World Seed

A few hours later, I awoke with a start, my body drenched in a cold sweat. Fucking bunnies…

The experience the day before had actually left me with a nightmare, where I was being chased through the woods by a pack of horned rabbits with blood red eyes. Of course, I was the one rabbit sized, and they were giants. The dream ended with them picking me up and slowly eating my body, one adorable nibble at a time.

Looking outside, I saw that the sun was just starting to rise, so I decided to head on out for training. They might plague my dreams, but I can at least get revenge on them now that I’m awake! On my way, I decided to go ahead and sell off the last of my potions to Lisara, who bought them for five copper each. At the same time, I took note of the exact shade her potions had. If nothing else, that would help me make a better one in the future.

With my new 45 copper, I decided to buy a basic guide to the nearby herbs from Lisara as well. While it didn’t tell me any recipes, it did list all of the medicinal and poisonous plants in the area, and roughly said what their use was. For instance, I found out that one of the black mushrooms I saw on our hunts the day before was actually a rare herb that could paralyze anyone that tried to eat it.

Once I was done with that, I checked my contacts list to see if I could team up with Jacobs. Unfortunately he was still asleep, so that wasn’t an option. He had apparently gained another two levels after splitting up yesterday, so I needed to catch up. Next few levels, need to work more on my mana… If I suck this bad at fighting with weapons, then I need to make sure I won’t run out of spells as easily.

Outside of town, I made my way back to the area where we had seen the fluffy hordes. Specifically, I wanted to see if I could find that black mushroom again. If I could copy that, then I’d have a good stun spell for my arsenal. And similarly, I was collecting any plants along the way that were listed in the book I bought, whether they were for poisons or for medicine. I found that after reading through the book and learning its contents, my Herbology skill jumped up from Beginner Level 1 to Beginner Level 7 in one go.

Anyways, where was I? Oh yes, hunting the horned rabbits. It took me about five minutes to find the first group of them, but what I found surprised me. Rather than the groups of four or five I had seen yesterday, this was a group of at least twenty! My need for revenge wasn’t strong enough to commit suicide against that many people, so I moved on to the next group…. Which was just as large. All of the areas that we had hunted the small groups of rabbits the day before now had much larger groups today.

They knew… I don’t know how, but they knew I was coming for them! I groaned, shaking my head and resigning myself to return to town. Logically speaking, there was no way that those rabbits should suddenly have that many at all the spots we hunted before, so I could only ask a guard.

“Hmm? Oh, you tried to go out and hunt?” The guard showed me a knowing smile, as if guessing what the issue was.

“Yeah… but…”

“But there were suddenly a lot more of them, right? That’s a pretty common thing around here. It’s the reason we’re willing to pay people every day to exterminate them. They reproduce so fast that they can completely refill their population overnight. Most likely you found them before later on, after their numbers were thinned out for a bit. If we were to leave them alone for a full week, they’d be everywhere.”

So that’s why…I guess that means morning hunts are the worst. I sighed, shaking my head at the news. “Thanks. I take it adventurer’s tend to team up to start taking them out every day?”

“Hmm? No, the wolves tend to bring down their population by about half. That usually takes till around noon, and then the adventurer’s go in and clear the rest. We just stay out of their way until the wolves are done with their part.”

“Well… there goes my idea to get revenge. Or does it…” I suddenly had a thought occur to me, and a wicked grin spread across my face, before I raced back to the edge of town, leaving a guard standing there with a confused expression.

Wolves, I’ll be borrowing your experience for a bit! I thought to myself with a sadistic grin. As soon as I was out of town, I sat down and pulled a couple of plants out of my inventory. These were two other poisonous plants I had found while walking, though neither were as powerful as that black mushroom. One, an orange wead similar to blood weed, included a weak paralytic, while the other, a green flower with tiny yellow spots, caused slight internal injuries.

Using the steps I had so diligently practiced the day before, I started matching my mana to the two herbs. It was fairly easy to find out which parts of the plant caused the negative reactions, thanks to the aura itself. Basically, whenever I felt the aura for the poison, it suddenly felt like my mana was moving through tar. This was far different from the warm and gentle feeling I received from the two healing herbs.

This also made it harder to replicate the effects, making me feel like I was starting from scratch. All in all, I had to wait for an hour and a half before I had the two mana signatures copied to a sufficient degree. Then, I spent about another ten minutes mixing them at different ratios to determine the most volatile mix. What I came up with was a 4:7 ratio, with the flower holding the majority.

I felt that this alone would already be a fairly potent spell, but I wasn’t done yet! No, no, far from done. The next step would be what really made this dangerous. Now that I had the spell ready, I set aside a bit of my mana surrounding it to attune to Wind Magic, and then integrated the two together slowly. What I got as a result made me giggle hysterically.