World Seed: Game Start (45 page)

Thankfully,
Arcane magic like this works mostly based on intention, since she
seemed to react to it positively. ’I am Arianne. You do not
look familiar… what species are you?’

I
looked myself over, thinking that was a very good question. ’I
guess you could call me an elf? I fell from the sky yesterday, and
you are the first person I’ve seen with… well…
legs.

Suddenly,
Celeste appeared at my wrist, looking between myself and Arianne as
the latter giggled from my comment. “Something wrong? You two
are just staring at each other…”

Looking
down to her, I was a bit surprised. “You can’t hear her?
Guess it’s not something shared in the link, sorry…”
Though I said that, there was really nothing I could do about that if
she couldn’t interpret the plant mana communication method.

“
Aww…”
She pouted cutely, making me smile. Meanwhile, Arianne just stared at
the holographic woman with wide yellow eyes.

’
You
have a wrist ghost.’ She said simply, seeming to misinterpret
what Celeste was.

’
Kind
of. She’s really nice, but she can’t speak like we are.
Are there more people like you around here?’

She
thought about it for a moment, and nodded. ’I am surrounded by
my family, above and below, day and night.’ With a wave of her
arms, she indicates the trees around her, making me sigh slightly.

’
Anyone
with legs?’ Legs were an important characteristic, in my mind.
They seemed to be a key difference between Arianne and the rest of
the jungle.

The
plant woman looked down to her legs, thinking, before shaking her
head. ’Not for several hours walk. It is not often that the
dryads meet, as they tend their own family.’

Ooh,
a dryad. ’Ahh, I see… well… can you ask your
family to not try to attack me?’

She
tilted her head curiously, though maintained the magical
communication. Perhaps it was thanks to my wings absorbing the mana,
but I was not running out of energy from this. ’Why would they
attack you?’

I
tried to think of a way to say this without either scaring her or
making her want to eat me. I’m not sure if dryads would eat
people like the trees do, but still… ’I am not of this
world. I fell from the sky in a metal pod, and then the ground opened
up and swallowed it. I have been attacked repeatedly since then,
until I learned to match my aura to that of this world.’

’
Ohh..
you are not plant-kin. Your ‘pod’ as you call it, likely
landed on grandfather. As for the others..’ She turned her head
away and seemed to be communicating with the trees. ’They
thought you were an invader, come to destroy us as others have
before.’

I
shook my head at that. ’No, I am simply waiting to be rescued.
Some time tomorrow, I will be pulled from this world and return to my
own.’

She
thought about it for a moment, and nodded. ’I understand. The
family shall continue watching you, Flanel, to ensure that you keep
your word.’

…
Flanel?
My name is not Flanel…. Oh well… not like we’d
meet again anyways. ’Thank you. It’s never good to think
that everything around you sees you as dinner..’

She
smiled slightly, looking to one of the nearby fruit trees. ’No,
it is not, is it?’

Okay,
I deserved that one. Pretty much any animal ever deserved that one.
’Is it alright if I gather some of the plants here? I am a
druid, you see…. or, you might not know that term… Some
call us guardians of nature?’

She
looked surprised at that, glancing to the trees again before looking
back to me. ’You may take what you wish, but only from those
without a will of their own.’ I nodded to her condition, having
no intention of putting intelligent plants in my grove.

’
If
possible… could I get you to help me? I am looking for plants
that can be used to produce medicines.’ Saying such, I plucked
a stalk of blood weed from my grove and materialized it in my hand.
’This is one such plant, although its effects are only of the
lowest grade.’ Well, even though I say that, I feel like it is
significantly more powerful than the ones I gathered on Hascion.

Again
she thought about it for a moment before nodding. ’I can help
you. I know the qualities of everyone in my family. Although I may
not be able to tell you their effects on your kind, I can show you
which ones possess a form of healing factor.’

With
that, she turned around and walked off. While following behind her, I
planted a could of the less deadly plants in my grove, which had
grown significantly since I started cultivating here. After I leave,
I should focus on gathering enough void mana to make the second
grove.

“
Where
are we going?” Celeste asks again, appearing from my wrist.

I
smiled down to her. “The nice dryad lady is going to help us
gather herbs.”

Celeste
pouted again. “You only like her because she’s naked.”

“
That
is entirely not true.” I casually rejected her claim. “I
like her because she’s naked and hasn’t tried to eat us.”

That
earned me a tiny giggle from Celeste, who quickly returned to her
fake pouting. After a moment though, she sighed and shook her head.
“You could probably take her with us, you know? There should be
room in the grove for her to hitch a ride.”

I
smirked bitterly, having already thought of that. “Something
tells me she wouldn’t enjoy the idea of leaving her ‘family’…”

“
Yeah…
probably right.” Celeste turned to watch as Arianne gently
picked a fairly common flower from near a tree, bringing it to me.

’
This
is known as a heartbroken rose. Its quality is similar to the one you
showed me before, though more powerful.’

I
gently took the flower, and swept over it with my Mana Sense. Indeed,
the medicinal parts of the aura felt much like the blood weed, though
more complex. Without wasting any time, I absorbed it into my grove,
planting it alongside the blood weed. It’s a good thing that I
managed to get 10% Plant Affinity, because I’m not sure if the
plants here would be able to survive suddenly being transplanted into
an area without dense plant mana. Likely, they’d be absorbing
it constantly, just like the bird had done when she cultivated wind
mana.

