It was only during the aftermath of the second sudden flashbang that Merrick realized the implications of what he’d done. Mentally, he’d been treating the mutated peppers the same way he had the mutated fungi, but he’d lost track of the math at some point along the way. The green fungi had been T4 [Critical Success]’s that he’d [[Merge]]’d together but the peppers were literally on another level.

  He wasn’t sure how he’d missed that, considering the difficulty of the [[Merge]] before taking the slightly different pepper into account had felt identical to the previous merge, but it was apparent that the dungeon scored the plant with much higher marks.

  “Heh, I guess there was a level of instant growth then. That or the peppers were just naturally easier to [[Merge]] since I didn’t really notice the tier upgrade. Or perhaps, every time I [[Merge]] into a critical success, it resets the base difficulty…” Merrick trailed off before cutting off the train of thought. He wouldn’t be able to get an answer without several rounds of experimentation. With a glance at the cornucopia, he felt like the experimenting could wait.

  The finish line was in sight.

  Not only did the offering finish unsealing the fifth and sixth barrier, but even the final ring of light was completely illuminated, revealing the seventh and final room in the large horn-shaped structure. It consisted of a single alcove.

  The walls were also completely illuminated up to exactly the threshold between the sixth and seventh room as well. Merrick had a feeling that wasn’t a coincidence. With a jolt, he realized that there wasn’t a single alcove in the sixth room. Glancing around the fifth segment, where he’d just placed the strange mutated pepper, he realized that the alcoves, including the empty ones, had snapped shut there too.

  “Either those shut silently or that sudden flash discombobulated me a lot more than I thought it did,” Merrick mumbled his complaint to whatever voyeur had kidnapped him against his will while trying not to make it sound too much like a complaint at the same time. He was, after all, relying on their goodwill to release him from the dungeon. He only needed to give them what they/it wanted, the voice whispered in the back of his mind, then he could make it to the caravan on time and start his new life elsewhere.

  Merrick’s eye twitched a bit as he realized he was only going to get a single shot at the last alcove as well. So long as the dungeon accepted the offering, he would be unable to lift it back up.

  Reviewing the notes he’d taken on the puzzle, if one was generous enough to call it that, he went over what he knew.

  First, he’d really like to illuminate the entire segment with the singular offering he was allowed to place in the final alcove. He’d gotten so close to getting whatever bonus the place offered, it’d be a shame to not follow through.

  Second, he’d only have one shot at it. He’d already thought that but placing it on the list made sure he wouldn’t forget that.

  Third, he was able to place lower tier merged plants, as he’d proven with the horn in the fifth segment, but got a smaller amount of credit for it. He had to make sure that whatever he merged was on par with the pepper he’d just made.

  Fourth, he also thought he saw a reduced merit when he placed the alternate fungus mutations onto the alcoves. It was hard to measure accurately, but he didn’t think trying to finish off the bell-shaped pepper mutations would be best.

  Fifth, he probably only had two or three hours left before he had to finish. The voice wouldn’t stop nagging him until he placed the thought onto his list. He made sure to rank it last to show his mind who was really the boss there.

  Merrick cracked his knuckles and got to work right away, snatching up his new wheelbarrow from where he’d rested it and running out into the rows of artificially cultivated plants to collect samples.

  Instead of returning to his desk, he brought a couple handfuls of mint and ran out to start [[Merge]]’ing in the field to see if there were any other plants that would mutate at the fifth tier like the pepper did. There were twenty-five plants he was able to test, discounting the fungi and peppers.

  Annoyingly, all twenty-five other plants seemed to hit the [Critical Success] threshold on the third merge, or fourth tier. He wasn’t confident in his ability to complete a tier six [[Merge]], which he anticipated would be the next time they’d hit [Critical Success] considering the strain the fifth tier merge with the peppers had placed on his unknown resource pool.

  Hoping for the best, Merrick [[Merge]]’d three of the mutated potato-like tubers together and ran back to the cornucopia. He’d burned through one of his three remaining hours already and had developed a fairly large tolerance for the mulberry mint. He might have a singular reset of the unknown resource pool left with the plant, if that, so it was now or never as far as he was concerned.

  “This is probably overkill anyways. The green-frilled fungus lit up multiple entire sections on its own and the pepper did the same. Stop stressing me out,” Merrick began arguing with the tiny voice in his head that was yelling that he was missing something obvious. The anxious little voice seemed convinced it wouldn’t be enough.

  Tuning it out, Merrick crawled his way through the seventh segment that composed the tip of the horn. The ceiling was too low for him to reach the alcove in the back of the room by walking and there was only barely enough space for his shoulders as he shuffled forward with the tuber in front of him.

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  He was thankful that the mutations had constantly shrunk the plants back to their original size. There was no way he was fitting anything but a tier seven pepper back here if he’d followed his original plan instead of discovering the path of [Critical Success]’s.

  Holding his breath, Merrick gently placed the tuber on the alcove in front of him. He waited a couple seconds before releasing it and closed his eyes as he pulled his hands back, expecting that a sudden bright light in a small space wouldn’t feel too pleasant if he left his eyes open.

  “Fuck! Ow!”

  Instead of light, Merrick was treated with a several pound heavy potato-like tuber rolling off and landing heavily on his nose. His eyes teared up from the sudden pain and he scowled.

