Chương 25: Ghostbell

Alexandra stared at the field of white flowers before her. Few things looked more like a white flower than another white flower. Finding a Ghostbell here wouldn't be simple, if there even was one in the meadow. Just because there were a lot of white flowers didn't mean the cursed bearing one she needed was among them. Nevertheless, Alexandra was never the type to shy away from effort. She rolled up her sleeves and got to work categorizing the flowers.

If her memory served her right, Lara had explained that Ghostbells grew in clusters, so she eliminated all the lonely plants. But this was already more complicated than she expected. What was a cluster? A group of flowers. But where did it start? Did two flowers growing side by side count as a cluster? Three? What if they were close together, but with a visible gap? Let's be practical. Since she was no herbalist, Alexandra decided to follow her gut. If it felt like a cluster, it was a cluster.

Next, the flower was supposed to be low to the ground. Once again, it could mean a lot of things. She discarded the tallest stems without hesitation, but among the remaining plants, there was a range to their height that made it impossible to be certain. When she was done, she'd spotted six patches of flowers that fit her criteria. Two of them she suspected were of the same species, as they looked very similar, if not exactly the same.

"Okay…" She rubbed her nose, and sneezed. Her gloves were covered in pollen.

"Which one of you is a Ghostbell?" The flowers didn't answer. She scratched the back of her head. She could just pick all the flowers and return to Lanterned with them, but Lara had instructed her to collect the sap from the Ghostbell stems. It risked running dry by the time she reached home. She tapped her belt, checking that she hadn't forgotten her gourd. It wasn't empty. She drank the leftover water.

"Now, what do I do?" Returning home to ask Lara and running back here felt like a waste of time. The flowers were there, right under her nose. Surely one of them was a Ghostbell. She kneeled, bringing her eyes closer to her main suspect. It was a small flower, packed into a cluster of seven heads shaped like bells that hung from the stems. Bells. It was her best guess, but it wasn't a certainty. There were so many flowers in the plains, and many of them were bell-shaped.

She took a deep breath through the nose, letting the scent fill her nostrils. It smelled soft and floral. Like a flower. There was one way to find out, though she didn't like the sound of it either. Well, she didn't like the idea of someone else — Lara, in particular — finding out about it. She could do a taste test. Okay, sure, it was going to give her the curse of fragility. But it was almost nothing. Lara said so herself. Maybe not in such certain terms, but close enough.

Furthermore, she was doing all this to stack three curses onto herself, it made total sense to sample them individually first. This way, she could ascertain that her plan was safe.

"Completely reasonable." If only she had unlocked Basic Herbology. But it wasn't the time to get cold feet. Alexandra snapped one of the bell-shaped flowers at the stem, and brought it to her mouth.

"Cheers." She sucked a drop of sap from the broken stem. It was bitter. Less medicinal than the Aetherveil. Sweeter, too. The taste of chlorophyll was stronger. Flipping her journal, she landed on her status page. Nothing out of place. She didn't know if curses were going to show up there.

"I don't feel more fragile," she said.

"Maybe it takes time to activate." Then again, would she feel anything? Probably, right? A debuff in constitution should be noticeable. She grimaced. The aftertaste was burning her tongue. She shouldn't have finished her water so quickly. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

"I guess this one's a dud." Alexandra stood up, and moved to the next candidate. This one wasn't bell shaped, but it was certainly low to the ground. In fact, it was so low that the stems were buried underground. Did they still count as stems, or should she call them roots? She didn't know. In any case, it didn't change how she would act. With a swift twist of her wrist, she plucked a flower. Then, she snapped the exposed stem in half and drank a few drops of sap.

Earthy, probably because of the dirt she hadn't bothered washing. The sap was pungent, the taste—much stronger than the previous flower—reminded her of fish, and not the fresh kind. It filled her mouth, her throat, and went up to her nostrils. She shed a tear.

"Fuck." She gagged. Still no change in her status. This time, she did feel different. However, she wasn't sure if it was the curse activating, or the horrible taste of the sap leaving its mark on her. Hoping she wasn't doing that for nothing, she moved on to the third flower and repeated the same process, then the fourth. Both tasted horrible, but she still didn't think she was cursed. One way to find out how a curse would interact with her status would be to self-cast Inflict Weakness.

