When the day of the falling stars came, it looked like many others. There wasn’t much of a buzz – apparently there were some amateur astrologists who were interested in seeing the shower, since this particular one happened once every thirty three years, but it was ultimately just another meteor shower.
Sure, meteors and meteor showers were uncommon, but across the planet, a few happened every year. Most were over the ocean or unclaimed territory, admittedly, but I’d still seen a few. They were cool, worth going outside to watch for a bit, but that was about the end of where I normally thought about it.
Apart from the amateur astrologists and the people who were planning to climb onto a roof or lay out in the park, the last remaining group of people who were excited for the falling stars were the little folk.
All of the ones Dusk’s realm abandoned her seemingly without thought or care, surging out to wander around in the bog outside of the city, passing through the defensive wards without a concern.
“Should I be concerned?” I asked Meadow.
She gave me a strange look.
“I’d think that someone who’s at least twice benefited would have realized,” she said.
I blinked, caught off guard.
“The lushloam seed?” she said. “Your ninelight morels?”
“I got those both from the small folk, yes,” I said, nodding slowly. “What… What exactly is the point you’re making?”
“The small folk know things and follow old ways,” she said. “They know that what falls from the stars can have great value, and they collect it, often bartering what they collect with humans or use it for themself.”
I bit my lip as I thought about that. The small folk who I’d saved from a fungal tyrant had said something having used up their gifts from the meteor shower, and I knew there was something funky about the lushloam. It had felt like deep mana, though I hadn’t known much about the subject at the time.
“So this is normal behavior for them?” I asked.
“It is,” Meadow agreed. “It may be strange for us, but I’ve known a few people who like to comb around after meteor showers. Most of the time, they just expose intensely concentrated solar or lunar mana, and occasionally a lushloam, hollowvoid, or purestar seed, or hudau heritage stones. More rarely, they’ll find even stranger things.”
“Oh!” I said. If I could get a lushloam seed…
But the talk about it brought something new to mind. Seeds were kind of like spores and spores had mushrooms and that meant morels.
It made sense in my head, at least.
“No wiggling out this time – the ninelight morels. I asked about them. What’s up with them? And with my Kirin spell, too. It used the term ninelight. And I don’t understand it or why.”
“Ninelight, constellations, prismatic, and more are all ways to describe fortune and connections,” Meadow said. “Frequently, ninelight is meant to refer to something that empowers someone in an imitation of fortune. This can take various forms – often I see it as adding new mana types to empower the user, acting like an ingrained effect, or helping things grow better. Sometimes it can simply attract luck.”
I narrowed my eyes.
“Empowering a garden, acting like a second legacy to give more energy in the body or adding it to spells… Those are all things a lushloam can do.”
“Indeed,” Meadow agreed. “A lushloam contains a drop of fortune within it, as well as a complex blend of environmental magic that can easily shift from plants to bodies to spirits. The name…”
She pinched the bridge of her nose.
“It comes from a mistranslation. I believe the Librarian has been attempting to rebrand them as blendconnection seeds. It is not going well.”
She smiled, released her nose, held up a hand.
“Before you ask… a hollowvoid seed can be used to empower the body or spirit as well, through resolve, as can a purestar seed through destiny. They can also be planted and grown into trees, with massive effects that can completely reshape terrain, not unlike the lushloam can.”
I really wanted an exact list of what each seed could do in each scenario, but I had a mission and I couldn’t get sidetracked.
At least, not more than I already was.
“And my Kirin spell?”
“It’s likely meant to imitate effects not unlike a gradual feed of fortune to your foundation as it grows. I doubt it will have all the effects, but… Some. Especially as it grows.”
I had seen firsthand just how intensely potent a stream of deep mana could be, so having a stream of it would be amazing, even if it didn’t quite work the same. The knockoff version of incredible was still great.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Are there things to imitate the other deep manas? There are other seeds, after all.”
“There are indeed. golden soul is often meant to refer to something that acts as an imitation of destiny, and empty whispers is used for something that imitates resolve.”
“I’ve never heard of empty whispers, but I drank a golden soul elixir,” I said, knitting my eyebrows together. “It did compress down my mana a lot, kind of like drinking a drop of destiny did.”
“They’re not hard and firm categories,” Meadow warned. “Nothing can truly replicate the power of a deep mana, not really, but it can try. And the names are often just names. Not everything ninelight is related to fortune or imitating it, and some things that do imitate it call itself prismatic. Golden is the worst of it. At times it seems like everything is called golden. Golden Raiment, golden soul of power, golden armament blade.”
She frowned.
“Come to think of it, fortune is just as bad for entirely different reasons. Lots of things use constellations or rainbow in the name, and most aren’t related to fortune, despite constellations being a translation of fortune. And don’t even get me started around void… There’s a reason the Knowledge King tries to forcibly retool it to empty-whispers when it imitates resolve. Void is…”
She waved her hand dismissively.
“Well, nevermind. Use your senses and guess. You’re strong enough to have an idea. Better than most, I’d say.”
