- Health 72%
- Stamina 63%
Merrick felt the warmth in his stomach slowly fade away and checked his resource pools once more. His thoughts felt much clearer and his health had stabilized after rising a bit with the mending of his legs. He likely wouldn’t see it reach anywhere near 100% again anytime soon, considering his lack of blood-replenishing tonics and presumed inability to get a good restful sleep while living in the dungeon.
Still, 72% and stable was much better than half dead so he couldn’t complain. If he had a steady source of goodberries, he’d likely begin experimenting with them to see exactly what the best use-case for their medicinal properties were. All he knew for sure so far was that they helped with regrowing skin and were perhaps not the best at encouraging new blood production.
Merrick peered down at the still open jade case containing his everdew bell flower and mentally calculated how many berries would be able to fit into the case. The bush seemed to only have a few berries left adorning its branches, with many having fallen off due to over-ripening or his crash landing. After slowly plucking them, he counted 11 berries still on the bush alongside another eight or so in various states of damage on the ground around it. Judging by the back of his backpack, he’d probably crushed close to seven or eight with his landing, bringing the number the bush had grown to around 27 to 30.
The berries on the bush were much closer in size, shape, and weight to each other than the ones Mary had harvested less than an hour prior back in the first expanse. He couldn’t help but wonder if that was because the smaller bush was having a hard time surviving, let alone reproducing, and that caused deformities in its fruit. Either way, the berries he’d collected this time were so similar he almost couldn’t tell a difference, and it was very conspicuous.
[Merge Successful. One Gooderberry Merged. See More…]
[Merge Successful. One Gooderberry Merged. See More…]
[Merge Successful. One Gooderberry Merged. See More…]
[Catastrophic Failure … 20g Corporis Dust, 10g Anima Dust, 10g Futex Dust Returned. See More…]
Almost as if reading his thoughts, his skill once again showed him how flexible it was when it came to his intent. He’d mentally willed his skill to minimize the spam that filled the log when he realized that each success was going to fill up thrice as many entries as it had in the past. This way it would be easier to keep track of the data for him.
The first three merges went off without a hitch, which he’d been hoping. The fourth failing was within his expectations. He’d picked up the least damaged looking berry from the ground to bring his numbers up to an even 12 since the merges took 3 berries a piece and only 11 and survived his landing. It looked to him like his theory about the meaning behind the SML entry in his log was correct, requiring some sort of simulacrum-like effect of identicalness for the merge.
Unfortunately, that meant he’d been barking up the wrong tree for years. It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried to combine things that were similar in the past, that was one of the first things he tried. The threshold for identicalness seemed to be so high that only a dungeon would be able to replicate the level of perfection between each of the items. He had a couple more tests to attempt before he could definitively list SML as simulacrum in his lexicon, though those could wait until after he observed the numbers this time. To that effort, he mentally triggered all four ‘See More’ prompts in his Skill Log.
[SML: ::96%, GRW Mod: 0%, GTR Mod: 25%, RFN Mod: 0%, CFT Mod: 0%. TP: 98.5% See More…]
[SML: ::97%, GRW Mod: 0%, GTR Mod: 25%, RFN Mod: 0%, CFT Mod: 0%. TP: 99.5% See More…]
[SML: ::96%, GRW Mod: 0%, GTR Mod: 25%, RFN Mod: 0%, CFT Mod: 0%. TP: 98.5% See More…]
[SML: :: 70%, GRW Mod: 0%, GTR Mod: 15%, RFN Mod: 0%, CFT Mod: 0%. TP: 71.5% See More…]
He used his [[Merge]] skill to move the Total Potential readout from the third line to the second, reducing the amount of spam he’d have to filter through once again. He squinted at the feedback and scrolled back up through his skill log to verify that something had changed.
Sure enough, there were a couple changes. The first thing he noticed was that his Skill Log had changed the way it referred to the final product. From a Tier 2 Goodberry to a Gooderberry. He spent a moment wondering why that would of swapped before he realized that he’d changed the way he thought of the berry after consuming it. He’d even thought the word ‘gooderberry’ to himself and chuckled about the stupid pun, something he’d blame on blood-loss induced delirium if anyone asked him.
It likely didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but he’d have to make sure not to think of any other products he made by particularly crude or cringy names, less he be the victim of self-inflicted mental anguish every time he read through his log.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Secondly, somehow, he’d gotten no GRW Mod this time around and had instead earned GTR Mod where he hadn’t before. He’d have to reflect on what he did differently when merging the berries later since it would give him a direction to work toward those two shorthand-maybe-acronyms. That would have to wait until his next experiment though. He now had three gooderberries sitting in front of him.
Three. A number that had caused several bad impulsive habits for him over the past five years. It was all that he could do to try and prevent himself from trying to merge them together again. Only his fear of failure managed to help him curb the craving. Instead, he finished scooping up the seven damaged and failed to merge them together, pocketing the least leaky one and using the six more damaged ones to farm the dusts for future alchemy.
