Chapter 15: Ecosystem

Derivan finished off the last of the polishing with a bit of a flourish. The others were working through the massive array of food that Sev had purchased, with Misa absolutely demolishing everything that was set in front of her. They glanced over at him from time to time, making sure he felt included, and that had been... nice.

"Well? Did it feel like a massage?" Sev grinned at Derivan. The armor chuckled faintly, glancing over his now-shining armor with a small amount of burgeoning pride.

"I am afraid I do not know, given that I have no experience with massages to begin with," Derivan said, flexing an arm and testing the smoothness of the movement. "It is... comforting, I suppose. I feel refreshed, more easily able to move. There was a stiffness to my movements that I did not realize was there until now."

"Sounds like a massage to me!" Sev said cheerily, grinning.

"And I gotta say, you're looking good after that polish." Misa gave him a thumbs up, Vex nodding in agreement.

"I never realized how much detail was hidden on your armor," Vex said. "Not that you were dirty before, it's just — the polish really brings out the detail, you know?"

Derivan hummed with pleasure. It certainly had. Most of the intricacies of his armor were engravings, rather than the gold or silver trims that were more typical for magical armor. They hadn't been particularly visible until now, and while vanity was not something he was overly concerned with, he couldn't help but feel a little pleased.

Vanity or not, it was a visual reminder that the others thought of him and wanted him to feel included. He'd never felt particularly left out at meals, but he was grateful, nonetheless.

"Shall we check our statuses, now?" Derivan suggested.

"Fuck yes," Misa declared. She glanced at Sev. "I mean. I think now is a good time."

"Nice try," Sev said with a chuckle, but he waved at her to go on. "Yeah, let's see if that battle did anything for us."

As one, they triggered the mental command that opened their status screens. Even Derivan, though more as an act of participation than any genuine need. His status hadn't changed much — it was still reporting errors — but some numbers had gone up.

Derivan, Level

Health:

Mana: 600/600

Stats:

Slime: 6

Physical Empathy: 22

Magic: 14

Skill List:

[Intermediate Mana Manipulation], [Mana Sight], [Fireball], [Barrier],

[Mana Sight], [Fireball], and [Barrier] were all basic wizard spells; he'd yet to study all of the scrolls Vex had given him. Instead he'd elected to improve his mastery and training of the skills he'd already managed to learn — [Barrier], in particular, was going to be important as long as his health was broken.

"Yesss," Misa crowed, distracting Derivan from his thoughts.

"I take it you gained quite a few levels?" The armor glanced up at her, chuckling.

"I'm level 42 now! Straight to Silver!" Misa grinned wide. "Got a new skill for it, too. Here, see for yourselves." She spun a copy of the box up towards the rest of the party with a thought, and they glanced at it with interest.

[Every Last Drop] [Active] [Grade: 1]

You may choose to lose mana instead of health at a cost markup.

Sev whistled. "You can use that together with [To Fall Yet Hold the Line]?"

"Probably!" Misa grinned. "I haven't tested it yet, obviously, but I sure fuckin' hope so. It's gonna be a pain in the ass to level, though."

"Do you have a lot of mana?" Vex asked.

"Weeeell..." Misa drew out the word, then blew out a sigh. "Okay, no. But every little bit helps!"

"We'll have to see what counts as you losing mana," Vex said thoughtfully. "Like, if you're holding on to a mana potion, does that count as 'your' mana?"

Misa smirked. "I fuckin' love you guys, you know that?"

There was a smattering of laughter.

"I'm up to level 37," Vex said, smiling at his status screen. "Almost Silver. I think I went up almost 20 levels, which is kind of unheard of. No new skills, but I got some upgrades to my existing ones — improved rune recall, that kind of thing."

"Level 45," Sev said. "No new skills." He seemed to hesitate a little, like he wanted to add something, but changed his mind at the last minute. "Which is fine. Plenty of stat points to distribute."

"You'll get some soon, I bet," Misa said cheerily, perhaps not noticing the cleric's brief hesitation. "Silver's the range for skills, Gold's the range for upgrades, and Platinum does whatever the fuck it wants."

"Is that the saying?" Sev asked with a faint grin.

"Ah, it's close enough," Misa waved it off. She yawned and let out a stretch, evidently finished with her food. "What've you got planned for the rest of the day, boss? Can't be just a picnic."

"Why don't we just explore?" Sev suggested.

