Chương 221: Chapter 200: Heart of Gold, Terms and Conditions Apply

[Time]: Autumn Semester, Day 2 — 2: 00 PM [Location]: West Campus · Yggdrasil Academy · The Grand Conservatory If Professor Heidi Lucent marked the world-ending ceiling of the academy's faculty, then Professor Cosette had staked out the exact opposite coordinate and, against every law of the local power hierarchy, become a legend standing on it.

Hathaway stood in the humid, oxygen-heavy air of the Grand Conservatory and ran a passive mana scan on the woman at the head of the class for the third time, on the working theory that her own retinas had developed a rounding error. Under three hundred M-Units. The figure pinging back off Cosette read weaker than Rory.

A legend of the botanical supply chain, standing here in a hand-knitted cardigan, tall and loose-limbed, her posture settled into the soft, unhurried slouch of a woman who had been sickly for so many decades she'd long since stopped bothering to sit up straight for it, was out-classed in raw mana by a baby. She had founded the [Cosette Botany Expert Award]. Her private library ran just shy of five million indexed volumes.

If you wanted to publish on A3-grade flora, breed a new medicinal moss, or so much as commercially farm a rare root anywhere in the Inner Sea, you first threaded a maze of patents her bloodline had held for generations and paid the toll on your way out. The student survival guides described her as a frail, gentle saint with a heart of pure gold and a moral compass fixed on true north.

"Botany is not one thing," Cosette said, her voice a soft, warm current that pulled forty-five students a collective inch forward to catch it.

"It is divided by who you are feeding. Were you Potion students, I would teach you to let a plant run feral, to make it fight its own soil, because that struggle is what wrings the volatile compounds out of it. But you are Alchemists." A gentle smile creased the corners of her eyes.

"Alchemy is the discipline of the leash. You do not want the whole wild animal. You isolate one trait, you bully it, and you refine it until it does the single thing you asked and nothing else at all. It is the difference between a wolf hunting a forest, and a hound bred across nine generations for one flawless nose."

She led them down a winding path of crushed white gravel, past pitcher plants the size of carriages and a stand of willows whose leaves chimed like struck glass when the artificial breeze moved through them, and stopped at a towering stalk. Hathaway leaned in. It had the rigid, segmented nodes of a bamboo shoot, but the drooping, clustered canopy belonged unarguably to a locust tree, and the outer skin carried the tender, faintly waxy sheen of fresh sugarcane.

Near the base, a patch of that skin had peeled back, and the interior underneath was a dense, geometric lattice of flawless blue crystal.

"Ah, my current favorite." Cosette reached out and stroked the crystalline fibers, the way another woman might stroke a cat.

"An entirely original species. Its formal designation is Aoyama Poaceae, Sophora-Leaf Thorny Bamboo Genus, Inner-Blue-Crystal Hollow-Rolled Wooden-Tube Bamboo." Did someone let a cat walk across the naming registry, Hathaway's linguistic processor managed, tripping over the string length.

"I have run expeditions through hundreds of folded spaces and alien sub-realms," Cosette went on, drifting into academic pride, "and the match rate for this particular flora sits at roughly 0. 03 percent." A low, impressed murmur went through the students. Match rate. Spawn probability across independent folded spaces. Hathaway's translation layer supplied the rest without being asked. A peach-flavored apple in some pocket dungeon pings seventy-six percent: standard procedural filler, worthless for precision work.

Nought-point-nought-three means the material barely exists in the master catalog. Legendary-tier drop.

"Its properties are lovely," Cosette continued, tapping the stalk.

"A false-hallucinogenic payload, a highly filterable reduction matrix, and a sap that is completely colorless and odorless. Perfectly harmless. Harmless to Witches, I should say." She tilted her head.

"A single drop in a mortal's cup would liquefy their nervous system where they sat. But for our purposes, entirely benign, and gloriously easy to grow." She clasped her hands behind her back and straightened her frail spine, and a fond warmth touched her face.

