I didn’t decide right away.

  Well, that wasn't entirely true.

  I decided against blood magic right away. While learning vampiric spells did have a certain appeal to the same part of me that wanted to summon a thousand ravens and disappear into a swirl of darkness, it just wasn’t ultimately practical for me. Maybe if Orykson had managed to get me more on board with killing, I might have jumped at the chance, but as things were? It didn’t suit me.

  But between detritus magic and mushroom – no, not mushroom, fungal – magic?

  It took a little bit longer.

  Meadow encouraged me to take a bit of time, and even with my trip to Crysite being not too terribly far off, I wasn’t so pressed for time that I needed to make a snap decision right there and then.

  “Why don’t we look at something you’ve kept on the back shelf for a while?” Meadow suggested, and I glanced over at her.

  “Alchemy?” I guessed. “I’ve been meaning to, but between setting up the absurdly overdone teleportation platform, training my spells normally, and clearing out the second gate portion of my hudau mana, I’ve been… busy.”

  “Being busy is understandable,” Meadow agreed. “But I think you should look at scheduling. It’s difficult for you, I understand that. Why don’t you try and use Internal Pocketwatch to set a couple layers of weekly reminders? If you spent just an hour or two on potions each week, you could have a small stock of battle elixirs.”

  She paused, a frown coming over her face.

  “You’re also welcome to not pursue alchemy if you want. I don’t want you to feel like I’m for–”

  “No, no, nothing like that!” I said, holding my hands up. “Nothing like that. I do genuinely enjoy alchemy. I’ll try and put alarms, though I also tend to just… blend them in? I don’t know how to say it. But after the first few alarms, it starts becoming just a part of life. I turn it off and it’s just an alarm, not an alarm for anything specific.”

  “Would it be helpful, or would it be annoying, if I tried to remind you in person?” Meadow asked. “I know some people find it condescending, but others need the person-to-person reminder.”

  “Helpful,” I said. “That was always the best way to get me to do my work at school.”

  “Then I’ll try to remind you once a week as well. Maybe on Cretday evenings?”

  I flicked my eyes back and forth, thinking about that, then nodded.

  “That works for me. But you’re right, I’ve been neglecting it some. I know I can make proper firebomb potions now, and those are useful.”

  “Oh, you can do so much more than that,” Meadow said, rubbing her hands together giddily. “Third gate is where potions begin coming into their own. Let’s take stock of your plants?”

  I nodded, and while Dusk and Dawn played with the Hex-Ermine and the Aurora Toad, Meadow and I strolled through the realm, looking at the assorted plants I’d collected.

  There were a lot more new plants than I’d realized. My time in and since the Idyll-Flume had let me collect gibbous windbush, muddy armroot, diaphanous dandelions, vigor camas, spiritbalm, mercurial lotuses, acid-drip creosote bush, the ash willow, mistshroooms, stillfield asters, and the ninelight morels. There was also the hive of solbees – or now, hives. It had started off as a single hive, but in the months since, they’d spread to several of the trees

  Meadow had me running Analyze Life and picking out the different interactions that the spell arrays could have, if bound together with mana-grass, bindingroot, and either quickflower or slowleaf.

  “A lot of these have physical enhancement properties,” I said. “The stonesprout I got from Ed seems to pair well with the stillfield asters for toughness. Not enough that I can shed blows, but enough to stop my muscles from tearing themselves apart. Then both the vigor camas and armroot have strength boosting properties. Looking at the gibbous windbush and diaphanous dandelions, I think they could add an element of speed in.”

  “Indeed,” Meadow said. “As a matter of fact, if you were to successfully knot together all six of their bodily arrays, I think you’d be able to combine it with Starfish Regeneration to have a very good body-enhanced haste.”

  “And it wouldn’t run into the issues of eating up a bunch of room in my already-full life gate, or the issue of burning through my mana in a second,” I said excitedly.

  “You should still learn to not use them as a crutch, since otherwise you’ll be diminished when you have to fight without them,” Meadow said. “But yes, that’s another reason I think a haste spell is… less than efficient for you. And when it comes to self boosting, if you got your hands on a flowing haemanthus plant, mixed it with your blood carnations, camas, armroot, and dandelions, and a bit of your own blood, you could make a potion of vampiric reflexes.”

