs were still lined up in their neat little grid. The Collectors office sat in the middle of town, though I had no idea what they used it for anymore. There was no evidence of modernization anywhere, not even the standard teleportation platform that so many other villages had adopted.
I suspected the council’s personal feelings toward me had motivated their decision to reject any of the standard upgrades everyone else was enjoying. Even most of the mana cores I could sense around me were still dormant despite the village having the knowledge of how to complete the process for years. But, with my scrying spells all but instantly mapping out the town, I quickly realized that it was far emptier than it should be.
That begged the question: had they lost half their population in an attack when Ammun had unleashed hordes of zombies all over the island, or had half the village simply packed up their bags and left because they disagreed with the council’s decisions? As a distant third possibility, I considered that perhaps a bunch of families were simply off somewhere else together, soon to return.
That one didn’t seem likely to me, but I expanded the range of my divinations just in case there was some campsite set up a few miles out of town. It didn’t really matter one way or another, but I had to admit to a bit of curiosity about what had happened here.
With no platform in the village, there was no need to appear in plain sight. My destination was a spot a mile in the air. I promptly turned myself invisible the moment I arrived, having no real desire to speak to anyone involved with the council or any of my extended family while I was here. They hadn’t been kind to Mother when we’d left, or for many years before that, from the way I understood things. As far as I was concerned, they were no family of mine.
Instead, I turned my focus north and flew over to the arbor, where a small circle of huts was surrounded by no less than eight greenhouses, with several more tucked away between the trees. It seemed the Arborists had been hard at work expanding their operations in the last few years.
The person I was looking for was a woman perhaps forty or fifty years of age. She’d had a stage one mana core when I’d left, but that had been a number of years ago. It was possible she’d advanced to stage two, though it was also equally possibly the knowledge of how to do that had never made it here. In that case, she’d probably be stuck at stage one still.
Either way, she wasn’t anywhere in the arbor, as far as I could tell. Maybe she’d abandoned the village after all. She’d stayed behind when we left, citing her duty to the arbor as the council member in charge of it, but a lot could change in half a decade.
If I couldn’t find her, I’d just have to start asking questions. I located the nearest Arborists, landed behind a nearby tree, canceled my invisibility spell, and walked out into view. “Hi,” I said. “I’m looking for Shel.”