“Are you ready to learn some new spells?” Meadow asked. Dusk said that she didn’t think she was, but I nodded.

Meadow tipped her head to Dusk.

“That’s reasonable. Most of what I’m showing is more for Malachi anyhow, but you’re welcome to listen in.”

As she spoke, she flexed her mana, and I felt life rush out from her and weave through grass all across the park.

“Mass Enhance Plant Life?” I asked, tilting my head.

“Indeed,” Meadow said. “If you’d like to learn it, I can teach you.”

“I think I’m fairly locked into using plant magic, even if only as a supplement,” I said. “Thanks to my connection to Dusk, I can carry my garden with me anywhere, grow rare plants, and disregard most of the standard downsides.”

“It makes you a unique plant mage, certainly,” Meadow agreed. “Normally, I’d teach a plant mage several spells like Briarthreads now – there are ones to root yourself in the ground and draw power up through it, spells that create a cloak of ivy that can absorb and redirect force that punches through your Briarthreads, spells that create sharpened sprays of needles…”

I remembered the needles the spriggan had thrown at me, and nodded.

“Spells to form adaptive fungal armor?” I asked somewhat hopefully.

“Not normally, but it may be worth it for you, given you have the ninelight morels, as well as mana that can approximate mushroom mana.”

“What are the ninelight morels?” I asked. “I thought with the name, it might be related to fortune mana.”

“They’re not completely unseparated,” Meadow said. “But we’re getting off track. The point is, there are many plant spells that I would normally teach a plant mage. They have ingrained effects that all build on plant magic, creating quite a beneficial resonance. If you want, I can still teach them to you, so don’t think I won’t. But you also have somewhat less of a need for them than a normal plant mage.”

She held up her hand and a dangerously sharp looking apple leaf forged itself over her palm, then shot forwards in a spinning arc, digging into the ground before dissolving.

“What do you need to do that for? You can call blademoss to cut, no need for cutting leaves. You could of course integrate these spells into your fighting style, and it may even be a good idea, for the ingrained effects, as I said. Think about it, there’s no need to choose now.”

I nodded my agreement, since I could see her point. There were lots of ways I could use my life mana, after all. A haste spell that used life and time mana would be quite strong, especially with my beast body. I needed to pick up a regeneration spell of some sort.

The third gate was bigger than my first or second gates were, but they still weren’t infinitely huge.

“I will say that I believe Mass Harvest and Enhance Plant Life would be good for you,” Meadow said. “They will assist in caring for Dusk, with alchemy, and their ingrained effects will benefit you, particularly the harvesting spell. Even if you don’t expand into plant magic more, they will combine with the standard versions to make you a shockingly diverse plant mage.”

“I agree,” I said, nodding.

“What do you know about meta spells?” Meadow asked.

“Now who’s changing the subject?” I asked teasingly, then answered. “Not much. I’ve heard them talked about, but…”

“In essence, they’re spells that strengthen other spells,” Meadow said. “Some people define anchor spells, like Spatial Anchor or Capture Moment to be meta spells, but I don’t, personally.”

“That’s the problem of any categorization,” I said. “Estragon often get into territory fights because of it.”

“Indeed,” Meadow said wryly. “In any case, Mass Enhance and Harvest plant life are almost always classified as meta spells.”

She held out her hand.

“May I have some paper?”

Dusk, who was sitting on my shoulder, clapped, and paper appeared in Meadow’s hand, alongside a thick black marker. Meadow started to draw out the spell arrays, talking as she did.

“While there are designs for these spells that operate fully on their own, they’re large, have poor mana efficiency, and yield worse results,” she said, then passed the papers over to me.

The spells that Meadow had drawn out were quite simple, only barely more complex than my fungal lock spell. They were certainly easier than the standard harvesting and enhancing spells were, and I studied them, arms crossed.

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“There’s no way this is it,” I said.

“It is. All it does is connect to the standard versions, then apply the different magic of your third gate to them, activating them and spreading them out.”

I focused on the harvesting spell and shifted my mana around to form the circuit within me, then let power flow through it.

Within my mana-garden, I felt my Harvest Plant Life spell light up and resonate, and the newly formed shape of the Mass Harvest spell started to drain mana to activate. I flicked it into the grass, and I felt the spell connect. Moments later, I felt power flow in as I pulled from all of the grass around me in a massive circle.

The grass didn’t have much extra power to spare, since it was just ordinary grass, and the spell cut off only moments later, but it was enough for me to get a sense for the spell, and I could tell that there were a few strange things.

First, it had only drawn from the grass, not from the tree, even though there was a tree within the radius I could draw from. I wondered if there was a way to draw power out from the tree as well?

