Chapter 486: Grow the cheese!

Chapter 486: Grow the cheese!

[Sixth symphony’s movements]

10% Maximum mana : A Graceful dream of Spring :

Temporarily increase natural health and stamina regeneration by 20%.

Prevents disease and illness.

Prevents food from spoiling.

Makes it easier to fall asleep.

May affect the weather.

20% Maximum mana : A Tense mystery of Autumn :

Greatly sharpens the senses.

Makes it easier to concentrate, understand and memorize.

40% Maximum mana : A Regal festival of Summer :

All physical stats are improved by 10%.

Airborne Mana is fluidified.

Channeling speed of all magic is doubled.

80% Maximum mana : A Vengeful tyranny of Winter :

All damage received by the caster is inflicted upon everyone else as soul damage.

May dramatically affect the weather.

So many more effects to keep track of... Couldn’t the skill have been simple for once?! And it’s not even a sustained cost like [Runeforged Overlord] so it’s not halved by the scepter.

Alright, well. The effects are decent. The summer movement is especially interesting. I wonder what fluidified airborne mana is supposed to do.

Let’s try these out.

Sofia activated the Spring movement, and a tenth of her mana instantly left her body. A calm melody started playing, composed of a few different instruments and even an ethereal and distant voice singing softly in a language Sofia did not understand, seemingly coming from all directions. Despite the sudden mana loss, Sofia felt invigorated by the music.

Mana : 4 520 014 / 5 022 238 (4 520 014)

Her mana was stuck at 90%, expelling some more into the air, she checked her regeneration, it was not impacted. Then she looked around, trying to see the mana movements producing the music, thinking that it was weird how it moved by itself.

Interesting how this... Hey!

“It’s another curse!” Bookie exclaimed in shock, saying out loud what Sofia also just realized.

“It sure looks like one,” Sofia agreed, “This one does not spread to our mana though, it doesn’t even get absorbed, I think.”

“It’s just passing through me,” Bookie observed, looking at his hands, “It feels a bit good, Sofia.”

Testing with some Pareth bones from her reserves, it did fuse just as usual, it just looked a bit weird as the opaque white bone melded with the slightly translucent golden bone.

The margin is already lit but I might as well still build with my own bones, golden is nice. The most crucial step is to make sure everything is strongly secured to the midenicite island. I’ll make it all one block of bone, and I guess I can drill holes into the island and insert bone rods in there to make sure it will never fall off...

Wasn’t there this thing about structural integrity, though?

Sofia looked inside of her storage ring.

Where did I put the architecture books... I knew this was a good buy.

Two weeks later, the castle’s main rooms were entirely furnished, in part by furniture Pareth had just made by himself with his own bones. Bookie had grabbed all of Sofia’s random stored metal and technological things, and spent his time ‘building things’ with the engineer skeleton. During this time Sofia had completely extended the castle grounds with a gigantic round bone platform spanning the entire radius of what used to be Zangdar city.

“Whew, that took a while.” Sofia finally stopped as she just finished fusing the last bit of bone to complete the platform. “I’ll make the guardrails later...”

She sat on the spot, legs dangling above the void.

“Still, though, what’s taking Alith so long...”

Bookie, can you send me the Plant hero?

Sofia stood with the plant Hero before a large bone plant box filled with crushed bones mixed with blood and water.

“Are you really certain none of the seeds I have will grow here?” Sofia asked again, but the skeleton shook his head again, showing Sofia the wheel of cheese he had picked out from her reserves of food. This was Exidian cheese she really liked, and she only had two small wheels left so she was a bit reluctant to let the skeleton experiment with it, seeing as she might be stuck in the margin for a while still. “So this cheese really is the only thing you can grow in the margin on my necromancer dirt... You- I... You know what, do it, I don’t even know anymore, you have my permission, grow the cheese.”

The plant hero pressed the cheese into a ball, then rolled it into a long log on the floor, before putting that on the gross soil. Then, with his two palms aimed at the thin log of cheese, he activated his magic.

Rapidly, a fuzzy orange layer grew all over the cheese log, and wart-like growth started emerging and growing up, these turned out to be tentacle-like orange mushrooms, each growing to about the length of a finger. With the skeleton’s magical prowess, the entire plant box was covered in orange mushrooms in just a few minutes.

“These are actually mushrooms, right?”

The skeleton nodded.

“They don’t look as bad as I feared when they started popping up. It’s a bit like... Thick orange grass? Do they do anything fancy?”

The Skeleton picked a mushroom from the lot and mimed eating it before holding it out for Sofia to grab.

“Oh. If it grows from cheese it does make sense that it’s edible.”

Sofia picked up the orange fungi and threw it into her mouth.

Hey! That’s actually really good! So this is where the aftertaste of the cheese comes from!

Sofia looked at the box of orange mushrooms with a look of newfound respect.

“I’m getting books on mushrooms next. Let’s make a few more planters of this to decorate a bit. It’s not much but that will have to do for now...”

Wait, no... I have another ‘Seed’ I could take care of now!

Pareth! Can you grab Bookie and come here?

Let’s raise our very own Dryad!