“Huh, not exactly what I expected.”

  Merrick listened to his voice echo out around the inside of the cornucopia after stepping inside. Instead of dying to a horrendous trap or hidden monster, he found himself squinting in the dim lighting as he tried to puzzle out what he was looking at.

  The first thing he noticed was that the Cornucopia was segmented, seemingly made out of seven distinct bands. The bottom of the artificial cave was flat enough for him to walk through, with a roughly three foot path to walk down to the end.

  Due to the horn shape of the structure, the space narrowed as it progressed towards the tip with each segment getting a foot or two smaller. He’d almost have to crawl to reach the seventh segment that made up the tip of the ‘horn’. He wouldn’t be able to confirm that, however, because some mysterious force was preventing him from venturing too deeply in the cornucopia.

  Or deeply at all, for that matter. He was only able to move around in the first ‘segment’ of the cornucopia, so to speak. It seemed that there was some sort of invisible barrier separating the segments. With a shrug, Merrick didn’t try too hard to get past said wall due to the fact that he could really see that well deeper in anyways. The only light provided was what managed to come through the opening and it rapidly faded away.

  Looking around the first segment, which appeared to be about six feet deep and twelve feet wide, Merrick was barely able to make out what appeared to be alcoves carved into the wall of the horn. They almost reminded him of the reliquary podiums in the local church, where they enshrined objects of power and worship.

  After his rejuvenation potion had kicked in, a lot of the mental fatigue he’d be subconsciously struggling through had faded away so it didn’t take him much thought to figure out what the dungeon wanted from him.

  “I guess I should be thankful that you don ‘t want me to fill the entire horn of plenty, huh? Just a few shelves should be doable. I’ll just need to make a few more potions.” Merrick pivoted on his feet and marched out of the cornucopia to collect materials for the newest puzzle he’d been presented with.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got growing here. First row of crops appear to be goodberries. Followed by dungeon mulberries every other row for lighting, thanks for that by the way. Some sort of apple I don’t recognize, then more mulberries..” Merrick continued mapping the various crops before they started repeating. Just to be sure, Merrick kept going until he hit the cave wall, then turned around and repeated the exercise on the opposite side of the cornucopia.

  He picked a handful of each fruit, pulled some tubers out of the ground, and took cuttings from various flowering bushes to fill his baskets. He also collected several rocks, branches, leaves, and other fodder that he would use to forcefully fail merges in order to replenish his stock of rejuvenation potions as needed.

  By the time he was ready to return to his unnaturally comfortable chair and start working, he’d collected several plants that he didn’t recognize. Before going to the desk, he failed to trigger any sort of change by placing a few of the un-merged harvests he’d collected on the pedestals. That tried, there wasn’t really much contemplation to do so he pulled out his experiment journal and set the basked on the desk before getting to work.

  A series of [Merge successful] messages raced across his [[Skill Log]] in the back of his mind as he created a tier two version of every crop he’d collected. He’d only had a single failure, with some fungus that he probably hadn’t harvested carefully enough. That or it’d gotten a bit crushed by the other plants in the basket while he traveled. Luckily he’d grabbed spares and the second attempt for the fungus worked fine, though the SIM value was a bit lower than the others.

  Each of the entries had a value located in the GTR Mod area of his [[Skill Log]], which he dutifully noted. The names of the plants didn’t mean much to him, but he jotted each of them down on the off chance that they weren’t specific to the Mulberry Grove Dungeon like most of the flora was. He even purposely failed a merge with each of the plants, just inflicting enough material damage to tank the SIM value, so that he could notate what dusts each of them produced.

  After gathering his preliminary samples, Merrick noted that his mysterious resource pool didn’t feel excessively drained. It appeared that the quality of the [[Merge]] was far more impactful on him than the quantity, at least as far as successes went. The forced failures still taxed him much harder than the successes did.

  Merrick wandered over to the cornucopia with one of each tier two sample in hand, or in basket more specifically, and counted the alcoves.

  “Sure enough, there’s one shelf for each specimen,” Merrick nodded to himself, happy to not feel foolish for once. It seemed to him that his common sense and critical thinking skills had been lacking since he stepped foot in the dungeon that day. He couldn’t even blame the pretty woman flirting with him, considering the issue persisted after he’d been separated from Mary. Blood loss, he reminded himself. It was the blood loss.

  He shot a quick glance to his Status Page and was pleased to see his health had ticked up a few more percentages since the last he’d checked and he mentally noted that the rejuvenation potions may be good for blood generation. More experimenting would be required to confirm or disprove.

  Merrick gently set the first of the plants down on an alcove, starting with his trusted Gooderberry. For a moment, Merrick didn’t think anything had happened again. That changed, however, when he realized he was able to see just a little better. He looked around for the light source and saw that there was a thin line glowing at the top of the cornucopia, located at the transitionary area between the first and second segment of the structure.

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  He made sure to keep his eyes on the line as he set the next plant down in a different alcove, this one a weird potato-like tuber he’d never seen before. The line doubled in size and increased in intensity, confirming to Merrick that he’d been right in his assumption. With each plant he set down from that point forward, the line crept further down the wall and brightened.

  Strangely enough, it appeared the light only affected the segment he was standing in and the one on the other side of the line. Segments three through seven remained shrouded in darkness, for some reason.

  Merrick decided not to let that effect his mood and continued placing the plants until his basket was empty and each alcove was filled. With a clunking noise, each of the alcoves appeared to have been covered by a plate of cornucopia that made it impossible to identify that there’d ever been an impression in the wall.