"It's a forest," Misa said, deadpan. "There are trees, and also more trees."

"It's a lot more than just a forest!" Vex argued, then paused. "I mean. I guess it is, technically, literally just a forest. But there are a lot of interesting things in forests — alchemical ingredients. Magical plants. Weird animals, sometimes."

"Each time we have been through a forest, our goal has been to trek through it," Derivan commented. "I know very little about the plant and animal life within one. Perhaps you can serve as a guide, Vex?"

"Oh! Yeah! I know lots of little tidbits about plants. Maybe a little less in this region, but still." Vex's eyes practically gleamed.

Misa groaned. "You're lucky I love you guys."

"She loves us!" Sev proclaimed with an exaggerated cheer.

"I'm going to hit you with my mace. And you're a healer, so I know you can take it."

"...Lead the way, Vex!"

Vex grinned brightly. With a wave of his hand, the tables and chairs that he'd made out of stone crunched back into the ground; with it, the mana that had vacated the grove and was peering curiously at them through the trees rushed back in, seemingly joyous. Vex looked up at it like he was surprised, though his face relaxed into a softer, happy smile after a second.

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Then he scurried ahead, infectious grin returning even as Sev hastily gathered the remainder of their supplies. Derivan followed closely behind, and Misa took the back of the trail, waiting for Sev to go ahead of her. There was still a need for some caution, as safe as this area tended to be, and she would rather not leave their healer and leader vulnerable.

The first thing the lizardkin found — and brought to Misa, of all people — was a bit of moss.

"Found it!" Vex's claws dug into the bark of the tree, easily tearing away a strip of it. On that strip of bark lived a strangely luminescent purple variety of moss, glowing weakly in a rippling pattern; to Derivan's mana sense, there was no magic radiating from it. How strange. "This is Drunkard's Beard."

"...You better not be calling me a drunkard," Misa said, narrowing her eyes playfully at Vex. "Also. What kind of drunkard has a beard that glows purple?"

"Honestly, herbalists just really like naming any type of moss after beards." Vex scrunched up his snout a bit as he thought about it. "I can name at least twelve varieties, I think. This one makes you drunk."

"It's alcoholic?" Misa blinked.

"No. It makes you drunk." Vex poked at the moss. "It's actually pretty weird. It doesn't seem magical at all and there's nothing in it that should make you drunk. But... that's what it does. It's not just an effect that's similar to being drunk, either; all spells designed to test for sobriety will consider the person drunk, and species that have unique mental reactions to alcohol will all have the same unique reactions to Drunkard's Beard. None of the physical ones, though."

"The fuck?" Misa peered at the moss. "Okay, that is pretty weird."

"And kind of cool, right?" Vex grinned at her, and she scoffed — but not before she grinned back.

Just a bit.

Derivan was watching the moss closely. "We don't know how it works?"

"Nope," Vex said, shaking his head. "One of the weird mysteries we've just kind of given up on for now. I'm sure someone out there is studying it, but there are much more interesting things to study still."

"Like this thing!" Sev called out, and the other three were startled to realize that Sev had wandered a good twenty feet away.

"Dammit, Sev!" Misa shouted back. "Don't wander off on your own!"

"But come look at this!" Sev waved the party over and they came, Vex absentmindedly tucking the sample of moss into his tailpouch. Sev was standing next to what seemed to be a cluster of crystals not dissimilar to the mana crystals they found in Nuclei. "What do you think this is, Vex?"

"...Hm." Vex searched his memory, crouching down to peer more closely at the crystals. "Crystals in a forest are pretty unusual. There are a few varieties of plants that mimic crystals, but I'm bad at telling them apart. It's probably a type of mana flower; feeds off the ambient mana in the air. Good for mana potions."

Curious, Derivan activated his [Mana Sight], crouching down by the crystals to watch the flow of mana. Sure enough, Vex was right — where the mana tended to twist and breeze past objects, it went through the crystals, becoming a little less bright on each pass. If he looked more carefully, he could see small sparks trailing down the crystals down towards the roots of the plant.

The sight was rather breathtaking, really. "Should we gather some?" Derivan asked. If they were useful for mana potions...

"Probably best to leave it for the herbalists," Vex said with a slight grimace. "They're not easy to harvest without all the raw mana just spilling out."

"And these have nothing to do with the mana crystals we get from Nuclei?" Derivan glanced at the crystal flowers again; they really did look alike.

