The Third Portal: Chapter Three

“So, the first thing you should know is the customs house,” Ivy said, leading me away from the docks into a large stone building. It was fairly sparse, unadorned, but there were people moving about. A pair of large boards was set up at the end of the hall, and six desks were on each side of the room, which Ivy pointed to. Most of the twelve had small lines in front of them, with people approaching and leaving.

“These are where you can turn stuff in and get points, which is what most people care about, so let's get it done first," Ivy said. “It’s also where you can confirm that you’ve completed missions, get your ID stamped with points, all that stuff. I’ve been working here as a legal aide. Eventually we’ll have a bunch of buildings for a town hall and municipal stuff, but for now, it’s all running out of various wings of this building.”

He then gestured towards the board on the left in the back of the room, near doors that were labeled with different legal services.  

“This is where rewards are listed, where you can cash in points to purchase things.” 

I scanned the board. Everything was arranged in order of price, with several of the most expensive items embossed in sparkling gemstone ink, and in lettering twice the size of the rest of the board, which was just written in plain blank ink of a more standard size. 

Land (Varies. Varies): Depending on the size, location, and intended use, you may purchase land with points. Please schedule a consultation with the Brighteyes to spend your points this way. 

Garden-Rebirth Phial (Fifteen thousand points. One remaining): These bottled miracles were created by The Refiner before she passed, well over two centuries ago, and are one of the ultimate medicines for spiritual healing. So long as one has not passed the barrier to become a true Arcanist, drinking this Phial briefly converts your mana-garden into a state of raw power, letting you completely change your spells without losing progress, purge out inefficiencies or sicknesses, and even re-seal a falsely opened gate to Arcanist, giving a chance to open it without the aid of a gatekey elixir. 

Fossilized Fruit of the Primeval Ginkgo (Twelve thousand points. Three remaining): This ancient tree's fruit refines and manipulates the energy in your body into new patterns, extending your lifespan by a minimum of three hundred years, tripling your natural rate of recovery from fatigue or injury, and boosting your immune system well past its normal limitations. 

Jewel-blade (Ten thousand points. One remaining): This blade is made from the shed tooth and scales of Elio himself, and was then reinforced and enchanted by Elio as well. A perfected seventh gate blade, it contains a variety of gemstone spells to empower the user and the blade. 

Palatial Peridot (Nine thousand one hundred points. Four remaining): Chunks of peridot roughly the size of a cherry that serve as gateway points to a connected demiplane that covers roughly forty acres, has been aspected to be an open plains biome, and comes complete with a four bedroom luxury home.

Crystalheart (Eight thousand six hundred points. Two remaining): These powerful natural treasures create a spiritbond with you, binding onto your body and acting as a second copy of your mana and energy, doubling your effective strength, both magical and physical.

Fusedstrength Quartz (Eight thousand two hundred points. Six remaining): These clear quartz crystals bear no base power, but can be fed up to ten distinct magical minerals to create a powerful new stone with unique properties based on the stones used to create it.

Gemstone Larder (Seven thousand nine hundred points. Eight remaining): If you have telluric, gemstone, cavern, mountain-tortoise, or other compatible magic and establish this gemstone as an Earthen Larder spell, you’ll find that rather than the usual drain on your mana regeneration to store power, your mana will actually restore faster than if you had no Earthen Larder at all, while the stone still accumulates and refines power at the same rate as a comparable ruby. These stones can be saturated up to ninth gate, boosting your mana regeneration and the efficacy of power stored further for each saturation increase.

Custom Growth Item (Seven thousand five hundred points. Unlimited stock): The gemstone dragon Elio is a competent enchanter, and indeed, produced many growth items that were distributed in the Idyll-Flume. With this reward, he will ply his trade directly for you!

Organshield Crystal (Seven thousand points. Eleven available): These natural treasures resemble smooth polished onyx with bands of red, and if consumed, alter your biology to weave telluric energy through your heart, brain, lungs, and other vital organs, adding protection without becoming rigid. The density of this energy matches the user’s gate.

I paused for a second, digesting the shiny lettered rewards. Some of those rewards sounded interesting, but I didn’t think I’d be able to get any personal use out of most of them.

The Fossilized Ginkgo would be incredible, of course, but it was the second most expensive thing on the entire list. As a third gate mage using spells to lengthen my lifespan, and with the massive amount of life energy moving through my body, I could probably live an extra century or two anyhow, like how Meadow had extended her own lifespan. The healing was still amazing, but it wasn’t quite as useful for me as it was for others. 

The Organshield Crystal was the most obviously useful for me. With my soul mana running through my body, I had strengthened and refined my entire body, which should apply to this as well, letting me get even more out of the treasure than the average person. 

Both the Fusedstrength Quartz and Gemstone Larder  could be good, but they would also be gambles, since it wasn’t listed how they would react with the Temporal Basin. If I even wanted to establish a Temporal Basin again – having my time magic regeneration not be incredibly awful was admittedly pretty nice.

I also had to remember that these were the priciest things on the entire list, and they were advertised for a reason. Everyone would want to get their hands on them.

I started to skim through the rest of the list, then paused when I spotted something that I thought might be worth pursuing, even with its high price. It was absurdly expensive, but if the comments that Octavian had made about passing tools between bonds were right, there was a chance Dusk and Dawn could both use it too.

