(Book 1 Complete!) Side Quest [Isekai / LitRPG]

Logan jumped as far to the right as he could, scanning for signs of sclerags burrowing up from beneath him in all the disturbed dirt. Nugget let out a small cry as he, too, scanned. One mound was raised higher than the rest of the recently upturned earth.

Slipstream Mirage!

He only charged it for a second, swiping the empty air above the mound, then backing away. If his force mirage distracted the scorpion-like monster, he could then catch it by surprise from behind.

The mirage swiped and faded, and nothing happened.

Senna giggled and Logan turned his quizzical expression to her.

"Sorry, it's not a monster. We just planted some chagga root there and you almost stepped on it. Also, that was neat. Did you get some kind of ghost skill now? I bet Alden's jealous you have another skill."

Logan cocked his head and stared at the disturbed dirt as Bromlin approached with a watering can and soaked the soil. Only then did he realize why this area looked so different. The weeds at this edge of the garden hedge had been completely razed, and the earth was tilled.

"That skill came from no ghost," said the gardener, who appeared and was their de facto ghostly expert. She tilted her transparent head. "Although… you do have the Dream affinity now."

Logan let out a nervous laugh. If the ghost wanted to attack him, now she could, since he shared her affinity. But the ghost folded her arms and remained where she was.

"It's how my Null Pulse and Eldertread skills converted under the Dream affinity. Alden hasn't actually seen it yet."

"Yeah," Senna said, more to Bromlin. "Alden's gonna be even more mad that it's not just a new skill, but another affinity, too."

Bromlin made as if about to place a bet, the reaction seeming to be instinctual whenever the two bantered like this, but he caught himself and ended up agreeing with Senna. Then he clapped Logan's upper lower back, which was as close as he could reach to Logan's shoulder. "We saw the updates on the Quest Board, laddy. Glad to see everything's under control back there."

"It's getting there," Logan said, though he still kept a wary eye on the gardener. "We charged the void stones and can bring you back." He then scanned the freshly weeded area. "Looks like you've made more progress yourselves."

"Well, it's been a pretty quiet two days, and there wasn't much else to do while we were waiting. We figured you might still be awhile charging the stones."

That's right, they don't know about the side effects of traveling through the Ruined Wilds on the surface. He explained that was why he hadn't returned even sooner, and that Avalyn had been speedy about charging the stones for him and it was the trek through the Ruined Wilds that was the main reason behind the delay.

"For me," he finished, "the time change hasn't been so bad. I haven't even had to sleep yet, actually." He had flown plenty back on earth, including a few international trips, and he wished he hadn't had to deal with jetlag back then.

The ghost drifted over to speak. "That's because the Ruined Wilds contain imbalanced pockets. The general terrain is composed of the five sages's powers, including Time." She pointed to the castle. "You would need to go through sanctioned structures to be impervious to the effects."

They weren't passing through Kalashi Citadel until the two Luvania quests were solved, so they'd have to deal with the strange time delay travel.

"We should probably start heading back," Logan said. Then he turned to the spirit. "I promise you, I will come back and restore balance here. But I promised others some things, too, and I have to take care of those first."

"Uh, actually…" It was Senna who spoke, not the ghost. "So we are making some pretty good timing on clearing the weeds out. There's only one more section. It sounds like the others will probably need a little more time to sort things out anyway, so think we can spare a few hours to wrap that up?"

Logan glanced back to the Ruined Wilds then at Senna. "I suppose." A few hours wasn't a problem. He just couldn't afford to take on quests that would take several days right now. "I'm guessing you received a quest?"

She punched him in the shoulder with a smile. "Yep! You want in?"

New quest available!
Clear out the weeds choking the Grand Kural Gardens and plant Chagga Root along the perimeter.
Reward: A recipe
Accept? YES/NO

The reward, which would have been negotiated while Logan was gone, made sense. Senna, who was skilled with crafting items, wanted to broaden her horizons into alchemy too. And who better to learn a recipe from than some ghost who tended a garden?

The ghost was eying him, arms still folded. "I'll give better recipes, too, when my garden is completely fixed."

Logan thought of all the times he had held himself back from pursuing the things that really would make him happy because of all the expectations of his dad and Janie.

Quest accepted!

Senna looked relieved when the quest information populated on Logan's Quest Board. He could see she and Bromlin were co-participants, which meant she had noticed the moment he had joined the quest party too.

"All right, now what?"

Oddly organic and alien at the same time, the weed reminded Logan of a distillation setup from a science lab. The parasitic plant connected to its host in two places. Up top, a messy tangle of tendrils gripped the host's upper branches, anchoring the main body of the weed in place. Those tendrils twisted downward in a rope-like braid, merging into a single woody knuckle.

