Last Words chapter 48 (Patreon)

We made it back to the other side of the door the next day, without too much suspense. Alice called her parents, the others had their check ins, and I got in touch with Riley, checking in with him and letting him know everything I had learned recently. I’d called to inform him about the basics when I’d found out from Alistair and Damon, but the wordworld exclusive stuff was new, and I even offered him a tattoo if he had a way to get up here.

He didn’t, unfortunately, but I left the offer on the table, and I made a mental note to see if there was a way to apply them long distance. Once we were back, I settled in at the camp to check on my skill page.

Unfortunately, I ran into a bit of a problem almost immediately, and I called Ron and Deke into a meeting as soon as I noticed it. When they arrived, I caught them up, writing out my skills for them. Once I was done, I passed it over and waited, then pointed to the sheet of paper. “You see my issue?”

Speaker - Tin Rank. Verbosity: 28/100

Skills: 

Purchase- Level 9: Pay a commensurate amount of money for things of value.

Sell- Level 9: Exchange goods for currency.

Contract- Level 10: Form an agreement with another party, involving compensation for a specific task.

Perks: 

Tier 1 Contract perk-Empathic read: Discern the basic emotions and intentions of the target of a negotiation.

Tier 1 Mana Body Perk-Mana touched: Double mana regeneration.

Unaffiliated Skills: Beginner Mana Body- Level 10: A body imbued with a wisp of mana, minorly increased strength, speed, and endurance. Natural mana generation.

Mana: 1.2/1.2

Funds: $153,750

Deke caught it first. “Shit,” he said grimly. “Your Mana Body is still level ten. Which means it no longer levels at point one mana. Beginner Mana Body levels at a different rate, presumably per one mana added to your pool.”

I nodded solemnly. “Yeah, and that’s bad. It takes days or even weeks of effort to grind a single mana with these unripened fruits we’re using. Even with my new affinity, I’m only doing point two. If I get more mana every single training session, I could get one in five days, but there’s no reason to assume that’ll remain consistent. I’m betting once I hit two mana it’ll take longer to saturate my body.”

Deke nodded. “That was my conclusion,” he confirmed. “The mana fruits lose efficacy the stronger you get. It’s why you don’t have Sage level monkeys living at the edges of this forest throwing buildings at people. Stronger monsters need stronger fruit. Which is why the higher rarity fruits are so hard to get ahold of.”

“I’m guessing there’s more stringent growth requirements too?” I asked with a sigh. “Higher mana density deeper in the forest?”

He shrugged. “I’d have to test the soil, but probably. In fact, I’d imagine the existence of the stronger monsters raises it. I’ve been looking into alternatives, but mana fruits are pretty much a staple of growth here. There are attributed fruits and plants that can help, but given you plan to consistently switch between patterns, you need to fill your neutral mana reserves, because the attributed mana can’t fill patterns of other types.”

I grimaced, but nodded anyway. I guessed I had gotten lucky that the mana from the mango nectar hadn’t actually changed the attribute of my mana. That would have been a pain in the ass. “So, basically…we need to go into the forest and get our hands on a ripe mana fruit.”

“Unless you feel comfortable taking the long way to your next level,” he said with a sigh. “I don’t see a way around it. The question is whether we can actually SURVIVE that.” He glanced at Ron. “And I’m not qualified to answer. What do you think? Can we get into the forest and get back out safely? Maybe use the drones?”

“No chance,” he denied. “Our attempts to get a drone deeper into the trees have been universal failures. The monkeys are stupid, even if they’re pretty strong and ridiculously fast. But from what we can tell, beasts get smarter as they rank up. We’ve tried to send a few drones in, and they all got wiped without any trouble. We caught a few images of what we think might be stronger beasts, but nothing too helpful.”

I raised a brow at that. “Really? What beasts?”

“Apes, deer, birds, giant spiders,” he listed blithely. “The giant spiders are only in one direction. It seems like none of the other animals will tolerate them leaving that area, because their territory is surrounded on all sides by stronger beasts. But like I said, we’ve only gotten brief glimpses. No, if we want to find riper fruits we need to go in person.”

“And what do we need for that?” I asked him. “Weapons, armor, what are we looking at? If we go slow and are careful, do you think we could do it safely?”

He hummed, leaning back. “I think we would need to feel it out. If you can get us all to Beginner and we have access to Barkskin…maybe? If we move VERY slow and are armed to the teeth. Not to mention having a local guide might help. Do you think those rebels you’re in touch with might know someone who can guide us?”

I paused. “They might,” I said slowly. “They don’t have access to the fruits, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know how to GET access. It just means actually getting their hands on one isn’t worth the price. Especially since just having one fruit is unlikely to make much difference to them. Not like it would for us. We might need to expose some of our resources to them though. Weapons and materials, I mean.”

