Resin is much rarer around here, the walls are made of regular stone and the few areas that do have signs of termite influence have hexagon-shaped nurseries with eggs in them.

  Termites don't commonly have nurseries, they have areas where their pupas are allowed to incubate but full on nurseries similar to bees? Nope.

  Judging by the size of the eggs as well as the strange, orange liquid on the floor, I'm guessing that these must be holding cells for future queens and drones, if this place is ever fully developed and a swarm of ready-to-breed termites come out of the cave, the local area would have been devastated.

  And that's ignoring the ensuing war that would happen to the forest when two different termite broods treat it as their home.

  Killing all the larvae that I come across is an obvious choice, I would have loved to keep some of these for myself and raise them to be some kind of royal guard but I'm not a tamer or a summoner so there's no point.

  I'm pretty sure the entire nest had been cleared out by the time I reached the boots, which were safely tucked inside a small room made of wood. The termites didn't come here for some reason, and everything inside was intact.

  I picked them up, put them on, and then left to go find the last piece of the mender's set. When the shirt is finally on my hands, I'm gonna start working on becoming an inhuman, starting with what the mender was doing here.

  Call me crazy, but I think that the mender was trying to become an inhuman. I've been studying the contents of her cottages and everything I found leads to some kind of ritual involving the leyline in the local area.

  Why she needs the leyline is obvious: it's because the ritual needs fuel, and leylines are full of mana.

  But, see, mana can corrupt, and absorbing magic into your body without purifying it might as well be a death sentence. The cottages serve as a way to purify that magic, and they are all intrinsically linked to the leyline, making their effects more potent.

  Activating all the cottages is the best place to start if I want to succeed with this whole thing, this is also a safety net for me, so that even if my assumption is wrong and the mender wasn't actually becoming an inhuman, I wouldn't become a Warped once I do the ritual.

  "Okay, now it's time to go grab the shirt." I threw my boots away and made my way out of the nest. Not getting a single level despite massacring all those termites was weird, so maybe some of them escaped?

  Hopefully they don't start a new nest and grow out of control or something.

  ...

  It lifted the insectoid until it's perfectly leveled with its face and gave it a small smile, the thing squirmed under its titanic grip, biting and scratching at its bulky fingers, refusing to give up even when its unharmed flesh made it clear that the insect's attempts at damage is all but futile.

  With a manic grin that tugged widened its bearded face, it grabbed a bottle from its backpack, its armor— all twisted scrap metal corrupted by magic and spikes. — clinking with its movements.

  It poured the contents of the liquid on the insect, satisfaction crawled through its core when it began writhing in pain, then glee bordering on madness washed over every fiber of its being when the insect began to change.

  The still squirming termite got stuffed into a container and knocked out with poisonous gas, its time on this earth is far from over and it will serve another purpose yet.

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

  ...

  Yeah, I think it's better if I go around hunting the stragglers down, I can't risk them starting another nest. I'm pretty sure regular termites become queens after a while right? All they need is to be fertilized or something?

  Or maybe I'm both wrong and stupid for assuming that non-royal castes of termites would somehow figure out a way to breed on their own and start a colony that will take over the forest in as little as a few weeks.

  I did confirm that the nest had a few stragglers though, with a decent amount of them having been killed by me on the way out, the rest will either succumb to the poison in their system, get eaten by predators, or die from the harsh winter bite.

  All's well that ends well.

  The small break that I gave myself after getting back to my cottage only lasted for half an hour and I was back to searching for more of the mender's stuff after I finished eating.

  Constantly going out like this is probably taking a toll on me, and the only reason why I haven't collapsed is because of the mender's gear itself. That and my passive.

  Everything will be worth it in the end though, once I get my hands on the full set and have my physical recovery boosted even further I would be unstoppable, I'd be able to work throughout the night without becoming tired and I don't even have to eat!

  Getting to the general location of the shirt was fairly easy as well, and unlike the previous pieces of the mender's set, this one didn't need me to fight a Warped, die from a fall, or fight an army of insects to get.

  Saving the easiest one to get for last is an idiotic move most of the time but when it comes to the mender's set, does it even matter? Even if I had the shirt while fighting the Warped, my chances would be the same!

  Anyway, the shirt needs me to simply disarm a bunch of traps, otherwise the path forward is to simply go straight. The general location of where it's hidden is pretty obvious as well, and the area itself is clearly telling whoever sees it that there is a hidden treasure around here.

  "Then again, I guess it sets up the expectations of whoever finds it." I say while softly running my hands up and down the cave walls, these are made of bricks, a very big change compared to the later locations.

  There are only two obvious conclusions when seeing something like this: either the mender didn't know what to do back when she made the first secret area to hide her shirt or... She wanted people to lower their guard.

  Termites, ants, puzzles, any would be explorer who wanted to take the entire mender's set for themselves would never expect them to be guarded by things like that.

  Out of all of these, the Warped will be the biggest surprise, you can even say that it's the run killer. The end point.

  Starting from the opposite end of the puzzle was a stupid move on my part, but then again, I've done this so many times in the past that I still know how to obtain them even after years of never opening Firelight Chronicles.

  Stepping into the atrium reminded me of the first time I encountered the mender's set, back then, I was still playing casually and didn't know much about the game. Despite my inexperience, I managed to get the entire set, I did throw it away after I leveled up ten more times though.

  Realizing that the full set's effects could last the player way past level 100 took me a while, after that, this thing became a staple in my playthroughs whenever I went for the mage class.

  My eyes go over the right-most wall of the atrium as I pick up the shirt, carved on the brick are these series of glyphs that show things like a giant tree, two different caves, and a cliff, each glyph one had a piece of the mender's set drawn above them.

  Below would be the clues and hints the explorer needed to find the locations and solve the puzzles, a call to adventure without any warnings. This is further proof that the mender wanted this first location to set up the expectations of the person who finds it.

  There are no signs of termites or even the Warped in the glyphs, just hints made to make searching for them easier. It's a trap, and one that will kill the common man.

  For me, I got by thanks to my knowledge of the locations and a lot of preparation but they almost weren't enough, there were still unexpected developments.

  Directly below the hints, I spot more glyphs. Ones that weren't in the game.

  I pick up the shirt and walk over to the glyphs, these are written in Pricorian strangely enough. Reading them made my hair stand on end, I did it again just to make sure that I wasn't mistaken.

  This... This is a recipe on how to become an inhuman, and it's a type that was never in the game: Dryad.

  Expectedly, it takes a lot to fully accomplish this but luckily for me, the mender already did most of the work. Now? All that's left is for me to do the ritual.