“Marigold forest is a place with above average mana density and home to quite a few gold tiers… the lords here are all mithril tier too. But as long as we avoid any mana gatherer trees, we should be more or less fine in evading the more dangerous foes,” while the group slowly walked through the dense weaving of trees, Mala described the general points to take care of rather well. Icy eventually found a book which referenced this section of the continent, and a single page on the Marigold forest’s highlights.

They often remained vigilant of anything hiding behind the thick trunks outside their senses, but still discussed the specifics which only Mala truly knew. As it turned out, the book didn’t really tell him about ecosystems but instead told him of interesting items which a dragon might want from the forest.

And only a few existed, some were alchemical ingredients that he couldn’t care less about. Another was just a fruit which produced bountiful volumes of life essence.

But the last were marigolds.

A field of the golden orange flowers which took up a region towards the forest’s centre and marked a rather important spot. For one, nothing dared fight in that region as it would anger the king of the forest instantly, a being whose power fluctuated between the top end of mithril tier and some part of master tier depending on the decade. Kings rose and fell over time for these more competitive regions, but only because the top beast races did not demand to conquer them and allowed local beasts to acquire the status of king.

“So what do the Marigolds do?” Rather than allow the two know-it-alls to continue teasing them, Jaren asked them directly to cut to the chase.

“Nothing much,” he replied with a small smirk.

But it utterly failed as Jaren just rolled his eyes and yawned. Then he said, “Mala’s pulled that enough times. Try a proper answer.” Well, there went his fun. Then again his little attempt to draw shock must have gotten boring years ago, so he held no ill-will towards the cynic.

He’d also be pretty bored of any joke after a few years too.

“The marigolds are a side effect of the soil which is perfect for trapping solar energies. At night this energy is slowly released with a highly beneficial effect, although, during the day the marigolds technically store some. They are very useful for certain potions if harvested in the afternoon.” To avoid having to pronounce more than half of that, Icy used the Soul Link to explain everything. Raccelline didn’t really care much about what the flowers were, and even whether they were pretty only mattered a slight bit.

“Do we still have to run?” Her voice broke the momentary silence as they communicated and she very quickly received her answer. Without hesitation climbing up onto his back and leaning forward as a way to lie down…

His body was large enough to comfortably fit her, especially with the growth offered by all that life essence, but being ridden was still a strange concept for any intelligent being.

“Did anyone want to stop by the marigolds then? Or would the natives attack us for harvesting some?” Korridan asked the group, but really only focused on Mala and himself here, no one else could really use the flowers for anything.

Before she got a word in though, Icy replied out loud, “I can speak to them, if necessary.”

With the matter decided, they decided to take a small diversion towards the marigold patch, a quick search with Sky Sight Barrier allowed them to find its exact position with relative ease… Although the spell was broken seconds later by something in the forest. No one was surprised that a beast noticed his Apprentice true spell, although the fact they just broke the spell was enough to tell that they weren’t highly aggressive.

If they were, the group might have started to leave immediately.

Fortunately, like most forests closer to civilization, the beasts here didn’t immediately attack passing humans unless they smelt blood or saw the people with weapons drawn. Like this, they made it past quite a few steel tiers who similarly preferred to avoid a battle, and before long they’d walked for a couple hours to come across the field of orange they’d waited for.

In the sunny daylight, it almost seemed to glow in the completely open ground. The flowers were so tightly packed that seeing anything but orange was hard, and they even released a soothing scent similar to lavender but slightly fruity. No more than half a metre tall, it was easy for everyone to see above the vivid orange and look all the way out onto it, seeing some beasts gently laying across the place with others on the outskirts.

And even with this forest being so close to a major city, they saw no other humans here.

Almost immediately after arriving, they first saw a large ram sitting towards their left. Whilst intimidatingly close, especially with its overwhelming power, the fact it didn’t take a central position showed that the strongest thing here already exceeded it…

And his mana sense showed that it exceeded gold tier completely, giving the others a reason to share his concern. Although, he still used the wyvern’s mana as a rough guide to this, so it wasn’t guaranteed to be accurate across species.

But when the difference is just so great that point kind of falls apart.

Instead, the thing which took central stage in the field was a sapling. “Do your notes say anything about a node tree growing here recently?” He asked Mala a question through their Soul Link and, expectedly, was informed that her relatively recent notes mentioned nothing of this.

Relative being in the last few decades, that is. Most node trees took between fifty to two hundred years to reach maturity, so a sapling being here could simply be a result of it only growing recently. Of course, that implied that some distance away were mana gatherer trees, and they definitely didn’t notice any of those on the way over.

Which left just one possibility, a rather annoying one at that.

An intelligent plant. Awakened, enlightened, whatever you wanted to call it… Everything in the forest clearly knew better than to annoy it.

Most of the group came to a similar conclusion, although everyone besides Mala and himself used rather obvious guesswork. But to make sure, he said to the group, “Wait here, I’ll go ask.”

