By the time the group had cleaned up the majority of the body parts and the Priests declared the Chaos largely taken care of, Seth had more mud, blood, and other unpleasant stains on his robe and hands than one of the island’s large fishing boats would produce in a week. The robe itself had also started to undergo some alterations. He was forced to cut off the lower part of the torso as it began turning into an egg. On the way back to Lith, the wanderer who had spoken to him by the gate came over looking just as dirty as Seth, but with hide armor that was too expensive to get rid of and would probably require a day or three of scrubbing.

“Nice job, kid.” He said as he fell into step next to Seth. “I wasn’t really expecting much from you, but with the effort you put in today, you definitely have what it takes to work alongside wanderers. This cleanup work is about as nasty as it gets, and you did your part without complaining. I bet my teammate that you’d flop, and I’m sorry for misjudging you. Also, Bizzy wanted me to thank you for getting her out of laundry duty for the week.”

He jerked his head in the direction of a woman with long floppy ears, who gave Seth a distinctly canine grin and a thumbs up.

“Er, thanks, I guess.” Seth said, feeling slightly better about the day. “I’m Seth, Son of Levi. I should become a full Priest soon, so I’m really not interested in working with any wanderer teams. Unless you’ve got a portable library, I’ll stick to whatever temple I’m assigned to.”

“I could ask around if you want,” the man said with a grin. “But I get it, no shame in sticking to what you’re good at. Assuming you’re a decent healer. Even if you’re not, we’d still take you. Better a bad healer than no healer, am I right?”

Seth nodded politely, a bit tired of the man’s persistence.

“Anyway, if you change your mind, we’ll be in town for a couple weeks. Just ask for the Three Lost Legs or me, Brian, Son of Sarah.” Brian said as he returned to his friend.

Seth was curious why Brian had his mother’s name instead of his father’s, but figured it fell under his dad’s second rule of healing: don’t ask the patient about their family, or about unusual genital injuries. You could sometimes ignore the rule if you knew the patient well, but Seth wasn’t interested enough to talk to the wanderer any further.

The sun was behind the trees by the time the group returned to Lith. Seth headed back to the Temple of Virtue with his dad while Priest Joe stayed behind to draft a report with the guard captain. Joe took off his thick outer robe and handed it off to Seth’s dad to be burned. Seth offered to carry it, but somehow his dad could tell that he was wiped and refused. Seth barely remembered getting back to the church and cleaning up, before his mom tucked him into bed in his dorm like when he was a kid.

When Seth woke late the following morning, the bone-deep exhaustion was somehow completely gone, but he was still a bit sore from all the walking and lifting of bodies. The other five acolytes that lived in the dorm had already gone to their duties or lessons. Seth panicked for a moment that he had overslept when he didn’t see them, then remembered his dad telling him not to worry about today's responsibilities while they had been putting their robes in the fire pit.

He headed to his parents’ rooms off the side of the main temple. While his mom was an acolyte like him, she was allowed to stay in the secondary Priest’s quarters with her husband. Apparently, some temples were more strict about that sort of thing, especially Sin temples. Others were more casual about living arrangements, such as Bond temples. Seth personally enjoyed the relatively formal but accommodating structure of the church of Virtue, and wouldn’t have switched even if he had a twofold priest birthright.

When he entered the main Temple, he could hear Priest Joe giving a lesson on Virtue to Meranda and Philip. Seth knew that neither of them enjoyed the joint lessons, but Priest Joe only had so much time in the day for teaching. Meranda was the main reason for the lesson, but she was more interested in her other gift that improved her singing. Philip wanted to be a priest, but hadn’t been born with Virtue essence. He knew that if the only instruction he received on the subject was remedial lessons for someone born with a gift for Virtue, it would take decades to develop a gift that could let him become a Priest.

Neither Seth nor his dad cared to help because Philip had tried to prove his value when he first came to Lith by putting another acolyte, Seth’s mom, down. By the time Philip had realized his mistake, everyone already knew his true colors. Seth’s dad suspected that this behavior was what had gotten Philip assigned to Lith in the first place, but Priest Joe always handled such paperwork personally and kept people’s records confidential.

As Seth reached his parents quarters, he saw the door was open slightly. Slowly pushing it open, he leaned his head in and saw his mom sitting in a chair with some of his dad’s paperwork. The snoring from the next room forestalled any questions about his dad’s whereabouts. His mom noticed him in the doorway and quietly put the papers back in one of the folders dotted around the front room. She carefully made her way to the door and closed it gently behind her before leading Seth back out of the Temple.

“I used my Plant essence!” Seth said with excitement once they were outside. “In the jungle yesterday, I–”

“I’m looking forward to hearing all about it!” Lola said. “But later. I promised your father that we would wait for him to talk about your work yesterday.”

Seth deflated slightly. Then he noticed where they were heading.

“Why are we going to the greenhouse, then?” He asked.

“Well,” His mom replied with a sly smile. “We aren’t talking about it if you just show me your progress yourself, are we?”

Seth chuckled. “Sure Mom. Can we at least plant something other than spider peas today?”

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“I thought I’d let you choose, actually!” She paused. “Just not the azaleas. I’m not letting you anywhere near those until you’ve got a lot more practice, especially with adjusting soil conditions. Azaleas are high maintenance and need acidic soil to really come into their own.”

In the end, Seth went with pansies. They were another of his mom’s favorites, and much hardier than most people gave them credit for. She was thrilled when he made them bloom the right way after only a couple of Virtue misfires. However, when he tried to show off and use only Plant essence to heal a pansy with a bent stem, his mom gave him the sideways glance that meant he was doing something wrong. To his considerable frustration, she refused to tell him what he had done wrong since she had promised his dad that they wouldn’t talk about it.

