As I let out a slow breath, Kene paused his hand.

“I really need to master those new spells,” he said. “I wasn’t even able to finish sketching before the fight was over.”

“That was weird, right?” I asked Kene. “Like, it’s not just me. That was weird.”

“It made sense to me,” Kene said. “You don’t want to run out of mana so early in the day, especially during the first week or so, where there are going to be the most things that are the least picked over. If we’d just said we’d move on, we probably could have.”

Dusk let out a sheepish laugh and made wind noises, apologizing for attacking so suddenly. She’d been irritated, and needed to get out her frustration.

I patted her on her head and picked her up, then turned to look around the standing stones.

“What did we even get?”

“I know a bit about mineral magic, since it also can be used for its own branch of enchanting and alchemy,” Kene said. “Mind keeping watch while I look at things?”

I did, standing around and keeping my mana senses spread over as wide an area as I could. A few magical beasts noticed the stranger in their midst, and one of them actually came down to watch.

It was short, with small horns, a white body, and leaf-like scales that ran all along its back. Given the forest mana that it was putting out, it had to be a forest estragon.

Dusk offered it some dried slices of the leftover mana-apples from the fall’s crop, and the estragon snacked on it happily, then wiggled along and plopped down in the middle of the stones.

The two people who noticed were less welcome, however. One of them simply turned and moved away to a different section of the forest, but the other came to investigate. She looked over the group of us from the cover of the trees before retreating.

Eventually, Kene finished his work and started to sort several stones into different small piles.

“We’ve got some wardstone,” they said. “That’s the most obviously useful, since it can be applied to just about any ward, even your own. Then we also have some stunstone…”

“Sunstone?” I asked.

“No, stunstone,” Kene said. “It can release a small disorientation effect when touched. That’s probably what the mineral mage was here for, actually. Then, finally, we have glimmerstone, which soaks up sunlight during the day, and releases it slowly at night. Super useful for solar collector enchantments.”

They glanced up at me and shrugged.

“Any preference?”

Dusk piped up, saying that seeding some of the glimmerstone through the pixie’s village would probably be good for their mental health, and I nodded.

“I can use the wardstone for putting up wards while we’re here,” I said. “If it works the way I think it will, it should help me hide some of the spatial ripples. But I don’t see a use for the stunstone. But I’ve got a better question, what about the big, standing stones?”

I gently whacked the boulder that made up the ring.

“I don’t know what they do,” Kene said. “Mostly. Two of them are glimmerstone, so maybe Dusk should eat those? But otherwise, I don’t see the point in picking up something we can’t identify, and might not turn out to be valuable.”

“We have so much free space, though,” I argued.

“And we’re going to need to find someone who can identify it, hope they’re correct, and then sell it,” Kene said. “And that’s assuming you can find a buyer who’s also capable of transporting a multi-hundred pound stone.”

I considered it for a moment, then conceded, while dusk ate the giant glimmerstones.

“We should sell the stunstone at the auction,” Kene said. “This pile isn’t going to fetch a ton of money, but it could go for a little bit.”

Dusk wandered over and sucked them up, putting them in her treasury, then Kene dusted their hands off.

“Ready to move on?” they asked, and I nodded my agreement.

We meandered through the forest, keeping our mana senses spread out wide. A few other curious estragon emerged to look at us, and Kene fed one of them a small strip of jerky from his bag, then we kept walking.

“How are we going to make contact with Liz and Travis?” I asked as we walked.

“I think it’ll be a good idea to head back to the area that’s being set up as a sort of base,” Kene said, pausing momentarily to pluck some berries from a bush. “These are moonglow berries. They’re good to help with soreness.”

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“Why not just take the bush?” I asked.

“They only sprout a berry once every seventeen moon cycles,” Kene said. “Not worth it for such a small effect. Anyways, I think we should head back as it gets later. We’re mostly running into estragon and stuff now, but I don’t trust there to not be more dangerous things as we move further from the entrance.”

As if summoned by his words, we stepped into a small clearing, filled with a buzzing sound and a familiar mana signature.

“Crystaldigger wasps,” Kene groaned. “Again?”

The wasps bombdove down on us, but this time, both of us had third gate defensive spells, rather than just Kene, and my aura pushed the wasps away. I snapped – not needed, but it felt cool – and summoned Briarthreads around me. They lashed out, knocking away the wasps as I headed deeper into the clearing.

The center of the clearing had a huge mound, and my guess was that the mound was where the hive queen was. Sure enough, as it became apparent that the weak wasps weren’t able to touch me, they retreated back to the mound, which began to quiver and shake.

The bear-sized giant wasp with a crystal stinger erupted from the earth a moment later and rushed towards me. I waited…

Waited…

Waited…

Now!

I tapped my Foxstep spell right as it clashed into my aura, then spun around and released a scattering of Pinpoint Bonehshards. Dusk unleashed her shattering spell, and together they drove into the back of the matriarch.

She let out an angry buzzing noise, and I sketched out a spell, while dusk pulled a vial from her pocket space.

