A quick glance at Merrick’s Status showed him that his potioneering had leveled up, which was only mildly surprising. He’d not leveled the skill in a while but he’d also not been making too many breakthroughs in his skill either, due to the high cost of reagents and difficulty sourcing them.

  “If anything was going to level me, this would have been it I guess.” Merrick looked down at the potion he’d just finished brewing. He’d actually managed to make what he was mentally calling a minty rejuvenation potion. He’d figure out a more trendy name if he ever needed to market a potion, but considering he was leaving the Steelhearth Stronghold as soon as possible, west-bound caravan or not, he didn’t see himself mass producing the concoction.

  Before drinking the potion he decided to collect all of the mulberry mint and placed it upon the desk to start working. He wasn’t sure what the potion’s effect would be yet and he didn’t want to risk wasting time collecting the mint if it was a restore-over-time effect. He’d had to redo his entire catalog the first time he’d figured out that was a possibility.

  Merrick picked the potion up and prepared to drink it before stalling, glass on lips, and setting it back down instead. He decided he needed to sort the mint first and try to put the individual leaves together with similar sized and shaped leaves. It’d be such a waste of possible RoT effects if he had to pick pairings out after drinking it.

  Twenty minutes later, he once again uncorked the vial containing the colorful green mixture that he hoped would have a positive effect on his drained resource pool. Merrick took a deep breath to center himself before imbibing the potion and caught a strong whiff of the smell, strangely not spicy or minty. It smelled a bit like the heavy air that he associated with the time shortly following a heavy rain. A dense air that pushes away the smell of the city, one that makes his lungs feel warm.

  With an eye twice, Merrick made sure his anti-toxin potion was within arms reach on the table, having been pulled out of his bandolier in advance.

  “I’m stalling.” Merrick’s eyes wandered away from the vial as he suppressed the voice in the back of his head screaming that he needed to hurry up. He’d had so many unfortunate experiences with testing his own potions that he’d developed somewhat of a trauma. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a very easy way to determine what the potion would do and his theories and pattern recognition could only take him so far.

  He stoppered the vial again and set it down.

  “I need to make sure that I actually grouped the mint correctly enough. The lighting here is too dim, I’m just going to [[Merge]] a large mulberry and bring it over. I need to make sure I’m merging efficiently so any time I spend here should make up for itself.” Merrick grabbed his newly emptied basket and wandered over to the rows of mulberry trees. There was a much larger mulberry tree in the same clearing as his desk but he couldn’t reach any of its branches and the trunk looked far too smooth to climb.

  Annoyingly, Merrick discovered that the mulberry trees were also not identical, much like the mulberry mint. Luckily, every other row of plants was a string of mulberry trees so he had plenty of samples to choose from. Once again, Merrick sent up a prayer to whichever god decided to encompass the concept of repetition into its domain. It truly was the king of all experimentation.

  Merrick couldn’t be too picky, of course. It was a well known fact that whatever magicka powered the mulberry’s glowing within the dungeon tended to fade over time. Inside the dungeon they’d last for an hour or two, but if removed from the dungeon they faded almost instantly becoming indistinguishable from a regular fruit.

  Luckily, Merrick didn’t intend to be too picky. Just a singular tier three berry should be large enough to put off a significant amount of light, fairly close to an oil lantern and less messy than dumping a pile of standard berries across the desk.

  Interestingly, Merrick discovered the mulberries were a few notches more difficult to [[Merge]] than the other plants in the dungeon. It wasn’t anywhere close to the mutated versions, but it was noticeably more draining, almost approaching the levels of a second tier merge. Or was it a third? He decided he’d need to dedicate more time to figuring out a proper naming convention for his skill’s output. Calling the base materials used in the first merge a tier one, and the results of the first merge a tier two didn’t really feel accurate to him.

  Regardless, merging the mulberries felt like they were a tier more difficult than they should be for each combination. After several failures along the way, due to the low SML Mod not always being compensated for by the GTR Mod, Merrick had made himself a tier 4 mulberry. It was a bit farther than he’d intended to go, but he couldn’t help but be fascinated by it.

  Each tier of the mulberry had not only changed in size, but also color and brightness. They’d gone from the warm yellow glow he was used to, to a bright orange coloration for Tier 2, burnt orange coloration for Tier 3, and a deep red for the fourth and final tier that he’d [[Merged]]. In some ways it reminded him of trying to merge the not-exactly-a-match peppers together. An unknown variable in his skill experimentation that should have left him anxious about his self-imposed deadline but only excited him more.

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  As much as Merrick wanted to keep going, he knew that he didn’t have time for it. Additionally, the excitement from the baffling behavior of the mulberry merges had him ready to experiment more. To do that, he had to consume the new potion but he felt like he was ready to do so now.

