The plant tide continued to move forward. Plants continued to bloom and die every second, in a nearly-perfect circle.

Felix stared at the circle of moving plants as if he wished to devour it with his eyes, before he turned back towards me.

“Miria, does the plant circle have any dimensional nonsense going on inside of it or around it?” he asked.

I frowned, and worked on ‘tasting’ the dimensional space around us. A few moments later, I nodded. “Just a bit. The flavor is very light, but it’s definitely messing with space somehow. It feels almost as if the circle of plants is… richer? Deeper?” I frowned, not quite knowing how to interpret what I was tasting. I hadn’t had many opportunities to test messing with space and dimensions, and so trying to understand what my rune ability was telling me was surprisingly difficult.

Felix nodded again, pursing his lips in thought.

“Do you guys mind if I test something?” He asked. “Be prepared to run away if it goes poorly, but I think this thing really isn’t alive. And if it’s that’s the case, since the patch of plants is so perfectly circular, I was wondering if maybe there was some sort of unique item in the center. It could be useful.”

“Are you planning on walking inside of it?” I asked, starting to feel worried. Even if the circle of plants wasn’t alive, it certainly didn’t seem safe.

“No, I have a different idea. But first, I want to toss a few things into the moving jungle and see what happens,” said Felix.

“Ah, that makes sense,” said Sallia. “If we need to run, I’ll pick up Anise. Miria, can you grab Felix? The two of us can run much faster than they can.”

Anise looked at Sallia and I in curiosity, her eyes widening.

“Absolutely,” I said.

“Do you two run really fast normally?” asked Anise. Now that the three of us had admitted something was wrong with us, and we had promised to tell her about it, Anise seemed excited to finally get answers. I didn’t realize how much she had picked up on some of our other ‘odd behavior.’ There were plenty of things that seemed to make sense about our group if one wasn’t paying careful attention, but if there was anyone positioned to realize things were weird, it was Anise. And apparently, she had pieced together the fact that Sallia and I were much physically stronger than we should be.

“Sallia and I are pretty strong, Anise,” I said, patting her head. “We’ll talk more soon, but Sallia and I are… in excellent shape, I suppose.” I felt my lips curl into a grin.

Now that we were going to tell Anise the truth, I couldn’t quell the excitement I felt.

Felix waited a few more moments, to make sure I was properly focused again, and then materialized one of his boots from the Market before tossing it at the circle of greenery. It plopped onto the edge of the pool of plants.

The boot seemed to sink into the tide of plants, almost as if it had sunk into mud. It made a strange squelching noise, and sank much further into the ground than it should have. I finally realized why I could taste a bit of dimensional manipulation happening around the circle of plants: it seemed that the greenery was somehow bending space a bit, making everything inside of the circle of plants deeper than it should be.

“Interesting,” said Felix. “Well, nothing is happening to the boot, so at the very least, the plants aren’t highly acidic or hot or anything,” said Felix, grinning. Then, he tossed a clump of dirt into the tide of plants.

Unlike the boot, the dirt clod seemed to slowly dissolve as it came in contact with the circle of plants, accompanied by a faint cracking sound. In moments, green moss started to sprout inside of the clod of dirt, before shredding the clod of dirt to pieces. In seconds, it was swallowed by the tide of plants.

Anise looked at Felix’s boot with unabashed curiosity, and then looked at the clod of dirt that had broken into pieces. “What’s that boot made of? Is it special?” she asked.

“It’s special,” I said, grinning. “It’s pretty sturdy compared to a normal boot, and very convenient to carry around.” Then, I thought about it for a moment, before I turned towards Felix. “Should we try with something else? The way the boot is fine might not mean much - after all, it’s from the Market.”

Felix thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. “Anise, could you shoot an icicle spell into the pool of plants? I want to see something.”

Anise immediately materialized a second-circle icicle spell, and then fired it into the circle of plants. It sank into the dimensional layer surrounding the plants, but didn’t start sprouting moss and flowers, the way the clod of dirt had.