Raccelline remained on top of him, but appearing as such a non-threat meant that he let her stay. Slowly, he walked over to the ram to strike up a conversation, its eyes opened as soon as he neared, and with similarly still mana he was slightly more sure that it didn’t plan to attack. Not that it gained much for killing something no stronger than a bug in its eyes.

“Apologies for awakening you. But does that plant take kindly to those harvesting some of the marigolds?” Rather than beat around the bush, he opted to waste the least of this stronger beast’s time, even if they frankly had nothing better to do.

Its head tilted against the ground as though it was confused for a moment, but then returned to an original sitting posture before speaking. “A dragon travelling with a bunch of humans, even letting a child rest on his back, that’s rare. Do not destroy them; only harvest some petals from each flower. Is she truly a child as well?”

The ram identified his species straight away with pure confidence, whilst slightly more common for beasts, it was still odd for most natives to recognise a dragon so easily.

“She is… It’s a problematic manner. Yes, even if I were an adult.” While the ram’s brows creased at that comment, it knew better than to learn more of the situation. If a species who naturally reached master tier as adults didn’t feel confident handling the mysterious situation, why would it purposely become a mark for anything that wanted this girl?

Either way, Icy didn’t hide the fact and thanked the ram for its time.

Generally speaking, while all beasts above bronze tier are natural omnivores, they tend to preserve some instincts of their species. Like most sheep-related beasts focused on consuming plants and fungi to grow, albeit this rule isn’t true all the time.

Once he returned to the group, they got to harvesting quite a few marigolds, in the end taking several hundreds of petals. Just as the ram said, nothing bothered them as long as they stuck to just taking a few from every flower. He even ate a few to receive the classic prompt about receiving experience, but was pleased to see a second pop up!

[Consumed Sun marigold! Assimilation progress 0%]

Well, now the field was just asking for him to eat a thousand or so petals, and that’s precisely what he did. Each petal took just half a second to break down, placing them in a level completely safe for him to assimilate, and about 5 minutes later he finished the process without anyone the wiser.

[Assimilated Sun marigold! 2 new bloodline directions potentially available]

It was quite a problem too as he’d stayed at 99% progress to the Elder guard bloodline on account of being unsure of how to bring up the topic. Or if he could absolutely trust them with knowledge of his absorption ability. He didn’t mind showing it to the wyvern that one time because it would never see such a thing again, and thus couldn’t look into what caused the process and what actually happened.

But Mala was just… Too inquisitive. If it was about magic, in theory, she would always ask about it. Always.

Although, she really wasn’t the sort to cut things open for the sake of discovery either, so he felt somewhat safe at least.

While the group continued to harvest more marigold petals, Mala rapidly drying them out with spells and crushing them into a fine powder, he chose to ask the Nexus something he’d seen more and more. He asked in Draconic to avoid the attention it might bring. “Why do you sometimes change the assimilation messages? Surely it should all be identical?”

[The Nexus is intelligent, and we simply write the prompts at the time as there is no dedicated system for assimilation]

“Every single one of those messages is personally written by you then?” This whole time he’d simply assumed that the assimilated prompts worked no different than his experience ones this whole time… This meant the Nexus had been working with him even before their agreement. Why?

But they didn’t respond this time, and neither did they send a blank prompt. What exactly allowed and stopped certain messages, almost arbitrarily?

“It’s time we left, it’s clear that we’ve overstayed our welcome.” Rebecca’s words through their Soul Link quickly broke them from the cycles, and the eyes of some beasts from all round could be seen. They harvested more than enough petals as it was, anymore and the field might actually need time to recover. They walked around its edge, doing everything possible to avoid accidentally treading on even a tiny sprouting marigold, and left the region safely.

But that didn’t mean they were out of the woods yet.

Well, literally speaking that is. Figuratively they were perfectly fine and easily left without a hitch by avoiding any gold tiers the best they could.

From there, they set their sights on a somewhat more well known city towards the west with a substantial cathedral to avoid the situation from today ever repeating itself.

From what they found out from Darak, that god somehow infiltrated every single church in the city without the knowledge of any outsiders for ages, perhaps the city itself never once had a legitimate church of Manus anyway! That certainly explained why they never formed a cathedral either, and then it posed a question of who else was involved. Those who tried to take a young woman in front of them were absolutely in the know, but whether they were some shady gang of just loan sharks remained unclear. Then there was the group who targeted the three who went in to buy techniques, but that made even less sense to be in on the whole thing.

There was no way for anyone to link Darak to them…

So were they attacked randomly due to being outsiders who came from nowhere, or did someone find out about their deal?

Or maybe they’d gravely underestimated the pettiness of some as they were attacked for those magical tools at their waists.

Ironic if so, since they only presented the weapons to justify the loot from the cache they made up.

But not all plans can work perfectly, in the end, it was all about damage mitigation. That was how adventurers like them survived for so many years, and the only way those old guys were still alive. When it comes down to life expectancy, few who survive remain adventurers for long.

It was always safer and more effective to join a group and work for them, but for some that lifestyle simply isn’t appealing.

Strange, suicidal tendencies, if you will.