The lights dimmed, and four items appeared on the altar: a smooth stone disc covered in runes, a slip of paper, and two burlap bags tied with leather cords.

I picked up the paper, hoping it would have an easy description of what it did. Instead, there were three letters on it: I O U, followed by a doodle of the craftsman winking, sticking his tongue out, and giving a thumbs up. A thin lattice of mana ran through the paper – ungated mana, yet woven so finely that I didn’t even know how I would possibly begin to mimic it.

I carefully placed that on one of the vault’s shelves. If it really did represent a favor owed from the craftsman, then it might be even more valuable than the other rewards from the trial – if I could track him down and find him, at least. Given that Ikki apparently had trouble doing that, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to anytime soon, but it was still worth keeping in my back pocket.

I moved to the stone next, flipping it over and focusing my mana senses over it. It felt… Strange. Almost like beast magic, a mix of mana and energy. I wasn’t entirely sure that it would work for someone who wasn’t a beast, or didn’t have some sort of effect blending the two, like my own dual spells. It seemed to primarily be made of knowledge and mental magic, but it was complex, rivaling the complexity of dragon magic.

It was also very clearly a growth item, and I felt a spark of excitement rise in my stomach.

When Orykson had offered me growth items, I’d very nearly taken the Argos Millia eye. I didn’t regret my choice in the slightest, given that the key had eventually formed Dusk, but the eye had been tempting.

Given the mana that this focused on, it just might do something similar…

I touched the disk and sent a spark of ungated mana into it, and immediately felt as it slid into my spirit, locking into place.

My mana regeneration tanked for a moment, dropping to nothing at all, and I started to panic, then it slowly started to return. It built back up until it was lower than where it had been before, but not completely unmanageable. It had offset most of the regeneration from ingraining my harvest spells, but those would grow as I continued using them.

Far more concerning, spikes of crystal burst out of the ground in all four of my first gates within my mana-garden. They somehow didn’t seem to eat up any mana at all, yet they did take up space.

No, that wasn’t right. They seemed to be emitting mana, rather than draining it. Only a trickle, and it mixed with the energy of my mana-garden, then surged out, touching the energy in my body.

I’d built up a considerable pool of extra knowledge energy in my mind, from all of the casting of sensory spells, but I felt that flow away, locking down into the disk. My mental energy fared far worse – the item took an equal amount, but it didn’t have quite as large reserves.

It locked away portions of telluric, tempest, and abnegation energy from my body, and the rest in lesser amounts, and they flowed into the item. Within its heart, I felt a core sparking to life. Like the one that formed formed in my self-sustaining Spatial Anchor spells, only a thousand times more complex, it took from the energy and mana and created a generation core, one that provided its own constant stream of energy.

The flow reversed and swept into me, and suddenly my mental and knowledge energy pools began to recover far quicker than they had any right to. Within my mana-garden, the spires of crystal began to emit more power, not mana, but almost as if they were an ingrained effect in and of themselves.

As it worked, my mana senses grew… Deeper. They couldn’t reach any further, but the amount of information that I was able to gather from them was stronger.

Finally, all of the power accumulated, forming itself into a channel within my spirit. I opened the channel, and felt it drink from my energy, while blending together with the power of the stone and its mana production. If I hadn’t had the Magister’s Body spell, I would have been… Worried… about how fast it drained away my energy, but as was, I thought it should be manageable.

A serenity flowed over my mind, concentrating and assisting it. It paired well with my mind shield, almost forming a film over my thoughts that would allow me to keep working even if I was pressured from external attack.

Wrapped within the membrane, it was easy to sort the details my mana senses fed to me. What might take me several seconds to discern instead took moments, the fine precision of my senses were so improved.

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I drew my mana senses in, and felt them reinforcing the film over my thoughts, pushing against an attacker that wasn’t there, directly pushing away mental assault with my mana senses.

Placid Mind.

The spell’s name came to my mind unbidden, and I wondered for a moment if it had been built into the spell.

I stopped feeding power into the channel, and approached the bags, untying the smaller one to find a small pearl of purple power that radiated second gate mana, a green crystal with a mix of mana that was quite similar to the item, a bundle of died moss that bled with a variety of powers, and a dried mushroom that was shaped unnervingly like an eye.

I sighed. I supposed it had been too much to hope that they’d be living samples I could add to my garden.

These must be the materials that I needed for the advancement of the item to second gate, though, which probably meant that the third bag contained the materials to advance it to third gate.