Second, it had drawn the excess power from the grass in the same way. Exactly the same way – some of the blades of grass still had knots of excess energy that they could use to grow that I could have harvested, but the harvesting spell hadn’t touched.

Finally, the range seemed to be mostly limited by my mana sense, but not quite. It was similar to the effect that Foxstep had gained when it had been ingrained, where it was mostly reliant on my mana senses, but where Foxstep had been drawn mostly to the spatialsense ingrained into it, this had drawn more from the lifesense. It didn’t have the complete range of my full mana senses, but it was still quite a good range.

That one made sense, but the other two were still confusing.

I shaped the spell again, flowing power through the array, then flexed the power out, trying to connect to everything, but nothing happened. Instead, I focused on the tree, and drew power from it, as well as from several of the other trees within the range of my lifesense.

The tree I had connected to was an olive tree, but the spell was still able to connect to other trees just fine – there were several cypress trees in the park that I was also able to draw power from.

I let the spell fade and tried for something a little more complex, draining specifically the regions of the olive tree that would go on to produce olives, then spread the power out again.

This time, as I had expected, no power flowed in from the cypress trees, only the olive ones.

Interesting…

I narrowed my eyes.

“It’s only able to do identical things,” I said, thinking out loud. “So… It can target similar things, since both cypress and olive trees have similar flows of life to harvest, but it can’t manage both the grass and trees.”

That explained both of the points of confusion.

“Indeed,” Meadow said. “With time and skill, you can learn to match things in broader strokes, and draw more power. In the meantime, a good solution is to connect to multiple things – grass, trees, flower stems, that sort of thing.”

I nodded, then studied the Mass Enhance spell, wove it out with my energy and flowed power through it. Again, I felt it resonate with the power of Enhance Plant Life, so I connected the spell to the grass, then the body of the tree, then to where it would produce olives, and pushed power out, restoring all of what I had taken and then some.

My third gate life mana guttered dry a second later, and I had a moment of confusion, before remembering that I had only started practicing with it today. Even if it had been sitting open for two months, it had gone entirely unused, and hadn’t expanded all that much.

It had just been a while since I’d had to deal with a freshly opened gate, and restoring all that power had drained it quicker than I’d expected.

I reached for the power of the red star tree, then paused and looked at Dusk, my eyes narrowing. I could draw power from the red star tree, sure, but now was the perfect time to try out my new spell.

I converted some mana from my first gate up, just enough to move power through the Mass Harvesting spell, then drew power from grass all across Dusk’s realm.

I had hoped that it would be able to reach across every single blade of grass in Dusk’s entire realm, but unfortunately I was able to draw it out only in small sections, about as large as I could in the real world.

Still, with some sweeping arcs, I was able to restore my power. It took too long to be practical in a fight, but as a secondary method of recovery, it wasn’t bad.

I released the spell, thankful that both Mass Harvest and Mass Enhance were small, and thus wouldn’t eat up too much room in my mana-garden, then turned back to Meadow.

“What next?” I asked, and she laughed at me.

“What?” I asked.

“You just got two brand new spells, and you’re already asking for more?”

“Well, I have a lot more space I need to fill!” I protested.

“True enough, though I think you should already have one spell picked out,” Meadow said. I stared at her for a second.

“The pocket space one that I got with Orykson at the auction?” I asked.

“Well, maybe, but that wasn’t what I meant,” Meadow said.

“The Tortoise Time spell to slow an opponent?”

“That also could be a good pick, but I was referring to the Enhance Forging spell that cavern dragons have,” she said, laughing.

“Oh! Yeah, that was on my list.”

“You have a list?” Meadow asked.

“A metaphorical one,” I said, waving a hand. “But yeah, that was the one that my old cavern dragon ring was based off of.”

“Why don’t you go grab it?” Meadow asked, gesturing to me.

I leapt to my feet and started teleporting across the city, only stopping at the ward boundary to the dragon reserve, then passed into the employees only section and began heading over to the caverns. I waved to Eryka, one of the workers there, who was currently in the middle of washing a cavern estragon that was absolutely covered in goo from a slimbat.

The estragon was wiggling around, slipping out of her hand every couple of moments, even with the goo slowing it down.

“Want a hand?” I asked.

“Sure!” she agreed.

Together, Eryka and I worked on cleaning the estragon, with me holding it in place while she scrubbed. The entire time we worked, I sent my mana senses rushing through the little creature until I found the spell I was looking for, then shifted the mana in the first layer of my beastgate, shaping it into the pattern and running power through it.

Power flowed out of my garden, but without another spell to interface with, it vanished.

I reformed the energetic array several more times, until I was certain I could make it without trouble, and once Eryka was done cleaning the estragon, I brought it back to its habitat, then stretched.

I needed to look at the preserve again, this time with my mana senses.