To my surprise, it didn't take more than ten minutes for the effects of the blue leaf to wear off to the point of being unnoticeable. For such a powerful nervous system suppressant, it has a remarkably short half-life, I thought, maybe it's because it triggers rapid healing by causing cellular damage, or maybe it's because I only ingested a bit of residue. Up in the tree, I took out another leaf from the bag and looked at it while contemplating how the substance had managed to knock me out for several hours back in Suwlahtk. I ruled out catastrophic full-system damage because I was never fully exhausted when awakening after being darted, and I knew that such damage would have depleted me of a large amount of energy.

I don't like this, I thought as I frowned at the leaf. The only explanations that made any kind of sense were that my mind was dependent on some organ that was disrupted long-term by the blue leaf, or that I was somehow running on wetware. The first proposition raised the question of exactly what organ was being disrupted and how it was necessary for my mind to function, but the second one was simply disturbing. It explains a lot about why I need to sleep, and some of the other mental changes I've noticed, but... I inhaled, then exhaled slowly as I thought, It's not possible. Even if there was a human body with a full-saturation nanowire brain-computer interface hooked into it, my mind was never made to run on a human brain. It’s simply incompatible. The interface to the body's systems would be impossible to resolve.

I decided to think more about the issue later in lieu of wasting more time, I hopped down from the tree and stowed the leaf, then began searching the area for another infested tree. I found the juice pod I had dropped along with the hard piece which had triggered my gag reflex and found that it was a large clump of spores that had somehow congealed together. I examined another pod and saw no such lump inside it, then drank it as I made my way between the trees and kept an eye out for bears. My closed teeth made for a good filter to keep any non-liquids from the pod out of my mouth.

An hour later I found another tree that was infested with blue leaf. It was much smaller than the one I had found first, and of a different species, but it was in just as dire of a state and had an even higher density of leaves along its surface. I got to picking them, and soon enough my bag was three-quarters full. Due to the smaller size of the tree there were fewer leaves, so I sighed and set out to find one more source of blue leaf. How does this even spread, I wondered, this tree is at least a kilometer away from the other one with no signs of infestation between them.

The sun was setting when I found the final tree. Unlike the previous two, it had not been completely overtaken by infection, and the state it was in explained much about how blue leaf spread. The midsection of the tree, where the branches started, was covered in leaves. The rest of the tree below the branches was completely fine and the leaves of the tree itself were only beginning to brown. Looking at the branches, I found that a large number of blue leaf vines seemed to emanate from a single point near the end of one of the lowest branches. Looks like there was a bird's nest here, I noted, maybe an animal that feeds on blue leaf seeds?

My bag was around ninety-five percent full once I had finished picking off the last of the leaves from the young blue leaf plant. It was an unsatisfying amount, but probably one which was sufficient for what I wanted. After hefting the bag over my shoulder I pulled out my axe and got to work collecting firewood. I want to be done before the sun sets, I thought while chopping and keeping an eye on the exposed sections of sky, bears probably aren't afraid of fire but it might make them hesitate.

The fire crackled in front of me and I finished up my final juice pod. Checking my heads-up display bars, I could see that my nutrient levels were fine. Unfortunately, my body disagreed, and my stomach grumbled in protest against the lack of solid food. What a stupid body, I grumbled back as I prepared to punish it with the contents of my leaf bag.

I didn't have a chance to actually examine any of the blowdarts that were used on me, but I could infer that whatever they were dipped in was likely a concentrated version of the blue leaf sap. Once again I chided myself for not preparing properly to refine herbal ingredients, meaning I had to rely on some crude stone slabs and crushing implements that I had gathered after starting the fire. I guess I should just confirm the initial hypothesis first, I thought, and I placed three leaves onto the flattest of the stone slabs. I crushed them up with a rock, then angled the slab to let the liquid flow away from the plant matter. After a bit of heating with magic to increase the flow, I had what looked to be a milliliter or two of sap.

I dipped my knife into the sap, which was strangely hard to coerce into sticking to the blade. It's like the metal is hydrophobic, but this isn't water, I observed. I managed to scoop up some of the sap onto the tip of the blade where it stayed as a single round bead on the metal. With a frown, I held my hand close and slowly increased its temperature to try to dry it out. At first, the liquid shrunk as expected, but then it unexpectedly burst into flames and released a wisp of smoke. I held my breath and let the smoke dissipate instinctively, then groaned and criticized myself again for missing an opportunity and wasting material. A few minutes later I scooped another bead from the liquid on the rock and I held it close to my mouth before burning it, inhaling the smoke deeply.

The effect was immediate, though lighter than I was prepared for. Much like during the afternoon, my eyes began to vibrate and lose focus. My lungs stung inside, probably from rapid healing, and my movements grew sluggish. In a few minutes, it was over and I was left looking at what remained of the sap I had extracted. That was about the amount that would have been on a blowdart, right? I asked myself, is it just more effective if injected directly into the blood, or does it really need to be concentrated?

