Chương 48: Chapter 47: CHANGE IN AREA

As Jieyuan stepped into the pocket, they were the first thing that caught his eye. A little cluster of large, red-petaled blossoms circling the trunk of a tree, right in the middle of the clearing. They were a vibrant, deep red. Crimson, blood-like. They made the first splash of color other than green, brown, or white he'd seen in a month or so. Meiyao had stopped too; she was by his side, hadn't moved away from the entrance.

Jieyuan put his guard up, raising the Shifting Sisters. It was their first time coming across flowers in the forest, and in a place like the Dome, new was more often than not bad news with a few letters missing. Others might think it silly to be wary about flowers, but Jieyuan would invite these selfsame others to take a little stroll around Viridian Death City and challenge them to sing that same tune afterward.

It'd been a week since their little stroll in Viridian Death City, but Jieyuan certainly hadn't forgotten all its remarkable wonders and sights. So far none of the vegetation they'd encountered since leaving the city had been anywhere near as doggedly vicious (and thank the Heavens for that), but Jieyuan wasn't leaving anything up to chance. Flowers or not, if Jieyuan saw any signs of funny business, he'd be ready to dish out some emergency gardening. Jieyuan would've preferred a chromal beast, even.

He was already confident in Meiyao's ability to handle them. And it'd have made things more interesting, too. This past week, whenever they came across a beast, Meiyao would use Divine Nature Resonance on it if she thought it was safe to do so. That had let them experiment plenty with her new bloodgift, to the point they'd cleared most of the doubts they'd had about it.

One thing they'd quickly tested was whether Meiyao could copy the ability the beasts of the Dome had to freely navigate the mist; that had turned out to be a bust, though; Divine Nature Resonance was many things, but it wasn't their ticket out of this place. Jieyuan was even getting used to seeing Meiyao transform now, though each one was still its own little surprise. They were never quite the same, even for similar beasts. Three days ago, using it on a chromal tiger had left her with cat ears and a tail.

But yesterday, with a tiger of a different race, she'd grown fur all over instead. He was just glad she hadn't decided to try it that one time they came across a giant frog. Despite Jieyuan's unease about the flowers, Huaxin kept quiet. Meiyao didn't put up any warnings, either, and just stood there. It was as Daojue came through on his other side that Meiyao got moving, walking toward the tree and flowers.

"Meiyao?" he said quietly, momentarily taking control of his voice back from Maeva.

"It's fine," she said, not bothering to keep her voice low. Reaching the tree, she knelt down in front of it. Jieyuan walked over, still a little wary. Meiyao was running her fingers over one of the flowers. Her eyes were closed. Jieyuan was even less an expert in flowers than he was in trees. Trees had at least been part of some education, even if only as far as their woods were concerned. Flowers, though, weren't. His family had many businesses, but a flower shop wasn't among them.

Amyas's grasp on them wasn't any better, either. Jieyuan could tell a rose from a sunflower from a lotus, but that was about it. And these ones didn't look like any of them. They were large, about hand-sized, with three, flat broad petals and a little bud in the middle. It was chromal, of course. Its spirit was tenth-shade red, so tenth-step Redrealm, like most plants they came across around here. Meiyao opened her eyes, glanced up at him.

"These are crimsonrot violets. They grow over corpses, halting their decomposition and feeding on their blood. There should be one, buried under here."

"That's a lovely little morbid tidbit." Jieyuan squinted at the flower.

"You're familiar with them, then, to know their name? I'd have thought the Dome's plants were… well, only found inside the Dome."

"And you'd be right." Very gently, Meiyao pinched its stem near the base with her fingers, then plucked it out of the ground.

"I've never even heard of it before. Divine Plant Intuition lets me tell its properties, however. As well as its name."

"Its name?" Jieyuan frowned.

"I thought naming was, you know, a human thing."

"What do you—" Meiyao frowned up at him.

"Oh, right. Mundanes probably aren't taught this. There's a true name for everything, beast and plant races included. True names. The Heavens pick them, supposedly. We don't name things; we just discover their names. If we try to call them by anything else, we get this feeling of wrongness; and so we just keep trying until we find a name that, well, fits." That definitely hadn't been part of his education.