Hanging from that knuckle was a plump, enclosed pouch, something like a tropical pitcher plant, but fully sealed. It looked almost like a water balloon still attached to a spigot. The angle of the sunlight pierced through the membranous portion of the weed and revealed a fluid-line inside the engorged chamber. Beads of faint green moisture gathered on its surface, as though it were sweating.

At the bottom, the gourd-like pouch narrowed and curved to one side, forming a loop reminiscent of a bus strap handle. Where it met the host plant's base, it wrapped around several times before splitting into dozens of thin, pale tendrils, like uncooked ramen noodles, but finer. These sank directly into the host's stem.

If the messy top tendrils kept the parasite suspended, these lower rootlets were the real threat: the leeching system, siphoning nutrients and moisture directly from the host.

Name: Driprot
Type: Ingredient
Lore: Driprot is a parasitic, poisonous plant that draws moisture from a host's roots. It also partially decomposes new root growth, stunting the host's development while creating a composted mixture that provides additional nutrients tailored to the host's biological makeup. It blends these resources within a central vat-like chamber to produce a specialized poison tailored to suppress the host's defenses. Once the host is weakened, the driprot can continue feeding freely. Its adaptive toxin is highly valued for alchemical use due to its ability to adjust to different hosts.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

Given the unique alchemical properties of a customizable poison, it was no wonder Senna wanted to rip up as much of these weeds as possible. She and Bromlin had a huge pile of the uprooted weed in the center of the garden, where she dug into it with her small knives and drained a fluorescent green goop into empty vials.

Logan lined up his aim, tapping his gauntlet's claws twice to the curved stretch between the poison chamber and the point where the driprot merged with the host plant.

Without warning, he recalled a time in the garage with his dad, who was hovering over Logan's shoulder as he was hammering nails into a two-by-four.

"Come on kid, I could've finished these frames by now."

It wasn't helping that his dad kept letting out exasperated sighs as Logan pressed the hammer to the nailhead just before lifting it to drive the nail home. And when he had finally released his swing and missed, jamming his thumb, his dad had only laughed and then yanked the board away from Logan to finish it on his own.

Logan was back in the garden. He pushed his lips to one side, drew his arm back to give himself room, then swiped.

Sharpshooter is level 18!

Screw you.

The bulbous plant swung like a pendulum.

He went to steady it with one hand but paused and looked at the gardener, who watched him with an unreadable expression. "So this poison is a unique strain already adapted to the plant, right? Do I have to worry about it poisoning me?"

"You have Poison Resistance, don't you?"

"Uh…"

Senna and Bromlin also looked up at that. "You don't have poison resistance, lad?"

"No? Should I?"

"Resistance training is something most people do early on with the guild. Gets you ready for any situations you might encounter on business."

"I have a lot of other stuff I need the guild to take care of for me. Maybe I can add some of that resistance training to the list." He stared warily at the plant. It's swinging had slowed.

The ghost glided over to him and lifted his wrist, placing his hand on the braided stem above the big pouch. "You'll be fine if you grab it from up here and saw through it. This one's ripe, and most of its poison is specialized for the plant, not you. But there's a small chamber inside with the raw, potent stuff. That's near the bottom, though."

"Yeah," said Senna, lifting up a drained pod. She turned it inside out, showing Logan an inner bubble, which looked like a small cyst. "I'm keeping that separate, but taking all the liquids to study them."

"Thanks," Logan said. It was that first swipe he should have been more careful with, then. This time, he held the thick rope-like anchor section with one hand and sawed at it with the gauntlet on his other hand so the whole thing didn't fall down and burst open.

He then carried the thing as if he was holding a dead rat by the tail and dropped it off gently by Senna before going to the next.

Bromlin was hacking away at a different type of weed, but it wasn't an ingredient. Logan still caught a description of it. When planted, it would turn the ground more acidic, which would keep the sclerags away.

As Bromlin worked on cutting down and planting the felled chagga root, Logan hacked through several more of the poison-filled driprot weeds, finding the work oddly relaxing.

The ghost hovered, but not in the judgmental way his father had over him in the garage. She was just looking at the plants.

Moodprint.

It was a relieved happiness Logan sensed from her, and he actually smiled. Before long, her garden would be parasite-free.

"So," Logan said after he fell into a rhythm, "you mentioned skills here come from completing dungeon, not from monster cores."

She nodded as she looked toward the perfectly conical mountain in the distance. "That's right. Dungeons come in different tiers. The higher-tiered the dungeon, the greater the shard it will award. And a higher-tiered dungeon that hasn't been cleansed in a long time can bump the shards within it up higher."

