[ Star date 18.7.2831 AC, we have encountered some hostile incursion on the border of our territory, the cabalistic species of ‘Rabin’ have been eying some remote colonies, as such our ship has been tasked with intercepting them and to dissuade further unprovoked attacks.

Shields up, weapons online prepare photon torpedoes!!

‘Received conformation (Mental nod filled with amusement)’

FIRE!!!]

On the small glade, of about a meter wide, gasses have bowed down and entrapped a stone the size of a fist in their blades, then suddenly a force of vitality permeates them as they straighten up and loosen their hold on the stone. It flies in an arc up to 5 meters in the air until it comes crashing down next to an unsuspecting bunny which was hesitating whether to nibble on the tastiest grass it has ever seen or not.

With a beating heart, a scared and scarred mind it hops with unmatched speed away from the danger, deep in to the forest.

[Warning shot has been effective. Proceeding to power down weapons and await further orders from command]

With a happy imaginary smile Novus receives a mental message of content and pride form Mint, the past few days he was playing around due to boredom, first it started by growing Tubers in different shapes and sizes, excluding the one that looked like a phallus.

Then he went as far as to make some handmade ritual circles, which surprisingly did work but most were mana gathering ones which freaked out Mint due to its loss of mana and then a lengthy apology for the minor inconvenience, Novus tried to explain how useful those were but he couldn’t quite teach the Plant Hive mind about such stuff very easily, in the end he used the newly thought skills and some creativity and started to throw rocks, at unsuspecting bunnies who tried to eat the tastiest grass around.

That proved more troublesome than expected communication wise but easier practice wise. It was mostly due to the new overall density of Nutrients Throughout the whole glade that gave the plants more energy faster, and the tubers could be used as a turbo or to stockpile materials in a certain place for a project of some kind, or a bad season.

Eventually and after some training, Mint as a shooter and Novus as a spotter, they managed to scare off quite a bit of wildlife to the point that there is no sound of birds singing, perceived via the shared mana sense something both of them found quite pleasing to the mind.

On the up side, thanks to all the moving of the plant life he was able to get a hang on the Movement technique. And while it is not considered as much as a skill as it is a clever use of growth and nutrients absorption which in turn made it quite useful.

With how things are going Novus is getting inpatient all this grassing around was quite fun and entertaining in the beginning but not so much at the end. Honestly he misses his magic. While you could say that he was a training freak, it was mostly only with magic, it is quite fun after all to try and develop telekinesis for the sole purpose of flying but due to the lack of actual talent he couldn’t get the hang of it.

The mind magic affinity he gained the hard way and was only minor, and that was after he became undead. At that point it was able to suppress 10 people with at least 1 circle above him. This simply shows how hard is to get mental affinity and resist its effect without prior training.

The same can be said about other fields of magic, though most who learn it start at the common level for both skills and magic spells, but they also don’t get the bonuses of the previous two levels. As such a mage who started from the ground up can defeat a mage who started midway. Affinities excluded of course.

But that’s why society looks down upon people with lesser skills, most probably a maneuver by the rich and powerful to dissuade people from growing properly in order to keep their superiority, not to mention the increased potential of noble and royal bloodlines.

On the up side he is now a plant, a monster? A monster plant then. And since he is able to start from scratch and with tremendous bonuses from his growth skill he should be able to grow stronger faster, he might even be tempted to try the revenge thing again if he gets prodded hard enough by greedy people. He is the unique snowflake after all.

While his more than lacking knowledge in ritualism is apparently useful, it is quite useless without having your mana pool in order to guide the ritual properly. He only knew some simple mana gathering circles, which were kindly liberated from the dead mind mage, and never bothered to learn anymore cuz why would he need them in a forest? The increase in mana density might make his mana regen faster but it would also attract predators that are searching for a tasty snack.

And while Mint was disturbed by them due to messing with his pseudo mana pool, which wouldn’t happen if it was a normal one, it didn’t attract much attention due to the small size and overall weirdness of this lovely glade.

With all said and done Novus really wanted to start making magic happen, first he would need to figure out what affinities he might get then train his attunement and refine mana to a single element in order to boost effectiveness. First off he is a plant so maybe nature and due to the all of the sun absorption maybe light or a derivative.

As far as element go there are ten, the four basic- fire, earth, water, wind. Three primal- light, dark, space and three abstract- mind, body, soul.