I sent mana into the basic ungated spell, and cut off my sense of smell. Dusk threw the vial, and followed it with a shattering spell that caused it to explode.

A cloud of rancid stinkbomb power erupted over the matriarch, and I couldn’t help but laugh somewhat. When Kene had used a pheromone potion, it had been great at disorienting the wasps, but now the hive queen was bobbing and weaving like she was drunk.

She plunged at me for another attack, and I caught it on a web of Briarthreads, then lashed out at her.

I wasn’t sure if it was coincidence, or if cowardice was part of the psyche of crystaldigger wasps, but this one also turned and quickly fled from the clearing. I looked over at Kene, who gave me a lopsided, sultry smile.

“Gotta say, that was pretty cool,” they said.

“Thanks,” I said, blushing slightly at the look. “I… Uh, it was easier this time. I’ve grown a lot stronger and better at fighting since I fought them last time.”

“You definitely have,” Kene agreed, kissing my cheek as I walked over. They glanced at the mound. “Care to loot?”

We dug through the pile that the crystaldigger wasps had until we found significantly more glimmerstone, wardstone, and stunstone, which they’d likely taken from the standing stones nearby, but there were other things too.

There was a small sphere of what looked to be solidified sunlight, which Kene examined and tucked away. A heavy black stone laden with both mental and temporal energy, which I thought I may be able to use as the mana source for my first gate temporal mana.

And we found our first natural treasure.

Kind of.

Natural treasure wasn’t exactly a hard and firm category – by some definitions, the stunstone and other things we’d gathered would count as natural treasures. Generally though, the term was reserved for things like the lushloam seed, which were actually usable by people in a direct way, rather than just being a good material to craft things with or fight with.

The treasure was a small garnet, shaped like a teardrop, and absolutely radiated with the power of third gate creation, to the point that small bits of steam were sometimes drifting off of it.

“It’s a cretjewel,” Kene said, whistling. “It’s a great resource for creation mana. It can apparently do some serious extensions on the walls of their mana-garden, like taking an advancement pill to expand your mana. We can probably trade it for something else that one of us can use.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked, amazed that he simply… knew… so much.

“A mix of reasons. The simplest is I brushed up on natural treasures and stuff at the library before I came, but that was just a refresher. The deeper reason is that my grandmother. She has this thick, old grimoire with just about every natural treasure, herb, and useful enchanting or alchemy material in Mossford and the surrounding areas. I had to study it front to back a lot when I was training with her.”

I tossed the cretjewel to Dusk, who locked it into her vault and we moved on.

As we moved, though, I got a prickling on the back of my neck, as if we were being followed. I pulled my mana senses in closer and swept them more thoroughly over the area around us, but… Nothing.

We wandered into a small natural spring, and Kene stepped over and touched the water.

“This is a pretty potent material,” he said. “Second gate lunar magic. Probably useful for staff or domain weapon construction, if we can trade it…”

“How can you tell?” I asked, wandering over. I couldn’t sense anything abnormal about the water.”

“It’s not the top layer, look deeper.”

I did, with both my eyes and mana senses, and I saw it.

Inside the pool, there was a second, smaller, but much denser pool of water. Its energy blended in with the environment of the pool exceedingly well, to the point that it was practically veiled.

Kene glanced at Dusk.

“Get us some jars?”

Dusk called out some canning jars from the alchemy room, and Kene leaned down to collect the water.

Mana spiked, and I had just a second to react.

A large black cat with long, sweeping horns was leaping down from the tree, swiping at Kene.

I thrust my hand out and caught it with a three-layer fungal lock, but its momentum carried it to crash into Kene’s back.

The pair tumbled into the pool of water, and I leapt in without thinking, grabbing Kene and pulling them to the surface. As they gasped for air, I snatched their hat and shoved it back onto their head.

Then the horned cat finished ripping off my fungal locks and burst out of the water as well. It let out a loud, angry hiss, before turning and bounding away.

“I don’t think it liked the water,” Kene observed.

I relaxed slightly and smiled at them.

“I also caught its ambush, and they’re ambush predators. Sorry about not getting there in time to stop it.”

“It’s fine, dork,” Kene said, rolling their eyes at me. “You stopped the attack, and I hadn’t even noticed it.”

I smiled back, a bit more unsure. If I’d been Ed, I could have caught the cat in a gravitational field and slammed it down…

I shook off the thoughts and helped Kene collect the water, since we may be able to trade that for materials for my domain weapon.

Once it was jarred up, Kene cast a spell to dry us off, and we started moving again, Kene occasionally plucking the odd flower or berry that he noticed – things too weak to bother cultivating, but worth plucking while we moved.

One find we did integrate into Dusk’s garden was Mist-Larkspur. We already had some, but it was from seeds that had lain dorment for centuries, while this was fresh and wild, and Kene thought introducing the wild larkspur could help the slow-growing seeds to bloom faster.

Eventually, though, we took a break for a quick lunch, and then decided to turn around and start heading back.