I flicked my hand and opened a portal to the ninelight morels. The tall, spear shaped mushrooms glowed a shifting rainbow of pastel colors, forming a circle that shed a soft light in the middle of the fungal folk village. Just their mere presence seemed to have infused more vibrancy into this area of the forest, as completely mundane mushrooms that came up to my knee were growing all over and were converted into houses for many of the fungal folk, there was vibrant orange chicken of the woods growing off of the trees, and my soultoad’s seat mushrooms had absolutely exploded in number.
“It is quite a good find,” Meadow said, looking at them. “Even if you only pick up a few useful fungi to add to your garden, it will help them grow, and of course, it can be used with Fungal Lock.”
I nodded seriously, then looked at Meadow.
“I don’t want to hurt you, but you’re also way stronger than me. Do you mind if I test those benefits for myself?”
Meadow gestured for me to go ahead, so I flicked a finger to the morels and drew mana from them.
Drawing mana from the Ninelight Morels was… strange. Mushrooms were largely life and death, but they had deep tinges of lunar and telluric, a surprising amount of knowledge, and fainter hints of many other things.
It felt almost like when Dusk passed me power, and I had to manually break it down into what I could use, and then have the rest break down into energy for my body. I could tear this apart and restore my life and death mana, but the power just hung in my mana-garden, and the pressure it put on me was gentle.
I flicked my fingers at Meadow, feeding my Fungal Lock spell with a stream of my own mana, but also with the flowing power of the ninelight morels. The mushrooms that made up the locking spell within my mana-garden flared to life, glowing brighter, and I felt all of my harvesting spells hum a bit.
The ingrained effect of Fungal Lock improved draining spells, and with the ninelight morel’s magic flowing into the spell, even the passive restoration of mana that each of their ingrained effects offered was enhanced.
The flow from Meadow was even more dramatic. The spell forged threads of mycelium that dug into her form and drained her life energy, sucking it away to fruit more mushrooms made of mana and tendrils of mycelium all over her. The spreading and draining effect was akin to when I threw out a three-layered version of the Fungal Lock, despite the fact I’d only created a single layer.
Meadow swayed, and I cut the spell off immediately, then let out a low whistle.
“That’s… Quite an improvement,” I said. I hadn’t even activated Enhance Forging to further improve it! Yes, the power of the ninelight morels was limited, as it was a small mana source, but even still.
My fungal lock had fallen behind a bit in power, but with this…
I had to stop myself from cracking a grin as I thought about the Fungal Tyrants armor. It was able to adapt to various attacks, and was made of forged mana. It was a life and death spell that triggered my legacy. If I ran everything together, how strong could it be? I really needed to track one down and subdue it in order to steal its spell…
I shook my head and looked back at Meadow.
“Back to training my Mass Harvest and Enhance?”
“If you wish. Though now that you’re third gate, there are some potions you need to start working on…”
We trained until the sun began to set, at which point Meadow, Kene, Octavian, Thea, Kater, Dusk, and I all gathered up at the edge of the wards. I raised my hand and summoned my flying cauldron, while Dusk formed her cloud underneath her, Kene retrieved their broom, and Octavian nodded to Araceli.
Araceli was about the size of a dog, but at the nod, she began to change. Her muscles and scales rippled and bulged, then she started to grow. Within moments, she’d grown large enough to be compared to a horse in size.
That doesn’t sound big, but a dragon the size of a horse essentially comes bundled with wings the size of horses as well, and the overall effect is quite intimidating. Octavian leapt up onto her back, and as the first star began to fall from the sky, we streaked off over the bog.
The stars flew past us, and I found myself caught up in a flurry of lights. To my left there was a flash of white, then red to my right, then behind me there was more white, then blue.
A dazzling display of thousands of tiny shards of space dust and ice and stone fell around us and through us, and within moments, I’d lost track of everyone but Dusk, and the only reason I could still find her was our connection.
The falling stars didn’t harm us, and they didn’t even seem to trigger my defensive aura pin, only cascading down with a gentle pattern, like being caught in a snowstorm of light and sound and color and existence, like burrowing into the sand at the beach, like bathing at a spa, all at once, while also being none of those.
As I flew, I felt my mana meditations begin to speed up and cycle faster, moving in a steady, churning rhythm, sending power up into the sky of my garden, then down into the soil, over and over again until its pace was faster than I’d ever managed to get it to run without actively paying attention.
Dusk and the others were further away now, and Dusk’s connection felt muted as the colorful dust swirled, not unlike she did when we’d been stuck in separate astral planes.
I couldn’t tell if I was caught within the shower for seconds, minutes, or hours, but eventually I felt spots of power falling from the heavens above, and strained my mana senses to the furthest they could go.
Amidst the swirling tide, I couldn’t extend them far, but I felt four powers falling within my grasp, strange things that were kings yet peasants, that were fractions of a fraction of a fraction that is whole, that were many things yet nothing, things that could devour and devour and devour and devour and devour and…
I shook myself and pulled back to my senses, focusing them on the powers I that I might have a chance for myself, feeling them in multiple directions. I focused my cauldron and shot off.