An hour away from sunset, Luke burnt it away recuperating as Eleven stood watch over their spot. Lacking legs, hers would’ve been more of a ‘float’ than a ‘stand’ were it not for the matter of the meld, which removed her physical presence altogether.

Suddenly fatigued from the culmination of the day’s events, Luke had decided to remedy this immediately by getting some shut eye sooner, with the intention of testing out the perks of the level-up later. Because of this, he’d discovered how barring the recipient body, the meld was a two-way street, albeit with each lane having its own rules.

Luke would get a boost in recovery speed during a meld just as Eleven did, but while Luke would improve in observational acuity at the expense of his attacks and counters, Eleven would see a boost to her defense at no immediate cost to anything else. The latter wasn’t without its drawbacks though, as the sleeping form she’d be occupying would make for a stationary and bigger target, and should an attack overwhelm her boosted body, control would be automatically ceded to Luke, forcing Eleven into an involuntary stasis, ala meld, with two times the recovery period. A familiar down, such a blow would affect Luke’s observational abilities and tactical options till the rest timer lapsed, but the ability to escape a certain death blow once still gave him comfort. He’d be sure to factor this into future strategies.

For now, he’d enjoy the deep sleep the meld offered, and hopefully no external event would wake him from this slumber before he’d had his fill. Expecting an hour, or two at the most thanks to the meld, he hadn’t expected to sleep beyond that, and Eleven, being privy to his state; also found it strange he’d slept past the time he’d allotted but just as she was about to mentally nudge him awake, she felt the deeply contented flavor of his state and chose to not wake him up prematurely, and to take the whole evening’s watch instead, letting his slumber run its course naturally.

Although willing to accommodate him just a bit more, she hadn’t expected his rest to run over another hour, but it had, and all the way towards dawn at that. She’d taken an executive decision then and stood watch the whole night hoping he’d wake well, refreshed, and ready for the next day, but fate had something else in mind for her companion.

Fate’s decision was made manifest in the form of a burning sensation that jolted Luke out of his sleep, affecting comms over his bond with Eleven and as a consequence, he could not hear Eleven’s repeated calls to him. Confused and in pain, he ran for cover while mulling over the first idea he’d latched onto, that being they were currently under attack, and he needed to find a better spot to identify the assailant or assailants and begin mounting the counter-offense.

Ducking behind a tree, he tried to retrieve his colichemarde from the inventory, but the mental command turned up nothing, and this sent him into a deeper panic. He dove for the next tree and attempted to blink his way through it, only for his form to run straight into the trunk. Seeing as a phase-shift had failed, he chose to forego all other attempts and to physically shimmy behind the tree instead.

Hoping it would only be a temporary impotence towards effects, he tried to wait it out and when no notification was forthcoming after a five-second wait, he chose to reach for the only source he’d become familiar with over the past few days but unfortunately, a call to Eleven also turned up nothing but a faint whisper of static, leading him to believe her defenses had been overwhelmed by the blow that had awoken him.

A searing pain in his shoulder brought him up short, turning his attention towards the sleeve it was centered around. With his head on a swivel, he’d been too busy seeking enemies in the shadows to pay heed to the pain that had awoken him, but now, it had grown in intensity to the point it couldn’t be ignored.

Pulling up the hoodie’s arm over his shoulder, he revealed the two marks on his sleeve. The Westfallen mark remained dead and mostly unchanged, save for the frazzled edges whose appearance was akin to the dying embers on a burnt piece of paper, whilst the unknown fate mark in the likeness of an eclipse seemed more alive than ever. The crescent-like bleeding of light around the edges shined the brightest hue of cold white, and this made the eclipsed potions of the bright body stand out even more.

On further inspection, the mark looked more and more like the waning crescent just before new moon, and after chancing a glance at the skies above he couldn’t help but note its likeness mirrored in the skies of the burgeoning day, and this meant yesterday was the last of the current cycle. Although he believed in coincidences, he didn’t think this was one of them but bracing for the ever-increasing pain, he chose to table the issue for a calmer moment.

