The Third Portal: Chapter Thirty

It did take a while to finish the litigation over the guild duel, to get the guild leader’s niece signed up with Liz’s grandfather’s guild, and to then sell both fields to the Earthwright guild, and throughout the process, Gakodi repeated the same question.

“Are you sure there isn’t anything you want?” she asked. “I know I’m pulling a few strings to get you some one on one training, but still…” 

“I don’t want to take from people who need it more than I do,” I said, waving my hand dismissively. “Though, if you’re insistent, then could I have a first, second, and third gate pearl-light pumpkin? And if he happened to have any offensive plants, I’d be willing to take them off your hands, but I’d want to at least pay you some in points.” 

“Just the raw pumpkins? Ah, wait, it’s for your staff, aye?” she asked, continuing when I nodded. “Well, we’re still doing inventory, but he mostly seemed to be growing healing plants and mana sources. I’ll get the pumpkins to you.”

Forming a team for hunting down the soul strengthening array took up most of the rest of the day. Liz was happy to join, and Ed would be able to go, so long as it didn’t run past his weekend. Considering that I could send him back to the plot of land without too much effort, I was happy to agree. It would be nice to have him along. 

Octavian was embroiled with some sort of complicated mission involving a woman who he described as an inverse warlock. I didn’t know what that meant, but when I tried to get more information, he just grumbled something about cats being better than most scouts. 

I worked out a deal with Damien Nothing, the enchanter who had participated at the Beastgate Trial Trail, to appraise anything we brought back, in exchange for several samples of shieldstalk grass, and a chance to examine my hudau mana with their spellcraft.

The next morning, I found a box delivered to my plot, containing three pumpkins. They had an iridescent sheen, almost like pearl or opal, and though the energy was bound up within them, making it hard to drain, it wasn’t doing anything, power that needed to be refined. 

Also within the box was a bundle of six smooth, flat stones, almost the perfect kind for skipping stones. I would have thought they were there to hold the box down and prevent it from being blown away by the winds, if not for the fact that the stones had telluric, death, and solar energy interwoven throughout them. It wasn’t powerful, not a resource that I could use for advancing or improving my death mana, but it was definitely there.

“What is it?” Kene asked, sliding up behind me and slipping their hand in mine. 

“The rocks,” I said. 

Kene picked one up, poked it a few times, bit it gently, and nodded. 

“Lifeward hearthstones. Or sometimes known as lover’s comfort, or parents’ solace. Here, run a bit of ungated mana through one.” 

I did as Kene instructed, and felt the stone soak it up greedily, then flowed back into me. It bound power into a tight knot, somewhat like when Dusk placed her power into someone to turn them into a guardian. A moment later, I felt a soft trickle leak from the stone into the air. It was weak, basically just a stream of ungated mana, but it was unmistakably my own, carrying my mana signature. 

I stopped flowing mana into the stone, but the stone continued emitting a tiny wash of ungated power matched to my spirit. 

“How long does it last?” I asked. 

“Until you die,” Kene said. “Or I guess if you brought it into an area with so little magic that it couldn’t even sustain the trickle of ungated mana, but that would basically only happen inside magical containment fields.” 

I passed the stone to Kene and smiled. 

“Take it. For your shope, when I’m here on Crysite. You can at least know I’m not dead.” 

Kene kissed my cheek and slipped the stone away into their storage ring. 

“That’s sweet of you. Do you want to give one to your dad too?” 

“Definitely. I was thinking about doing that, then giving the other four to Ed and Liz. They could each have a stone with the other’s signature, and then Ed can give one to dad too, and Liz to her grandfather. And I’ll have to give Gakodi some sort of thank you present.” 

“Just a card,” Kene advised. “She already feels guilty that she can’t do more.” 

We made a bit of conversation over breakfast, then I fed the pumpkins to my staff. I let out a sigh of relief as I felt it begin stirring and improving the magic within my mana-garden, the unbalance that I had been working with for so long finally settling down. 

Not long after we finished, Liz and Ed stepped by, the toad outside keeping guard over the land using his connection to Dusk to get her to open the way for the group, and they entered. Siobhan leapt over and sniffed at Kerbos, while Dusk and Dawn chased around the both of them. 

“Alright, for the first leg of the journey, I think you all should stay here,” I told them, gesturing around me to Dusk’s plane. “It’ll be cheaper on mana to teleport just me to Port Heliodoor, then I can chain together a couple of Seven League Steps to get out in the general direction of the array. Then, we can all fly together.” 

“Makes sense to me,” Kene agreed. “How long do you think it will take you to get there?” 

“An hour or so?” I guessed. “It’s just shy of a hundred miles, but I’ll also need to charge up the path to the port, and could get caught up in various things along the way.” 

“Great!” Kene said, giving me a devilish grin. “There’s undead out that way, alongside the slaughter spirits, right? Well, while I’ve got a desolation mage, a telluric mage, and access to an acid-drip creosote bush, I’m going to create some bone melting potions.”