  Merrick approached the second segment and stuck his hand through, no longer feeling the invisible wall that had prevented his movement. He sent up a quick prayer to whatever gods were listening and approached the first alcove in the second segment before placing down an extra gooderberry he’d merged.

  “Naturally,” he sighed to himself. Now that he knew what to look for, he’d kept his eyes on the next segment as he set the berry down. No light had appeared.

  Looking at the previous segments’ lack of alcoves, Merrick decided it was a perfect metaphor for how he was feeling. All his work up to that point had amounted to nothing, and he was starting from square one.

  ‘There's nothing to do for it, you’d better get a move on it if you don’t want to miss your ride.’ The ever annoying tiny voice in the back of his head pestered him. Lacking anything else to do apart from sitting in his magically soft chair, Merrick trekked out to the furthest row with both of his now empty baskets.

  He stopped at the desk first, of course, to grab a few rejuvenation potions. It was mildly annoying that the dungeon-provided glassware wasn’t the same size has the slots in his bandolier but there wasn’t much to be done about it.

  Starting from the outside, Merrick decided to do field [[Merge]]s this time rather than drag everything back to the desk. He knew his new chair would forgive the betrayal, even an inanimate piece of furniture must realize how inconvenient trekking back and forth with a full basked would be when he could just merge it all down to one sample a piece rather than carry nine. Eighteen, really, since he had to be ready to fail.

  Merrick did his best not to mentally name each of the plants he was merging. Sure enough, his [[Skill Log]] returned results like ‘Tier 3 Unknown tuber’, or just 'Unknown pepper' without a tier listed. He then tried to intentionally name one of the flowers with a tier again in order to prevent himself from getting confused, but his it still appeared as 'unknown flower' rather than 'T3 unknown flower' even though it was the third generation of merges for the originating plant. He had a few theories about why that might be, the leading one being that he wasn’t creating the first ‘tier 3’ of that flower that had ever existed. Most likely, the dungeon had already seeded these improved plants around itself. If he was correct, that meant that large portions of the puzzle he was solving were redundant. Only plants that had 'tier' in their name for in his [[Skill Log]] were ones he was creating, most likely.

  To confirm his theory, the second to last tier 3 merge he made was dubbed the gooderer berry. He’d never heard of a higher quality goodberry than the standard until he’d made one that morning and it appeared that he was only able to mentally name the ones he created.

  That did worry him, due to the implication that there was something that had access both to his [[Skill Log]], his own internal dialogue, and the collective consciousness of all the humans that appeared to fact check his names against previously established names.

  Somehow, that made him feel even smaller and less significant than being kidnapped by the dungeon already had.

  Merrick proceeded to finish doing his last tier 3 merge, the super fragile mushroom that he carefully placed on the top of his other samples and quaffed a rejuvenation potion. His past experiments told him that he would end up developing a tolerance to the potions for a while if he continued to drink so many, but he didn’t know how long that would take in terms of successful merges since he’d never succeeded before that day. He probably had two or three more potions before he began to hit diminishing returns.

  In a fugue like state, Merrick placed each of the plants down in their respective alcoves and turned to exit the cornucopia even as he heard the clunk of each plant being sealed away. He didn’t even stop to verify what the next segment held, he already knew deep in his heart.

  He traveled out to the field and began merging each of the plants, careful not to try and think of any unique names. He allowed a series of ‘Successful Merge’s to fly by his eyes without poking at that particular experiment anymore. If something was labeled 'unknown' without a tier, he left it alone. He decided that if whatever was censoring his naming conventions was an intelligent entity, he didn’t want to draw more attention than he had to. He even allowed mentally labeled the next tier of Goodberry to be a ‘Tier 4 goodberry’. He was pleased to see he’d even managed to convince his [Skill Log] to rename the tier 3 version, though it appeared that ‘gooderberry’ was already too ingrained in his thoughts to relabel for the tier two version.

  Well, it was either that he couldn't shake the name subconsciously or it was because he’d called it a gooderberry out loud beside his party previously. If whatever was stopping him from renaming the other plants really was in tune with the collective consciousness, then perhaps it weighed each person’s opinion about the name of an object equally, in which case trying to label it a ‘Tier 2 Goodberry’ would be outweighed by the three other votes of ‘Gooderberry’ ingrained in Mary, Rod, and James’ minds.

  Even though thinking about the unknown entity was stressing him out, he was able to find some comfort in that theory. If it was correct, it meant that his friends were still living. Ideally, just Rod and Mary since he could be outvoted 2 to 1 on the naming. Though he’d rather begrudgingly accept James’ survival as well if it meant Mary and Rod got out safely.

  He was basking in this newly discovered silver lining when he ran into his first issue, on the damned mushroom again of all things.

  [Critical Success! Merge successful. One T4* Unknown Fungus Merged.]

  [SML: ::100%, GRW Mod: 0%, GTR Mod: 272.25%, RFN Mod: 0%, CFT Mod: 0%.]

  [Total 127.23% Potential. No Excess Detected. No Personal Blessings Detected. Variant Change +/- %8.25. Improved Output]

  He looked down at the much smaller than expected output from his skill, covered in strange green frills that had previously been a rich earthy color, before squeezing his eyes shut as hard as he could, hoping that he’d see something different when he opened them once more.

  He didn’t.