I didn’t sleep great.

For one, it was already hard to sleep in a new place.

For another, I was too wired on the energy from my success to actually calm down and sleep.

For a third, my brain kept playing tricks on me.

And finally, once I finally drifted off, I snapped awake when I realized I’d forgotten to send any of my excess mana into my trees and into my Temporal Basin. After doing that, I laid back down, and got a little bit of sleep.

The following morning, Kene and I had some scrambled eggs and coffee for breakfast.

“Is there any sort of… I don’t know, sleep replacement elixir?” I asked them hopefully as I added paprika and cumin to my eggs.

“Hmm,” Kene said, thinking. “I don’t think so. Sleep’s pretty essential to functioning. There are some potions that can allow you to sleep much more effectively, cutting your needed sleep down to a few hours a night. Expensive, though. They’re third gate, and require a half dozen mind-based components.”

“Shame,” I said with a yawn. “By the way, is there anything specific you’re looking out for on this trip?”

“Yes, actually,” Kene said. “I need sunset marigolds, breath-aster, dewdrop feverfew, and amethyst hedge-nettle. Maybe some sleeping valerian and shimmering lady’s mantle too, but those are a little bit out of season, and my stock of the mantle is pretty good for now.”

“I think I know some of those, but can I have some descriptions?” I asked. “I mean, I’ll use my mana senses, but… Can’t hurt to use my eyes too.”

Kene slowly described each of them as we drained our coffee, from the softly glowing sunset marigolds, to the eternally dewy white petals of feverfew, to the silvery green of shimmering lady’s mantle.

I couldn’t help but watch them as they talked, his tone sending a wonderful shiver down my spine. Dusk laughed at me and slapped my cheek, and I blushed.

“Sorry,” I said. “I just think it’s really cool to listen to you. There’s a lot of stuff with plants, and you know so much.”

“Thanks,” they said. “And don’t worry. It’s cute. But what about you?”

“Are there any wild grown cauldrons I could harvest?” I griped. “They’re so expensive. But in all seriousness, I need a second gate life mana source, and that’s about it, but any magical plants to help expand the garden would be helpful. Maybe the alchemical basics, so I can start growing material for my potions?”

“Hmm,” Kene said, “I don’t think I know of any cauldrons that grow on trees or anything, though there is a variety of giant acorn that’s supposedly able to be used to amplify pure life potions if you use it like a cauldron. No clue where one of those would even be, though.”

“Ah, well,” I said. “It was worth a shot.”

“You could always make your own, though,” Kene continued. “It’s not too hard to do, and a cauldron you make yourself will always be better at amplifying the arrays you provide to it compared to a storebought one. They take more mana control to use for things like boiling down stones, but it’s a fair tradeoff.”

“How would I even go about doing that?” I asked, “I’m not an enchanter, and the way that it can alter any material, that’s… I mean, that’s got to take every mana type. With mana sources, that’d be fourteen sources.”

“Nope,” Kene said, a mischievous smirk on his face. “Wanna guess again?”

Dusk chimed in with a rustling noise, suggesting that since her mana was a blend of all mana types, she could build one.

Kene actually looked a bit interested in that.

“No, that wasn’t it, but that does actually bring up some interesting applications with alchemy. Especially if you need a variety of mana types to work on your body, like lunar for the blood…”

They trailed off and shook their head.

“Anyways, while you two co-building the cauldron may be cool, that’s not it either.”

I took a few more guesses, but Kene’s smirk only grew until he was laughing slightly.

“What is it?” I said, exasperated, but also smiling back at them.

In response, they flicked their fingers up and caused a small spark to dance over their fingers. I was about to tell him that I didn’t have solar magic when I looked at it more closely with my magical sense.

It wasn’t a solar spell. It was an ungated one.

“Ungated mana?” I said incredulously. “But it’s so…”

“Weak?” Kene suggested.

“Yes!”

“It is,” they acknowledged. “But it’s not nearly so strange as you may think. All mana gets more intense as you rise in gates. We’re only second gate, so we haven’t seen the most extreme ends of it yet, but I’ve seen my grandmother do some pretty interesting things with ungated mana. It’s not able to apply much direct power, but when it comes to just holding onto some natural energies, it’s pretty good. A cauldron you make probably will only be able to handle first gate materials, at least until you raise your other three mana types to second gate too. I can show you some of the construction, maybe tomorrow?”

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“That’d be amazing,” I said. “Thank you, Kene. Seriously, you do a lot for me.”

They grinned, but there was actually a faint blush on their skin as they stood and started cleaning up. I hurried to help, and before long, we were grabbing our brooms.

“We’re going to fly?”

“Beats walking, and we’re going deeper than last time,” Kene explained. “I actually figured we could fly overhead until we got near where we were last time, then land and walk further? Most of the materials near the town are just ungated or first gate, but we were starting to move into a more mana rich region last time. I’m gonna be running some spells to look for some specific plants.”

We took off, sweeping the ground underneath us with our mana senses. Or at least, I did, Kene’s spell was far more effective.

We did stop briefly to collect some nonmagical plants that popped up on Kene’s radar, including some chives.

“Do those have any alchemy uses?” I asked as I helped him collect the thin stalks.

“No, they just taste good,” he said, winking at me.

