While not officially recognized as a safe zone, the junglings’ clearing essentially served the same purpose. Lacking the same pernicious poison cloud that permeated the rest of the jungle, it let us catch some much-needed shuteye without worry.

  And so it was that I awoke the next day bright eyed and bushy tailed -- at least, relative to my previous state -- and ready for my brand new apprenticeship.

  It was with some regret that I admitted I couldn’t easily discern the difference between individual junglings, which meant we likely didn’t manage to find the harvester who’d helped us the day before. Nonetheless, his siblings appeared to be equally inured to our presence, allowing us to accompany them outside the clearing with minimal fuss.

  And by “us,” I did, in fact, mean “us.” I’d debated for a while on whether or not to take Cal and Verin with me, initially leaning towards not. We’d yet to cross a single monster for them to fight, and neither of them would be useful when it came to my planned herbalist pursuits. On the flip side, as much as I felt a growing kinship with the taciturn, poison-gathering epicureans, I doubted they’d help me if I royally messed up harvesting something and received a big dose of hallucinogens -- or worse -- again.

  Boring though it must have been for them, Cal and Verin watched my back as I explored a side of Herbalism far more dangerous than anything my class in Sylum had ever hinted at.

  Tink. A host of needles pushed through a thick layer of tree bark before trying and failing to puncture my gauntlets. Having expected the attack, I carried on unperturbed, carefully plucking a purple growth from the tree in question. I cast Vivify on the plant to give it some extra life, and then right before I tossed my latest acquisition into storage, I examined it.

  Festering Chestwort

  A bulbous parasitic bud that burrows into tree trunks, forming a series of needles that hide under the tree’s bark. When agitated, the chestwort summons these curved spines to attack, injecting their target with potent rot-based poison. When deployed, the needles are said to resemble a ribcage surrounding the main growth “heart,” giving the plant its unique moniker.

  A few more lines listed its uses and some strange preconditions for it to transform from a bud into a flower, but I could easily review its qualities when it was time to brew with it.

  Below the chestwort I’d just picked lay a line of similar spiny rib cages, devoid of their festering hearts. A few of those were the result of the jungling, but the bulk were from me, hoping that the rot might work well against the vines in the temple entrance.

  Of course, the harvester had been a touch more refined than I’d been. Rather than grabbing the bud directly, she -- this one was a girl, I’d decided -- used two thin twigs to snatch it. The entire thing looked a bit like grabbing a dumpling with a pair of chopsticks.

  With my own defenses, I didn’t bother. Even if the spines somehow got past my armor, they would have to contend with my gloves, currently filled with life mana.

  Hands of the Harvester

  +5 to Herbalism

  While harvesting any plants, fungi, or other living reagents, increases the quality of all gathered materials and triples the time it would take before they go bad.

  Any materials harvested in this manner have a small chance to upgrade to a mana-infused variant.

  Additionally, protects the wearer's hands from any toxic substances encountered while harvesting.

  Admittedly, I’d yet to test if that last bit would protect me from toxins in my bloodstream if the spines successfully got through my skin, but I was counting on Heal and Cure to act as a last line of defense if needed.

  Evidently happy to be appreciated, my gloves flashed with a pulse of mana the next time I grabbed one of the buds.

  Hands of the Harvester has activated! Festering Chestwort has been infused with mana.

  For once, I didn’t have high hopes as to the plant’s culinary uses. Who wanted to eat a plant called a “chestwort” that made things rot? Even so, I reserved a small grin as the bud lit up with mana.

  Having collected enough, I rushed off to catch up to the harvester who’d moved on a while back.

  Now what else can we find for our poison?

  “Hey! I like this one!” Having her fair share to choose from, Cal plucked an orange lily from the ground, sniffing it while sitting on the jungle floor. “Nothing’s tried to kill you while harvesting these. I guess some plants are just normal, huh?”

  In a way, she was both right and wrong. True, the flower in question wasn’t dangerous in and of itself. That didn’t mean it was entirely defenseless though.