The calm sauntered in a few minutes later, and from a glance at the sky, Luke estimated the beginning of his reprieve at the moment the day’s sunlight overwhelmed the previous eve’s moon, making the moon’s waning sliver invisible to the naked eye as a consequence.

A cool, relaxing feeling suffused his inflamed shoulder, bringing an almost-instantaneous relief that outlived the waning pain for another minute, only stopping when the sun’s bottom was safely over the horizon’s edge and on a steady course for its place above everything.

Another look at the unknown mark revealed its change to a crescent a wee-bit wider than the actual sliver had been, and he wondered if this meant he’d experience more and more of this until the mark was satiated. Although there weren’t enough incidents to establish a pattern from, he guessed the mark’s nourishment would somehow be linked to the moon, and because of this, he couldn’t help but dread longer periods of pain as the moon’s phases changed.

He would just have to weather its rage in hopes the rainbow would be worth the storm, and from the familiar sense he got from the mark, he believed it would.

◆◆◆

Despite their bond and her insight into his state, he’d still had to reassure Eleven there weren’t any lingering effects from the event that had awoken him. Her concern had eventually slackened over time, and disappeared completely after Luke had served up breakfast, relieving her mind as her mouth did the gnawing instead.

Luke had thanked her again for the previous night before offering her relief for the morning, which she accepted before a quick meld. With the whole day ahead of him, he dedicated the first part of the morning to perusing through his new perks and left the rest to adjusting to- and exploiting the level 2 facets of the Alchemist class. These were all neatly summarized by a sequence of notifications that split them into a group of 3 perks for operation, as well as 4 practices for advancement.

The first perk was Source Eye, whose first feature was to highlight sources of raw alchemical materials, whilst the second was to provide guidelines for extraction, hazard, and usage. So, like a guided appraisal calibrated specifically for alchemy, thought Luke, moving on to the next two, Speed Up and Potency Up.

The names seemed intuitive and self-explanatory, and their descriptions confirmed just as much, with the benefits of the former being universal, and those of the latter being limited to alchemical practices. The practices could be improved individually for more Alchemist level ups, and once he'd maxed out every practice, he would finally get a class-up. These were listed as extraction, concoction, perfection, and improv, with the last being further split into two sub-practices with the same root. Improvisation and improvement. Although improvement initially seemed to be the same as perfection, the additional notes under each practice highlighted the differences.

Where ‘improvement’ was concerned with process and formular, ‘perfection’ was concerned with the results of the process instead, and these could be measured in terms of efficacy and pureness. Efficacy would be a workable estimation of the desirable effect yield, whilst pureness could only be an estimation on the degree of side-effects.

It only took under an hour for Luke to mull over the details of the level up and once he was done, he went right into testing out the first perk, Source Eye. Needing better equipment, the first alchemical materials he targeted were for extraction and concoction and for this, he revisited the swamps, giving the Rat-skin nest from the day before a wide berth.

For his first test he went with something he had prior knowledge of, and this was the common needle-mouth, also known as a Giant Mosquito. Needle-mouths were a class of insect with compound proboscises which were specialized for penetration and suction. The proboscises could be shrunken down to a desirable size via desiccation, then connected to a fluid receptacle to fashion a syringe.

They also had the additional benefit of a slated interior, which always forced fluids up and out of the shaft. This meant it would take less effort to sterilize since only the receiving end would require attention after usage.

For his purposes, Luke chose to fashion as many needles of different radii as his time would allow so that he would have a collection he could pull from depending on the size of the fluid source, and the particle size in the desired extract.

He'd spotted his first mosquito within 15 minutes of descending into the swampy areas, and he’d made short work of it with a quick stab between the eyes, followed by a low current jolt for extra measure. Although silent in death, its demise had still been registered by its kin in the vicinity and this instigated a retaliatory response that only served to make Luke’s hunt for them easier.