Vex hesitated. "They're related in some way, if I had to guess," the lizardkin admitted. "Maybe mana prefers a crystalline form or something. We'd have to ask one of the wizards doing research on mana crystals to know more."

"I would've thought we would have uncovered all the secrets of mana crystals by now," Sev commented.

"History as we know it doesn't extend that far back," Vex said with a slight shrug. "Too many gaps where we lost knowledge, and we haven't had that much time. And mana crystals are... complicated. We don't know why they exist and we don't know why the system needs them. We don't really know how it's processed into the refined form we use, either."

"You said something about processing them being costly to do outside a Nucleus," Derivan mused, and Vex nodded.

"The methods we know of can't be what the system uses. All we do is... pump mana into them. It's unrefined and inefficient, and we have to do it in stages so it doesn't explode." Vex paused, pondering how to explain it. "Mana attracts mana, but crystals have stable points where they stop accumulating mana. To stimulate their growth, we need to artificially inject mana into them and push them past the stable point, then let it accumulate naturally until it hits the next stable point."

"You know a lot about this process." Misa raised a brow at the lizardkin, and Vex flinched slightly.

"...Yeah, I do," he breathed out, and went silent.

They walked on for a bit, none of them saying a word, until Misa eventually spoke.

"You don't have to tell us, you know," Misa said quietly.

"I know." Vex looked to the ground. "I want to. Just... give me time."

The others could only nod. Derivan placed a hand on the lizardkin's back, and he jumped a little before smiling gratefully at the armor; Derivan inclined his head in response.

It took time, but Vex eventually warmed up to talking about the forest again, full of trivia about every little minutiae. This was a webwood spider, he would explain; it was a type of spider that lived in trees and created webs out of that very same wood, using some sort of wood manipulation and then applying a thin layer of sticky mana to it to catch prey. This small, unassuming stalk that looked vaguely like a dead root was in fact an illusion cast by a colony of tiny, ant-like creatures that Vex insisted were not ants. This tree was just a tree, but this other tree, right next to it and completely identical to both the naked eye and to conventional [Mana Sight], was a tree mimic, a very particular sort of plant that would periodically uproot itself and copy a different tree.

That last one, the party decided, demanded explanation.

"How could you tell?" Derivan asked first; he was switching between his [Mana Sight] and regular vision, and finding no differences between the two.

"Look at the roots, not the tree," Vex explained. "The two trees are identical, and that points to a tree mimic. But what actually differentiates them is the dirt — the dirt around the mimic is a lot more disturbed, and there are less plants around it, because there hasn't been time for much plant life to grow."

"I have no idea why this exists," Sev declared, glaring at the tree like it personally offended him.

"I think the mimic is the other one," Misa said, amused, and Sev switched his glare to the other tree.

"What's the point?" Sev asked. "I understand mimics; they exist to hide themselves from predators, or are otherwise ambush predators. But this one already has a perfect disguise; it's undermining itself by walking off every so often."

"It gets bored." Vex shrugged, and Sev stared at him like he'd grown a second head. "What? Mimics are pretty sentient, like most other animals. They're more patient than most, but all mimics move around. It's just more obvious when it's a tree moving around, because of the roots thing. Also, they're not predators." He reached out to pat the trunk of the tree.

"What I want to know is why the system doesn't register this one as a monster." Misa eyed the tree critically. There was nothing from the system — most mimics would be tagged with a level and name as soon as they were identified as mimics. "Are you sure you got the right one?"

"Oh, yeah. Tree mimics don't register as monsters. Honestly, what the system does and doesn't classify as a monster is still being studied." Vex gave Derivan an apologetic glance. "...It's... definitely not infallible. But different kinds of mimics aren't actually the same species, so most patterns can't really be extrapolated to all of them."

"Weird," Sev muttered, and Vex nodded, agreeing. Derivan remained silent, contemplating on the nature of what the system registered as a monster. It had changed for him, but he didn't know if that meant anything.

Too many answers they still needed, he decided with a sigh.

The party moved on.

It wasn't long until the sun began to set and they had to set their sights on returning to the Adventuring Guild — but the break had certainly done them good, they all felt. Derivan's mind was somewhat preoccupied by the thought of systems and monsters, but even he felt more or less rejuvenated; the questions he had were questions that could be answered later.

More importantly, they had timed their return to the Guild's announcement of the fate of the recently-formed dungeon.

And there was a crowd.

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