There were plenty of things a merchant needed to know, but theological or cosmological—Jieyuan wasn't sure what this would fall under—linguistics didn't number among them.

"Interesting," Maeva murmured in his ear. They were still merged together, even if she wasn't controlling any part of him at the moment.

"I'd wondered at the unusual consistency of this world's language. Does it include pronunciation, too? There's some level of idiomatic plurality, but you haven't come across any distinct dialects or accents yet." Trust Maeva to be interested in that kind of stuff. He vaguely understood what she was saying—she was scrounging up all of that from his mind, at any rate—but he wasn't sure if it was worth making the effort to really think it through Is that something I need to be concerned about?

"No," Maeva said, after a brief pause.

"Just a curiosity." Then that's that. Meiyao stood back up, raised the flower to eye level, and slowly twirled its stem with her fingers.

"Hmmm. I think this might be useful."

"Oh?" Now this seemed like something Jieyuan could be interested in. Useful things were useful.

"Useful how?"

"I might be able to refine it into something," Meiyao said.

"It's got all sorts of properties. Even taken raw like this it'd have a healing effect, increase your natural regeneration. It'd make you a little sick, however."

"That'll come in handy," Jieyuan said. Healing pills were mostly definitely welcome; Fatebloom Renewal might be far more powerful than any pill, but he couldn't use it often; it was a last-resort option. He was saving his Heartblood drops for when he really needed them. He had some healing pills on him, but no more than a dozen. Daojue didn't have any, and Meiyao only had a couple herself.

They'd taken proper stock of their pooled resources very early on, so he had a good idea of where each of them stood in that regard. He had six Radiant Light Blast and Barrier talismans (three of each) with him and two or so handfuls of healing pills; the only other kind of pill he had was fasting pills, of which he had well over a hundred. Meiyao had as many talismans, but not as many pills as you'd expect, just a handful of healing ones. Daojue had neither pills nor talismans.

Unlike him, neither Meiyao had Daojue had taken into account the possibility of being stranded in the Viridian Dome for several weeks. Not like he had, after Huaxin's first warning, almost two months ago now. Meiyao only had her talismans and pills because her stepmother, Protector Yuyan, had forced them on her just in case, in light of the string of assassination attempts they'd faced. Their stock was limited; so the possibility of topping it up was a very attractive one indeed. That wasn't all, either.

"You said all sorts of properties," Jieyuan said.

"What else can you do with it?" Even if he hadn't known Meiyao had at least some experience with refining—back in the Gleamstone Valley, she'd also picked up some plants and mentioned refining them, even if nothing had come out of it—he wouldn't have been surprised. He wasn't all that clear on how any of the chromal crafts—refining, inscribing, and nurturing—worked, but he'd read up on the basics.

Refining basically revolved around matching different ingredients (plants and beast parts), and merging them together through rituals. Given Meiyao's bloodline and the intuitive knowledge it gave her over said ingredients, it was little wonder she'd be good at it. There was also the garden she'd kept, back in her residence in the outer court. Which accounted for another of the chromal crafts, nurturing. Something Meiyao's bloodgifts gave her even more of an advantage with.

"On its own, only healing," Meiyao said, as she put it away in her pouch, and then bent down down to pick up some more.

"But if we came across these, we might come across others. Depending on just what else we find, I might be able to refine other types of concoctions. We'll see." Meiyao's words, as it turned out, might as well have been prophetic. The next pocket had more of those crimsonrot blossoms, but the one after that introduced some new flowers. Yellow daises streaked with purple. Meiyao picked them up, too, as well as all the new flowers that kept popping up along the way.

They were deep in the valley now, and seemed to be entering some new zone of the forest, one that seemed much more color-heavy than the ones behind. It wasn't just the flowers on the ground. They also started coming across flowering bushes and trees, and each and every time Meiyao would stop to pick some, adding to her quickly growing collection of ingredients. Several hours later, they stopped for the day in a surprisingly bare, clear pocket, with grass on the ground and not much besides.

An actual clearing, for once. This past week, whenever they did, he and Meiyao would first review her bloodgift a bit further, after which one of them would take the first watch. Jieyuan would also spend the rest of his time cultivating, or using Absolute Will Command to train with Maeva in his head; he hadn't been kidding about getting her to train him, and they'd been making some good progress.

