Wraithwood Botanist

I thought that I would live in fear that everyone and everything was an illusion after returning from Misty Row, but it was a lot easier to prove than I initially thought. Any illusion can be dispelled through a process known as freezing, the use of raw mana to overpower nearby magic in the air. Since illusions are made of mana, they get blown away, at least for a time.

Freezing is simple, effective and genuinely proves what you're looking at is real, so long as your mana can overpower illusions, which are usually quite weak.

Another major indicator of reality is the limitations of illusionary arts. The souls in Misty Row can read surface thoughts but not memories. Profiles of individuals are built within the mist with the help of inner thoughts and physical presence. But ultimately, they cannot recreate your house or let you sleep or live your life. Once you're back in the real world for a few days, any desire to freeze your normal location disappears.

Lastly, it just comes down to Soul Sight. There weren't any killer plants, and everything you see matches up with your eyes, nose, and divination spells.

It was quite easy—

—and thank God, I thought I would be traumatized for life.

Yet I wasn't, and after a few days' break, I had collected my thoughts and then returned to training with newfound vigor.

Without announcement, I sat down in my meditation chamber and learned the first stage of Dreamscape—a spell that took me three days. Once I emerged, I skipped speaking to Reta and went right into the woods to train—

—only to find her waiting for me.

"Oh, so now you want to train me," I said, watching Kline disappear with Active Camouflage—preparing himself for a kill shot.

"You're…" she yawned and sat down on a branch languidly, "ready to learn."

"I was always ready to learn."

"But you didn't want to learn. You can't learn Illusions through memorization. If you don't have a fascination with illusions… if you aren't creative… you'd be better off doing something else."

"Riiiiight," I said. "Well, I'm going to scan this tree. If you want to give me tips, feel free."

Scanning was the first step of illusions. It was the process of recording information from objects so you can recreate them later, much like taking a photograph or building a 3D model.

I needed to build a library of illusionary objects, so I placed my fingers on the cool, cross-hatch bark of a nearby and closed my eyes to scan my first object. Unfortunately—

"Don't do that," Reta said.

My cheek twitched. "Excuse me, what?"

"Don't do that. I'd usually let you suffer a bit to learn your lesson, but Kyro's threatening…" She yawned. "To kick me out of your house."

"I'll kick you out of my house."

"Yeah, yeah…"

"So why shouldn't I scan this tree?"

"Because it'll make your brain explode." She flew to my tree slowly, gracing me with her waking presence, and then picked a fluff of moss off the tree. "When you scan something, it copies the information within an object so you can recreate it. It sounds easy, but the first time you do it, you will be overwhelmed with information about wood and moss and roots and leaves, and all the chemicals within each. You're not copying the way it looks, you're copying the way it moves, its lightness, the way it bends in the wind. And that's natural because you cannot blend lighting. Observe."

She put her hand on the tree and scanned it. Then, she moved to the center of a meadow, which was far sunnier, and recreated the tree perfectly, including the lighting and shading.

My brain glitched out when I saw it. I had never seen something so… wrong. There were shadows where the sun was shining on it, and when a cool breeze ruffled nearby trees, its leaves didn't move.

It looked like a bad video game asset thrown in a random location.

"When we create an object, we don't create lighting for it," Reta said. "We just recreate it and let it interact with the real sun. It's like this stick." She picked up a stick with telekinesis and held it to the light, then moved it into her shadow and turned it sideways. "Once you create something, the physical world will interact with it, even in the illusion. So you just need to recreate something. But to do that, we have to recreate the object as it is to the very foundation of its core. And if you try to do that on such a massive object, when your brain knows nothing of the inner workings of trees, you will be on bedrest for the rest of the day. Instead, analyze this."

She handed me the pinch of moss, and I frowned.

"Just this?" I asked.

"Just this."

I was skeptical, but when I scanned it, I was grateful. Because the data from that small piece of moss felt like someone took an ice pick to the back of my skull, and I hit my knees as my brain absorbed a seemingly endless supply of abstract, esoteric knowledge on the inner workings of moss—a recipe—a collection of the shapes, sizes, colors, and physical attributes.

It was terrible.

Ten minutes later, the information stream finally ended, and Reta brought me a pinch of greenish-gray moss. "Now scan this."

"Just… give me a minute," I said, cradling my head.

"Trust me," she said.

"I do not trust you."

"Then do it because I said so. I am your teacher."

"When you want to be…" I grumbled, accepting it. I closed my eyes. "Round two."

I activated a mana scan, and to my shock, the amount of information I took in was less than a quarter. The moss was different, but I had already captured chemicals and moss-specific attributes and it didn't need to rehash what it already learned. Chlorophyll was chlorophyll, whether it was in a leaf, moss, or fern.

"See?" Reta said, fluttering to another tree branch and lying down. "Mana scans aren't painful. You just need to do it the smart way. So… scan these objects. Don't come back until you're finished."