Naturally, Alexandra had thought of that solution. However, she wasn't keen on suffering the effect of that curse for nothing. In essence, it wouldn't change her course of action. She still needed to sample the sap of the suspected Ghostbells. The only difference was that she would bear the brunt of two curses instead of one. Her stomach gurgled. She ignored it.

"Let's just get this over with." The fifth and sixth flowers were, in her opinion, of the same species. She picked one at random, snapped the stem, and extracted a few drops of sap straight into her mouth. It was the mildest taste so far. She swallowed. This was the one. She knew it immediately as she felt something grasp her insides. She opened her journal. You are suffering from the curse of fragility. The exact constitution loss wasn't recorded on her status. Actually, she didn't even feel that bad.

Just a bit tired.

"Ah, yeah… Constitution." In any case, it was a success, and the curse should fade soon enough. She located more Ghostbells and gathered their sap in her gourd. Then she stood up. Her legs felt heavier than they should. Not painful, just resistant, like she was always going up a slope. She took a few experimental steps and decided it was manageable. She left the meadow and headed back toward the road. The plains stretched out around her, the same rolling pastels she'd been walking through for a week now.

It felt longer than that, but her streak counter wasn't lying. She scanned as she moved, looking for grey stems, the only recognizable sign of a Manfall flower. Lara had said they grew near rock outcroppings. There were no outcroppings near the road. She'd have to go further into the plains. She left the road again. The uneven ground was less forgiving with the curse active. She turned her ankle twice in the first ten minutes, catching herself both times, but the second one sent a sharp complaint up her achilles.

She slowed down. The plains offered rocks in abundance but outcroppings were different. She was looking for something substantial, a place where the ground broke open and stone pushed through. She crested a low rise and saw nothing but flowers to the horizon. She crested another and saw the same. She sat down on a patch of bare earth and caught her breath. The sun had moved. More than she'd expected. She'd been out here longer than it felt. Lara had warned her.

Manfalls were rare, and more difficult to spot than Ghostbells. In the sea of pastel, white was still standing out a little. Manfalls didn't have a set color. They could be blue, pink, yellow, and more. Only their stem was always grey, but looking for a single grey stem in the plains… It was more luck than anything. She decided to call it a day. She stood up. Her stomach moved. She stood very still. It passed. She started walking. Ten minutes later it came back, stronger.

A deep rolling cramp that started somewhere behind her navel and spread outward. She grunted, and pressed her hand flat against her stomach and kept moving. The road was visible in the distance. She aimed for it. Another cramp. She stopped, bent forward, breathed through it.

"Fucking flowers…" She started moving again. The ground tilted under her. No, that was her. She overcorrected, her weighted legs not responding the way she expected, and went down sideways into the grass. She caught herself on both hands, her right hand sinking into a patch of soft mud she hadn't seen. She stayed there for a moment, on her hands and knees, waiting for another cramp to pass. She got up. Her right hand was coated to the wrist. Her knee had found another patch. She looked down at herself.

Mira's trousers. The ones she'd borrowed this morning, clean from the lavoir. She winced.

"That's just mud. Should be easy to clean." She kept going. Running out of Lanterne had been fast, but she didn't have that ardor now. She walked. The road was long, sinuous, bending between the rolling flats of the plains. Her stomach kept reminding her of its plight. Sometimes a sharp burst of pain. Sometimes a memory she left on the roadside. The critters would take care of it. She wiped her hand on the grass as she walked. The Ghostbell sap was in her gourd. That was something.

One curse identified, harvested, ready to use when the time came. With Inflict Weakness, she just needed one more to go through the process of unlocking Life Curse. It would surely be one of the worst moments of her life, but she would cross that bridge when she got to it. She'd also leveled Sickle Mastery. Ran some distance, though the counter had reset. Done the laundry. It had been a productive day, objectively.

She looked down at Mira's trousers, reminding her that she still had to gather the dry laundry from the line. Objectively. She focused on the road, then on the rooftops of Lanterne appearing above the flower line in the distance. Now, how was she going to explain that to Lara?