“Lastly, and the book I’m most excited about, for Logan I have Immelda Menagerie Inkboon’s only published appendix that focuses on plants and fungal guardian forms. It’s called A Forest of Screams and Silence: Deadly Flowers, Terrifying Trees, and Mushroom Magics.” She showed Logan the spine. “It has never been opened. You’re going to be the first person to ever read this.” She snorted in excitement once more, obviously tickled with herself. “You might be the only person to ever have read this. It is exceptionally rare.”
From somewhere in the library, someone wailed, “By the dark gods, I’ve been shot!”
Madam Gammy was there to shush them with a voice that sounded like an octogenarian smoker—two packs a day at least. “Hush, child.” Her words floated to them like the rustling of book pages. “I will take the spear out of your back. No need to make a fuss.”
Logan took the book from Inga, who couldn’t stop smiling.
Marko grinned. “So you aren’t giving us these books. You’re checking them out for us?”
“No,” the astral moth returned, “you’ll have to check them out. However, I risked my life to get them for you. These were buried deep in the stacks, and the challenges that I faced getting them were...” She trailed off, lips pursed. “Formidable,” she finally finished. “Well worth the effort, though. They are absolutely perfect, aren’t they?”
“It’s the thought that counts.” Treacle perused his book. “I, for one, like a gift I don’t have to store or pretend to use when the giver comes over. Being polite is a terrible burden. Still.” He paused and flipped to a page displaying an elaborate schematic. “I think I might just like this Tigg Allegg. Thank you, Inga.”
“You’re welcome, Treacle,” Inga said, beaming.
Marko adjusted his book on the table and laid his head on it. “Oh, so comfy. The crushed velvet really is delightful. Best pillow ever.”
Logan punched his buddy’s arm. “Be nice.”
The satyr leaned back, opened it up, and let out a happy laugh. “Hey, pictures. Aww, Inga, you know I like pictures.” His whole demeanor changed in a second. “These are actually very well done. There’s a happy tree. A happy cloud. And a way to paint shadows so they come alive to stab raiders in the back. Wow! Joy and murder!”
Logan’s tome was as thick as a dictionary, made from something that didn’t feel like leather, but rather more like someone took tree bark and hammered it flat. He opened the book, and it fell right open to a page that was made from a single flower crushed perfectly flat until it was the width of a single page. When the air hit the flower page, it plumped out into a delicate white display of petals and a yellow disc.
Suddenly, Inga’s eyes were the size of frisbees. “No, it can’t be.” She inched closer, inspecting the page with wide eyes, her antenna quivering. “My word. That isn’t a simple flower. I believe it’s a cultivation bloom.”
“That would be awesome,” Marko exclaimed. “Sometimes cultivation blooms have more recreational effects. You should just eat it, man. Or we can share it, go on a trip, get trippy, listen to music, and look at my book.”
Treacle sighed. “Eat it. Don’t eat it. But please, quiet down. I’m enjoying my book.” He licked a broad finger and flipped another page.
Logan knew a little about cultivation blooms. Some were beneficial, some were dangerous. They were similar to the cultivation pills and elixirs that they would learn to make in their third year, except these were natural and unrefined. That made them more powerful in many ways, but also more dangerous. Purified elixirs lost a bit of their juice, but they also weren’t liable to poison you. He wasn’t about to add anything to his core just for kicks. He turned to the front page and read the introduction while Marko and Inga watched. Plumped up, the flower could now be felt in the middle.
“Well, what does it say?” Inga asked.
“Ms. Inkboon warns against anyone choosing a plant guardian form because they are so weak at first. And she says her publisher didn’t want her writing this book because it wouldn’t sell. People like dragons, liches, and goblin kings, not killer cacti. I’m trying not to be insulted here.”
They all returned to studying until Logan couldn’t stop himself from pumping a fist in the air. “Yes. This, this is going to let me take out Magmarty. Oh my God, I can’t believe it.” He turned to the middle of the book and carefully removed the flower. It looked freshly plucked, not dry as it had at first.
“Is it okay if I eat this?” he asked. “Will I get in trouble from the librarian?”
Inga nodded. “I asked Madam Gammy about magic items we found in the book. She said if you can retrieve a book without dying, the spoils of war are yours. What does the bloom do, Logan?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.” Logan popped the flower into his mouth. He chewed and swallowed the bitter bud down. For a second, nothing happened.
Marko gazed at him expectantly. “Do you see rocking horse elves eating marshmallow pies? Am I all trippy?”
Logan went to answer, but before he could get a word out edgewise, pain hit him like a Mack truck. He was pretty sure he’d just made a terrible mistake.
Chapter Twenty
THE FOREVERGREEN FESTIVAL was Saturday, but that Friday, Logan was trying not to lose his mind. He sat in the worst class possible for someone in agony.
At the front of the classroom, the vulture-headed Professor Bartholomew Nekhbet rested on his big feathery butt, droning on about the Tree of Souls. Logan was having a hard time following. It felt like spiders had spun a cottony web of confusion at the very center of his mind. A four-alarm fire burned in his sunken chest. His gemstone felt like an arctic blizzard in his belly. He went from suffocating heat to coffin-cold ice in seconds. And this was actually a significant improvement.
He’d spent a sleepless night, shivering on his bed, trying to process the cultivation bloom, which Inkboon referred to as the Verdant Ascension. That energy floated outside his core, a bright shining star of white energy, connected only by a hair-thin tether of Apothos. The new energy seemed to be Vita-based, which was diametrically opposed to Morta—one of his two main elemental Affinities. So, he not only had to convert the energy but, according to Inkboon, he had to then form that energy into a pattern. A knot. Trying to tie his first knot as a Deep Root cultivator wasn’t going to be easy, though, since the first knot typically didn’t come until C-Class.
But that would come later, Inga assured him.
First, Logan had to peel the energy apart like an onion, stripping it down a molecule-thin layer at a time, then folding that raw power into his churning green-gold core. Once the energy was stripped of its Vita affinity, it would be cycled back out and transformed into a thin cable that could be knotted in accordance with the instructions secreted away within the cultivation bloom itself. The process was exhausting, both mentally and physically, and felt a little bit like trying to eat an entire elephant in a single sitting.
Thankfully, Inga hadn’t left his side.
She’d talked him through every step of the process, whispering encouraging words whenever he felt like curling up into a ball and dying. It took most of the night to process the first half of the cultivation bloom, and as he incorporated the influx of energy, his own core compressed. Shrinking down, down, down. Inga said it was all part of the refinement process. Ultimately, a cultivator’s main goal was to shrink their center into a small, dense object and then tie the energy circling it into an ever more complex series of “knots.” According to Inga, those energy knots allowed the cultivator to drastically alter the way they consumed Apothos. By using a certain configuration, a cultivator could become exponentially stronger or faster. They could unlock unheard of abilities or reduce the amount of time it took to process Apothos with elemental affinities.