Sweetened dreams

Mortal tier recipe. No cultivation requirements

This stuff isn’t exactly cheap, but it’s loved by most new parents. The rich and powerful will generally get their hands on more powerful items, or simply cultivate until the need for sleep vanishes.

It was created for the reason that one would expect. Another king had to constantly endure nightly terrors, to the point where he failed to sleep more than once a week, and normally collapsed from exhaustion at that. A group of hired alchemists concocted a drug capable of solving the king’s problem, but ingestion remained an issue. Simply drinking the potion would cause it to lose effects after three hours, returning him to those terrors. The solution was to coat an incense stick in it and let him breathe in the smoke all night long.

Ingredients and recipe Caramelised horsetail, 2 stems – non magical plant Mindnode worm blood, 50 ml – natural gathering stage worm Any spiritually refractive crystal, 30 grams – natural gathering stage mineral Spinal fluid of the recently deceased, 5 ml – non magical fluid

Last one is quite morbid, isn’t it?

Don’t worry, there are enough people dying everyday to facilitate the creation of this stuff. And a single potion’s worth can be used to produce 10 or so incense sticks.

If for whatever reason you chance upon a corpse then consider storing some spinal fluid for something like this, but if you’re reading this page for the first time then it’s doubtful. Just be responsible and buy some from your local morgue, they should keep it under ice to guarantee freshness.

Mindnode worms are big, for worms that is. They have a common habit of invading colonies and becoming a sort of de facto leader because their main ability is mentally controlling all the members of a colony…

Hunt it yourself, with a lot of trouble, or just buy its blood. They’re pretty easy to rear, and most alchemical stores will keep some on hand.

Caramelised horsetail is probably one of the only types of horsetail mortals like. Normally these reeds are a troublesome weed that everyone vigilantly snuffs out at the fastest approach, meanwhile these candy-like variants are farmed gratefully. Capable of growing in nearly all wet soil, they produce way too much sugar and end up becoming the major sugar source in most worlds. This sugar also makes it great to just chew on one, swallowing bursts of sweet water with every bite.

Do go easy on them though, too much sugar is bad for you. The average stem is half a metre tall, but if you have oddly differently sized ones then make sure you’re using no more than two metres of horsetail.

For the big one then, what does spiritually refractive mean?

Well, one can consider it a spiritual version of glass. It can be used to focus streams of mental/soul energies, or disperse them the same. This property is all due to refraction, and as there are lots of crystals which perform this feature you can pick any at the natural gathering stage. This recipe can end very badly if you use a crystal above natural gathering though, so take care.

Begin mixing the spinal fluid and worm blood. The originally dark red blood should start glowing in the presence of mental energy left over in the spinal fluid, if there is no glow then you’ve been sold either old goods or something fake. Freezing the spinal fluid does in fact preserve the mental energy.

With the product glowing you can leave it to the side until the glowing fades, this can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 20 minutes.

Now change over to the crystal. As a magical material its hardness easily surpasses what a mortal can break, but at the same time you don’t want to smash it to pieces. Whether you are a cultivator or not, simply take a hammer and chisel and try to break it along grains. This will cause the crystal to make clean breaks, giving you small shards, but not literal dust.

When the shards are roughly the size of your fingernails, no larger than your thumb’s nail, you may stop. For the more precise, ensure that each shard weighs 2 grams or less. Unlike magical gemstones, which are extremely heavy, spiritual ones grow lighter and lighter in weight. So, this small 30 gram crystal is likely the size of your thumb.

With the crystal broken, drop them into the no longer glowing worm blood one at a time. If you ever see the fluid light up once again then immediately stop and wait for the glow to stop. This time the glow will rarely last more than half a minute, making this process relatively short.

This part needs to be rushed a bit, but it should be easy with a dedicated tool. Simply juice the horsetails and pour all the sugary liquid into the current mixture. There will be no visual differences, but after adding all the juice from your first reed you will notice the spiritual crystal dissolving. No, this is not due to the sugar.

For a short period after juicing, and we’re talking maybe 20 seconds, a very unstable chemical within the juice is capable of forcefully breaking apart solid crystalline structures. It won’t completely dissolve the gemstones, but they’re actually swallowable now.

Quickly add the second one’s juice, this time mostly to just make the mixture sweeter and diluted. Mix well and use as necessary, but try to avoid drinking it.

Usage

In its potion form it lasts exactly four hours, this is due to an improvement of the recipe over its original creation. Not surprising by this point. For this reason, no reasonable seller will sell the potion directly. The volume of potion drunk has no effect on duration time, so the cost effective use is to slowly consume it overnight, which is why an incense was chosen.

Preparing the incense form is simple. Take an unscented rod of incense, coat it in this liquid potion, and leave it to dry in sunlight for 24 hours. There you go, burn it just before going to sleep with a way for the smoke to escape.

This goes without saying, but smoke is dangerous to your health, and a way for it to escape is necessary unless choking in your sleep sounds nice. The exact effect of this stuff depends on a person-to-person basis, such that one record even mentions a person to have slept through a high magnitude earthquake.

In general the received effect will revolve around a strong dream which practically refuses to allow your leave. Since these dreams are beneficial, rather than the nightmares which devolve some to utter fear of the night, it often leads to cases where people become addicted to the use of this incense. The addiction is purely psychological, like with many other drugs, but such a thing is understandable when this stuff makes every night into a wistful one like no other.

Do take care of your mental state in reality still, this stuff won’t magically fix any of that. And some people report their excessively poor mental states actually seeped into their dream worlds only to morph that comfy sweetness into a grey mess of horror and insanity. The mortal mind is a very fragile thing in the end.