Felix watched the icicle for a few moments, before he quickly grabbed a few groundnuts I had foraged yesterday and tossed them into the pool of acid. Unlike the clod of dirt, the groundnuts very visibly reacted to the crawling patch of plants: in moments, moss and flowers bloomed inside of the groundnuts, quickly causing the nuts to crack open and start falling apart. Within a minute, it completely collapsed. Just like the clod of dirt.

“I think that whatever is inside of the circle of plants makes moss and flowers grow incredibly quickly,” said Felix. “And it tries to use whatever is nearby as fertilizer. But maybe there’s some sort of issue with the ‘life’ created by the plant pool, so it doesn’t have a soul and dies right afterwards?”

Sallia shrugged. “Makes sense to me, and I don’t have a better guess, at least. I think we’ve also confirmed that it’s not somehow hiding from Miria’s soul sight. It really doesn’t seem to be alive. With how much we’ve messed with it, if it was alive and cared about our existence, it definitely would have reacted by now. Worst case scenario, we can just move on and we should be safe.”

Felix grinned. “We could, but I’m still thinking that we could get something useful out of this. We’re lacking good weapons for our exploration, right? Depending on how strong this thing is, we could toss it at a group of Orukthyri or something and maybe wipe them out. It seems worth a shot. It just depends on if there’s really an object that’s causing this pool of plants to exist, and if it does exist, whether we can safely carry it around.”

“I could dematerialize my dimensional backpack,” I said. “That should make it safe to carry around, although we would need to move out everything inside the backpack first. Just in case.”

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Sallia nodded, and then squinted at the pool of plants. “Let me see if I can find anything that looks like a core.” I felt Sallia start burning a huge amount of absorption essence, before a moment later, she grinned. “Yeah, I can see one. It’s a giant green plant-orb. Looks a lot like a giant ball of leaves, so I didn’t notice it at first, but it’s definitely there. Miria, get some water ready in case we need to heal someone in a pinch, and start moving all of the supplies in your backpack to our other packs. I’ll keep my own rune healing ability ready as well.”

I quickly emptied my dimensional pack, and then the two of us prepared to heal Felix if an emergency cropped up. Meanwhile, Felix started grabbing a few spare changes of clothes he had brought along for himself… and then started cutting them into strips using Sallia’s sword. He then used his metal attunement to warp a few spare strips of metal he had brought along, to make his attunement useful, and after fiddling with his attunement and the strips of cloth he had made, he fashioned a bizarre giant fishing hook.

“Sallia, can you do the honors?” he asked, handing the giant fishing hook to Sallia. “Hook the plant core and bring it out.”

Sallia grinned, and then squinted at the giant ball of plant matter that she could see in the distance. She started whirling the giant fish hook around, preparing to haul in the giant plant core. For a moment, she looked like some cross of a cowgirl and a demented fisherwoman.

She tossed out the hook… and missed.

“Need to work on your aim a bit,” Felix said, chuckling. Sallia gently swatted at him, and they both chuckled as he ducked out of the way.

Then, Sallia returned to focusing on the pool of green. She threw the giant fishing hook again, and this time, she managed to hit the plant core.

She started reeling it in. As the plant core moved closer to us, the giant pool of plants started following the ball of plants. However, I also noticed that the circle of plants was getting smaller as the ball of plants was moved around.

“Do I keep moving it?” asked Sallia, glancing at Felix. “If your theory is correct, it might try to make plants sprout in our bodies or something.”

Felix paused. “Miria, give me your dimensional bag. Sallia, hand me the rope. I’m going to move a little further away so that you guys don’t get hurt if this goes horribly wrong. Then I’m going to try stuffing the ball into Miria’s dimensional pack to see if that disables it. After that, Miria and you will heal me to remove any plants that sprout in my body or anything else crazy that happens. I think that should work.” I hesitated for a moment, before I nodded. My current healing ability was good at fixing almost any physical problem in someone’s body, and I had gotten better at using my healing ability. I was confident that I could heal Felix as long as he wasn’t dead.

Sallia and I tossed our equipment at Felix, who moved several meters away from us, before he finished pulling the ball of plant matter towards him.

