For two days, we prepared our retribution against the centaurs by scouring the forest for the interesting plants I had looked up in the manual. The success varied a little, curiously, Rai was the one who managed to find the largest amount of herbs, literally stumbling into a clearing filled with wolf’s berry bushes and nightshades and in the middle of the clearing, there was even a special plant that tried to attack him using some strange plant-magic and poisonous spores. Sigmir managed to get him out of there, but not before he was poisoned by the plant.

Once they got away, they went back to the spot where Adra and I were using magic to look for plants, to get healed and to get our help in subduing the strange monster. Healing Rai from the poison was a little difficult, at least at first, but once I noticed that I simply needed to focus on using Magic as a filter, it was possible to isolate the poison that was still in their system and draw it out, even to the point that I might be able to re-use it.

I was rather surprised when I gained a new skill, Alchemy, and an linked Special Ability, Ingredient Extraction. I had heard of the discipline but I hadn’t expected to be able to learn it, at least not without instruction or maybe some actual equipment. Hiding my grin when the healing-process was treated as extracting ingredients, maybe because I was almost as concerned with the purification and possible reusability of the poison as I was with healing Rai. At the end of the day, he blundered and a little pain would drive the lesson not to blunder around home in a poignant manner. I wouldn’t let him die, not without my permission, but suffering, that was a good teaching tool.

Once we got to the clearing, it turned out that the strange monster was an alraune, still weakened from the recent winter. After a moment of discussion with Adra, I used Ice-Magic to produce cold air, causing the alraune to shrink back into itself, as if it wanted to go back to dormancy. After Sigmir was strengthened by Adra, she quickly moved in and, with instruction from Adra, plucked the alraune from the ground, silencing it before it could use its legendary shriek. While none of us knew if the legends about its lethality were true, we were not eager to find out. If not for the veritable treasure-trove of poisonous plants in the area, we most likely wouldn’t have risked finding out.

After the alraune was harvested, Adra and I went around the clearing, harvesting as much as we could, focusing on the plant-parts that would be the most poisonous. I created small boxes from Hard Ice, sealing them air-tight after filling them, hoping to keep the plants as fresh as possible, knowing that we had more than enough to give the Centaurs a serious headache. Or maybe calling it stomach-ache would be more accurate, at least some of the poison would be acting on their gastrointestinal tract.

But that was only our biggest source of poisonous plants, stumbled upon by sheer chance, the rest of our harvest was gathered by simple and hard effort, roaming the forest, looking for the conditions the plants would grow in and the plants themselves. But even with all that effort and two days of strenuous searching, the single misstep from Rai was what got us more than half our harvest. Somehow, that annoyed both Adra and me, even if neither of us would have admitted it.

Gathering the plants was only the first step to create what I wanted, the next, much harder, step was to isolate the poison inside, extract it and maybe even refine it. That last part would most likely be impossible, but Lenore and I had spared some time to consider ways to do so, while looking for plants.

Normally, I would have needed some sort of distillation process to extract the poison, my blood magic was unable to help me with plants, but after thinking about it for a while, I had a different approach. To distill something, one would use the difference in volatility, the temperature when a specific substance turns gaseous, to separate different substances. While such a process would be possible, it would need the appropriate equipment, something we didn’t have in the wilderness and it would need quite a bit of experimentation to find out when which substance vaporized, which would waste a great deal of resources.

Instead, what I wanted to was the opposite. I could create a sealed container, fill one side with liquid, maybe even using Liquid Moonlight, before using it to freeze the herb completely. Unless we were dealing with a poison that somehow was neutralised by the cold, something I didn’t think likely, not in a cold region, I would get a chunk of ice, filled with impurities. Controlling something like that, even on a very small scale was, while difficult, slow and a large expenditure of Astral Power, completely in the realm of my abilities. In addition, I had some hope to get a feel of the different substances using my magic, otherwise, I would still be unsure what the different impurities were and I might waste something. Parts of the plant, mostly fibre, was easy but the rest, that was a lot harder. Luckily, Lenore agreed with me, even telling me that she thought that she’d be able to help, thanks to a link between her Death-Magic and Poison-Magic. Apparently, there was such a think, nestled between my own Blood-Magic, her Death-Magic and a few other types of Nature-Magic. Sadly, neither of us had the affinity or the extraction would be a lot easier.

Instead, I made a large cylinder out of Hard Ice, filled halfway with wolf’s berries, added water and multiple thin Ice Blades, before sealing it air-tight and used my magic to turn it into a blender, creating a deadly smoothie. Once it was nicely blended, I froze the mixture, having to control myself so I wouldn’t laugh. It looked too much like something one might find in a speciality shop, some sort of super-healthy ice-cream or frozen smoothie. Just that this particular treat would kill you.

Once it was frozen, Lenore and I sat down together, focusing our attention and a considerable amount of Astral Power into the container, scrutinising every single ice-crystal, trying to get an understanding of what we had there. It was a little awkward, letting my Astral Power seep into the different impurities contained in the ice, but together, Lenore and I managed to get a feeling for the different parts, some were harmless and would be discarded, some gave us an itchy feeling and one particular impurity made Lenore tingle in excitement and gave me an uneasy feeling, as if there was a small part of me that knew it would be harmful to me.

Using the Astral Power already inside, we added compartments to the cylinder and separated the ingredients, keeping those we thought had value and discarding the rest. That left us with an almost embarrassing small amount of poison, compared to the original amount of berries, but once it was concentrated, the previous feeling of unease was one of serious dread. With a little effort, I managed to identify it and was told that it was a concentrated, natural poison.

Again, we discussed what we had with Adra and she used some sort of detection spell, one that normally was used to check for poison in food and the result made her get rather pale.

“It’s poisonous, but you knew that already. I can’t really say how many that batch can kill. But, it’s a lot. The easiest way would be to poison their water barrels, the stuff will remain lethal, even if you greatly dilute it.” Adra explained, looking a little torn. She knew that what we were planning was ruthless murder, simply to make the centaurs pay but at the same time, she knew that it would allow us to gain a massive amount of experience and, even if she sometimes wanted to deny it, she was just as interested in gaining power as the rest of us were.

As such, she only needed a few minutes of internal debate before she decided to help, to make sure the centaurs death would be quick and mostly painless, joining Lenore and me in extracting more poison from the rest of our harvest, using her magic to get a feeling for the best mixture and delivery mechanism. We stayed away from the alraune, not trusting our skills just yet, planning to use it at a later point.

We worked through the night and continued on quite some time on the next day, before deciding that we had a good recipe, divided in dosages that would be enough to poison a water-barrel each, something the centaurs were using, as my scrying had shown me.

The work we did together gave me a few more points in the new alchemy-skill and once we were finished, my identify-skill even called our end-product an intermediate-level poison. Sadly, I had no real idea how to qualify that, but it was a good start.

Satisfied, I went to snuggle up in Sigmir’s lap, getting some of the sleep I had missed in the night. I would need to be awake during the night, Rai and I would sneak into the centaur camp, hopefully undetected, and poison as much of their supplies as we could.