  “How’s that different from the life-based haste?” I asked. “I assume the life based one boosts strength and speed, this one mostly boosts speed?”

  “It boosts reflexes most of all,” Meadow said. “Short, coordinated movements, rather than overall speed.”

  “A flowing haemanthus plant… I’ll keep it in mind,” I said, then went back to examining the plants again.

  “The stillfield asters weigh everything down with gravity,” I said after a second. “Could I collect its pollen and invert it? Lighten myself for the flight spell, using leaves from the windbush and dandelions?”

  “Certainly, and such a thing is commonly done. Your brother, for example, negates his base gravity with his second gate spell, then uses a third gate one to pull himself along. Inverting the pull of the pollen will require some fine control with your cauldron, but it’s doable.”

  “Then, that’s another potion I could make,” I said. “Flight, healing, and hasting potions, firebombs.”

  “The healing potions you can particularly upgrade,” Meadow said, pointing at one of the hives of solbees. “If you, the small folk, and Dusk build some simple beehives, the bees will allow you to collect honey.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Oh yes,” Meadow said. “Bees are more intelligent than people give them credit for, and solbees have something of a hivemind ability. But even normal bees will inhabit a beehive, knowing full well that humans will collect their honey. The improved safety and better constructions for their homes are worth the toll for them. They actually go on to produce more than they need, in order to specifically account for what you take.”

  “I… I had no idea,” I said, eyes shining. “That’s fascinating!”

  Meadow chuckled at that.

  “The honey of solbees has a few unique properties,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve seen it at the store with the claims it can improve the immune system? That’s true, though of course, some scammers just sell normal honey. It can be folded into a healing potion to help purify wounds, like Kene does with their solar mana in their healing spells. And a few drops mixed into your firebomb potions will help kick them up a notch. Then, blending the honey with spiritleaf can help improve spiritual recovery.”

  “Speaking of healing potions,” I said, pointing to the emperor’s tree. “Now that the tree and I are both third gate, I can use it to make time-based healing potions!”

  “Indeed,” Meadow agreed. “Those were, admittedly, much more useful with Orykson’s plans than your current path, but life saving tools are not to be discarded.”

  “It uses a captured moment for its healing,” I said. “So it will try and drag my body back to when I made it. Great for healing a stab in the chest, but not as great for slowing my aging, since I want my energy to progress, not regress.”

  “Exactly,” Meadow agreed. “You should try to expand your collection of temporal plants, when you can. I know there are some temporal mushrooms you can use… Anyhow, shall we continue?”

  “Yes indeed,” I said, then spent a bit studying the transivy and pointer moss. The pointer moss tapped out at second gate, unable to naturally push to third gate, but I’d seen how weaker components were often used in alchemical arrays to blend and improve their overall construction, and I thought in the transivy teleportation arrays, I could see… something.

  I’d used it before when making my spatial wards, but now that I’d cast Seven League Step, it reminded me of some of the aspects of integrating with space that the ritual used.

  “Can… Is this plant a ritual?”

  “Close,” Meadow said. “It teleports through space short distances to find the sun, and the way it does that is following the weave of space in a fashion similar to what the Seven League Step ritual does.”

  “Can I make a potion to make the spell faster, then?” I asked. “A ritual component, essentially?”

  “Not faster, but you can make it waste less mana arranging itself,” Meadow said. “The spell, like all teleportation, scales rapidly in mana cost with the weight of what you’re transporting – both magical and physical weight. You can make a potion with transivy to align yourself with the weave of space and effectively reduce the effort the spell needs to move your magical weight.”

  I pointed to the mistshrooms.

  “I can mix those with the mist larkspur to create philters of mist,” I said. “Can that be used to aerosolize other potions?”

  “Indeed it can,” Meadow said. “A healing mist, or a strengthening mist, or even combining it with a firebomb potion to make less of a bomb and more of a spreading fire. Quite useful. And if you were to take up fungal magic, you could use the Mistshrooms to produce normal mist in a fight.”

  We finally came to a stop in front of the acid-drip creosote bush. I’d nearly forgotten the tiny plant, since Kene had gotten a single seed from the very first of the sage’s trial’s that we’d tried, and it hadn’t been especially useful since then, in part because it took absurd amounts of third gate mana to bloom at all. Even now, it looked diminutive, and worse, it absolutely reeked. It smelled like tobacco and rot and herbs that had sat in the back of a cabinet for ten years without being used.