  “Plucking by the stem is okay. Just don’t crush any of them. They get angry if you do.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Cal tense up, slowly lifting one of her feet. “Uh. Just on the off chance that someone were to crush one of the lilies, could you elaborate on that? What gets angry? The plants?”

  Should be arriving right about- Yup. Even as one of my hands swooped in for another lily, the other pointed into the air.

  Following my finger, Cal froze up on discovering the rapidly growing swarm of bees currently staring her down. Clearly, she hadn’t read the flowers’ descriptions.

  Lingering Lily

  A defenseless flower whose nectar and pollen are highly prized by the nearby insects. Its pollen decreases the healing rate of wounds for both plant and animal alike. Bees make use of this fact in particular, rubbing their stingers in the substance to dish out painful, long-lasting damage to any foolish enough to carelessly trample over their protected food source.

  Faced with the wrath of her winged, would-be foes, Cal took the only sensible option.

  “Whelp. Not a fight my skill set can handle. Sorry. Bye!” Cal winked out of sight, leaving me crouched there.

  Stifling a sigh, I continued gathering the flowers without a care. Deprived of their original target, the poison-tipped pollinators shifted their attention my way, but it made no difference.

  For a moment, the jungle became a tundra as bee after bee fell to Verin’s glacial might. What little of them managed to brave the cold soon lay in a wide circle around me, zapped out of the air by my Pest-Killing Aura.

  When at last we moved on, a sheepish warrior appeared on a tree branch beside us.

  “So, uh, good job, team!”

  I bent down to a small berry bush, lush with neon green berries.

  Acid Currant

  While actually basic rather than acidic, these berries cause the imbiber to feel like acid is running through their veins.

  I picked them. I put them into a stone bowl. I threw them into storage.

  Not every ingredient made us fight for it. Sometimes it was truly that easy.

  Just for fun, I popped a few of the currants into my mouth.

  Tastes kind of like partially sweetened Mountain Dew. Which was, coincidentally, kind of what my blood felt like a few minutes later as it burned within my veins.

  4/10. Probably wouldn’t eat again.

  Although if I could brew a good antidote, who knew? Maybe they’d be good in a cocktail.

  In only a few days worth of harvesting, I managed to amass the sort of herb stock that would leave any standard alchemist green with envy. Alternatively, the plants I’d selected might make them go green for an entirely separate reason, as just about every reagent I had was deadly in some way shape or form.

  I’d ended up being pretty safe, too. Only twice had I needed Cal or Verin to intervene, in one case forcing an antidote down my throat when I succumbed to a rage effect while harvesting mushrooms. Thankfully, the potions were one of the few things I forced the two to carry outside of my storage for such scenarios.

  In the second case, Verin had been forced to surround me with ice walls while I let a potent disorientation poison run its course. I was lucky that both lacked any cameras, as it had taken me a few minutes just to stop walking headfirst into my icy enclosure.

  Still, the things that could actually poison me through my armor, choker, and gloves were few and far in between, and the poisons that could survive a few Cures were rarer still. Even with the hiccups along the way, not one of us suggested that the outings were too dangerous to continue.

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  Hopefully, though, we wouldn’t need to.

  Whether through luck or by design, the junglings had a section of one of their many tables that was completely empty, which I quickly took over. Having planned for needing to brew a spare antidote or two, I’d come to the jungle fully kitted out for alchemy, and it was the matter of mere seconds to remove everything from storage and get set up.

  Admittedly, my somewhat shoddy stone implements could use some upgrades, and some of the junglings’ tools looked a tad better, but I’d see about swapping mine out a bit later.

  For now, it was alchemy time.

  First, the prep.

  A pile of gnarled roots, chock-full of a growth-inhibiting toxin that strangled out nearby plants. Herbalism whispered that its innards were entirely useless for my purpose, while Alchemy let me know that only by soaking the skin would I get what I needed.

  A few thin leaves, dappled with spots of blue. Ingesting them would temporarily slow cell division, with a secondary effect of resisting life-based healing spells. Their prep was a more involved affair, this time.

  Only the lamina could be used, forcing me to summon the smallest of blades and overclock my Dexterity as I carved away the midrib, veins, and tiny veinules. A few casts of Dry followed that before I threw the many bits of leaves into a mortar, grinding them down into a blueish-green dust.

