The first and easiest selection to make was the spread-crystal. That was a massive improvement over my current, alchemically grown crystal, and it’s constant, if slow, expansion would be invaluable for expanding my storage capacity.

It was heavy, but I didn’t think that would be a problem.

The next pick was harder, if for no other reason than the abundance of good options, so I was forced to take a step back and consider my future.

I was a beast mage and a plant mage, and I was… Honestly happy with that. I wanted to expand my repertoire of plants and beast magic. After all, hadn’t I just been thinking about how amazing Foxstep was?

The path of beast magic might not be a reasonable option for most, since it required mixing so many mana types together, but between me already having four, and my full-gate spells, I was practically purpose built for it.

Plant magic was a little more complex. It branched off into alchemy and fungal magic quite well, and thus offered incredible versatility. Fungal Lock alone might not be as flashy as Briarthreads, but it had taken out its share of enemies.

That had me leaning towards the marbletree or the ninelight morels, but as I thought more about it, I started leaning towards the morels. I could grow them better than I could grow the marbletree, since I didn’t have telluric mana to feed the marbletree, and if they could really be used to cast fungal spells directly, that was invaluable.

There was also the name. Ninelight…

I might be overthinking it, but it reminded me of the prismatic, rainbow swirls of fortune. I didn’t think there was a drop of fortune inside the morels, since I was confident I’d be able to sense that, but it was still enough to give me pause.

That left me ruminating on my third pick. A few things, like the gold, mana-conducting ore, and sparksteel, were easy to dismiss. The dousing bead could potentially lead me to more treasures, but I had no way to reliably extract things from the earth, so I set that out too, and considered my remaining options.

The tooth would be good to pair with my current path – morels for plants and fungi, the tooth for beast stuff, but honestly I wasn’t sure that storing and reinforcing my teeth was that huge of a benefit. It almost felt like a waste of a reward, so I was able to put it aside.

The forger-stone was amazing, but it only enforced one spell. I had loads of spells that forged mana, and funnily enough, that was what stopped me from picking it. If I’d been able to reinforce everything, then it would be amazing, but just one… It wasn’t entirely worth it.

A pound of structure-ore was worth a ton, and Orykson had suggested that I should pick one up for practicing, but that was before I’d embarked on a more beast mage path. It also was something I could purchase normally, even if the market price had risen back to normal levels. I marked it down as a maybe and moved on to other things that attracted me.

The conquest-gem… I had mixed feelings about. I wasn’t opposed to learning more blood magic, especially with how useful Vampiric Senses was, but this felt a little too… Murder-ey. I was sure it would be useful, but I couldn’t see myself going heavily on the more depraved, conquest, and murder aspects of blood magic, and I felt like there was a solid chance this gemstone would push me down that path. That was a no.

I’d already dismissed the marble-tree for the ninelight morels, but I considered picking it up too. It would doubtless have uses in potions, but I wasn’t keen on spending both of my choices to expand on my garden, especially not with all the new plants I’d already picked up in the Idyll-Flume and had yet to get used to.

Which left the inkstone.

Far and away the strangest of the items, I walked back over to it and probed it sharply with my mana senses. Again, the ink that dripped from it felt strange, like a hudau heritage stone, or edgar’s magic, or his shell.

I rolled the stone between my hands and watched as, for a moment, my skin was stained with black and white ink. The color faded a moment later, and I sighed. It wasn’t a hudau heritage stone, but it was clearly… something. Maybe Edgar would know what it was?

“This will be my third,” I announced.

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It was a gamble, but the hudau heritage stones were absurdly valuable. Even if this couldn’t match its value, it would still be useful. Probably.

It was also small enough I could carry it with me, and not have to rely on the coblynau’s sense of direction, like I’d have to with the Ninelight Morels. At least with it, I’d be assured that I’d get two of the three rewards.

Not that I thought the Coblynau would back out on their word. Not in the slightest. I was more worried about the practical concerns of them getting lost along the way.

“Alright then,” Deep-thing said. “If you don’t mind…?”

“Of course,” I said, turning and exiting the room, so he could close it back up. I turned and placed the morels near him.

“I’ll be relying on you to deliver these to Dusk,” I said. “The other two I should be able to carry.”

“What about the weight of the crystal?” Deep-thing asked, and I winked at him.