This time around, though, as they settled down, Meiyao started taking the flowers out of her pouch and laying them down on the grass in front of her.

"You'll be refining, then?" Jieyuan said. They were sitting across each other, the growing row of flowers between them. Daojue, as usual, was in his own corner.

"Yes," Meiyao said. Soon they had over twenty different flowers between them, one of each race. She leaned over, started running her fingers through each, murmuring softly to herself as she did. Jieyuan couldn't see anything different about her, but he knew she was using her bloodgift right now.

"So what are we looking at?" he asked, after she'd gone through them all.

"Actually, I'll let you choose," Meiyao said. She tapped three of the flowers.

"Between these, there's a lot of options. All three types of concoctions. Augmenters, poisons, and antidotes. Just not fasting pills; those required very specific plants. And you brought enough of those, anyway." Jieyuan only had a basic knowledge of concoctions, but he put it to work.

"Antidotes are meant to deal with poisons, right? We haven't had any issues with those, but some general ones—there are general antidotes, right? —might come in handy."

"I can do that, yes."

"Great," Jieyuan said.

"Now, poisons. I don't think we'll have much use for them. Unless you can make one that works on higher-realm beasts, too? Because those are the ones that might be a problem. Between us three, I think we can handle Redrealm ones."

"Redrealm plants only make for Redrealm concoctions," Meiyao said.

"Which only work on Redsouls. You'd need Orangerealm ones for Orangerealm beasts, and so on, but you'd need to be at the same realm to refine them." That added up, but he'd seen her picking up some higher-realm plants, and they were among the ones she'd just laid out; ones whose spirit he couldn't sense. Just as he was about to say so, though, she picked one such flower. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

"That just means I can't refine them, however," Meiyao said.

"I can still grind and work them in other, mundane ways. So poisons are a possibility. Powders, particularly. But let's focus on the ones we can refine, first." She put that flower away, as well as three other ones, all of them higher-realm. All the ones left behind registered to his soulsenses. Most of them at tenth-step Redrealm, but a couple at a lower step.

"For a general antidote…" Meiyao picked up five of the flowers and set them aside.

"These would make the most potent one, I believe. What else? Augmenters, but what kind?"

"At least some regeneration ones, for starters," he said. Regeneration augmenters were the actual name for healing concoctions. They didn't actually heal you, just temporarily increased your regeneration rate. Jieyuan's knowledge of concoctions just about started and ended there, though; he only knew that much from what the shopkeepers had said when he'd bought his. She set another three flowers aside, forming another group.

"What else?"

"Well, what else can you make?" he asked. So far he'd mostly only really used fasting and cleansing pills, but he knew there were all sorts of augmenters. Cultivators seldom used them, though. They were a last-resort sort of thing. Augmenters strained the soul, dulling it for some time; take too many too often and you'd harm your ability to use your mantle, soulsenses and soulforce.

"The usual. Strength, durability, and…" She eyed the remaining plants for a moment.

"Agility augmenters, too." That last one immediately caught his attention. He wasn't really concerned about Redrealm beasts, but higher-realm ones were a different story, and no increase in strength and durability would mean anything against them. Agility, on the other hand, was far more promising. It was as useful for fighting as it was for surviving. And surviving was doubtlessly the priority here. But Jieyuan hadn't known agility augmenters existed, had never heard of them before.

"Agility augmenters? That's a thing?" he asked, surprised.

"How do they even work?" Meiyao nodded.

"I'm not surprised you haven't heard of them; they're normally very expensive, even more than talismans. They increase your reaction speed, augmenting your perception of time; they work like hastespace, in a way, except it's all happening within your body. Pair it with mantle-based strength augmentation, and you can move faster than usual. The effect on its own isn't that great—a onefold increase, if it's a really good augmenter—but it works while in hastespace." Onefold increase, and it works in hastespace?

Jieyuan's eyes widened. That was like doubling the haste factor. If he used it while space-hasting he'd be able to match an eighth-step Redsoul's hastespace. Once he broke through to fifth-step, he'd be able to match a tenth-step's hastespace— true hastespace.

"Definitely agility," he said.

"I was thinking the same." Meiyao set a few more plants aside in another little group.

"Anything else, or that's it?"