I grinned back, but that actually left me more confused. I didn’t know if the wink was flirty, or if the wink was him suggesting that he had lied and that chives did have alchemy uses. It could be both for all I knew.

Right around the area where the troll had been, Kene held up their hand and signaled for us to land again.

“I remembered that you only got some pointer moss,” they said, “so I added Transivy, Null-Ranunculus, and a few other plants that I thought may be useful to you into my divination.”

He began to shift around the trees, and then his hand flashed out as he tried to pin down a few strands of a very normal looking ivy. It phased out of the way, and I reached out and tried to grab it. It teleported again, just a few inches, and this time, Kene’s fingers wrapped around the plant.

“Gotcha!” they said, then grinned at me and we began to extract the plant carefully, making sure that at least one of us to had a hand on it at all times. Once we finished, I waved a hand and opened a portal to Dusk’s astral plane.

Kene’s mouth fell open, and the ivy slipped out of their grasp, teleporting back onto the tree.

“What?” I asked. “I told you that Dusk came from feeding a Lushloam seed to a growth item.”

“Yeah, but when you said she had a plane in her, I figured that it would be like this!” they said, tapping their storage ring. “Maybe if it was really good, it’d be the size of a chest of drawers or something. But she’s first gate, and crafting extraspatial pockets is normally third gate!”

They stepped back and ran a hand through their hair, laughing and shaking their head, and occasionally shooting looks towards the plane.

“Primes…”

“I’m sorry,” I said earnestly. “I really just wasn’t thinking. Do you want a tour?”

“…Yes,” they admitted. “But let’s get the Transivy again.”

A while of wrestling the ivy later, and we got it to latch onto some of the small folk’s housing instead.

True to what Kene had said, when he came by their village to help me make sure I got it planted, the small folk shied away from him, and the green one that seemed to have become something akin to a mayor flew out to watch us with suspicion.

After we got that settled, I showed him the small herb garden that Dusk had been tending to, which set Kene on another round of good-natured griping about how useful being able to grow any herbs at any time of the year would be for alchemists.

The river interested Kene some, and he took a few samples to do some tests on at home. It was obviously coming as a result of mana, but he wanted to know if it was the same as the first gate lunar spell ‘Create Water’ or not.

“So, what do you think?” I asked him as we finished the tour.

“It’s terrible,” they said in a deadpan tone.

I stuck out my tongue at him and shoved him out of the plane, then snapped the portal shut. A moment later, I opened it again, and saw them laughing.

“Okay, okay, I surrender,” they said. “It’s really cool. Or at least it has the potential to be. There’s still a lot of unused space, do you have any plans for it?”

We discussed potential plans for building a small house and garden. Kene suggested the idea of splitting the garden into four sections, one for each season, which I actually quite liked, and it seemed to cause Dusk to grow very contemplative before agreeing – though she insisted that the spring and autumnal sections be larger than the summer or winter ones.

“Regardless, as soon as we get back, I’m going to give you a bunch of cuttings and samples of plants to grow,” Kene told Dusk. “Even if your… Dad? Older brother? Isn’t able to use them in alchemy yet, it’ll be good practice for you.”

“Older brother,” Dusk and I said in unison, though hers sounded more like rustling branches than speech.

“Got it, gran…” Kene started. Their grin was teasing, but it trailed off as they stopped moving and stared off.

“What is it?” I asked, half worried we were about to be attacked by another troll. If we were, I was far more confident in my ability to take it on this time.

Confident or not, I flexed and spun my mana through my garden in preparation. There was confidence, and then there was arrogance.

“I just got a ping that a bunch of plants I was looking for were in that direction,” they said, starting to move quickly and quietly. I followed, and even Dusk fell quiet as we moved.

My mana senses began to resonate slightly as we approached the source of the plants, and I shared a look with Kene.

For a moment, I thought I was about to stumble upon another terragon, but as we pushed through the last of the trees and into the edge of the clearing, I re-evaluated.

The terragon had been drawing in the natural energy of the forest like wild, taking everything, it needed to allow the creature inside to grow.

This… was not that. It was, in fact, the exact opposite. Natural mana and wild energies burst from the ground and the air, spilling out like from a broken wine pot. The energy was somewhere at the between second gate and third gate, so it wasn’t absurdly dense, but there was a flowing abundance of it.

If the highly dense mana of a high gate was gelatin, then this was only water. But it was a vast pool of water.

“A natural mana locus,” Kene whispered. “There are several throughout Delford Forest, ranging in all sorts of amounts and densities. Great spot for harvesting magical plants, natural mana sources, and really just materials of all stripes.”

We stepped further into the clearing and began to look around.

It was huge, more than large enough to fit our store and upstairs housing in it, probably twice over, and filled with various flowers – marigolds, feverfew, aster, and wild roses. Many of them gave off mana, as well.

The center of the clearing was even more lush with plants, namely clusters of hedge nettle, lady’s mantle, and sage shrubs.

The centerpiece, though, was a single young tree with a rust-colored bark, apple-colored red leaves, and blood-colored roots.

Throughout its branches, several gourds lay, glowing ever so softly with a reddish-purple light. They didn’t look ripe yet, but they probably only needed a few more months.

It was a perfect bounty of natural resources, ripe for the taking.

I took another step into the clearing, and the buzzing of insects began to slowly fill the grove.

“But they’re typically host to a handful of monsters,” Kene said.

Oh.