Fortunately, the string of [[Catastrophic Failure]]s helped to humble Merrick and he decided not to risk losing potentially lifesaving medicines.
“Is it really a loss though?” Merrick began muttering to himself, another bad habit he’d picked up through years of self-isolation. “The [[Skill Log]] said Tier 2 Goodberry the first time. Why would it classify something as Tier 2 if that was the end of the line? Surely it’d just say something like Superior Goodberry.”
Merrick flexed his toes in the dirt as he thought, thankful that every second he pondered the temptation was another second his legs and feet were able to recover and begin feeling more normal. Already most of the pins he’d felt shooting up his legs, as if he’d sat on them too long and they fell asleep, had faded away.
“Nope, not worth it to find out.” After spending the time pondering the recover of his legs he realized there was absolutely no way that he could take that risk. He was trapped deeper in the dungeon than he’d ever heard of someone delving and the gooderberries were his only healing. Even if he could succeed in the merge, he’d be going from three lifesaving medicines down to one. He wasn’t confident he’d only ever get injured a single more time.
The dungeon must have heard him, he decided, as the bushes around him chose that time to begin rustling. Merrick scooped up his knife from where he’d left it strewn on the ground with the rest of his belongings and moved into a defensive posture.
Out of the bush wandered a single bramblekin. It looked almost as shocked to see Merrick as he was it and they both froze for a moment before exploding into violence.
The creature looked much like its kin from the first floor of the dungeon, a bundle of thick wooden vines that looked much like a bloated tumbleweed that was a little too dense, covered in thorns. Its weapon of choice were hands that ended in five thick thorns and its head looked like a pig totem with a large horn curving backwards from its forehead between its eyes.
Merrick wasn’t great at close quarters combat at the best of times, having much preferred the bow when he was learning the way of violence. It didn’t help that he’d lost his sword and therefore his reach, something he would have appreciated greatly when battling the bramblekin due to it being two-thirds of his height.
He missed a lunge with his knife and was rewarded with a swipe of claws across his ribs as he attempted to lunge out of the way. Although it was a glancing blow, the bramblekin’s sharp thorns reminded him just how foolish it was to step foot in the dungeon without at least leather armor. He ignored the stinging pain from the cuts and did his best to refocus on the battle.
The creature’s charge had carried it a few feet past where they’d collided with each other, reminding Merrick very much of the first time he’d gone boar hunting with Rod’s father, the Master Wyll the Ranger. Not only did the bramblekin look a bit like a wild boar, but it apparently carried its weight the same way. With time to prepare, or a spear, Merrick knew he could turn that into a lethal weakness. Unfortunately, he had neither.
What he did have, however, was a very silly idea.
Merrick began using his [[Channel Magicka]] skill as he prepared to catch a spell. He shifted his knife into his mouth, using his teeth to bite down on the leather hilt of the blade, to free up his dominant hand and rolled his shoulders. The bramblekin made eye contact with Merrick and then charged once more. Merrick, not wanting to spook the dungeon spawn, charged right back at it.
At the last second, Merrick leveraged everything his [[Improved Reflexes]] and [[Dodge]] skills were whispering to him to pivot out of the way, and slapped his lands on the creatures face as he did so.
Using about thrice as much magica as it should have required, Merrick dual-cast his [Smooth Knot] spell on the creature’s face. With minimal resistance, he felt the magic leave his hands and impress his will upon the carved wooden-totem head of the bramblekin. The wood knots that made up the creature’s eyes receded into its head, leaving it looking like a masquerade mask.
Merrick had to trade another slash to his midsection to pull off the maneuver, there wasn’t much of a choice when the spell required physical contact to cast, but he was supremely glad his plan seemed to have worked.
The bramblekin began stumbling around blindly as the knife dropped from Merrick’s teeth to his hands. Slowly, he began methodological slicing through the wooden vines that made up the creature’s arms. One slice, two, back away from its claws. Approach from a different angle and repeat.
Thankfully the cuts he’d taken weren’t so deep that they couldn’t scab over, because it took him several minutes to remove the creature’s weapons at its shoulders before moving in to finish it off while it was defenceless.
“Heh. I disarmed it. Heheh.” Merrick chuckled to himself. If asked, he’d once again blame the stupid puns on the loss of blood and adrenaline. Luckily, or unluckily really, nobody was around to watch him crack jokes to himself.
“Thankfully bramblekin actually use their eyes to see. That could have gone so badly.” That was leaving out the fact that [Smooth Knot] was a craftsman’s spell to make woodworking easier. He’d never heard of someone using it on a living floranoid of any variety.
Most living creatures had a passive soul barrier that prevented hostile magic from changing their form without a massive disparity in power. Thankfully, bramblekin didn’t seem to have that same innate resistance.
A thought occurred to Merrick and he twisted the horn off the creature’s face with a manic grin. He waited for the dungeon to reclaim its body and leave behind his copper coin only out of habit, already thinking about his next merge experiment while looking fondly at the horn in his hand.