The last three can be represented by the stats in the stats sheet, the rest can be seen in nature all the time. Mostly in combination with each other. For example, since he is a plant and could probably awaken Nature affinity, after some training it could be divided in to water and earth, then use those to make other affinities like compressing earth mana until it becomes metal, water to ice and again with water to make ice water element, which a very cold liquid that can freeze air itself.

That particular piece of knowledge he found out by himself. Since telekinesis was apparently an element of its own, he used a combination of mind and space, since he didn’t have affinity for it he supplemented it by using a bag that was bigger on the inside and a lot of effort, but it resulted in a subpar lesser telekinesis. In the beginning it could barely sway a blade of grass but the end of his Lich days he could deflect an arrow volley with his will alone for a few times, so some good came out of.

Anyway with some review out of the way Novus started to try and see if he could make his own mana pool first. He did try when he first found out about Mints own but he wasn’t sure if it could work and he could potentially damage himself. Now he had plenty of nutrients to spare and extra limbs to “burn”.

First he used the deepest tuber he had. It was a bout 2,5m under and was the smallest since it is quite hard to grow something so deep, as the ground around it tries to squash it with its weight. On the other hand, this tuber has the current highest concentration of nutrients of around a factor of 8.

With that he asked Mint if he could use the mana it has, and after a smug approval of the type “If you can.” He focused and slowly tried to feel the mana and influence it with his will. It took a few days until it started to wobble a bit in his direction, and almost a week until it started to flow slowly to his tuber. Although it seemed slow to waste almost two weeks to move mana from point A to B, it must be known that Novus developed Psi capacity which is used by mind mages on his 3rd month of intense torture and mana when he killed the mind mage and absorbed a tiny amount from him, and even then he lacked the knowledge and skills to train properly.

When he hunted in the forest he used at most mana bolts, darts and orbs without any affinity to boost its power. Well he did mostly just make his enemy confused to the point where it can’t resist and then killed him the fastest way possible, which was quite slow in the early days, quite similar to torture might I add.

During his reminiscence the mana has slowly floated to the deepest tuber and he was slowly forcing it to stay there. What he is trying to do is make it in to a core for his magic. After that he would have to bury his seed in case its important, can’t risk it too much. Better safe than sorry and all that.

Not long after the tuber tried to start expanding, its nutrients were diluting and increasing in volume, so he applied Nutrient compression to the point where he had to use a lot more energy than normal compression and it was rapidly rising in proportion to the mana, no wonder Mind kept the mana spread out throughout the whole glade.

Intelligence is always a trait that species which strive to survive not only today but tomorrow have, those that prepare for the future. And Novus was over prepared, he had enough food to last 2-3 months stored in tubers, in case there is winter season, or drought, or some bad event that would starve the average grass, and that’s not counting the high density of nutrients which flow in his body, he could last another 2 months if he devoured parts of himself.

With struggle and concentration, he kept pushing his will in to the mana and boy was it slow as a snail. Novus didn’t even bother to keep track of time and used pure focus to overcome the inability of a low grade plant to compress mana by itself. He kept pushing and pushing both nutrients and mana from Mint which surprisingly wasn’t bothering him and was having its attention focused on the event as well.

Not long after the nutrients which were in the tuber were slowly changing, or more precisely charging with mana, their color changing from the slightly yellowish to rich brown all the way to light golden from the view of an outside observe.

But He was not satisfied, it’s all and good to have mana enriched blood but the moment he used the magic in it, it would revert to normal, and his body can’t produce more of it on its own, for now. So he kept pushing even more, but alas his will wasn’t strong enough yet so he looked at it from another angle.

If he could produce those new type of nutrients on his own, albeit with heavy effort, what would happen if he compressed them by themselves. So he kept the pressured to the highest possible degree and slowly started to syphon the new nutrients, which he now mentally designated as nectar, out to a new tuber that is grown from the nectar itself. He pushed and pulled compressed and made for as long as he could until he created a sphere of about 2 cm diameter at the base of his thickest root around 2m underground.

From an outside point of view, it would look like a shining yellow orb almost amber like, nestled between roots as it pulsed with unmatched strength and vitality.

When Novus got out from his trance with a job well done, he was surprised by the result, although he was aiming for a core, which he often found in monsters during the good ol days, he still got something quite close to it or more properly the plant equivalent, it doesn’t have the same density of mana as a core of its size but it still passively absorbs mana from the surroundings, at a very, very slow pace barely noticeable but still fast enough to matter, and that’s not including that it is a new type of tissues he can make with it. With this he may be able to enrich his whole self eventually. But something was missing.