  A bowl of blood-red berries with thick black seeds. Unfortunately, the toxic part was locked within the seed, meant to slowly leach outwards in an animal’s stomach acid. Alchemy whispered that a quick boil after cracking them open with a mallet would suffice.

  I’d yet to discover an alchemical variant of Gloves of the Arcanist, leaving me to use the basic dexterity version as I worked. Despite being thin enough that I didn’t notice them most of the time, I was glad for the layer of protection in this case. By the time I was through with the last of the berries, I suspected my hands would have been permanently stained red otherwise.

  Over and over, I processed my herbs into more usable forms, tackling each problem with spells, skills, and raw stats when necessary. It was actually shocking sometimes just how much I was able to accomplish with raw Dexterity, Perception, and the custom knives summoned by Arcane Armament.

  Even so, for every reagent I handled perfectly, there were two more that I utterly botched.

  Many were just too high-leveled for me, Alchemy and Herbalism both growing silent whenever I looked at them. God’s Eye occasionally offered hints here, but the skill’s descriptions tended to be more broad, not zooming in to exact usage instructions. For these, there was only trial and error and a whole lot of guesswork.

  A smaller number simply required better equipment than I had. My control over heat was rudimentary at best, relying on where I placed something in my cauldron or on variants of Flameploof modified by my Spell Adjustment. Neither strategy could hold a candle to even the most basic of adjustable heat enchantments, and even if they could, I lacked the thermometer to make it matter. Any plant whose prep had a specific temperature requirement was doomed from the start.

  And all of that was just the pre-work. Once I began combining different substances with one another, my Initiate-ranked Alchemy offered me next to nothing.

  That would have put me in a rather sticky situation if I’d been more resource constrained. With the abundance of life in the jungle, though, any failure that didn’t kill me meant I just had to try again. Even if I ran out of something, I doubted I’d have much issue restocking it later on.

  And fail I did, in a large variety of different ways.

  Sometimes, the failure was a matter of form. The goal was a liquid potion that I could dump down into a small hole, but that didn’t mean my ingredients were going to play along. A few had almost gelatin-like properties, turning the end products into jelly. More often, the reagents refused to dissolve or properly combine, leaving me with a gross toxic sludge of little use.

  When I did end up with a workable liquid, it was a crapshoot on whether or not my ingredients had added up to more than the sum of their parts. On one occasion, I combined five different anti-regenerative substances, and the end result was just as strong as if I’d only bothered to use one. On another, I’d worked with only two, and the result was twice as strong than both of them added together. Very rarely, things would swing in the opposite direction, with two poisons somehow canceling one another out.

  Undoubtedly, there was some deeper biology at play that I wasn’t aware of, or failing that, it was magic. The system seemed to waffle between the two at will. Often, it would mention cell division, coagulation inhibitors, and other keywords which let me know there was an actual scientific mechanism responsible for what I was seeing.

  Other times, it was the exact opposite. A mana-filled herb would somehow equally halt regeneration in plant, animal, and fungus alike, heedless of the entirely different chemical pathways each of them relied on. Here, I was fairly certain some level of straight-up magic was to blame.

  Ultimately, though, there were just as many ways to succeed as there were to fail. With enough poisonous substances, it wasn’t that hard to make a vial of poison. Very quickly, it became less a question of if I could make a regeneration-halting poison, and more a question of how strong I could make it. My first victory, a viscous violet brew, wasn’t even worth testing on the door.

  Lesser Regeneration Poison

  Deals 2 damage per second for 30 seconds.

  Reduces natural health regeneration speeds by 10%.

  Reduces the effects of lower-ranked healing effects by 15%.

  …

  A hodgepodge of other tertiary effects had made it in, but were so minimal as to not be worth mentioning. As for the regeneration aspects, I sincerely doubted 10% would even be noticeable based on what we’d seen so far.

  Test after test, however, slowly saw all of those numbers trend in the right direction.

  Only two days later, I had my masterpiece. Orange and gritty and smelling like a bachelor’s shower mold, the poison sat in my cauldron, ready to wreak havoc on one unsuspecting set of vines.