Due to the low effort required in taking the targets down, there weren’t any points gained from combat, and since he’d already involuntarily sacrificed the Hunter class, he’d only get points towards leveling up his Alchemy once he got to processing his haul.

With 23 carcasses by noon, he chose to end the hunt then and move on to the processing and crafting. Seeing as it was his first experience harvesting needles, he went for less speed and more attention to detail as a steady pace would make for fewer mistakes, but even at his slowest, he still couldn’t bring down the margin of error to zero, and with a success rate just below 80%, his ultimate yield came down to 18 needles. With these safely stored in order of size in his inventory, all that was left was to attach one to the mouth of a container and presto! He’d have a make-shift syringe.

Aside from the middle stomach out of three, whose walls made for a good-enough material to fashion a dropper bulb from; all the other materials yet to be harvested were of little use to Luke. Thus, Luke harvested all 23, placing them in storage after scraping and washing before discarding the leftovers. These he left to rot by the wayside as he headed deeper into the swamp in search of his next target. Fungi.

Lacking recipes and advanced refinement techniques, the best he could do with his skills in concocting would be to produce extracts from them, and for this, he would first collect the concentrated droplets off each mushroom before sinking a needle into it and collecting additional fluid from the inside. Once he’d collected as much fluid as possible given the time constraints, he would then collect the shriveled mushrooms and place like with like in the same slot of his inventory.

They came in all shapes and sizes, with some eerily similar, and to many-a-casual’s fault at that since nature had a penchant of assigning diametrically opposed properties to the similar. Because of this, death by misidentification was a common hazard for the fledgling shroom-enthusiast, but fortunately for Luke, his Source Eye would be a good counter to that.

◆◆◆

Going in, Luke had only had peripheral knowledge about fungi, with the bulk of it being centered around the edible variety. These would normally grow under dense enough cover where the lack of direct sunlight and a surplus of leaf litter would provide the moist conditions and fuel they required to thrive.

This kind is what he had run into the most on his way down, but since he was on an alchemical expedition, he’d chosen to spend the least amount of time on them. More of the same were now sprinkled on the way to the darker parts so he settled on one stop per edible mushroom.

This way, he made good time on the first half of the way in, with the last half being stretched out by longer and repeated stops. Just over the halfway mark, he finally ran into a different variety, his first alchemical ingredient for the trip, and this presented the chance for him to finally utilize his Source Eye on a fungus.

+-----------------+

|“One-Feather Fan”|

+-----------------+-------------+

|Class: Constituent Notification|

+--------------+----------------+

|Family: Fungus|

+--------------+---------+

|Formal Name: Turkey Tail|

+---+--------------------+

|Use|

+---+----------+

|Immune Booster|

+-----------+--+

|Antioxidant|

+-----------+------------+

|Abnormal Mass Correction|

+------------------------+

Being a very common mushroom, it wasn’t a surprise that Luke actually knew this one, but the surprising thing had been the difference between the inspired name in the title, and the formal name. The title fit something he would’ve named the mushroom, which begged the question whether a formal name would be provided should the ingredient be new to him.

The answer to that question came to him soon enough, as he managed to spot his second alchemical ingredient a quarter of an hour later. The notification confirmed the formal names would be limited to what he already knew, whilst the descriptions would always be colorfully descriptive, and though alluding to the usage wasn’t a must in the title, the appearance certainly was.

+-----------+

|“Mop-Brain”|

+-----------+-------------------+

|Class: Constituent Notification|

+--------------+----------------+

|Family: Fungus|

+--------------+-----+

|Formal Name: Unknown|

+---+----------------+

|Use|

+---+-------------+

|Cognitive Booster|

+----------+------+

|Memory Aid|

+----------+---+

|Focus Enhancer|

+--------------+

Storing the mop-brain extracts and bulbs, he moved on, discovering more and more mushrooms along the way. Some he’d hoard whilst others would be limited to a few intact samples for alchemical assays when he had the time to dally.