  “This is quite the find,” Meadow said, nodding in approval. “While most of its uses are more up Kene’s alley, you should be able to get a few uses out of it as well.”

  “I… vaguely recall them saying something about foundation compacting?” I said. “Does that have something to do with the steps?”

  “Yes, indeed. Once you’ve finished digging them out, and are preparing to advance to fourth gate, there’s a potion to acid-wash the steps. It’s difficult and strenuous, but it can help you squeeze a bit more reinforcement out of the ascension. But as I said, advancement alchemy is more up Kene’s alley. I can teach it to you, but you seem to be more of a battle alchemist.”

  “That’s… Fair,” I admitted. “What battle uses does this have?”

  “For one, if you were to crush a few leaves from the bush, mix it with the spores of soultoad’s seat, and the flowers of a mercurial lotus, you’d create a very potent poison,” Meadow said. “It’s not a subtle poison, but it is strong. If you were to mix it into a philter of mist, it would be… Well, there is a reason that doing that is illegal in wartime.”

  I made a grim face, and Meadow nodded.

  “If you can split and bud the creosote, you can use harvesting, draining, and some alchemical baths to modify one of the bushes,” Meadow said. “The modified bush can be fueled with Enhance Plant Life to produce droplets of a short-lived, but potent acid, one that’s especially good at eating through bone, which can be useful for destroying undead. You’ll find that useful on Crysite.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes, the ample death energy has created many natural skeletons and zombies running around,” Meadow agreed. “But that’s for another time. For now, shall we get to brewing? What do you want your first Spellbinder potion to be?”

  I considered it for a second, but while there were several contenders for utility, and I planned to brew them all, there was really only one option.

  “Flight,” I said, marching over to the dandelions and the gibbous windbush. Meadow had be pluck a half dozen leaves from the windbush, as well as one of the dandelions, and a handful of pollen from the stillfield asters, and we set to work.

  First we filled the cauldron with water, and used the enchantments to slowly tease out as much of the lunar energy as we could, skimming it off the top and pouring it into the soil at our feet – it was good for the plants. We were left with a very neutral liquid, one that was barely even water at all, only the minimum of what water could be while still being water, as unenriched as we could make it.

  “Now, tempest mana-water would be a better base,” Meadow said. “Do you have any tempest mana sources?”

  “Yes!” I said, summoning one to my hand. We’d sold much of what we gathered in the Idyll-Flume, but not so much that I couldn’t toss in a first gate acorn that was constantly spinning in a natural tempest wind. It sunk into the potion, and I used the cauldron to tease the tempest mana out into the water.

  “Now, the flight arrays,” meadow said. “Can you see the spinning, almost tornado-shaped structures in the leaves?”

  “I can,” I said, studying it.

  “Enforce that, and drain the rest. In the dandelions and the pollen, you’re going to get to try out a new technique. Both of them have dozens or hundreds of tiny bits, and you can’t just use Enhance and Harvest. You’ll need to use the Mass versions.”

  I picked up a speck of pollen and tried to focus on it with Analyze Life. There were faint bits of telluric energy that seemed to work to pull me down, but the way that down was defined was with a very general agreement to move towards the nearest big source of telluric power, and I felt my eyes widen.

  I saw how it could be done.

  I flexed the spells in my spirit, and spun the orientation of the telluric energy, cutting it off from the rest of the pollen, until it was drawing in on itself, and the power of the potion and mana-grass I’d add. Then, I swept out with the Mass Harvest, cutting out the same bits across all of the pollen.

  “Well done!” Meadow said. “I thought I’d need to show you that.”

  I slowly added the pollen to the cauldron, alongside a handful of mana-grass, then let it simmer until it was ready. After that came the gibbous windbush leaves, and then the pollen, then finally the dandelion seeds, gently blown in. I skimmed off all of the excess, and then added slowleaf, so that it would trickle the power of the flight out over the course of ten minutes.

  “With more leaves, pollen, and seeds, as well as more mana-grass, you can spread the flight out further,” Meadow said. “There are potions that last hours, or even days. But for a first batch, ten minutes is a good starting point.”

  Finally, I skimmed off the excess of the mana-grass and slowleaf, and was left with a shimmering turquoise liquid, gently bubbling away in the bottom of the cauldron.

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