  Even the system had something nice to say about my efforts.

  Congratulations! You have crafted an item: Regeneration Poison (Plant-focused).

  The quality of your work is: Passable. Due to the mana contained within, all effects have been slightly strengthened.

  Note: This item was made using components harvested by the crafter.

  For creating an item using your own materials, a vertical bonus will be applied: Quality upgraded to Standard.

  Based on the quality, tier, and recipe difficulty of the crafted item, you have been granted 10xp.

  Augment of the Alchemist, Toxic Augment, and Vitalizer’s Augment have activated, increasing the strength of your poison.

  All of that was par for the course by now, to the point that I mostly tuned out the notifications whenever they rolled in. The tiny experience gains were nice, but even a full day of Initiate-tier alchemy paled in comparison to fighting a monster or two, especially when considering my experienceless failures.

  For only the second time ever, however, there was something more.

  Note: This item has a unique design! Due to the Prestige of the crafter, the unique design, and the full vertical bonus, this item has been upgraded into a named item.

  Calculating…

  Congratulations! You have crafted an item: Patchwork Dungeon’s Anti-regenerating Vinebane.

  For crafting an item of Rare rarity at the Initiate tier, you have been granted 20xp.

  For crafting a named item at the Initiate tier, you have been granted 100xp. Further copies of this item will not grant this reward.

  Alchemy has reached level 12!

  Honestly, I hadn’t even been sure simple poisons like this could turn into named items. The only other time I’d made something named had been Nadja’s Bangle of the Cocktail Princess. That one had made sense, at least, as I’d etched unique designs onto it. This was just a big mixture of herbs.

  Then again, I wasn’t entirely certain all of these plants existed outside the dungeon, which would make anything I made with them the first of its kind.

  Name or not, though, the more important feature was the potion’s strength. For once feeling optimistic, I hit the concoction with God’s Eye.

  Patchwork Dungeon’s Anti-regenerating Vinebane

  Deals 20 damage per second for 10 seconds.

  Reduces natural healing by 45%.

  All effects lessened when used on non-plant creatures.

  All effects doubled when used specifically on vines within the Hungering Jungle.

  My brows raised as I read the last line, an effect I doubted would have been there on the original unnamed variant. Without a doubt, it was exactly what I needed.

  Before that, though, I took the obvious first step.

  A finger went into the pot. The same finger went into my mouth.

  You have been poisoned.

  Your quest status has been updated.

  Mithridatism II

  Dose yourself with at least x different types of poison of Rare or greater rarity.

  1/10

  I did my best to keep myself from gagging -- definitely not something I’d be using in my dishes -- but the progress on my quest was worth it.

  From there, all that was left was to officially test it out.

  In short order, I grabbed Cal and Verin, and the three of us returned to the temple’s entrance. Just as before, a wall of vines barred our way, and a simple stone pedestal greeted us.

  Removing the relevant vial from my storage, I couldn’t help but hold my breath as I raised it up. If this didn’t work, I wasn’t entirely sure what our other options were.

  Slowly, so as to not waste a single drop, I tipped the bulky container over, sending my named potion into the hole. For a few tense seconds, nothing happened, until the poison finally reached its target.

  In real time, large swathes of the vine wall began to gray and wither away. Chunks fell off, plopping to the ground en masse. While the base of many of the vines thrashed and wriggled about, attempting to replace their damaged sections with fresh greenery, their growth was glacial at best.

  It’s working. I did it.

  The momentary surge of pride was replaced by a sense of urgency. The poison wasn’t going to last forever. Knowing we had only a few seconds to capitalize on, I raced forward, hacking at the door to help the destruction along.

  “Go!” I rallied the others forth, and as one, we descended upon the barrier.

  And then, quite suddenly, it was over.

  One second, we stood before the door, chopping it into bits. The next, we were through, the previously impenetrable obstacle now behind us.

  Before us, a chipped and mossy tunnel stretched onwards, lit by the same omnipresent glow that illuminated the rest of the dungeon.

  Uncertain of what we might find, the three of us set off to explore the ruined jungle temple.

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