Of the ones he paid special attention to, the Spongey Null seemed the most peculiar out of them. It was akin to a button mushroom in appearance, with a sieve-like netting over its surface, bulb and neck. It was null-aligned, meaning it wouldn’t taint any other objects it interacted with, but take on their taint and alignment instead. This made it a good experimental vessel since bits of the mushroom could be ‘tainted’ and experimented upon in isolation. Best of yet was its flash-reset property, which allowed for any acquired taints to be voided by subjecting the tissue to flames. This meant the mushroom could be used over and over again in experiments without a loss in quantity and purity, so long as the alchemist maintained fine control of the flames and knew when to stop purifying.

Because Luke was new to this, he collected all the nulls he came across in hopes their quantity would make up for his margin of error as he learnt to preserve and reuse it.

◆◆◆

He’d been travelling for just over 2 hours when he stumbled upon the holy grail! One-feather fans, Larval fluffs, Branded Buttons, Mop Brains, Xana-mists were there in abundance, all centered around a humungous Null that stood at least three times his height from base to the neck of its broad-hat cap.

Although enticing, such a collection of mushrooms was just too… convenient, so Luke wouldn’t fall for such an obvious trap. After only a moment’s hesitation, he turned to leave but something wrapped around his ankle, tripping him up. His sickle was in his hand a split-second later and as he made to cut the vine dragging him towards the mushroom clearing, several more sprung up from the foliage around him.

He severed the vine before ripping the remnants from his ankle mid-roll as two of the other vines met empty air where he’d scampered from a second earlier. Rising from his crouched position, he repelled the other attacks with ease at first, but with time their attacks became more incessant, driving him backward toward the clearing. He entertained the notion of a blink for a second before thinking better of it. The vines’ efforts were too coordinated to be anything but guided and being an extension of the sentient entity controlling them, they would definitely constitute a phase boundary.

An appraisal of one of them confirmed this, so he redoubled his efforts to repel them before making a run for it. Now 50 meters away from the clearing, he chanced a glance at the giant mushroom and as he’d expected the vines had originated from it. Two of the vines that were akin to fluid appendages wriggled on either side and an appraisal of the shroom revealed its actual identity.

A Perverted Null?

A pair of red eyes shone through the darkness behind it and Luke wondered if that was his actual attacker behind its perversion. He made to appraise it, but the eyes slowly closed, only to open again in a violent flash that was proceeded by a spherical object that flew towards him.

Too fast to dodge, Luke had blinked out of phase in an effort to avoid the projectile, but no sooner had the blink registered did he scream from the burrowing pain at his ankle. A notification accompanied that pain, informing him of what had happened.

encountered, [Phase Blink] cancelled.

He ducked behind a tree and downed a health potion before turning to assess the damage to his right ankle. The spore-like projectile was lodged halfway into his ankle and though the damage it had done on impact seemed superficial, the threads weaving a carpet up the ankle promised more damage over time.

Braced for the pain, he used the sickles curved point to gauge a chunk of flesh and the spore out, but more threads sprung out of his bloody ankle soon after. Unwilling to waste even a single drop, they rushed toward any and all red drops that escaped from his wound and they continued growing with each drop absorbed.

An appraisal of the threads classified them as an unknown toxin with an unexpected twist, beside the placeholder was a ‘sentient’ modifier in parentheses. Although it didn’t explain everything about how the toxin functioned, it helped stress the need to detoxify, lest it propagate to all his vitals and end him or worse, to his brain and pervert him as well.

He tied off his lower leg a few inches above the ankle with the intention of stilting the toxins progression upwards. Not sticking around, he socketed a stamina potion before limping further away in hopes of placing as much distance as he could from whatever had almost done him in in the clearing.

