Wraithwood Botanist

Chapter 25 - Poisons and Aphrodisiacs

So here’s the good news: I woke up feeling all the ways that I imagined I would. I felt lighter and full of vitality. It felt like I was seventeen again and could run a marathon. It was great.

If only I weren’t traumatized, it would’ve been a miracle.

But I was, and Kline was, too, so we got up and left the shelter as soon as possible, willing to face another wandering reaper over a single minute of being in that room.

That said, as soon as I felt the brisk, misty breeze of the morning on my face, smelled the aroma of fungi and herbs all around me, and heard the sound of symphony bugs playing melodies—I forgot all my worries.

"God, it feels good to be in nature..." I said, looking down at Kline. "Don’cha think?"

Kline looked up and meowed before sauntering off, ears twitching, smelling plants and fungi. Then he disappeared and reappeared fifty feet away.

"Seriously?" I whispered.

I blinked, and he was back, meowing at me with a smirk on his face.

"Well, at least it worked," I chuckled nervously, crouching and petting his ears. He purred.

I stood and looked around. "Where are we going today...?" I pulled up my map. "Oh... yeah." I frowned when I remembered what I had to do. There was a list of ingredients, and I got all of them—except one.

Lumidra—the active ingredient.

I pulled up the information on the plant.

—---

Common Name: Lumidra

Summary: Lumidra is one of the rarest flowers on this planet, and the main reason for that is that absolutely everything kills it. Too much heat? Not enough cold? Light touch? If it didn’t exist in a secluded cave full of earth piranhas that worship it for its spiritually hallucinogenic spores, it would be extinct. Thankfully, there is one in a cave near here, and it’s quite alive. As long as you can dispatch an army of the creatures guarding it without having them panic and destroy it, you’ll be fine... Good luck.

Species: Lumidra Skilasna

Type: Spirit Flower

Key Facts:

Luimida propagates using a symbiotic relationship with small spirit beasts called shalks that carry the spores to other caves.

The flower is famously sensitive to impurities. You must quickly pick it while using a purifying spell and lock it in a preservation chamber within 15 seconds.

The flowers grow deep within long caves, so directly fighting the beasts outside the cave is permissible, so long as there aren’t seismic attacks. However, magic that changes the atmosphere in the cave or destabilizes the ground will kill the plant.

The plant filters impurities so it is not affected by poisons or other chemicals, so long as they don’t cause direct damage to the roots or cause exothermic reactions.

Few survived.

Yet, here was a young woman who asked to be dropped into Areswood Forest—and actually planned to live there. She was competing for Elana’s Legacy and was determined to get Brindle’s—and how was she doing it? She was making poisons and aphrodisiacs in the middle of a forest with a creepy smile.

Haspel and Telgan are going to loathe me, Elana thought as she sat down, leaving her apprentices to make the facial creams that she was working on. So why not tell Brindle as well? She grinned. Tomorrow. I’ll do it tomorrow. But for now, I should call those two... Kori while I’m at it.

Brindle was the Black Botanist himself. Even if Mira were to go after the soulmancer’s legacy, he would never know it. But that just seemed too cruel. Elana felt it was her duty to fulfill her pupil’s wishes—if only to rub it in another’s god’s face. But first, she wanted to rub it in all the other gods’ faces first.

3.

Soulmancy had to be the best thing since smiling because I loved alchemy, and I couldn’t imagine turning down a legacy that let me work with it.

Look, only a scientist could truly appreciate magic. For example, suppose someone wants to create pure ethanol from alcohol. In that case, they need fermentation tanks to produce the alcohol, distillation columns with heat exchangers to separate it, and molecular sieves to selectively absorb water out of it.

Only then could you get near 100% ethanol.

With magic, I could just separate the ethanol while hovering the liquid in the air like a princess mage! No wonder fantasy worlds remained "medieval"—it was because modern equipment is completely useless in the face of magic.

And interestingly enough, I feel like I was better at this than 99% of alchemists would be. That sounds presumptuous, but with magic, it wasn’t really necessary to learn hard science. The gods, sure. Researchers, sure. But with the Guide, you had a million years of recipes that broke things down into separate this, extract that, sublimate this, measure that, and it was all prepackaged. So, if you wanted to make your own creations, it just wouldn’t be the same to think in terms of chemical reactions.

Science for the win!

As for what I was making, I was making an aphrodisiac that I was certain would turn an impotent male into a Viagra-snorting sex god. But that had a while to cook, so I moved to the main course:

Poisons.

Both required the beasts to drink it, so I needed to start with bait. To do that, I mashed trian berries and ebb root (delicacies shalks sought out) and sauteed them lightly. With any luck, they would feel like their brethren came home with food. At that very least, they would be confused.

While it cooked, I started on the poison. I grabbed some froxim weeds and used Desiccation—a spell that removed water without applying heat—to turn it into a plant that was drier than dead grass. That allowed me to grind it in a mortar with ease.

Froxim was the star of the show. It was similar to neomycin—the active antibiotic in Neosporin—which is topically medicinal but extremely lethal to ingest. It was lethal and tasteless, making it ideal—it smelled like battery acid. Since the shalks had sensitive noses, that was obviously a problem. Therefore, I chose a root that was famous for removing an animal’s sense of smell—jostle root.

I sliced some of the ginseng-like root down the center and hung it up, allowing the sap to run out like molasses. The minute I did it, my sense of smell instantly disappeared. It was like smelling pure carbon.

Well, I know it works, I thought as I continued.

To finish things off, I used Desiccation on quarlen flower pedals to separate the essential oils. I put those into an apparatus and used water vapor from a vapor array to collect the essential oil. Once in gaseous form, I let it condense and go into a large jug of water.

By that point, the original berry root mixture was ready, so I poured it into the water like a mixed drink, hoping that it smelled delicious—considering I couldn’t smell anything.

Bait that doubles as an aphrodisiac—complete.

Now, it was time to finish my poison. I mixed most of the jostle root (we’d be wearing some to mask our scent) and the froxim weed in a large bowl and added a small pinch of pramite as a catalyst to speed up the process of the jostle root turning into a liquid. Lastly, I added ethanol as both a solvent and binding agent. Once completed, I had a tasteless, topical-safe poison that removed the sense of smell and didn’t give any other indication of being a poison.

I packaged the poison in a jar, grabbed my aphrodisiac cocktail, and my bag of exploding shenai fruit. It was time to pay the shalks a visit.