Through
all of this, I made sure to continue cycling earth and dark mana, and
eventually made the breakthrough in Earth Affinity to 10%. Like with
my Plant Affinity, it was now a constant thing in the background.
Though, instead of taking advantage of this to increase the speed of
cycling dark mana, I added wind to replace earth. Now I was
cultivating both Wind Affinity and Dark Affinity. Inwardly, I had
determined that before I started focusing on gathering new
affinities, I would at least train the primary seven all up to that
point.

Arianne
led me around to find several more herbs, all of which I either
placed in my inventory or in my grove. Surprisingly, she only gave me
one poisonous plant, and that was because it also had a strong
medicinal aura. From what I could tell, the pollen of this flower was
good for medicine, but the petals of it contained a strong poison.
According to Arianne, it would grab anything the touched its petals,
and hold them there until the poison was done. After that, the petals
extracted its life force and used it to produce more pollen.

Definitely
a plant going in the ‘second grove’. I thought as I
carefully placed it in my inventory. From there, Arianne led me to
get a total of two more plants, before she said that I had now
received all of the ‘healing plants’ in this family.

’
Thank
you very much, Arianne. I would try to compensate you in some way,
but I really don’t know what you would like?’ I smiled to
the naked green lady, and did my best to keep my little soldier from
saluting. It was a difficult task, let me tell you.

She
smiled gently to me, shaking her head. ’That is not needed. It
is good to have someone new to talk to, if even for only a short
time.’ She looked around discretely, and then sent a message in
a particularly quiet tone. ’The family is not usually very good
for conversation.’

I
laughed when I heard that, having to hold my stomach. Again, Celeste
appeared at my wrist. “Come on? What’s so funny?! Don’t
leave me out like this, man!”

“
Sorry,
sorry. You know I don’t mean to. How about this, once we get
rescued I’ll let you see my world for a little while?” I
smiled down to Celeste, who was quickly placated by the bribe.

“
Okay…
fine. But you better keep your promise!” She huffed out before
disappearing into the metal wristband again.

After
that, I decided to say goodbye to Arriane, who seemed somewhat
reluctant to part. Though, as she said before, it was merely because
she liked having someone to talk to. When I offered to let her come
with me, she firmly refused, saying that she would not leave her
family behind. Only if I could take her entire family would she come
with me. And naturally, my grove was not nearly big enough to
accommodate all of the plants she considered her family. Especially
that ‘grandfather’ that ate my pod… Though, now I
couldn’t help but seeing that massive hungry plant as an old
man shaking his cane at people and yelling for them to get off his
yard.

Chapter 41: Slime
Time

The
next few hours passed uneventfully, and I even managed to get Dark
Affinity to 10%! However, after that, I began seeing movement again
through the trees. Part of me thought that Arriane had come back for
some reason, and that part was rather happy for the chance to see the
naked plant lady. Of course, that part was located entirely in my
lower body.

Sadly
though, what I saw was not the movement of a beautiful dryad, but the
birth of a monster. Using my X-Ray Vision, combined with Zoom and
Aura Sight, I was able to watch as a particularly dense mass of plant
mana surged into a fallen seed on the ground. As it did so, the seed
thickened, becoming a round sphere similar to the Seed of Plants that
I could refine. Around the green pellet, the mana began to condense
in the form of a viscous liquid. It was at this point that I realized
the monster being birthed here was not a dryad, but a plant-based
slime.

With
interest, I watched the process until it was completed. I had never
seen a slime before, let alone seeing as it was formed. More and more
of the liquid mana poured in around the slime’s core, until it
had a diameter of a meter. At that point, it seemed to stop, the
slime sitting there with an occasional jiggle of its body.

Huh…
If that’s all it takes to form a slime, then druids should be
able to do so by liquefying a layer of mana around an element seed.
I’ll have to experiment with that later. If I can produce
slimes of my own, I could learn all of their special powers and add
them to my repertoire. Plus, if I can make them loyal, they’d
be an excellent bodyguard for my real body. I began thinking up plans
for the slimes as I watched the new one idle in the spot it had
appeared. From what I could see, it was not sentient by any means,
and was simply a mindless monster.

Shrugging
my shoulders, I got up and went over towards it. Navigating around
the trees that were in between us, it started moving as soon as I was
in sight. Though, its moving was to try and eat me, I think. It was
difficult to tell, because all it did was bubble hungrily and slowly
slither towards me. Okay… if I plan to make slime bodyguards,
I am going to have to make them better than this.

Seeing
that I could evade the slime simply by slowly walking, I watched it
for a little while. To my surprise, it had an acidic quality to it.
Any of the leaves or twigs it passed over dissolved almost
immediately. Naturally, I didn’t want to subject myself to
that. Thinking back to what I knew about slimes, their weaknesses in
games were traditionally magic and energy attacks, and they were all
but impervious to physical attacks.

Thankfully,
I had next to know physical attacks, aside from punching. And no, I
was not about to punch a slowly rolling ball of acid. I did, however,
want to do a few tests. Pulling my magic staff out of my inventory, I
focused on the seeds I had ‘planted’ in it. Using the
Seed of Void as a focus, I formed a field of void magic around the
slime. Instantly, its body dissolved, leaving the core lying in a
puddle of gooey acid. When I lifted this field, the slime slowly
began to reform itself, a process that took over a full minute to
complete.