"Heidi and I found the original specimen together, on a joint expedition into the Gaia Space. The whole camp turned in for the night." She said it with no shame whatsoever.

"I slipped out, made a quiet trip home, filed the patent and the sole naming rights, and was back in my tent before anyone stirred." Hathaway stopped breathing. You picked the pocket of the Tenth Seat of the High Council over a copyright claim. The number ran cold down her spine. The woman who carpet-bombed our entire theoretical foundation this morning without lifting her voice. You robbed her, and you are narrating it to a room of sophomores like a fishing anecdote.

Cosette caught the horror climbing Hathaway's face and appeared to register, a half-second late, that publicly confessing to industrial espionage against a Grand Witch fell outside standard lecture practice. A faint pink dusted her cheeks. She coughed into her fist and pivoted with the practiced grace of a politician stepping over a live wire.

"A-anyway. I hauled a batch back to the lab and pulled an all-nighter with Sharon, that is Professor Curie, and Heidi. Confirmed it really is bamboo. Its resemblance to anything we'd previously catalogued began and ended with genus and family. We sacrificed five hundred mice to nail down its properties. Heidi, meanwhile, bound a resurrection stone to herself and downed half a cup in one go, which was how we confirmed it was harmless to Witches. That sped things along considerably."

Bind a resurrection stone to yourself and chug half a cup of an unidentified alien fluid. Hathaway's developer brain logged the data with a mixture of horror and profound respect. The research methodology of Witch scholars is aggressively simple: deploy straight to production and trust the auto-respawn if the server crashes.

She recalled skimming an article in the Inner Sea Academic Review on exactly this brand of madness: hardcore research Witches routinely modified their own digestive tracts into biological mass spectrometers, capable of swallowing an unknown variable and returning a full physiological impact report in real time, right down to the exact caloric count. The academic journals were packed to the margins with this kind of brute-force biological hacking.

Cosette plowed right past the casual mention of spending an extra life on a taste test.

"We steeped the crystal sap in high-proof spirit, and it stripped out every last one of the toxic aftereffects of the alcohol." Her eyes began, unmistakably, to sparkle. The frail botanist folded away, and what surfaced underneath was the grin of a veteran degenerate three drinks into a very good night.

"But. It is still alcohol. Do you understand what we made? Harmless Vodka. Fifty bottles in one sitting, a total blackout stupor, and three minutes later you wake with pristine liver function, no headache whatsoever, and you are cleared to begin again." Hathaway looked at the blue-crystal bamboo. An odorless, colorless, biologically undetectable agent that can simulate acute intoxication while filtering out the physical damage.

In any sane cosmology that was a flawless assassination tool, or the finest surgical anesthetic ever discovered. The three greatest minds of the civilization had unearthed it, held it up to the light, and reverse-engineered a loophole for consequence-free binge drinking. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. I love this species, her inner developer sighed. Their priorities are a structural disaster and I would die for them.

The tour moved on, into a shaded grotto where rows of massive rotting logs sat under localized humidity wards, each one furred with clusters of mushrooms that pulsed in bruised violet, sickly green, and pale gold.

"Fungi bleed their traits into one another," Cosette said, sliding back into effortless authority.

"These spores carry explosive, spectral, and restorative properties all at once. Harvest them wild and you brew a tonic that heals the wound and then detonates the spleen. To isolate a trait for alchemy, you change the bed it grows on. Explosive strains on petrified ironwood. Spectral on grave-ash. Restorative on weeping willow." For the next hour she gave it all away.

The academic warlord whose family taxed every leaf in the Inner Sea knelt in the mist and poured decades of proprietary cultivation data into forty-five second-year notebooks, holding back not one humidity coefficient, generous to the last decimal. A menace and an angel in the same cardigan, Hathaway thought, her quill flying, and this one stays two hours past the bell just to make sure you understood the mycelium.