"What about cultivation augmenters?" he asked. He hadn't seen any for sale, but he was fairly sure he'd heard them being mentioned at some point.

"I think they're a thing."

"They are," Meiyao said.

"But not useful to us. All they do is increase your harvesting efficiency, for chroma. But with these the best I can do is a temporary increase to third-order, and we're at fourth-order already. And we're using prisms, anyway, which makes that point further moot."

"Then I think that's it," Jieyuan said.

"A general antidote and regeneration and agility augmenters."

"All right." Meiyao clapped her hands, then rubbed together as she looked back down.

"Let's see…" She closed her eyes, ran her fingers over each flower again. Then she began distributing the remaining plants throughout the three groups she'd formed. When she was done, she looked back up at him.

"You've never seen someone refine something, have you?"

"No."

"I'll talk you through it, then. I'll start with the antidote." She was smiling, sounding rather excited. About refining, definitely—Meiyao wasn't trying to hide how much she enjoyed it—but he'd also come to realize she really liked talking about the things she was passionate about. Luckily for Meiyao, he'd always make for an avid listener as far as she was concerned. Meiyao pulled the group of ingredients she'd separated for the antidote closer and pushed the other two further to the side.

"There are four steps to refining. They're the same, whether you're refining concoctions or constructs. Prior to it, you'd also need to properly plan out the concoction, and there are a lot of calculations involved, but my bloodline lets me skip all of that." She picked up the first of the flowers. A small, black-petaled rose.

"The first step's attuning, so that you can use your soulforce on the plants. The refining rituals only work on attuned materials, too. It's the reason why I can't refine higher-realm plants, since the ritual only works on plants from the same realm." She then whispered, softly, " Regrow." That was Meiyao's attuning hymn, the same he'd heard her using sometimes, when she'd been attuning chroma. With his soulsenses, Jieyuan noticed the spirit of the rose shift, as Meiyao left her imprint on it.

She then went through the remaining flowers, repeating the process.

"The next step is essencification," Meiyao said.

"Refining the ingredients into chromal essence." The plants all rose into the air at the same time, moved by Meiyao's soulforce, until they were hovering between them at eye-level. Given their weight, Jieyuan reckoned it didn't take much concentration to move them around. One of the plants, that black rose from before, floated closer to her, and she laid a finger on it.

"This is where the essencification comes in. It's not a chanting ritual, like the heavenly ones we use to cultivate, but a channeling ritual." While Meiyao spoke, Jieyuan caught, with his soulsenses, the trail of chroma leaving Meiyao's finger and disappearing into the flower.

"The ritual's rather complex," Meiyao said, even as she kept pumping chroma into the rose.

"Usually, there's some calculation involved here. Every ingredient has its own essencification factor—which you'd find after a lot of trial and error—and based on that, you also have to take into account its mass and age to calculate the exact channeling rate." The rose began to change. Its surface rippled, and then it started losing its shape. The edges rounded, merged together, fading away, as it turned more and more indistinct, like it was being reduced to pure color.

About a minute later the rose had lost all shape, and what was left was an indistinct, swirling clump of a black liquid streaked green.

"There we go. Chromal essence." Meiyao smirked at him.

"Again, my bloodline gives me an advantage here. Jieyuan wondered how much more impressed he'd be if he knew more about refining. All the chromal crafts were said to be the kind of thing that demanded lifelong effort to get anywhere with. The kind of thing you needed to dedicate several years to just to get your foot in. Meiyao could've only really started delving into refining after she became a cultivator, and she hadn't been one for a whole year yet.

Not to mention that most of her time would've been spent training and cultivating, leaving very little space to pursue the crafts. With a little wave of her hand, the amorphous, liquid clump floated off to the side, and another of the flowers floated closer. Meiyao repeated the same process on it, and then on all the other ones, until they were left with seven shimmering swirls of goo, each one its own rainbow of blurring colors.

"Now, for the third step," Meiyao said.

"Amalgamation." The clumps of chromal essence then started to move, floating closer and closer, until they met each other at the center and started to merge, until they were one big cluster—about the size of his fist—shifting through just about every hue imaginable. Meiyao brought it closer to her again, and touched it with her finger.