I took the disk from my spirit, and it rotated around my head. I snatched it and fed the items into it, pressing them to the disk’s surface until they vanished.

The spell advanced, and once again, I felt the spikes forming within my mana garden, and the crystal grew in thin, shaky tendrils over the vast tree that was Magister’s Body, and the fungal stem of Beast Mage’s Soul. It truly sparked and reacted then, diving deep into the foundation of my mana-garden and doing… Something. I couldn’t understand what.

No more of my energy or mana was locked away, and yet a second channel formed in my spirit. I flowed power into it, and felt my mana senses pull in, before projecting out through my eyes.

Witch Eyes.

Again, the name of the spell came to me unbidden.

I swept my gaze around the room, and under the power of the Witch Eyes spell, I could see clearer. Not just as if the lack of light was less important, but as if the senses projected from my eyes were pushing away anything that might be in my way.

Could the witch eyes peer through illusions? That would be useful – I’d seen plenty of illusions recently.

I opened the third bag curiously. Inside of it were more materials, as well as a scroll of paper, which I picked up and unrolled.

It listed out the materials for raising the item – which it identified as the Runelight Lens – to fourth through ninth gate. I snorted as I looked at the items required for ninth gate. How exactly was one supposed to get their hands upon the petrified liver of a thousand year old three-eye toad? And that was one of the less egregious items it listed!

I rolled the scroll up and tucked it into Dusk’s vaults as well, next to the bag of items to raise the gate of the lens. Ninth gate was a long way away, if I ever got there, and if it even really existed. For now, I just needed to look one step in front of me.

Then I frowned as a random thought struck me. I was currently inside of Dusk, in a very literal sense. She was the realm, and the realm was her. Could I mentally speak to her like normal? The metaphysical distance had slowed communication before, but now that distance should be zero.

I shot a thought to Dusk, asking if she could hear me, and this time, rather than fighting through soup to sent it, it zipped out like normal. A moment later she sent back the equivalent of mild curiosity and agreement, so I asked her to come into the vaults.

She told me to wait, she was currently working on a project above the vaults, to which I had no response other than to shrug in acceptance. A few moments later, she sent that she was having trouble with opening the portal she needed, and thought it was because I was maintaining my own. She’d see me soon, just meet her on the island – not the one we’d been stranded on, the normal island in the real world.

With a sigh, I stepped back into the altar room and shut the portal to let Dusk do her work… whatever it was.

I glanced around the altar room for another moment, trying to see if there was anything else I could do, any last moment hidden challenges. Upon seeing nothing, I stepped through the gate and appeared in the center of the unstable astral plane again. Araceli was there, a locket around her neck that was a growth item. It was strange, a core of mana not unlike my own within it, mingling with her body’s energy.

Had I gotten an item meant for a beast? That would… make a lot of sense, actually. Huh.

Mallory was sitting there too, a new bracelet around her wrist that felt like a spatial and abnegation focused growth item.

“Took you long enough,” she griped, rising to her feet. “We’ve got a few more hours before we need to get out of here. Up for some last minute exploring?”

I focused and let my mana senses bloom around me. They stretched out, stronger than ever before, and as I let them settle around me for nearly a hundred and fifty feet in every direction, I could feel the rents in the air creeping towards us.

Maybe once I would have stayed. Dodged the tears in space, looking for spiritual treasures and items to add to my garden. But I liked to think that, if nothing else, I’d learned a few things from the war root and the drake about throwing myself into high risk, low reward situations.

I liked to think it, at least, I wasn’t sure if it was actually true or not. Still, I shook my head and pointed at the rainbow portal, the one that would lead back out onto the island in the real world.

“I’m not, but I won’t stop you.”

“Suit yourself,” Mallory said. “I’m going to try and grab a few extra things while I still can.”

With that, my erstwhile rival slipped away into the plains, and I looked down at Araceli.

“Ready to go, girl?” I asked her.

She slumped against my leg for a moment before standing up and striding towards the portal, while I stepped into the rainbow alongside her. Its light washed over me, and moments later, I found myself standing in a green valley between four mountains, back in the outside world.

I had done it. I might not have been some legendary hero who climbed the entire tower, or who had taken advantage of the sundering to dive between the pocket worlds and collect power from all of the remaining trials and floors.

But as I rolled my new growth item between my fingers, I thought that I’d still come out of the trial pretty well off.