After ten minutes of trying and failing to get the sap to dry out onto my knife so that I could stab myself with it, I decided that I needed more material to work with. I can tell how they probably concentrate it, I thought as I crushed up five more leaves, the first phase of heating reduces the volume which means it is probably shedding water. But how did they get it onto the darts? Maybe they were wooden? I had to speculate because I hadn’t even gotten a good look at the structure of the darts, besides some glances at their fletching. They could have been wooden for all I knew, but even if they were I wasn't planning to use a blowgun to subdue Yaavtey. I needed the poison in a form that could be dried onto metal or mass-converted into gas or vapor.

Could I be going about this the wrong way? I wondered while staring at another bead of sap on the tip of my knife. I had already heated it to rid it of excess water, which had the effect of darkening the shade of liquid and making it nearly opaque. What if it needs to be cooled off, instead of heated? I thought, body heat alone could melt this rapidly from a solid state judging by what I've seen here. I tried to blow on the sap to cool it off, nearly blowing the bead of liquid off of the end of my knife. It jiggled back and forth once I stabilized it, looking strangely like a laughing human to my eyes.

I wonder if... I thought incompletely as an idea floated out of my mental background noise and presented itself to me. I brought up my visualization of heat in my mind's eye, concentrating on the liquid and locking in my focus. Laser cooling works by carefully selecting a laser frequency to induce a counter-vibration in the atoms of a material, I thought, it's possible to spend energy to cancel out energy, so I should be able to do this. I was momentarily struck with the absurdity of what I was about to do, and what I had already accomplished with magic, but I set it out of my mind and got to work.

I was sweating from exertion and concentration when I finally managed to cool the bead of sap off using magic. The act of cooling a material was at least fifty times harder than heating one, at least to figure out initially. Heating was simple, just a mental picture and a push added energy to the material and made it hotter. It could be likened to hitting a rock with a hammer in terms of difficulty once the initial hurdle of using magic was passed. Even the initial hurdle wasn’t much, had I not been exhausted when Pae’eyl was teaching me I likely would have grasped it even faster than I did.

Cooling, on the other hand, was like chiseling a rock using that same sledgehammer as the impact force, and a single nail as a chisel. Too much force, and heat was added instead of removed. Too little, and nothing happened at all. What little information the magic gave me about its own state seemed to manifest in my mind as a “direction” that the heat was moving in. Pushing in the correct “direction” was necessary for the added energy to cancel out heat in the material, though there was no real indication of what “direction” was correct. I knew intellectually what the “direction” likely represented, but it didn't help much with the process. The directionality was made all the more frustrating by the fact that my only indication of the liquid's temperature was its viscosity and surface appearance, since I couldn't exactly touch it to test its temperature.

After many failed attempts, I gained the mental dexterity necessary to do what I wanted to do, and I watched as the bead further contracted and began to dry on the surface, turning slowly into a solid lump of sap. A surge of positive emotion erupted from my chest only to be forced right back into it because I couldn't risk any unintentional physical reaction causing noise in the dead of night. Slowly, I melted the bead back into a liquid and then increased the knife's angle, then painstakingly cooled it again as it slid down the metal. In the end I created a streak of solid poison which had affixed itself to the blade through either stickiness or some other force. It doesn't matter how it worked, the point is that it worked, I thought frantically, I need to add more.

The sap had a strange property to it that I noticed when I was adding the second bead to the knife. Somehow, its melting temperature appeared to be well above its solidification temperature. Without precise tools I couldn't be sure, but even accounting for the energy used in phase transition it seemed that once the sap was solidified, it needed to be heated well into the temperature range where it would be liquid before it changed back. While mysterious, this property was also incredibly convenient for me because it meant that the liquid sap didn't melt the solid sap easily. It was stable as both a solid and a liquid at room temperature, it just depended on which state it was last in.

By the time I had gotten all five leaves' worth of sap onto the knife I had tried and failed to create a simple gesture to help myself initiate the mental processes to use cooling magic. It was simply too complex to shorthand, and needed to be adjusted every single time it was used. I could probably manage quicker cooling of something very hot, so long as I could touch it, I thought, but for this sort of thing, it's amazing this works at all if it works the way I think it does. Even during my best attempts, I only managed to reduce the temperature of the sap by an estimated ten to fifteen degrees Celsius over a second or two before I had no sensory data that could help me determine if I was cooling or heating the material.

Okay, I guess I should put out the fire and climb a tree before I test this out, I thought as I stood up. I kicked some dirt onto the flames to extinguish them, picked up my bag, and climbed the nearest tree which looked large enough to sleep in. After getting comfortable and finding a spot where I wouldn't fall out if I went limp, I drew my knife again. I took one final look at it in the dark before pulling up my pant leg and jamming it into my left calf muscle. Stinging pain from rapid-healing began instantly, and I held the knife in place for a moment before pulling it out and wiping the blood from it.

Did it not work? I wondered, I can't see any of the poison on the tip. Maybe I wiped it o- The whole world spun on an axis I didn't know it had, then there was nothing but darkness.