[Time]: Autumn Semester, Day 3 — 10: 30 AM [Location]: West Campus · Yggdrasil Academy · The Grand Conservatory Cosette knelt in the loam at the base of the crystal bamboo, sinking her bare, slender fingers into the topsoil and parting it with a kind of reverence.

"The root structure lies to you," she said, brushing dirt from a mat of pale brown threads so dull they vanished against the earth.

"These are only the capillary feeders. To read the true architecture, you excavate roughly sixty centimeters down." She waved a hand and the soil folded open. Beneath the mundane brown filaments ran a subterranean lattice of thick, pulsing root, woven from deep violet and brilliant azure crystal, glowing with latent mana, anchoring the whole plant to the deep currents with the structural authority of a bank vault.

"Beautiful," she murmured, rising and dusting her knees.

"Now. The final subject of the week." She brought them to a warded alcove at the back of the Conservatory, where the temperature dropped a noticeable degree and the air thickened. Alone at the center of a raised bed of unusually dark, wet-looking soil grew a single flower. It wore the layered velvet architecture of a rose, but its petals were a deep, light-eating obsidian, and it radiated an ominous, cloying gorgeousness that set Hathaway's threat detection pinging on a slow, steady loop.

Cosette stopped three feet short of the planter, and every trace of warmth drained out of her face.

"Ward yourselves. Now." Forty-five personal defenses snapped up at once. Hathaway layered a kinetic shell over an atmospheric filter. Beside her, Victoria's ambient mana hardened into a clean, geometric shield without so much as a gesture.

"The thorns and the scent of this specimen carry a necrotic toxin," Cosette said, her sweetness stripped down to bare clinical steel.

"A breached skin, a single unfiltered breath, and your heart stops in three seconds. There is no antidote. Verify your seals." Hathaway verified hers twice. Cosette knelt at the dark bed and began to dig. The soil here came away heavier, deeper, threaded with a low reek of copper and rot. A pale shape surfaced under her hands. Then a shoulder. Then a face. Buried to the neck beneath the black rose, serving as its root-bed, was a humanoid creature.

A vassal servitor, emaciated, its grey skin drawn tight over the skull, its jaw clamped shut by thorny vines. Its eyes were open, bloodshot, and locked wide in a silent, bottomless agony, and the barbed roots of the rose plunged straight through its chest and into its heart, pulsing in slow rhythm as they drew blood and life force directly up into the stem. It was alive. From the look in its eyes, it had strong feelings about that.

Hathaway stared into the bloodshot, agonizing eyes, and something low and delighted stirred awake behind her sternum: the same purely professional satisfaction she'd once felt watching a damage number tick up exactly on schedule. Her mouth had already started to curve before she caught it, the first fraction of a small, private smile of pure aesthetic appreciation. Her developer brain flagged the emotional output a full second late. Error. Why am I enjoying this. The realization landed like a bucket of ice water.

The smile died before it finished forming. Her boots moved on their own, putting half a step of distance between her and the planter. Beside her, Victoria did not so much as blink. At the small sound of Hathaway's retreat, she turned her head a precise few degrees, slid her pale eyes sideways, and lifted a single silver eyebrow a millimeter, delivering a flat and devastatingly dry inquiry: What, exactly, are you doing. It is soil composition. Let her think it's squeamishness.

Heat went up the back of Hathaway's neck, for reasons that had nothing to do with the ones Victoria assumed. She stepped fully back into line and said nothing more. On her other side, Surtrina rolled her weight over and bumped a shoulder into her, quietly opening a hand's width of extra room at the rail, as though nothing at all had happened. Cosette laid a fingertip against the black petals with maternal tenderness.

"She is a terribly demanding girl," the professor sighed, her voice back to its soft lilt.

"Ordinary soil starves her. She needs a live, continuous supply of life force, steeped in the spiritual resonance of a deeply resentful soul, and the only efficient method is to graft the primary roots straight into the arterial system of a living servitor." She patted the dirt around the creature's throat.