"The amalgamation ritual is much like the essencification one. For each amalgam you'll have your own channeling rate, calculated from the coefficients of each of the ingredients used and their quantities. But…" And she raised her eyebrows at him.

"Let me guess," Jieyuan said in his best dry voice, "your bloodline helps with that?" She smirked.

"Something else you have to take into account is incompatibility. This isn't an amalgam, yet, but just a mixture of essences. If any of the essences are incompatible with each other, the ritual will fail. But if it works, they'll be amalgamated into what we call a raw amalgam. The chromal ink used in inscribing is also a raw amalgam." She started channeling chroma into it, and the change was immediate. It started to swirl faster, its colors shifting rapidly.

Meiyao kept it up for a few moments before she drew her hand back. Physically, the liquid clump didn't look any different from before she'd done the ritual, but to his soulsenses it'd changed. Before he'd been able to pick apart all the different spirits of the essences comprising it, but now what he sensed was one, whole thing.

"And there you have it," Meiyao said.

"A raw amalgam. All that's left is congealing, where it's turned into a refined amalgam, into either a concoction or a construct. But first…" The amalgam started to separate into much smaller, little spheres, each roughly thrice the size of a thumbnail.

"Are those…" Jieyuan frowned.

"Those are some rather big pills."

"Just watch," Meiyao said. She brought one of the spheres closer, touched it.

"Congealment is the hardest step, where refiners usually fail. During the congealment ritual, you have to get the channeling rate right, like with the other three—but there's another component to it. Intent." She tapped the sphere, glancing at him.

"You have to perfectly visualize the refined amalgam in your mind's eye and know exactly what properties it should have. These must match its possible properties, too." She closed her hand around it and closed her eyes.

"Thankfully, it's much easier in the case of pills than it'd be with, say, a weapon. Refiners who specialize in constructs often have to study how weapons are produced the mundane way to get it right. Concocting is far more straightforward, however, so my bloodline mostly covers it. But I still need to be more careful about it." Meiyao's brow furrowed, her expression becoming one of intense concentration. Jieyuan stayed quiet, just watching, doing nothing to disturb her. She stayed that way for several minutes.

Just as sweat began to build up on her forehead, though, her face relaxed a bit, and Jieyuan sensed the flow of chroma pooling inside her closed hand. Another minute passed before Meiyao opened her hand. What she held out for him to see wasn't a liquid mass held together by her soulforce anymore, but a solid, hard pill. It was only one color, too. A dark shade of yellow. It was also much smaller than the original amalgam, smaller than a thumbnail. About the right size for a pill.

"It is smaller. Is it denser?" he guessed.

"No," Meiyao said.

"The congealment sacrifices not just your chroma, but also most of the original amalgam. More than half of it. Refining is very costly." She tossed the pill to him, and he held it up pinched between his fingers, eyeing it. He also felt it with his soulsenses, but the impression he got from it was too general.

"Is this it, then?

"That's it. An antidote pill," Meiyao said, as she pulled another of the amalgam spheres into her grasp. This time, the flow of chroma started immediately, and Meiyao's expression barely changed.

"There shouldn't be many Redrealm toxins and poisons it can't cure."

"That might come in handy," Jieyuan said. They hadn't come across any poisons yet, but you never know, with the Dome.

"Though, of course, I'm also hoping it won't be necessary, to begin with."

"Agreed," Meiyao said. And just as she finished speaking, she opened her hand again, revealing another finished pill. She quickly went through the remaining ones—seven in total. She handed them all to him.

"We'll distribute them later," she said, looking briefly Daojue's way.

"I'll get started with the other ones. You can rest up, if you want. I'll be taking first watch."

"I think I'll keep you company a little while longer, if you don't mind." It'd have been smarter to take Meiyao up on her offer and beg off, but he could spare at least some minutes. Meiyao was in a good mood, and he didn't want to let it go to waste.

"Oh." Meiyao gave him a wide smile.

"Sure. There's still a lot I haven't told you, so maybe…?"

"I'd love to hear it," Jieyuan said. He wasn't all that interested in refining. Or in any of the chromal crafts, really. Unlike Meiyao it'd probably take him decades to get anywhere with them, and he had other priorities. But Meiyao clearly knew a lot, and he might end up learning something with more immediate applications.