“I’ve got a plan.”

I drew my staff out from my spirit, placed it down, and allowed it to dissolve into the ritual components. I picked out the alchemically grown crystal broke my link to it, then turned to the spread-crystal and cast Capture Moment.

“I think I’ll stay here until the snowstorm’s finished, unless you’d prefer I move up to the mouth of the cave,” I said, and Deep-thing waved my concern off, then left to go take care of his own people.

The moment I established the Temporal Basin spell in the spread-crystal, yellowish light began to glow inside the blue crystal, turning it a vibrant green color. In the same instant, I felt… changes… begin to flow into my mana.

Much like when I’d felt the tinges of death seeping in when I’d used the amber with the scorpion in it, I felt tinges of space and crystal flowing through my mana now. It wasn’t a massive change, but the magic lent itself a little bit easier to the use of my Foxstep spell now.

I had to suppress a grin. I could get used to that…

Then I looked over my staff. I hadn’t added in solidified temporal mana to mark out the Testudinal Reserve spell yet, so I started the slow process of drawing out some of the excess from my spirit and shaping it. I then began to move through the rest of my spells.

I’d done a decent job shaping them, but I’d not had a ton of downtime since the powerful boosts that the Idyll-Flume had provided, and not everything in the staff was entirely accurate anymore. I took a few bits and shifted them, added a bit more here, took away a touch there, until I felt like it was a more accurate representation of my mana-garden.

It wasn’t truly an exact method, but rather instinct that guided me, trying to match that which existed in my spirit to that which existed in reality.

Once I was finished, I sent my power swirling through the ritual, and held onto the expanding magic until I felt the edges of my spirit tingling, then released it.

My reformed staff looked somewhere between my first staff and the second staff. It was made of a dark, reddish wood, with swirling patterns of gold and silver, which glowed purple and blue. The spread-crystal sat atop the staff, oriented in such a manner that it resembled a true mage’s staff, catching the faint light of the glimmerstone and refracting it out into green specks. At hand height, a prismatic pattern formed a grip, banded by a single black band on the bottom, and a golden band above.

I lifted the staff, and as I’d suspected, since it was connected to my spirit, the physical weight of the spread-crystal didn’t weigh it down much at all. With a few testing swings, I grew used to the slight changes, and then drew it back into my spirit.

The next two days were slow, but simple. I practiced my newest sensory technique, and with time I found it easier to surrender my control over my mana senses to my surroundings, and allow them to carry me as they saw fit.

I thought part of that might be from the lessening of the snowstorm’s power. It felt less like giving up in the face of a force beyond me, and more like allowing something that was almost a peer to guide me.

But another part of it was practice, plain and simple. With little to do but to practice magic and my mana sensing, I was able to cram in effort, if for no other reason than to force the pressure of the boredom away.

I eventually found that I could practice the surrendering technique even within the stone halls. There was energy everywhere, after all, and the earth pulled my mana senses down in a slow but steady dripping. It wasn’t a match for Analyze Earth, not even close to it, but it helped me learn to slowly sink my mana senses through thick stone.

But the sensory technique wasn’t the only thing I practiced, and with gradual and continual shaping practice, I was able to pull Testudinal Reserve closer to mastery.

It wasn’t there yet, let alone anywhere near close to being ingrained, but progress was progress.

Having the company did a lot for my mental health, honestly. I’d grown lonely, without Kene or Dusk to speak to, and in some ways, it was incredibly healing to have simple conversations, even if they mostly centered around what life was like outside of the cave.

I may have been mentally healed, but the physical healing was a lot slower. The palliate-blacksalt was doing its job and stopping things from getting any worse, and in the two days, my blisters had shrunk a little bit, but It wasn’t much. It was still painful to walk around, but it was survivable and unlikely to get infected, and that was what was most important.

As the third day dawned, and the snowstorm finished its last flurries, I said my goodbyes to Deep-thing, thanked Doctor-thing as he applied a fresh coat of the blacksalt to give me nine days, and promised to meet up with them in Puinen, after the Beastgate Trial Trail was over.

Then, with some trepidation, I cast the pain relieving spell that Meadow had taught me, and left the cave. I took a moment to glance around, then spoke aloud to myself.

“I have no idea where the trail is.”