Might as Well

They left the fracture, with Sam wondering what the hidden bonus could have been. However, as they walked back to their little camp, it soon became apparent what the reward was.

Next to their little garden, another small plot of land appeared, the ground was loose, and glistened as if it was recently watered, and in it, nestled comfortably in the middle, was a crystalline plant shoot. Sam could practically feel the mana radiating from it.

Clarissa gasped, rushed forward, and began fussing around the new plant.

The rest of the team stood back and watched the young healer warily as she ascertained what happened.

Finally, after ten minutes, she looked up from her screens, grinned, and then sent one of them to each of them.

Sam quickly took a curious look at the new screen.

[Tree of Rewards: A small plant, recently born from the seeds of your team’s labor. Grows into ???]

He had to hold back hard to avoid gasping. It was the Tree of Rewards! No wonder countless guilds were massacred when one of these distortions was found. The other Sam managed to participate in a raid where a Tree of Rewards was at the end. Naturally, as a lowly guild member, he could only watch from the sidelines as the leaders harvested the tree for all its worth.

Still, the opportunity allowed the other Sam to catch a glimpse of the special tree and the reward it provided. The Tree of Rewards grew as many fruits as there were people on the team. And each fruit was a condensed wonder of dimensional magic. Full of chaos and possibility.

Then the person who harvested it could channel the mana into it and receive something aligned with the mana. Mostly insanely rare raw materials, seeds, eggs, and a few rare people received skill books or even fully formed weapons.

‘But why is it so small?’ he wondered. The image of the tree he had in his memories was of a fully formed crystalline tree, at least the size of two grown men.

Then the realization hit. Both him and the others.

“Hah! Probably it will grow with every fracture!” Katie called out in an excited voice as she also rushed over, closely followed by Puffball, and began to coo over the small plant while Clarissa tried to make sure no damage came to the new growth.

Dan, Isabella, and Sam soon followed them.

After logging back from a brief rest in the real world, they set their sights on the next fracture with the wood element.

They left their camp behind, the new growth protected by a carefully crafted barrier made from wood, stone, and animal feathers – donated by Hawky and Melody – with some fur from Lucky and Puffball added. Sam also made sure it had some runic circles protecting it, while also adding the Gardener’s friend to it and the original garden plot.

Walking up to the swirling portal, the energy tainted with brown, yellow, and smattering green, the team approached and Sam touched it.

[If a tree falls, is it a clumsy treant?]

[Don’t miss the trees from the forest. Hint, hint! Or is it? Mother Nature is still cranky, go and give her a hanky, or a spanky! Hah! Get it?]

[Time Limit: None]

[Penalty: Splinters! All the splinters!]

[Reward: You can rest easily]

[Charges: 6/6]

[Hidden Bonus: Additional growth for the Tree of Rewards]

“Did you all get that weird message?” Sam asked idly while he processed the information.

“Yup!”

“Yeah…”

“Kinky…”

“I worry about the system…”

Sam grinned, dismissed the screen, and turned to the team.

“Everyone ready?”

After receiving affirmative calls from everyone and a cheering meow from Puffball, he turned around and stepped forward with a confident step.

The fracture was similar to the previous one, but while the first one was a series of meadows surrounded by a sparse collection of trees, in the new one they had to follow a small, well-trodden path through a dense and dark forest. There was even a small amount of fog to add to the atmosphere.

And despite being alone, they could hear the numerous calls, noises, and other sounds produced by a busy forest.

Sam sent out a pulse of mana and kept watch with his Mana Sight, instantly spotting several monsters hidden in the fog and forest.

He glanced at Dan and nodded toward the local flora. “Dan, if you could start?”

The muscled mage grinned. “With pleasure!” He then raised his club, concentrated for a moment, and released a blast of flame in front of them that instantly annihilated the first few trees, and based on the extremely short cries, even a few animals that called them their home.

Then it was Sam’s turn, and within a few seconds, a bona fide flame tornado was rampaging through the fracture while Isabella and Katie went around to deal with the straggler monsters.

Soon, they created their own meadow, made from ash and the corpses of the slain monsters.

Aside from the expected treants, they saw a few wood golems – the size of children, crawling out of holes, wielding rudimentary wooden weapons – and some of those ivy snakes.

Sam suspected that this was just the first salvo. The true monsters would probably show up when they progressed deeper into the fracture.

They quickly picked through the drops.

“Anything good?”

“Could be…” Isabella spoke up as she held up something in her hand. “What do you think?”

He looked over curiously to see a small seed with gentle sparks of rainbow light appearing around it, only to vanish in the next second.

“Clarissa? Can you identify it?”

The healer came closer, took the seed from Isabella, and started examining it.

Then, a few minutes later, she gasped. “Wow!”

They didn’t even have to ask. The screen instantly appeared in front of them.

[Transformation Tree Seed: A very versatile tree that takes up the properties of whatever seed it is planted next to. The higher the quality of the seed the more mana is needed for the transformation.]

“Well, I now know how to get the local druid circle on our side…” Sam spoke as he read through the description.

“Would that work?” Dan asked.

Sam shrugged. “Worth a try… They have been after more Ironwood seeds.”

“How much do we need?”

Sam looked down at the seed, and then back at the forest, trying to guestimate how many would drop. Sadly, while the other Sam heard about it, it was well known that the Transformation Tree Seed was a rare drop in most nature-based fractures.

Finding them in the world? Impossible! They would be sensed as they were created and a nearby monster or NPC would pick them up. Create them artificially? Well, there were rumors, but nothing got revealed to the world at large…

“I think we should aim for ten… that sounds like a nice number.”