Now more than 300 meters away, he took out a long and thin needle and allowed it to drink from his palm to an overflow before pulling it out and sticking it into the affected ankle instead. As expected, one of the thin threads turned towards the needle suffused with fresh blood before making its way up the shaft, consuming every drop in there greedily.

Initially propelled by its own intent, the thread’s ascent up the needle’s shaft had been slow, but it saw an immediate increase in speed once Luke crowned the receiving end of the needle with a null cap, and as the off-white bulb turned a darker shade of green, he set it aflame, burning away the toxin.

A steady length of the toxin thread was pulled up the needle’s shaft as more and more colored fumes billowed from the burning bulb, effectively detoxifying Luke’s leg. Aware of its encroaching demise, the toxin violently wriggled in attempt to extricate itself from the purifier, but the slated interior of the shaft wouldn’t let go.

Instead, it kept drawing the toxin up the shaft and after 3 minutes of the same, the purifier prevailed. Although nulls were quite the rarity, Luke did not bother extinguishing the flames after purification, but opted to let them burn out instead, lest a sliver of the toxin escape. As the last embers of the spent null fizzled out, a notification popped up, codifying Luke’s first inspired creation.

+---------+

|“Unnamed”|

+---------+-+

|Class: Tool|

+-----------+---------------------+

|“Purifies toxins within a stream |

|- - - - - of fluid.” - - - - - - |

+------------+--------------------+

|Constituents|

+------------+

|Null Cap / ?|

+----------+-+

|Needle / ?|

+----------+-+

|Flame Source|

+------------+

He thought of the name ‘Detox Torch’ and with a mental command it was renamed to that, albeit with a ‘1.0’ tacked onto it. He shook the needle vigorously before placing it back into his inventory, and once the feeling was back in his heel, he picked up the pace on his way out of the swamp. He hoped he’d find a proper place for his rest before sunset.

◆◆◆

Luke watched the sun set with bated breath, awaiting the onset of a painful episode similar to the one he’d had at sunrise but fortunately for him, it never came to pass. Instead, it was an uneventful end to an otherwise event-packed day, and that wasn’t so bad.

Yet to have their last meal of the day, he had planned on serving it up as soon as he’d recovered from the sunset, but a sudden feeling of lethargy settled over him soon after. A quick check on his status and an appraisal of the area the fungal attack had been centered on turned up nothing. Nevertheless, he kept the appraisal going just in case he’d be able to spot new details in time.

Hoping another pair of eyes on his status might be able to see through what had escaped his notice, he turned to Eleven for aid only to be met with another dose of lethargy from their bond, and when he physically turned to face her, he caught the sight of her falling form.

He managed to catch her in open palm before she reached the floor of the wide branch they were perched upon, but their contact was brief seeing as they’d melded within a second of contact. A cool feeling washed over him soon after, and upon recognizing the source of the calming waves he turned first to the lunar mark on his sleeve before staring up at a tilt where the moonless sky stared back.

His field of vision closed in bit by bit, first into a tunnel, and then further towards a point as the time ticked by. The more the field narrowed, the clearer the picture became, to the point he could finally isolate the shaded moon’s silhouette from the darkness it blended into, as well as pick up on hints of a face within it, but the clearer the picture became, the more he could feel his consciousness fading into the background.

[Advanced Appraisal] has registered the object, . Detail unclear. Calibrating… Detail unclear. Calibrating…

In a bid to beat the encroaching slumber, he willed the repetitive notifications away and focused his vision further by squinting his eyes and just like that, the image resolved to a somewhat familiar, middle-aged face.

30 years younger, was his last thought as a #Ding and a series of new notifications accompanied his descent into oblivion. The devil would remain to be read through once he’d awoken, but the morsel he’d glanced upon was enough to double the smile already on his face.

Hidden Class requirements met. Class Unlocked: Skryptor.