The circle of blooming and dying moss and flowers simply couldn’t catch up to the plant ball as it was yanked away, and the entire circle of plants died a moment later. I also noticed several plants suddenly launched upwards, and felt the tidbits of dimensional manipulation I had tasted earlier disappear. Whatever the ball of plants had been doing, it was now turned off. The only thing that was left was a giant ball of plants. As it came near Felix, I noticed that his skin started to turn green. A few moments later, Felix grabbed it and finished stuffed it into my backpack. I chuckled.

“You have a few flowers blooming in your ears,” I said, as I opened one of our larger water containers and got him to dunk his head in it. I started healing him, and a few moments later, I was relieved to see his skin start to return to its regular color, and the plant sprouts in his ears and eyes started to disappear.

Once I finished, Felix grinned, and wrung some of the water out of his hair.

“It worked!” he said. And then his grin widened. “I got a bunch of Achievement for owning it, too!”

Anise glanced at us when Felix mentioned Achievement, but didn’t say anything. However, the expectant look in her eyes grew more pronounced.

“What’s it called?” asked Sallia.

“A green lake core,” he said, shrugging. “A bit of a weird name, but… huh?”

Felix paused, frowning as he focused on the air in front of him, where a System notification had probably appeared.

“Anything interesting?” I asked.

“Yeah… it says it’s a material for creating several items, and then it gave me an ad for a company that wants to buy it,” he said, giving the System notification a deep frown. “So many ads.”

“That sounds about right for the Market,” said Sallia dryly. “Anytime you exist, you must see ads.”

Felix sighed. “Well, I can apparently bring it back to the Market and try to craft something with it, if we don’t find a use for it out here. I didn’t really expect there to be materials we could take from random worlds back to the Market like this. I guess all the items that are present in the Market are made from something though.”

I shrugged. “Does it cost anything to transport?”

Felix sighed. “Twenty Achievement for each item transported, but honestly, that’s pretty cheap. The ad claims that this material should be worth around 200 Achievement, so if the corporations were still around, I could make a nice profit by bringing it back.” Felix shrugged. “Not that there’s anyone to buy it anymore. Oh well. Anyway, Miria, do you mind keeping it in your dimensional pack for now? I need the plant core to be near my body or the transportation won’t work. I’m pretty sure your backpack should be good enough.”

“I’ll be fine leaving it inside my backpack,” I said.

“Say, where do you think the green lake core came from?” asked Sallia. “I don’t remember this world having any materials that sort of… magically mess with their area like this.”

That brought my good mood crashing down.

I thought of the black sun again.

When we had first arrived on this planet, I had gotten a message from the Market’s System that stated this world was connected to another dimension. It was common knowledge in this world that an alternate dimension was where the outside creatures originated, and that the black sun also originated from there. The creatures from that world all seemed to have incredibly strange and difficult to understand biology, almost as if they were concepts brought to life, instead of flesh and blood creatures. Meanwhile, the creatures born in this dimension seemed much more normal.

The strange, moving ‘pool’ of plants didn’t really seem to conform to the local laws of physics. It felt much more like something that would come from an outsider. Really, the only thing unique about this crawling pool of plants was the fact that it hadn’t tried to kill us, unlike everything else we had encountered that came from the world of the black sun. I felt like something as weird as this pool of plants would have at least made it into a few adventurer’s stories, but I had never heard of anything like it.

Which probably meant that nobody had encountered anything like the ‘green lake core’ before. If it really came from the world of the black sun, it meant that our dimension was collapsing faster than I had thought.

As I thought about it, I felt even more depressed.

Perhaps this world really was doomed. If strange occurrences like this were getting more and more commonplace, then our world was getting more and more like the world of the black sun. I had no idea if our biology and organs would even work if our world got terraformed enough by the black sun, or what would happen to our bodies…

Maybe there was some way to send the black sun to its home dimension, or cut off its connection to this world? I had no idea if it was possible, but it was my best guess about how to fix all of this. Otherwise, this world really seemed screwed.

“Now that you finished capturing the core of plants…” said Anise, breaking me out of my depressing thoughts. She was looking at me with upturned eyes. “Can you tell me everything? I really want to know.”

I felt some of the sorrow in my thoughts disappear.

Even if this world was doomed, I could at least make one of my friends happy. It was nowhere near enough to completely fix my mood, but it was definitely a start.

“Anise, let me tell you about the Market,” I said, grinning.