[For some reason Mint was pretty quiet, usually when I make something new or fun it is pestering me to show it how to do it, quite odd.]

When he spread his mind around the root network he noticed something growing about 5 meters west of him, the best description was a wriggling mass of roots. It was absorbing all the mana it can get its hand on and all the nutrients from the common tubers via the root network.

Whatever it is it was just starting to form, and it was hungry. It probably had to do with Mint, but he didn’t know how exactly, the good news is that it isn’t immediately harmful to him, the bad news is that the stored nutrients of the whole glade would last at most another week, his excluded, at this rate and he doesn’t know when it will stop growing so he did the only thing he knew how.

For the second time of his new life he grew rapidly in a frenzy like state. First he grew more leafs in a half circle shape very close to his main grass stalk, and was making something similar to trunk, one layer at a time, and growing his roots deeper while circulating nutrients trough the nectar core in order to enrich them with mana as best he can and increase his growth speed.

Once the height of his improvised trunk reached close to 4 meters, he connected the leaf layers making them as close to as one possible and started to grow new leafs from the inside out. From the outside it looked like a green stalk rapidly rose from the glade and leaves sprouted like an umbrella.

When he felt satisfied he started to actively produce nutrients during the day and enrich his body during the night, in between he lowered his seed for about 50cm underground were it would be safe for the moment. From all of that he fed the access nutrients to the new root growth hoping it won’t starve the glade, he kinda liked it here.

When he made his best palm tree impression and produced enough nutrients to feed the new glutton he had some time to think. Novus noticed of the positive things about being a plant is that he barely keeps track of time. Some moments blur others together lasting barely a second others, like a sunrise, may stretch to almost eternity it becomes quite surreal.

And on the plus side he has two new skills and managed to max out a few more including his racial class, on the down side he hasn’t evolved or noticed anything prompting him to. Due to the “Know thy self” trait everything was more rpg-ish than instinctual, so he thought that a screen would pop up with three variations for further evolution or something. But alas he was mistaken.

As for the skills:

Nutrient Enrichment (Lesser): 4/25

Developed by living organisms who were born and lived in an area of high mana density, this skill increases the mana content in the flesh of the individual. It makes it stronger, more resilient and better conduit of mana. Higher levels of mastery allow for a higher speed and degree of Enrichment and in turn better bonuses.

Plant Mana Regeneration (Lesser): 2/25

When a normal plant becomes enriched with mana, it becomes a magic plant. This skill shows the ability of said plant to draw in the forces of the arcane. Higher levels of mastery show how much of the body is magical and in turn the speed of mana regeneration or accumulation.

Those two sounded marvelous but, he still didn’t have an actual mana pool. The nectar which he could now make were more potent in active components so to say, or if you prefer layman term he could grow faster using them, and if they were even packed with more mana he could grow in faster spurts, even develop a skill similar to earth spike or root spike in this scenario, noted and catalogued for further experimentation.

He now was at a loss, Mint was doing something weird and he was only able to provide large amount of nutrients to its pet project but, even in magical worlds the laws of nature and physics are unbreakable for mortals, our resident reincarnated included. In short the nutrients in the soil were running out due to aggressive harvesting. There are only two options.

To dig deeper and wider or to reach out for the edge of the glade and start parasitizing from the trees. Usually a normal person would choose one or the other, or just watch the weird thing do its thing. But this particular overgrown grass is kinda attached to the disembodied conciseness of its only true friend, of sorts, since it came to this world of magic. And in this case he chose to help.

He still kept actively producing nutrients and fattening his tubers with the extra like mad during the day, barely enjoying the sun like a proper plant should bordering on self-abuse. And during the night he would grow his root system deeper and wider and using the content of his tubers to keep a steady income of food for the root blob

His roots were already nearing 6 meters deep and the moisture to one of its eastern roots was higher so he hoped there is a subterranean water soruce or river of sorts. The width of the glade itself was close to 30m in diameter and his root system was covering about a third of that when it comes to width.

Once he went past the 4m depth mark he started to encounter rocks and thick roots, probably from other trees or part of a similar intertwined network of roots present their glade. For the moment he grew around them trying not to disturb them and make even more trouble for himself.

As time passed by he was getting a lot of himself enriched with mana, first he went up from the nectar core to his seed, in which he packed it full with the new nutrients and up to the stalk all the way to his improvised palm like leaves. He barely bothered to count the day night cycles and honestly he didn’t care.

For now, all he had to do was provide Mint with food while trying not to starve the soil in which the glade was growing.