  The alcove didn’t appear to be tilted, so Merrick wasn’t quite clear on how the potato had rolled off.

  Assuming that he must of accidently bumped it as he removed his hands, Merrick carefully set the potato down again. He closed his eyes and covered his head with his hands, which was good because the tuber rolled off once more. Merrick watched as he released it the third time, making sure he didn’t bump it.

  Somehow, the thing rolled on a flat surface at a speed he’d expect from a steep incline and fell right off.

  The tiny voice was right, he realized. There was something he was missing there. The final item wasn’t supposed to be a tuber.

  Merrick shimmied backwards and was thankful he’d left every merged sample he’d made out in the field in the cart. His since of urgency had been slowing ramping up as his anxiety screamed that something bad would happen if he didn’t finish the cornucopia in the next hour and a half.

  Grabbing a mutated sample in each hand, Merrick attempted to crawl forward thirteen more times to complete the puzzle with a standard [Critical Success] result, bonus points be damned. He had to finish, and soon.

  Every single plant, including ones that were flowers or flat like the mushrooms, somehow slid right off the platform. Merrick was down to an hour and thirty minutes remaining.

  Merrick attempted to clamp his steel will down on his ever increasing anxiety, hampered significantly by the tiny voice that kept insisting that he was missing something on repeat, and walked back to his comfortable chair to revisit his notes.

  Drumming his fingers on the table repeatedly, Merrick had to wonder what the solution the puzzle was. The singular alcove, which is brain insisted was just proof that he was on a time limit otherwise the dungeon would have let him fill every single alcove with new mutations, showed him that the dungeon wanted something specific. Something that he, and most likely he alone, would be able to make.

  The lights on the wall, as well as the size of the area where the alcove was located, told him it had to be a mutation. It had to be a tier two of a mutation at a maximum as well, as a third tier mutated sample would be far too large and cumbersome to get to the back of the cornucopia. Unless, of course, the dungeon was expecting him to get another [Critical Success].

  Merrick didn’t think that possible, however, considering the GTR modifier seemed to reset upon the first [Critical Success]. Unless there were hidden positive modifiers like the negative ones he was convinced existed, that wouldn’t be possible. Merrick didn’t think there would be, though. Something in his gut told him that what he could see is what he had to work with when it came to bonus potential modifiers.

  Scanning through his notes, he stalled on a quickly jotted entry. The mulberry mint hadn’t been there when he started and had only appeared after he started placing the [Critical Success] results in alcoves. Perhaps that was a hint, though he’d assumed the dungeon only wanted him to be able to continue using his skill.

  Annoyingly, Merrick didn’t think he’d be able to [[Merge]] a [Critical Success] for the mint in short order. He’d just about run into the limit of his stimulant abuse as far as his rejuvenation potion and the mulberry mint itself went. Unless, he thought to himself, he was able to make a new potion on the fly.

  Merrick’s eyes darted across his notes, jumping to the section where he’d notated what dusts were yielded from each plant. Luckily, with little else to do with his time for the last two years he’d managed to identify some repeating patterns when it came to making potions and the dungeon had provided him quality alchemy equipment to use.

  Merrick knew from past experience that his potions were relatively weaker than their traditional counterparts when compared, at least for the ones that had traditional counterparts. It was one of the reasons he didn’t try to sell healing potions or even his rejuvenation potions, there were better products on the market. He made those for personal use only.

  He also knew from experimenting that he could augment the performance of specific potions with complementary ingredients. That was a relatively newer discovery, however. For the first year and a half he’d tried to amplify his potions he’d been met with failure after failure and had almost been convinced that his dusts weren’t compatible with traditional alchemical recipes. It was only after an accidently success when he was rotating through brute force experiments that he’d been able to perform some reverse engineering and figure out what he’d been doing wrong.

  When adding complementary ingredients, he realized they couldn’t dust to exact same ingredients as the potion he was making. If he was using Vita and Mox dusts, for example, the ingredient he added need to share at least one of those attributes as well as another that wasn’t included in the dust. Of course, that didn’t work all the time either.

  The real breakthrough had happened only two months prior, and the potions he’d produced with the knowledge were what secured him his ticket west. He needed to use another reagent that produced dusts that were counteractive to the shared element in the ingredient as well as seemingly random.

  He said seemingly because he knew there was a relationship between the antithetical dusts and the ingredients, he just didn’t know what the names for the various dusts meant so he wasn’t able to pinpoint what the connection was. If the additional ingredient was a sweet fruit like a peach, he’d start by using a bitter fruit or if that didn’t work, a sour fruit.

  He was thankful that the mulberry mint seemed to share two out of three dust components with his known rejuvenation potion recipe, which meant it’d be a match to make an enhanced product. He’d not experimented with mint before, but he did have a few various flavors around and only a couple of them matched the anti-pairings he’d established. He decided to follow his gut and grab what he thought to be the closest opposite to the fresh minty flavors of the mulberry mint.

  If the pepper didn’t work, he’d attempt to use the potato-like tuber. He was thankful for the abundant resources he had around him, he’d get to the answer one way or the other.

  The finish line was still in sight and he’d discovered his marathon was actually a sprint, so it was time to get running.