Manning

“Well, the trial could have gone better.” I was watching the ranger elf exit my forest after finishing the dungeon. It had been a bit touch and go at first, he didn’t perform nearly as well in the boss battle as I thought he would, but I was glad to see he survived. Ash had been against dragging him into the pit trap that dumped him in the dungeon, but I insisted there had to be some sort of penalty for people who failed the trial. If there wasn’t then there would be people attempting the trail constantly and I only had the one uniboarn until his first litter was born.

“You can’t really blame Gladil, Manning. You didn’t even tell him what the trial was!” Ash was not pleased about it at all.

“Figuring it out is part of the trial. You’re just angry because you haven't figured out how to solve it yet either.”

“Just tell me already!” It looks like Ash was finally giving up. I’d offered to tell her while I was working on it, but she insisted that she wanted it to be a surprise. Somewhere around the second day that Gladil was still running she asked what he was supposed to be doing, but when I asked if that meant she gave up she responded ‘No’.

“There are three solutions to this one. The first is to pass it with perception. The trees shift and move as the adventurers travel in a circle, but two of the trees do not move. They stand still next to each other while everything else adjusts after they pass line of sight. If the trial taker runs off between those two trees, they win.

“They can also win by a feat of strength. The uniboarn is bigger than most adventurers and far heavier, but if they can defeat it in single combat the loop breaks, and they beat the trial that way.

“Finally, they can befriend and tame the uniboarn. I am not here to force anyone to kill another living being if they don’t to, so if they can convince the guardian to let them pass he will escort them out of the loop.”

“Bull! You had your boar charge Gladil almost the moment they met. How is anyone supposed to befriend it with that sort of attitude.”

“That wasn’t entirely my fault, Ash. He called him a direboar. You can’t just call every horned or larger creature dire- whatever. It’s stupid and offensive to both demons and regular great beasts. That is something that Uni and I agree on.”

Ash rolled her eyes and crossed her arms, not completely buying that excuse. I don’t know why, because it was the truth. Humans and the other sapients had next to no ability to name the creatures of my forest, going with bland names like direboar or adding modifiers like earth-squirrel. Obviously, there was room for better names there. For example, the earth affinity squirrels with hard pointed tails should be called Spearrels. It was just a better name!

Either way, Gladil was now exiting the forest near the bridge to town and Ash was obviously done with this conversation. I decided to tackle another issue that the humans had. Not only were they unimaginative, but they had a disgusting habit of putting almost everything in their mouths.

Hypocritical, I know, considering half the things I made in my forest were designed to be edible. But ever since the local kids started smoking and chewing the leaves of the mildly hallucinogenic ivy I was growing in the forest, the eating of everything was starting to get on my nerves. Or senses I suppose, dungeons do not really have nerves.

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I did not want to kill everyone who entered my dungeon, or on most days anyone really, but this was a habit that needed to be curbed. I told myself that I was doing them a favor. Not every dungeon would be as benevolent as me, so they shouldn’t just get used to everything being consumable.

To teach them their lesson I decided I would modify one of the plants Rocky had raided from their farmers. I’d already planted corn and other vegetables and thought that suddenly changing properties of the plants might be a little cruel. I decided to try to modify a pepper that the hedgehog had stolen from a windowsill planter. I didn’t have very many of the seeds before, so I hadn’t begun experimenting with them.

It was also one of the stranger plants I’d run across. Up until this point every plant I’d grown was composed of mostly nature mana with a light increase in one of the three base types that made it up, Earth Water or Air. Well every plant with the exception of the dark aligned willow trees that covered the external border along the river, but those were created by mistake. The peppers, however, had a very small amount of fire mana in their composition.

I asked Ash about it and her guess was that sometime far long ago the peppers had most likely been created by a dungeon or god(dess), and they were cultivated today for their flavor. The amount of fire present in these peppers was so small that it would scarcely affect the flavoring. I wanted to scale the amount to keep it mostly nonpoisonous but also make them very painful to eat.

I had access to using dark, earth, water, and air mana naturally due to my affinity and the small amount of Cara’s mana pool that existed within my gemstone, but as a dungeon I also had the ability to work with other base types as well albeit far less efficiently.

Unfortunately for Rocky, or maybe fortunately, I decided I would use him to help me test the effects of the peppers. We started by him eating one of the regular peppers I’d grown from the scavenged seeds, taking care to separate the seeds from the flesh of the pepper for replanting. The initial pepper was a dark green and around the size and shape of a human fist when fully grown. Rocky enjoyed this step.

I had him plant the seeds around the clearing a bit of distance away from each other and then pumped them full of nature mana. The stalks that the peppers branched off didn’t contain any of the fire base, that only collected when they flowered before the peppers started growing. Before long I had a clearing with 12 different pepper plants and the first buds started to appear. I scaled back the nature mana and started converting the mana in the air around the flowers to a higher concentration of fire mana.

The first two plants burst into flame and the third withered away as it dried from the inside out and died like it’d been left in the sunlight for too long on a particularly hot day. I decided to change my approach a bit and started from a very small amount of converted mana and slowly worked my way up.

The first plant’s peppers were just slightly smaller and mostly the same shade of green. The shape had also changed a bit, they were longer now rather than rounded. Rocky ate them with little problem, only stopping to drink water after the first couple peppers. He was a very hungry hedgehog. It was hard to tell if anything had really changed but there didn’t appear to be any adverse effects, so we continued.

I quickly noticed a pattern as I increased the concentration on other plants. The peppers continued to get smaller and the color change became far more noticeable. The green faded away to yellow and then slowly build up into varying shades of red. Nearest I could tell from my companion, the more intense the red the more it hurt him to eat. Eventually we got to a point where even the peckish hedgehog wouldn’t finish a pepper. These ones looked like they were shriveled from dehydration and were a bright shade of red.

I’d wasted a lot of my mana making the peppers, but I felt like it would still be a lesson worth teaching. On top of that for the next several generations the peppers would maintain their painful taste, so I wouldn’t need to breed anymore directly. At the end of the day it was yet another plant in my forest that wouldn’t be seen anywhere else before, and that alone was enough to make me feel like it had been worth the expenditure.