Spiritual Tool (Six thousand, two hundred points. Three chisels, two shears, two buckets, and one shovel remaining currently, stock prone to changing): These Arcanist tools can be absorbed into the mana garden of anyone at least at the Spellbinder level and used to assist with various tasks such as trimming excess, moving spells, or digging out steps. 

I tapped my lips, then moved on, quickly passing out of the top twenty and into the range of more reasonably priced things. Frankly, I was impressed by the breadth and depth of the rewards listed. 

Some of the more common listings were training courses, which came in many varieties, from a two hour training session with Elio, to learning alchemy from the chief healer of the Hyacinth Heart Guild, to non-magical blade training from accomplished weapons experts.

Booking out some of the training might be useful, but I was fortunate to have Meadow, Ikki, and Orykson. Even though Ikki and Orykson would no longer actively mentor me after third gate – at least without winning a prize from them at the Elysian Mastery Tournament – that wasn’t a problem for right now.

Training wasn’t the only thing offered, though. There were natural treasures galore, gemstones, bound spirits, plants, teleportation services, lodging, and more. I even noticed golden soul elixirs selling for three thousand seven hundred points, which I mentally marked for Kene to potentially use. They’d been on Orykson’s list of things Kene could use for soul strengthening, alongside a few others that I spotted on the list. 

Among the plants, one stood out more than the others.

PearlLight Pumpkin Seeds (Two thousand nine hundred points. Four bags remaining): Pumpkins grown by these seeds act as a strange variation of a mana source. While they can’t be harvested via the usual Harvest Plant Life spell, the pumpkins can be consumed to act as a mana source that restores any type of mana. It seems somewhat more effective at restoring life or death mana.

It sounded like those pumpkins might be an energy producing plant like my pointer moss, but for hudau mana. My staff was built around having a plant for each mana type, in addition to having a non-plant mana source. Kene’s work refining the tiles meant that I had non-plant sources for hudau mana – at least until I hit fifth gate – but I was still missing the plants.

There was also a natural treasure that drew my eye, though it was on the pricey side. 

Timemind (Four thousand, eight hundred points. Two remaining): This natural spell treasure sits in the spirit like a spell, and can be added into third gate time, knowledge, or mental mana, where it passively bolsters the subconscious processing of information. When mana is run through it, it bolsters your memories of that moment.

With Foxarmor guiding my body and processing based on the input of my sensory spells, this seemed like the kind of thing that would be invaluable to keep up with what my body could do. 

There were far fewer enchanted items than I had expected, but that was explained by the numerous business cards pinned to the bottom and sides of the board. They offered enchanting, alchemy, wardcrafting, and construction services in exchange for points, traded services, goods, or silver. 

The construction services surprised me at first, but after giving it some thought, it made sense. There were a lot of people who would want to buy land to live on, and those would need a lot of help. Heck, I still needed a mana generator, to ease the burden on Dusk for running my fridge and oven.

Towards the lower half of the list, I spotted something else that might be of use.

Bottled Nascent Truth of the Druid (Four hundred points. Eighteen remaining currently, stock prone to changing): If you’re a beast, plant, or other nature mage, a woodsman, a diviner, an oracle, a mediator of arguments, a mage who lays to rest the restless dead, a memory mage, or a shapeshifter, then Truth of the Druid can reinforce your spellcraft and actions.

I raised an eyebrow. Labels describing methods of casting, such as witch or archmage, weren’t especially in vogue in the modern world, what with the increased accessibility of knowledge making it far easier to branch out into learning whatever sort of magic they needed, and with engineered spells broadly available. 

But this was an instance where a now-unused label might be able to reinforce quite a bit of my current abilities. Quite a bit of my magic was beast, plant, or nature based, and while I wasn’t exactly a diviner, I did have more sensory spells than a normal mage.

I didn’t know much about druids, but I thought that magically, they were similar to witches, working with whatever natural magic that they could find and incorporate, which let it cover such broad swaths of magic, though witches seemed slightly more slanted towards ritual magic, potions, and complex enchantment work, while druids were more in line with beasts, plants in their raw state, and memories.

The main difference, at least as far as I could remember, was that while witches had been viewed with suspicion in most of Mossford’s history, druids had been seen as wise people, often mediating arguments between kings in ancient times in the place now known as Thornfront. 

Probably. 

I wouldn’t lie, history had never been my strongest subject, but I was pretty confident that was accurate. It might have been another kingdom, and I might have gotten parts of it twisted around. There was also something nagging me about white hair and lesbians, but I definitely couldn’t remember why.

“Are you just going to stare all day?” Ivy asked, raising an eyebrow. 

I jerked slightly and looked at him. 

“Oh, sorry. I just got… Yeah. Uh. Sorry.”

“There’s also a bounty board over there,” Ivy said, pointing. “People can put their points up for missions. The Brighteyes – they’re basically the governmental administration, Lightwatch, Wildwatch, and Spiritwatch rolled into one, they’ll get broken up once things are more settled – also post missions here, if they’re not giving them to one of the guilds set up in the area. On which note, we should probably visit said guilds. There’s one in particular that I think you’ll find… interesting.”