"Sadly, the draw is fierce. Even a hardy one is spent inside a month, and the restocking is such a tedious little chore." In the front row, Spectra raised a pale hand, her gaze resting on the buried, twitching thing with the cool interest of a researcher over a petri dish.

"Professor. Does the servitor's taxonomy affect the yield? Would a beast-class host resonate the same?"

"An excellent question, Spectra." Cosette beamed, thumbing a fleck of dirt off her cheek.

"It does not. Any living creature will keep her fed, but humanoid biology yields a far richer despair. Their awareness of their own suffering acts as a multiplier on the pigment. Beasts simply lack the cognitive depth to grieve properly." Hathaway looked at the buried creature, and then at the sweet woman who had just handed the class the optimization curve for sentient torture. The Earth-born conscience never even put up a fight. Hathaway's logic engine ran the audit, cold and clean.

It just quietly expired somewhere between the Sun Volcano and her nineteenth birthday, and nobody sent flowers. She closed her eyes. One respectful second of silence, observed with all the sincerity of a crocodile dabbing at its eye during a funeral it had personally catered.

"This particular unit is at the end of its cycle," Cosette's voice went on, "so I will walk you through the transition graft. The arterial seam must be seamless, or the new host bleeds out before the loop stabilizes." Hathaway's eyes snapped open. Transition graft. Moral high ground was a luxury item. A2-grade practical methodology was a hard requirement, and it was being demonstrated exactly once.

She leaned in and locked her focus onto the surgery with the unblinking hunger of a developer watching the one build that mattered. Cosette worked with terrifying, microscopic precision. A flick of the wand severed the spent servitor from the network, the barbed roots clamped and held, and a fresh, thrashing host floated down into the pit on a golem's arms.

Her delicate fingers threaded the thorns into the new creature's jugular and aorta and sealed the graft with a low healing hex to keep the heart pumping through the shock. The dark soil went back over its chest until only the rose remained.

"Now." She clapped her hands, bright and pleased, surveying the impatient and the rapturous in even measure.

"Practical application. You each have a seedling and a host waiting at your stations." Hathaway walked to hers. On the steel table lay a sapling rose, roots twitching blindly at the air, and strapped beside it a servitor, awake, staring up at her with raw and total terror. It strained against the leather, working wet, frantic, meaningless sounds past the collar around its throat. Hathaway looked down at it, her face carved and unreadable. The servitor thrashed, rattling the table.

If you keep doing that while I align the taproot, her developer brain noted, cold and unhurried, I nick the subclavian instead of splicing it, the graft fails to take, and I lose points on the rubric. She raised one finger and put a blunt [Slumber] hex through the middle of its forehead. Its eyes rolled up and its struggling stopped, all at once, comfortably limp.

She picked up the silver scalpel, parted the skin of the throat, found the carotid, and began threading the barbed root into the vascular tract with slow, meticulous care, sealing each port behind her with a [Mending] hex to stop the leak. When the last root seated she lowered the host into its iron planter, took hold of the [Slumber], and dismissed it. The eyes came open somewhere around the second spadeful.

It worked out where it was very quickly, which was the point, and then it worked out that the roots already had its heart and that nothing below the collar was taking instructions any more. The soil went on in even layers, over the chest, over the shoulders, over the mouth, and the last of it to go under was the face. She checked the pulse under the dirt: steady, rhythmic, engaged. Ten minutes later she stripped off the bloodied gloves and stepped back to audit the seam. The taproot sat flush.

The soil was tamped clean. Overhead the rose lifted its obsidian petals toward the false sun, fat and glossy and freshly fed. Clean sutures. Flush vascular integration. Pigment loading on schedule. Her developer brain filed the result with the plain, uncomplicated pride of a first build that shipped without a single crash. For a first pass at live parasitic grafting, the technique is honestly tidy. She flicked a fleck of dirt off her sleeve and wandered over to see how Victoria's rose had turned out.