“What about the extra?” Clarissa asked, clearly interested in the seeds as they would be a boon to an alchemist.

“Well, you’re into plants, so some will go to you and I need one for something else, but that can wait until you already have a few to play with. The rest can go to Lucy and she can auction them off. Same deal as the last one…”

“Last one? When did you have an auction?” Isabella asked, surprised.

Sam just grinned. “Well, let me tell you what your fearless leader did!”

As he began to regale the young woman with tales of financial exploitation of the mentally challenged, Dan raised his club once again and unleashed another torrent of flame.

It was after the third batch of forest being burned to cinders that they came across a new monster. It was a wood golem, made from treants. In the joints, instead of wood as nature intended, there were only masses of solid-looking shadows, with a giant maw making up the entire torso.

It was bigger than everybody on the team, but with Dan’s fire and Katie’s general craziness, the first of them fell within minutes and many more followed after it.

“Hey, look what the golem dropped!”

Sam ambled closer to Katie, who was holding a black book. “What is it?”

“Shadow Tendrils! Do you want it?”

“Let me check…”

He took the book and touched it to begin reading the description.

[Shadow Tendrils: Level 0/25 (0%) (Active) Summon shadow tendrils in an area to restrain your enemies. Capable of doing psychological damage in the right hands.]

Sam thought about it and decided that this was a skill that shouldn’t fall into Katie’s hands. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to learn it.”

Katie smiled at him and returned to looking through the rest of the loot. “Don’t worry! I’m sure more of them will drop!”

Sam really hoped that wouldn't happen. He then channeled a brief amount of shadow mana into the book, which instantly transformed into a dark cloud that go sucked into his body.

[Congratulations! You learned Shadow Tendrils!]

In the area that looked like the center of the forest, the entire area around it burned, smoldering, and smoking, they found the next boss; a gigantic wood golem, also made from treants, with ivy snakes and smaller treants growing and living on its body.

As they watched it stand up, shaking loose dirt and other detritus (and a few unlucky minions) Sam idly spoke up.

“Do you think if we carved out the inside, we could create a giant wood mecha?”

“I don’t know, but I want one!” was Katie’s response. Puffball meowed in agreement with his ‘master’.

“So what did the giant wood mecha drop? Please tell me it dropped plans for other wood mechas?”

“No such luck, boss! Sorry!” came from Isabella as they gathered in the middle of the pockmarked area, next to the shattered remnant all of them holding the scattered loot in their hands.

“A few more seeds…” Dan began as he counted out the Transformation Seeds in his hand. “How many does that make?”

“Well… we got the initial ten for the druids. Clarissa took another half a dozen, I have one, so we have… three extras,” Sam declared after a small amount of mental math.

“Wow, the fracture is really generous… and this is only the first run!” Isabella said while she cheerfully examined the loot before her.

“If we’re lucky, we’ll get the same amount in the next run.”

“Same distribution?”

“Sure…”

“Alright! Anything else?”

Katie simply pouted. “No Shadow Tendril book! So unfair…”

Sam just patted her on her pauldron. “Don’t worry, we still have five chances!”

They left the fracture in high spirits, returning to their small camp. The team spent a few minutes arranging their inventory, making sure the garden was intact, chased away the unwanted eldritch carrions that were eyeing the small crystalline plant, and returned to the fracture.

Seemingly, the most common major drop was the Transformation seed in this fracture, though Clarissa reassured them that the reagent and ‘junk’ drops were also valuable to healers and alchemists.

Sam’s heart ached a little as he knew very well, he could have made bank by buying up all those potion ingredients at the beginning…

It was around the fourth run when an idea occurred to Sam. Before going in for the fifth time, he took Isabella aside, put a seed in her hand, and whispered a few hasty instructions in her ear. She sent him a queer look but said nothing.

They were halfway through the fracture when Isabella shot forward, her hands shining with rainbow light as she simply punched her hand into the maw of one of the smaller treants. Instead of pulling out her hand, she kept still as the light that previously vanished in the dark and the shadowy maw of the monster began to shine through the darkness. First, it was only a few spots as the monster stood there surprised and paralyzed, then the light spread, causing cracks to spread through the body.

The rest of the team finished the rest of the monsters, then slowly gathered around the bladedancer watching the process. Sam just grinned.

It took an entire minute for the light to fully swallow the monster and when it happened, Isabella finally pulled away her hand and watched the monster with trepidation.

Soon the shape of the monster, which was a wooden stump with arms and roots for legs, started to morph. It became thinner, slightly taller, and lost the roots. Instead, it gained a distinct human-ish shape. A head, two arms, two legs, and a body.

Soon the light died down and the result of Sam’s harebrained idea was shown.

Before them, standing on the ground with closed eyes, was a small plant person thingy. It had armor made of leaf, but the body looked slightly wooden. Its hair was made from grass, falling daintily down on its shoulder, edgily covering one of the eyes. Basically, to Sam, it looked as if somebody had made an emo from a tree. It even had spiked bracelets made from thorns.

It opened its eyes, showcasing their darkness and endless depths, locked eyes with Isabella, and opened its mouth too, showcasing a small maw of darkness, reminiscent of treants, and let out an adorable cry.

“Oh my gosh! So cute!” was all Sam heard before Isabella shot forward and glomped the newly born being that would become her pet. Or eat all of them.

‘Can’t wait to see…’ Sam mused while watching the team fuss over the new plant monster.