He pointed to the mountain. "Is that a dungeon?"

"Yes. It used to have an entrance facing the garden here. Dungeons are also some of the greatest sites of power, and they distribute ambient mana."

"Almost like how plants create oxygen?"

"That's right. But without the Exalted Kin to fix the imbalances, many have changed. This dungeon has skewed toward Order alone, and its opening was stoppered up as the mountain's shape changed to be so… perfect."

Logan hacked another weed free and carried it over to Senna before resuming his questions. "I'm guessing that cut off some sources of ambient mana and led to mana scarring? That is how monsters appear here, too, right?"

She nodded. "But mana scarring wasn't the only result. In this section of Kural, at least, each of the affinities have been predominantly grouped together in clusters around the mountain. See those ponds at the base? They used to be a river that bent around the mountain in a horseshoe. I walked down this hill every day, grabbed the fertile silt, and nurtured my garden with it. I was already a ghost by the time the river changed too, though. When it did, the water pooled into the individual ponds you see there, and is a rough landmark separating different regions where certain affinities are more prominent than others. I'm lucky this region retained the Dream affinity, otherwise I would have lived my afterlife away from my garden. Despite my displeasure over its current state, my pain would be infinitely worse if I could not at least be near it." She shook her head. "I know too many ghosts who have lingered with a purpose, but lost that purpose anyway. They cannot move on, and they have turned to darkness."

Senna and Bromlin had both listened in, occasionally asking questions about dungeons, like what was inside the mountain before it had closed up. Apparently they had never heard of dungeons, so they likely didn't exist in the Fold.

The absence of dungeons in the Fold surprised the gardener. She said there were other places like Kural, separated from both the Fold and Kural by the Boundary of the Ruined Wilds, but she didn't know if those had dungeons too, or if there were any unique rules about how the System worked there.

As for the dungeon's contents, she also didn't know what was inside this one. She had never been one to go off delving into the depths, being content with her garden.

After asking all their questions, Logan figured there had to be a reason why some fundamental things were different between Fold and Kural. The System rewarded killing with experience and gave incentives to people in the Fold with skills from monster cores, so why not here? The gardener at least enough lore about the Fold to explain the five sages were as responsible for creating both places.

Logan pointed beyond the Kalashi citadel, where the Fold lay. "There's a blight on the other side of the ruined wilds. Do you think something similar could be happening with Order taking things over?"

She asked him for the details of the blight, and he explained what he knew and what he had seen as he had walked through it.

"These drakla fruit you mention… If they were decaying at different rates, then no, it would not be Order. Otherwise, they would all progress in decay at the same rate. But it is possible that it could be an overloaded strain of Chaos. You may differ from the other Exalted Kin, but everything they did revolved around maintianing balance with their harmonic threads."

Logan perked up. "What's that?" His status currently had two of three harmonic threads unbroken.

"All I know," she eventually said, "is that the harmonic threads affected their power, and they were always trying to increase their thread count."

Logan tucked that knowledge away. He could increase his harmonic threads, but what would that do? How did it affect power? He asked, and she wasn't sure, but she looked at the mountain. "All I know is how many of your people passed me by, refusing to aid my garden, because they needed to mend their threads."

With his own eyes turned to the mountain, Logan was definitely curious now. Dungeons were sites of power and could mend threads? And possibly give him more? He didn't even really know what the benefit was, but if the ancient Exalted Kin aimed for that, it seemed reasonable to set it as a goal for himself.

He caught her reproachful stare from the corner of his eye. "Don't worry," he said with a smile. "I'll take care of your garden before I worry about that." He didn't have time to investigate it now with all the tension waiting for them back at Gnashridge Heights. And so they worked in silence for about fifteen more minutes.

"There," Logan said, clapping his hands as if dusting them off. "The weeds are down." The ghost had said it would take years for any new weeds to reach that state of overgrowth again, and Logan planned on coming back here long before years were up. He needed to learn more about these dungeons, too.

He would also check in with Mariv and Razor and Avalyn about dungeons. Could he mend harmonic threads at dungeons because they were dungeons? Or did it have more to do with them also being sites of power? Logan suspected the latter. Even if there weren't dungeons in the Fold, there would probably be some way to mend his broken threads. The System seemed to have some reason for setting things up certain ways. And he had gained the race within the Fold, so he suspected it would make sense that any rules related to his race could still be met within the Fold's bounds.

"Very well," the ghost said. "Here is a recipe. You've been gathering that poison, so I might as well teach you something you can use it for."