Reta gave me an absurd treasure hunt of random ultra-specific objects. Rocks from within an underground creek, pine needles from a dark thicket, every tranan mushroom in a patch (a mushroom notorious for having ten thousand caps in a three-foot area).

It was absurd, but I needed a break, so I didn't argue.

"Come on, Kline," I said.

Kline dropped his Active Camouflage, exposing his position on the branch above Reta. If I didn't have a consistent passive form of Soul Sight present at all times, I wouldn't have even noticed he was there, lurking, preparing to strike. It was terrifying.

Kline sneered and jumped off the tree, obtaining his full sight and laying down to let me mount him. Then I did, and we went on our hunt.

That night, we spent the night in the forest and hit the ground running, picking pine needles in the thicket that the River Guardian had chased us through on our first day after picking the water sack plant. Then, we found a branch off of the river and traveled aimlessly to areas known for those mushrooms.

We didn't finish even a quarter of the list, so we slept at the old alchemy station and hit the hunt early the next morning—and then repeated that process the next day.

It took two and a half days to complete her mana scan treasure hunt, and when I was done—

—I felt like I learned nothing.

But when I returned and found a massive pile of plants, rocks, and objects that Reta and Trant had collected, I realized that the scavenger hunt had nothing to do with finding objects—it was about giving me a break.

"What's this?" I asked.

"A congratulations," Reta said, rubbing her eyes. "For completing the Misty Row trial."

"An apology," Kyro corrected, glaring at her.

"A gesture born of mixed emotions," Trant said. "Everyone's glad you conquered half of Misty Row and came out alright. We were all pretty worried. So Reta did this to get you to take a few days off while we helped out for once."

I glanced at Reta, who quickly averted her gaze and lay on a branch.

"I'm your teacher," she said, facing away from me. "This is what teachers do."

"She loves you," Trant said. "Now come, come. Look at all these plants we found."

I went to the pile and gladly sat down, listening to lectures on plants before Trant handed them to me to scan. We did that most of the day, as Reta slept and Kyro drank, and by the end of it, the data overload I initially experienced during each scan had waned substantially.

"You feeling good?" Reta asked at sunset, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

I nodded.

"Then scan the tree."

I looked at the two-hundred-foot tree with its thirty-foot radius with deep anticipation.

"You sure?" I asked.

She nodded. "You'd be amazed what happens when you do things the right way."

I smiled bitterly and walked up to the tree, resting my fingers on the bark. Then I closed my eyes and started the scan. It felt like someone chopped my frontal lobe with an axe, but the feeling subsided very quickly, leaving me with all the information on the gigantic object.

"That's it?" I asked.

"That's it," she confirmed. "That's what happens when you learn all the individual elements first." She pointed at the seemingly random pile of organic and inorganic objects. "Now scan that tree."

I followed her eyes and found another tree of equal size. I nodded and scanned it, and to my bewilderment, I only got surface-level information. It was like I was just copying its shape.

"Now do that for a few thousand objects." Reta stretched her arms and rubbed her eyes. "Build up a library, and we'll start working on conscious creatures. Till you're done, I'm going to sleep…" She fluttered away, but before she got too far, she turned to me one last time.

"And don't neglect your training with Trant. Mastery is determined in decades, not days. Make sure to live your life."

With those words, she disappeared, leaving me to train.

And train is what I did. I copied objects until my brain eroded, and I couldn't think straight and Kline had to drag me back to camp. The next two days I did the same. By the third, when Trant realized that I was too dedicated for normal alchemy lessons, he decided to spend his days with me, teaching me about plants and alchemic principles as I scanned the plants.

Then we went home, where Kline and the lurvines had stacked up quarries from their hunts.

Kyro became more proactive and helped skin and butcher the meat. She actually ate when I cleansed and cooked the meat with spices that Trant collected. Then, I would hug Reta against my chest until she fell asleep and lay her down so I could do my mental shielding training.

Time passed like that until the trees turned color, and the air became chilly. Most of the plants had fallen victim to fall, but I enjoyed the long hikes and practice.

It was my dream come true.

Yet I couldn't feel completely content about it. The Harvest was only twenty days away, and I still couldn't use illusions offensively, and the tension only rose by the day. I wasn't ready.

It was miserable, but just three weeks before I was set to leave for the Bramble, Reta was wide awake in the morning.

"What's up?" I asked as I got out of bed.

"Today I'm going to teach you and Kline about battling with illusions."

My mind sharpened, and I nodded resolutely.

Then we began. I spent the next two weeks training heavily with Reta. And when it ended, I felt vindicated for continuing to trust that she would come around. Because when that woman wanted to teach—

—she could.

It was so impactful that one week before I was set to leave when I searched the Equipment tab for items to order for my little village, I found myself surprisingly confident in protecting the items I was thinking about ordering.

So, I didn't hold back, using all the platinum and gold rewards that I had earned during the Trial of Worth's rankings.