He nodded. “If the next level of fruit is going to be as useful as we think, it might be worth it.” He turned to Deke. “What are we looking at for mana gain here, in your opinion.”

“Five times,” he said bluntly. “Mana fruits are covered in my book. They ripen in phases. Unripe mana fruits are violet, the next phase is indigo. They’re five times more mana dense. The phase after that is blue, and that’s five times more mana dense too.”

“Seven ranks of Mana Body, seven ranks of fruit,” I nodded. “But if each one is only five times denser and you need ten times as much mana…”

He nodded. “It gets harder each rank. You need more and more fruits. That’s part of the reason people tend to stick to mana fruits instead of using attributed plants if they’re aiming at long term progress. Finding fire attribute plants might be doable at a low level, but even regular mana fruits get scarcer at higher stages, nevermind attributed plants. Mostly the only people who go full attribute focus are those content to stay where they are.”

“Do you think there’s any chance we might stumble on a blue fruit?” I asked hopefully. “Maybe that would help us level faster. Well, me and Alice. Our mana trait will ensure that we get the full ten times bump from the next level of fruit, but the blue ones won’t hold up to that pace, might be better to get started early.”

Our double efficiency would mean that the indigo fruits would give us ten times more mana gain per session, which was great, but the blue fruits would be only five times as mana dense as the indigos, which, even doubled would put us at five times the amount we would get for the indigos, and that would continue to drop each rank. Getting our hands on the blues early would help us rush through Beginner way faster, and might be just what we needed.

“No,” my cousin said bluntly. “We’d die if we found a blue mana fruit tree, and if we somehow didn’t we’d die if we tried to eat them. The rest of us shouldn’t even touch the indigos that we find until we hit Beginner. There’s a limit to what the body can withstand in terms of mana.”

I sighed, but agreed nonetheless. I wasn’t putting my people in danger for no reason. “Alright,” I said after a moment. “Here’s the plan. I’m going to get in touch with The Silent Pond. I’ll make arrangements to acquire whatever they need me to get my hands on, and use it to leverage them for a guide. Not just to take us out there either, I want information on everything we might meet so we can strategize and outfit ourselves properly. Meanwhile I’m going to drop a bunch of fruit here. I want everyone training their asses off. We’re pushing for Beginner Mana Bodies for everyone. Once we have that, I’ll apply the empty Barkskin patterns and let everyone fill them manually. Should save us a bunch of money. “

Ron nodded along. “I can take everyone through a mini boot camp to improve digestion efficiency for the fruits. Can you supply some of those mushrooms to help with the training?”

I did some mental math. “Yeah, I can do that,” I said after a moment. “I might need to make a trip back for a cash infusion before we head out on the expedition. It really sucks we can’t use the drones. You sure we can’t make something work?” I asked Ron hopefully.

“Trees get denser as we go anyway,” he said apologetically. “Even if not for the animals, navigating would be rough in there, and there’s almost no light. I’m not saying there are no drones that we could use that might be workable, but if there are, we don’t have access to them. Night vision is one thing, but none of the ones you can grab have the kind of maneuverability we need to work around the beasts, and that’s just the ones we’ve seen.”

Sighing, I nodded. “Deke,” I told my cousin. “How are your studies on alchemy going? And how are you doing with learning the language?”

“The latter is easier than the former,” he admitted. “Actually, I’ve been comparing the translated version you gave me with the original copy of the book and I’m making progress learning to write it too. That’s really helping me learn the spoken dialect.”

Ron snorted. “He’s picking it up faster than any of us,” he said in an exasperated tone. “I feel like an idiot next to him, and I’m already multi lingual.”

“I have a knack for memorizing things,” my cousin shrugged. “It’s helping, but if you’re asking if I’m anywhere close to being able to actually concoct potions…probably not too soon. I have a lot of things I need to learn, and when I do start, it’s going to be a lot of trial and error.”

“What if it wasn’t?” I asked. “We could put you in touch with an actual alchemist, maybe get you a teacher. You’d just need to be fluent enough in the language for it not to be suspicious.” 

He hummed with interest. “I could do that in…let’s call it two weeks? It’ll be tough, but if I’m shifting my focus entirely to language acquisition I bet I could do it. I’m guessing you can’t just buy it for me?”

“The skin rental loophole is viable,” I said with a sigh. “But I don’t think I can rent brainspace. I tried. Nothing. I’m not even sure about the limits of that ability, honestly. I’ve tried to buy a few more bits of information from books and haven’t had any luck. I think the language only worked because ALL of the language was contained in that book. There’s a finite amount of letters in an alphabet and I had them all.”

He grimaced. “Noted. We can look into it later. For now, we have our plan. So I suppose you should go pick up some of those fruits. My idea for an application serum hit some snags, so it’ll be a while there. Especially if I’m putting my research on hold, but I’ll get into it when I can.” And with that, we all headed out to work on our plans for the future. I had a feeling it would be a bust few weeks.