As they were working their way through a second tray of pansies, Levi snuck up behind them, lifting Lola to her feet and spinning her around as she yelped in surprise.

“Lola dear, light of my lamp, apple of my orchard,” he leaned in close. “Never try to help me with my paperwork again.”

Seth’s mom snorted, affectionately headbutting his dad with a grin. Seth deliberately tuned them out at that point and tried desperately to focus on the pansies.

Later that afternoon, the family settled into his parent’s sunny front room after carefully moving seventeen folders out of the way at his dad’s direction. Seth let his dad talk about their work yesterday first. While there was a lot of overlap in their stories, his dad had seen some interesting things in the inner part of the Chaos area.

“...the worst one,” he explained. “Wasn’t a cultist body at all. There was a monkey affected by both Chaos and Monstrous essence”

Seth and his mom sat up and shared a look. Monstrous essence could be even more dangerous than Chaos .

“The Chaos was really what helped them get it as quickly as they did.” His dad continued. “Its Monstrous form never really stabilized, so the monkey had difficulty fighting everyone while its bodily proportions kept changing. If it had been consistently agile or durable, it would have been much more dangerous. Instead, a wanderer with beagle blood put a half dozen spears through its eyes after it started growing rapidly and fell out of a tree.”

Once his dad finished his story, Seth recounted his experiences with the body cleanup, tree healing, and body-eating boars. He could tell that his dad noticed him talking around something, so to avoid telling them about the ghost, he came clean about his attempt to copy the Chaos essence with his Plant essence. To his surprise, it was his mom who was angriest about this.

“So you finally stop trying to force your poor Virtue essence to be a Plant, and immediately try to force your Plant essence to be Chaos?!” She squawked.

“Lola, he has Virtue essence to fix him up.” His dad tried to help. “It was still a foolish thing to do, but he was merely trying to figure out how to make the Plant essence easier to use.”

She held up a hand, looking troubled yet determined. “Levi, we haven’t talked much about Plant essence. I won’t try to tell him how to use Virtue, and you need to trust me about my essence in turn. My mother taught me that the most important thing about Plant essence is to never let it linger in your body like Virtue. Pull it out when you need it, then cut it off. That might make it harder to use than Virtue essence, but they aren’t the same and Seth needs to understand that.”

She leaned toward Seth. “You were just trying to figure out your gift, I get it, but you should have taken more time to learn before you started experimenting. I wasn’t thrilled about you going to help with the clean up for just this reason, but someone didn’t ask me.”

Levi shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was an issue. When Seth mentioned that he had finally gotten his Plant gift to work, I should have talked to you. Virtue gifts also have some risks when people first discover them.”

“Thank you.” Lola said. “Now Seth, the reason that you were having more difficulty using the Plant essence wasn’t because it’s less accessible, but because you were using far too much to repair the plants and wearing yourself out by pulling so much through you. With Virtue, you can use the essence you keep circulating through your body to supplement what you draw out directly, which means you don’t have to deal with essence exhaustion nearly as quickly. For plants, the proper technique is to use the plant’s own essence with a small amount supplemented from yourself to guide the process. You use your own to accelerate growth, but for repair and other adjustments, the plant will have a lot more Plant essence than you. Treat the plant’s own essence the way you do the Virtue you circulate in your own body.”

Seth saw an opportunity and suggested, “Once you show me how to do it properly, I could go back to the jungle to help more of the plants! Dad and Joe purified the area, but there’s still lingering chaos in a lot of trees and shrubbery that could be a problem if left alone for too long, right?”

His parents had an entire conversation with body language in the pause that followed his question.

Finally, his dad said, “I’m not sure you should take that risk. It’s admirable that you want to help with the issue, but going outside the walls is dangerous. You’re only a couple years or even months away from having your Virtue Heightened to become a Priest.”

“Actually,” his mom countered. “Purifying the jungle foliage is a good exercise for both his Virtue and Plant essences. Being able to use both well can only be a benefit to him as a Priest. I agree that leaving the walls is dangerous, but Seth does have a point about the Chaos in the plants being a danger in the long term. You could probably ask that guard you know to go with him.”

Levi looked like he had eaten something sour. “Well, yes, but…hmm. I’d have to make an official request to Joe as the Head Priest and to the guard captain.”

He looked around at the myriad folders that contained most of the Temple’s ongoing forms.

“I like filling out reports and requests more than most people,” he continued. “But even with the scribe’s gift from my mother, I get hand cramps eventually.”

He looked at his two favorite people, one leaning back with raised eyebrows, the other eagerly perched on the edge of the chair.

“Alright, fine.” He conceded. “I’ll file the requests, and once Lola thinks you have a better handle on Plant essence, you can go back to the ritual site if the requests are approved.”

Seth grinned and immediately turned to his mom, who nodded.

“While you two aren’t off the hook yet,” she said. “He does actually have a decent ability to use it already. Once I impart some fundamentals, he’ll be good in a day or two.”

What followed was a surprisingly lecture-centric series of lessons in the garden as Seth’s mom told him all the ways that her mom had told her it was possible to mess yourself up with plant essence. Then she told him that beyond the basics, it was traditional to allow someone to develop their own way of using Plant essence. Two days later, Levi had papers signed by the three relevant parties, and Lola gave Seth her approval. The following afternoon, he and Sheldon were going to head back into the jungle.