"You know, Amyas, you don't have to come up with excuses for spending time with a girl, not in your own head." That was, of course, Maeva. Shut up, Jieyuan sent. She giggled, the sound of it coming like she was just to his side.

"Oh, you're adorable. You were much the same, back on Earth. Remember that time you fell for that girl who was into chemistry, so you convinced yourself becoming a chemist might—" Maeva, Jieyuan thought at her, doing his best to keep his face under control. I will stop the command. Actually, I should do it anyway, no need to waste—"No!" Maeva said, immediately.

"This is interesting. Refining's like a science. Let me stay. Please?" Little surprise there. If Maeva was one thing, it was curious about—well, everything, but science most of all. She was the kind of person who'd learn something just for the sake of learning. In that, they couldn't have been any more different. Then behave. There was a shimmer in the corner of his vision, and he stole a quick glance to see Maeva appear like she was stepping out from behind him.

She primly ruffled her lab coat and then sat down beside him; she shot him a brief, sunny smile before focusing on Meiyao. Meiyao didn't see or hear any of it, of course, and went over the remaining flowers, resuming her explanations. This time she talked about compatibilities, how different properties with each other, even the calculations she didn't need to do.

"One trick to tell whether two plants are compatible," she said, holding up two flowers, "is to compare their essencification factors. If they're too different, they're probably incompatible. There are exceptions, however. But there are tricks to tell those too. You see…" At one point Meiyao had started taking breaks from the refining process itself to explain some particular thing or another, just as she was doing now. Jieyuan nodded along, and not just for show.

Maeva had been right, and the only real reason he was listening was because it was Meiyao speaking. But as it went on, he found himself getting interested in refining too, despite himself. He recalled how Maeva would babble on to him—to Amyas—about physics stuff. Although he hadn't cared for the subject, the way his sister was so passionate about it would get him hooked, at least while their talks lasted. But with Meiyao it went further.

Though Maeva had been a great many things, she'd never been all that good at teaching. Pretty much everything concerning science had come too intuitively to her for her to explain it properly to a normal person like him. With Meiyao, it should've been the same, but one thing that was becoming clear was that though her bloodgifts let her skip most of the process, she didn't just coast on her talent alone. She was very well read on the theory. Not just that, she was a surprisingly good at explaining things.

"I wasn't that bad," Maeva said. He didn't glance at her, but he could hear the pout in her voice. Maeva, you tried to give me a lecture on subatomic physics when I was in third-grade, that quantum chromodynamics thing you got your first doctorate in. I was still wrapping my head around gravity, and you wanted me to understand fundamental particle interactions.

"If you'd read all the books I gave you on quantum physics—" Maeva, I was nine. And yes, I know you were already reading that kind of stuff at that age, but you know very well that doesn't count. Now be quiet. Maeva did quiet down, though not before giving him a look of mock outrage. After a while, Meiyao finished up with the first three batches of pills, one of each type, and started producing more flowers from her pouch to make some more. But Jieyuan decided he'd indulged himself enough, and excused himself.

As he closed his eyes, though, and sent his focus inward, he didn't go to rest quite yet. He wasn't all that tired. Meiyao had called their stop earlier today, and at fourth-step it took more than walking to get him tired anyway. More than that, what he was about to do would tire him out, so better get it over with first. He whispered the command, and when he opened his eyes again, he was back in the Radiant Gold Palace—in that arena where tournament was held.

He was standing in the middle of the center stage, and Maeva was right in front of him. For once she wasn't wearing her sundress and lab coat, but rather cultivator's robes and armor. Granted, white and yellow robes.

"All right, Amyas," Maeva said.

"What do you want to do?" Even after a week of this, the sight of Maeva—bookish, scrawny Maeva, who in life probably had never so much as thrown a punch—dressed like a martial artist was still enough to pull some chuckles out of him. This more than anything really drove home how she wasn't the real Maeva, too. She'd have never done something like this.

"Footwork."

"Got it," Maeva said, crossing her arms. The floor below them rippled; the next moment, they weren't standing on metal but rather on a tight, crisscrossing network of dark brown roots. Just like the ones covering the streets of Viridian Death City. They were immobile right now, but Jieyuan knew that Maeva could get them moving at a moment's notice. Maeva shot him a grin.

"Ready when you are."