“Woah!” Merrick was thankful that he’d been able to control his fall backwards as he recoiled away from the sudden shift in his environment. It was only his instinctual turning that prevented him from flattening the basket with the remaining samples in it, that or perhaps is [[Enhanced Reflexes]] working overtime.

  Squinting his tear-filled eyes into the brightness, Merrick managed to observe the changes to the room. Not only had the ring that demarcated the boundary between the fourth and fifth segment lit up almost half of the way, but the walls throughout the first and second segment were also now glowing with light, casting their radiant approval upon his offering.

  After a moment's hesitation, Merrick elected to attempt to place another offering in one of the empty alcoves. He reached into his basket and pulled out the conical shaped T4 mutated fungus, placing it on the alcove next to the green-frilled one. Sure enough, the ring lit up by another tenth or so, leaving less than half of the ring to go with only two out of eleven samples provided.

  Looking backwards, it also looked like the third segment of the cornucopia’s walls had begun to lighten slightly. Though, that could just be a trick of the eyes from the bright light at the start of the tunnel reflecting off the smooth floors.

  That changed… a lot.

  “I need to think about this.” Merrick turned and left the cornucopia, circling around its massive length to reach the workstation the dungeon had prepared for him.

  He didn’t make it half way to his beloved seat before he noticed a large change to the area. Bright green spears of plants had shot up all around his working area that had previously been fairly barren soil and a large wicker rickshaw-styled wheelbarrow leaned up against the keg of distilled water.

  “I love what you’ve done with the place, as long as it doesn't kill me.” Merrick wearily approached the area, far more alert than he’d been moments before. Mentally, he was kicking himself for letting himself get complacent in what was the most dangerous place located within the Stronghold’s walls. Lives were claimed by the dungeon almost every day, but he’d somehow been lulled into a sense of false security. At any point, he realized, the dungeon could flood the room with stronger spawns to finish him off. Perhaps it never even intended to release him when he completed whatever task it wanted.

  Sure, he’d never heard of a dungeon modifying itself while it was being delved, outside of the Labyrinth of course, but the Mulberry Grove had proven itself capable of at least that much in the short time he’d been delving so far that day. That or there was a higher power in here, some sort of dungeon master type classed individual, that had kidnapped him. Just because he was powerless to resist regardless didn’t mean he had an excuse to be so apathetic to his surroundings.

  The wheelbarrow, Merrick decided, was self explanatory. The dungeon, or whom/whatever was controlling it, had come to the same conclusion as Merrick about the feasibility of transporting some of the larger specimens he was [[Merge]]ing back to the cornucopia. Or perhaps they’d intended for him to use the workbench the entire time and had only created the wheelbarrow due to his folly with the mushrooms. Regardless, it was appreciated.

  The plants, however, required a closer examination.

  The first thing he noted was that the patches of the plant were scattered around the area haphazardly, painting a much different image than the cleanly cultivated rows of identical plants that filled the room otherwise. The plants’ leaves were a rough textured, dark green color and several patches were flowering, long lavender colored cones sprouting from the central stem of the plant.

  The refreshing smell to the forefront of his mind memories from a few years prior.

  - - -

  It was a few weeks after Mary had given Merrick the breakthrough text on the alchemical principles of the far away Varlamore tribes and given his stockpile of so-far useless dust a purpose. Throughout the years up to that point, he’d periodically thrown away all of the [Catastrophic Failure] results, convinced they were truly worthless.

  With the new knowledge and ability to unlock an entirely new-to-him facet of alchemy, potioneering, he’d spend several days and nights straining himself to create more dust for his experiments. That morning he’d wandered into his temporary Alchemy Master’s workshop feeling dead to the world and, apparently, it showed.

  “Here, boy,” the withered old crone who would just as soon throw a pot of water at a stray cat as feed it had roughly pushed a warm clay mug into Merrick’s hands. “Drink up, it's good stuff. Great for the soul, you look like you need it.”

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  Without even questioning what it was, Merrick had begun sipping away at it. That was partially due to his near-zombie like state of exhaustion at the time, but mostly because he knew that even if it was an alchemical experiment she was trying to give him, well that fell under his exploratory apprenticeship agreement anyways.

  A crueler master would have begun using him to test their experiments anyways, considering his truly mediocre talent at traditional alchemy.

  It wasn’t poison though, it was a rich, sweet mug of warmed milk mixed with chocolate, which he’d thought only nobles would be able to afford, and a hint of something else that had felt like a salve to his weary mind.