I laughed as my partner tossed back their hair and dragged my brother and soon to be sister-in-law off to the alchemy room. Dusk zipped over to me and leapt on my shoulder, and we headed off, charging the portal and then moving through Port Heliodoor. We spread our senses out, gently bumping at the senses of Mrs. Cromwell in a friendly sort of way to let her know we’d arrived, then headed out. 

I chained together several Seven League Steps, mainly relying on my mana, and only putting a bit of the burden on my body. I was on my fourth of the five jumps when my senses caught something at the edge, Sky Dragon’s Senses in particular catching the change of mana on the wind, and I turned, wandering into a thicket of brambles. 

There was a source of powerful lunar energy interwoven with life, with traces of desolation and creation interspersed throughout. I was hoping that it was a crystal ice lotus, the lunar equivalent to the ever-elusive sun lotus, but as I approached, I thought it must be something else. 

Or… Maybe not? 

I squinted and bent down. There was a small succulent plant, one that almost looked like aloe vera, but was blue with white tips. It was surrounded by a ring of crystalline mushrooms that I would have once dismissed as just being covered in snow, but… No. They were very much creating the snow. 

I moved my hand closer, and felt the temperature drop considerably as I approached. It was borderline painful, and I turned to open a portal into the air when I felt something shoot towards me. 

I whipped away, teleporting backwards as a roughly humanoid bundle of slime lanced towards me. It glowed with a mix of death, life, lunar, desolation, mental and knowledge mana, which felt strange for a slime. The humanoid shape was strange too. 

It thrust its hands out and I felt energy swirl from my body, burning in the air and turning into power for the slime. Its body started to shift, its features sharpening. It shrank, and sprouted hair a shade darker than its own.

Well, I didn’t like that one bit. But I’d fought slimes before, and for all that they were able to drain power from their surroundings, they also were weak to being drained in turn. I drew power from the Ninelight Morels, activated Enhance Forging, and threw out a three-layer Fungal Lock. 

Its form lost the black hair and shifted into a rougher shape as it let out a shriek that rattled my… everything. It seemed to strike at my spirit, my mind, and my body all at once, and it threw me off guard enough that it was able to rush forward and surround me, its goop spreading over my flesh. It was slightly acidic, but not enough to do more than sting, and I conjured both Fungal Armor and Briarthreads, knocking it back and shoving it off of me. 

It stumbled back and shrieked again, but I was more prepared this time. My armor slowed the physical parts of the attack, Placid Mind helped me shrug off the mental portions, and I forced control over my spirit using the experience I’d had with the root of resolve. As it rushed towards me, expecting me to be caught off guard, I cut it in quarters with blademoss, with one vertical and one horizontal cut. 

My massively overrun Fungal Lock sank in then, greedily sucking away more power and using the surface area to suck away the energy of the slime. 

The four parts continued to try and chase me, but I teleported around in a circle, weaving in and out of the way, while conjuring Markus. The hunter scowled upon seeing it. 

“I hate oozes. Their body makes ‘em all but immune to bolts. Not good prey at all.” 

“What is it? Is it sapient?” 

“It’s soul scour slime,” the hunter said. “Seeks out intelligent life, dissolves them, and takes on their form, roughly. Not sapient. Probably?”

“Probably?” I asked. 

“Well, they can learn an’ grow,” he said. “But sometimes they can’t. And sometimes one will demonstrate activity learned from a slime on the other side of the world. They’re not an existential threat, but they like to eat sapients, only eating other mana sources when nothing else is available.” 

I let a bit more power slide into Fungal Lock, then spoke aloud, trusting the monolinguistic spell to translate.

“If you understand me, stop attacking people and let me go, and I’ll let you go.” 

The slime continued to rush at me, and I teleported away. It took me a bit of time to wear it down, but it finally faded to nothingness as the last of its energy was drained. I glanced at Markus, hoping this would fulfill his purpose, but he kept floating next to me. 

“If the hive theory is true, that they’re all just parts of one greater slime, I’d love to hunt it,” he said wistfully. “But no evidence of such. Report the outbreak to the hunter’s bureau, it’s only a D class threat, but it’s worth moving them to unoccupied lands so they’ll go dormant.” 

“Well, that’s… surprisingly helpful,” I said. “Are you going to suggest we slaug–” 

“BULLY!” Markus shouted, loud enough to make my ears hurt. “Are you finally up for hunting some sport, sport?” 

“No,” I said, banishing him back to his gourd. I let out a sigh and headed back to the bush and ring of mushrooms, only to find an arctic fox chewing on one of them. We stared at one another for a moment, before she took two mushrooms in her mouth and scampered away. 

I sighed and collected the weird aloe-vera looking plant, since the fox wasn’t eating it, then carefully extracted a section of the mycellium, nearly freezing my hands off as I did. I didn’t want to hurt the environment, and if the foxes ate it, who was I to turn that away from them?

As I opened the portal into Dusk, Ed looked up, spotted my hands full of dirt, and slapped his forehead. 

“Mal… did you get distracted halfway there?” 

“In my defense, I was eighty percent of the way. That’s a passing grade!” 

“Primes…”