  Merrick carefully set the watermelon sized red mulberry down in a large mixing bowl that had been provided for him and let its cherry glow spread across the table. A quick look at the mulberry mint leaves confirmed to him what he already knew, he’d done as good a job matching them as he could without more precise equipment and much more time. As good as the ostentatious scale looked, it was a bit large for the micro-measurements he’d need to do if he wanted to get more accurate calculations.

  Merrick knocked down the potion before he could stop himself, managing to trick most of his brainpower to concentrate on the mulberry mint leaves while he snuck the cork off the vial. Realistically, it wasn’t possible to actually trick his own subconscious traumas like that but going through the motions helped. Somewhat of a placebo effect, he supposed.

  Instantly, Merrick’s entire being felt like it released all of its stress all at once. Like sitting in a hot bath after a hard day's labor, every muscle in his body untensed and a migraine he hadn’t even noticed sneak up on him vanished into the ether.

  Not only did he not feel any level of tolerance from the potion, despite the base potion being the same as a standard rejuvenation potion, but he also didn’t feel a single negative side effect. He idly wondered if he would even notice some of the… grosser side effects with a stomach that had been emptied due to fasting. Even the gooderberry he ate earlier had felt like it was converted directly into healing energy, leaving nothing in his stomach to be forcefully voided through his bowels.

  Interestingly, he almost felt like his unknown resource pool was overfilled after the potion. It was only slightly, and he almost certainly wouldn’t have noticed were it not for the numerous times he’d filled and drained whatever energy that his innate skill used to work its magic. But Merrick was almost certain that he was at least two percent over what was his maximum capacity. It felt significantly different than just having a larger fuel tank as well, he’d experienced growth before but this left him feeling bloated.

  “Starving and bloated, what a wild combo.” Merrick grumbled to himself. The wave of comfort he’d begun enjoying instantly took a backset to his discomfort. Not wanting to deal with it for too long, Merrick got to work.

  [Merge Successful. One Tier 2 Mulberry Mint Leaf merged. See More…]

  [Merge Successful. One Tier 2 Mulberry Mint Leaf merged. See More…]

  [Catastrophic Failure … See More…]

  [Merge Successful. One Tier 2 Mulberry Mint Leaf merged. See More…]

  [Catastrophic Failure … See More…]

  [Merge Failed. One Inferior Tier 3 Mulberry Mint Leaf merged.]

  [Catastrophic Failure … See More…]

  …

  [Critical Success! Merge successful. One T4* Mulberry Mint Leaf merged.]

  Merrick looked down at the fragile looking teal leaf in his hand and internally consulted the tiny sleep deprivation demon that had taken residence inside of his mind for his remaining time. It seemed to have given up yelling at him around the time he got sidetracked playing around with the mulberries. He wasn’t sure how he felt about the fact that he’d begun missing his aggressive subconscious but it certainly didn’t bode well for his survival odds if his dungeon-imposed isolation was to be a long term thing.

  His internal timer told him he probably had a little over an hour remaining until whatever impending doom he’d felt ramping up came crashing down on him. The voice almost felt like it was holding a grudge, but he was sure that was all in his head. No pun intended. Unless he could still blame the blood loss, of course.

  Thankful that he hadn’t cut it too close, Merrick gently picked the teal mint leaf off the table and prepared to go place it in the alcove. Considering he’d tried literally every other plant, he felt confident that he’d narrowly avoided whatever bad-end was coming for him. As he stood up, Merrick let his eyes linger on the mutated mulberry.

  “I should take this with me. It’s small enough to bring with me into the final segment and might help me see if there are any hints carved near the alcove. Plus, it’ll probably help mitigate the sudden light induced eye strain. I can only imagine that was where the migraine had come from.” Merrick scooped up the watermelon sized berry and carried it in his arm like a baby.

  He’d considered bringing it in the basket but decided against it due to the fact that he wouldn’t have much space to remove it and more than half the light would be blocked by the basket if he didn't. Thankfully, the membrane that contained the juices of the mulberry seemed to have thickened significantly during the merging process and felt almost as tough as leather now, so he didn’t have to worry about it getting popped or scraped open on the smooth floor of the cornucopia.

  Hopefully for the final time, Merrick crawled his way through the seventh segment of the cornucopia, slowly rolling the red mulberry in front of himself as he gingerly transported the mulberry mint. The red lighting managed to overpower the bright walls of the previous segments and colored the walls with rich tones that reminded him of the stubborn sunlight that forced its way through his cheap workshop curtains on the mornings he wanted to sleep in.

  With a smile, Merrick placed the teal leaf down on the alcove. He was still smiling when the leaf slowly drifted down seconds later, as if caught in an errant wind, and landed directly on his nose.