  - - -

  “Mulberry mint!” Merrick was able to recognize the plant based on the description his Master had given him after he began inquiring about the miracle drug. It had felt like three months of vacation distilled down into a refreshing elixir, and was far more effective than any rejuvenation potion he’d ever brewed.

  The locals just called it ‘dungeon mint’ but his master informed him that almost every dungeon has its own unique medicinal herbs and that specific strain of plant was local to the Mulberry Grove Dungeon. ‘Only the peons who will never explore farther than the end of their neighborhood would call it something so simplistic as dungeon mint,’ she’d said.

  Regardless, it was an extremely rare herb that the deep delvers would occasionally extract from the dungeon but very rarely sold. It had healing effects on delvers who over-strained their skills or suffered magical backlashes. Most importantly, to Merrick at least, he knew it would help alleviate his strain greatly.

  His first thought was obviously that the dungeon wanted him to merge the mint plants together but that was quickly absolved after he harvested a few patches of the plant and brought it back to his workbench.

  He plopped his butt down in the purple cushion, slowing only for a second to wonder if it had somehow gotten even more comfortable during his time away or if he was realizing the age old adage ‘distance makes the heart grow fonder, before examining the dungeon mint. It turned out that the lack of neat orderly rows wasn’t the only thing that differentiated the plant from the others. Their leaves didn’t look identical in the same ways the various other plants in the room did, instead looking like they’d grown naturally rather than been manufactured.

  Merrick still attempted to merge a few of the leaves together, unable to help himself. After six failures, he did successfully merge a single leaf of the mint plant, though it followed the path of the other plants and seemed to just increase in size. Merrick carefully separated the various dusts that were produced during the attempts into separate glassware on the desk to prevent spillage and set the leaf to the side. He’d have to test if the potency increased later, but for the time being he felt the need to ponder his Innate Skill.

  Something strange was happening when he merged a [Critical Success] and he didn’t understand it. Both for the bramblekin and the fungus, the success had shrunk the finished product back to a similar size it had started at before the merging and changed it at the base level. Before getting multiple variants for the fungus, he’d wondered if it was just condensing the magicka located within the items.

  Now, however, he decided it seemed like there were perhaps branching evolutions. The implications were worrying for the long term, depending on how much genetic variance the plants he was merging had, due to how difficult it would become to reach a high tiered merge. Not every project he’d work on in the future would have an all-powerful god-like entity spawning near simulacrums of things for him to merge together.

  As annoying as that was for the future, Merrick decided that was most likely what was intended. Unless his yet-to-be-disproven theory about needing the items to be dungeon spawned to [[Merge]] them turned out to be true, his skill almost certainly required him to take advantage of the various modifiers that appeared in his [[Skill Log]] rather than having a 100% Sim value for each merge. Even the exponentially increasing and seemingly arbitrary fail rate he’d started to encounter while merging Fungi proved that to be true.

  Combined with the fact that there were only clear ‘Tier’ increases due to the nature of the subjects he was working with, organic beings with the capability to grow, mutate, and evolve, his skill was likely supposed to focus on quality over quantity. Unfortunately, he didn’t know what the modifiers meant yet.

  “I’m getting ahead of myself. There isn’t a point figuring out how my skill will work outside of the dungeon while I’m still trapped within its bowels. [[Merge]] first, ask questions later.”

  Merrick picked up an unmodified leaf of what he believed to be Mulberry mint and started chewing on it. He felt instantly better and used his tongue to tuck the mint into his lower lip once he felt like he was back in peak shape.

  “This challenge appears to offer bonus points for the [Critical Success]s, so I need to aim for as many of those as I can,” Merrick stated aloud before pushing himself back from his chair. As we went to stand up, he felt like he had an important realization but the moment he tried to think about it it slipped away like water in a leaky bucket.

  Merrick stuffed a few of the mulberry mint leaves, including the larger tier two version, into what was left of his plant pockets before lifting the wheelbarrow and headed back toward where he’d left the mushrooms.

  Now armed with the knowledge that the number of required plant samples would decrease in each segment and equipped with a source of resource renewal for his [[Merge]] skill, he was loath to leave the T4 mushrooms laying where they were. He had several samples to collect and [[Merge]] while he still had an abundant, and more importantly free, source of experimental material on his hands.

  He’d, of course, finish his homework before starting to play.

  Merrick was nothing if not studious, after all.