The Bloom of the Gravewyrm was not something you could find in a market. It was not listed in any guild compendium. Asking about it outright would paint a target on my back, either as a fool chasing fairy tales or as someone with dangerously specific, obscure knowledge. I needed a more subtle path.
Whitefall Town had three layers: the bustling guild-centered core, the residential ring, and the grimy underbelly that clung to the town's western edge near the old river docks—the Silt Warrens. It was there, according to rumors heard while mapping runoff tunnels, that one could find a man who knew things. A broker. They called him Silas the Listener.
Finding him was the first test.
I went at dusk, wearing a plain, hooded cloak purchased with some of my hard-earned silver. The Warrens were a maze of leaning shacks and narrow, refuse-choked alleys. The air smelled of stagnant water, cheap alcohol, and despair. My Fivefold Senses (F) were a curse here, amplifying every foul scent and whispered threat.
I'd learned the protocol from a drunken ex-adventurer in the guild tavern: "Find the rusted anchor at the dead-end by the tanner's yard. Scratch it three times with a copper coin. Wait."
I did as instructed, the screech of metal on metal unnervingly loud in the quiet alley. A slot I hadn't noticed slid open in a seemingly solid wooden wall.
"Coin first," a raspy voice said from the darkness within.
I slid two silver coins through the slot—double the rumored rate, to show seriousness. A moment later, a hidden door swung inward.
The room inside was small, windowless, and surprisingly clean. It was lined with shelves holding scroll cases, corked bottles of strange fluids, and odd curios. A single mana-lamp cast a warm glow on a desk, behind which sat a thin man with sharp eyes and fingers stained with ink. Silas.
"You're not from the Warrens," he stated, his gaze missing nothing. "Guild copper on your belt, but you move like you're expecting a knife in the dark. You have new money and old questions. Speak."
I kept my hood up. "I'm looking for information on a person. A bandit, likely operating on the northeastern borderlands, near the Dwarven passes."
"Name?"
"Unknown. But he has a... specialty. He uses decay. Rot. Necrotic magic, but crude. He's more thug than scholar."
Silas's eyes glinted. He pulled a ledger from a drawer. "Necromantic bandits are rare. The Holy Empire purges them zealously. The Church of Light pays well for such leads." His tone was probing.
"I'm not with the Church. I'm an alchemist's apprentice," I lied, gesturing vaguely to imply I was running an errand for a reclusive master. "My master believes this bandit may have come into possession of a certain... botanical specimen. A byproduct of his foul arts. We wish to acquire it for study."
"A flower that grows from death," Silas said softly, not looking up from his ledger. He turned a page. "There is a report, six months old, from a merchant caravan that was attacked near the Bleakstone Pass. Guards described the bandit leader as a hulking man whose touch rusted metal and withered shield straps. They called him 'Gorek the Blight'. He was last seen lairing in the Fungus Warrens, an old, collapsed Dwarven mining complex now overgrown with... unpleasant things."
My heart beat faster. The name was right. The location matched the novel's offhand mention. "What about his movements? Patterns? Strengths?"
Silas looked up. "That moves beyond general knowledge and into tactical intelligence. That is more expensive. And risky for me to possess."
I placed another five silver coins on the desk. It was nearly a quarter of my savings. Silas didn't touch them.
"Gorek is cautious," he said slowly. "He moves his base every few months, following the caravans. He has a band of thirty, mostly thugs, but three are said to be failed acolytes like him, with minor death magic. He is paranoid. Traps his territory with rot-wards and corporeal scavengers—reanimated beasts. His strength is estimated at high C-rank, possibly low B-rank in his domain. He is weak to concentrated fire and holy magic, both of which are in short supply on the border."
High C-rank. A whole tier above my E-. An impossible fight. But I didn't need to fight him. I needed to rob him, after he was dead. The novel said he was killed by a caravan guard. I needed to know when and where that would happen.
"What about his enemies? Has anyone notable been pursuing him?"
Silas gave a thin smile. "Now you ask the most dangerous question. Yes. The Ironwood Caravan Company has placed a substantial bounty. More interestingly, one of their newer caravan masters, a woman named Kaelen—no known relation to historical figures—has sworn a personal vendetta. Her brother was part of a guardsman unit Gorek annihilated. She is... determined. Some say skilled. She is due to lead a large, well-armed supply train through the Bleakstone Pass in approximately..." he consulted another scroll, "...seventeen months."
Seventeen months. The timeline aligned perfectly. In the novel, the guard who killed Gorek was a minor character who later joined a protagonist's party. That guard must be in Kaelen's employ.
This was the opportunity. I wouldn't confront Gorek. I would shadow Kaelen's caravan, wait for the battle, and in the chaos after Gorek's death, slip into his lair to retrieve the Bloom before anyone else knew it existed.
"The Fungus Warrens," I said. "Are there maps?"
Silas finally scooped up the five silver. "There are old Dwarven surveys. Useless for navigation now due to collapse and fungal overgrowth, but they show the original structure." He produced a yellowed scroll from a shelf. "This is a copy. Ten silver."
I paid, feeling my purse grow dangerously light. The scroll was crucial. It would show ventilation shafts, old ore chutes—ways in that weren't the main entrance.
I stood to leave. "One more thing," Silas said, his voice dropping. "A word of advice, 'apprentice'. The thing you seek... it is not just a flower. It is a heart, frozen in the moment between life and death. It sings a song that attracts both healers and necromancers. If you find it, do not linger. And do not let it hear your heart beat."
The warning was chilling. I nodded and slipped back into the foul alley, the precious scroll tucked inside my tunic.
My plan was set, but the scale of the challenge was now horrifyingly clear. In seventeen months, I needed to be strong enough to:
1. Travel alone to the dangerous borderlands.
2. Survive the environment and random monsters.
3. Skirt a battle between a high C-rank necro-bandit and a professional caravan guard company.
4. Navigate a trapped, monster-infested dungeon lair.
5. Secure a volatile, sentient-seeming artifact that reacted to life force.
My current E- rank with a few fancy tricks wouldn't cut it. I needed to accelerate my growth exponentially.
The answer lay in the third part of Kaelan's legacy—not just the theory, but the practical exercises. In the back of the journal, I'd found what he called "The Arborist's Drills": specific, brutal mana exercises designed to toughen channels, improve node integration speed, and increase mana density—the very "better clay" I needed.
One drill, "Rootbound Meditation," involved saturating a limb with mana until the channels were at the point of rupture, then using Plant Creation to forcibly reinforce them from the inside out. It was described as "excruciating" and "potentially crippling." It required a massive, readily available mana source and insane pain tolerance.
I looked at the Mana-Gathering Crystal on my table. I had the source.
I thought of the pain of my first, failed root. I had the tolerance.
And I had seventeen months.
That night, I began.
Sitting on the cold floor, I placed my right hand flat on the crystal. I opened my mana channels wide and let the crystal's power flood into my arm. It was like pouring a river into a garden hose. Pressure built immediately, a burning, swelling agony. My veins bulged, glowing green under the skin. Just before I felt the channels would tear, I screamed inwardly and activated Plant Creation (G) and Mana Channel Cultivation (F) in tandem.
I didn't create a plant outside. I used the skill's principle to treat my own mana-swollen tissues as the substrate. I forced the raging mana to crystallize into microscopic, fibrous structures along the channel walls—a desperate, internal grafting.
The pain was beyond anything I had felt. It was my body being rewritten from the inside. Sweat poured from me, mixing with tears of agony I refused to shed.
After an hour, I collapsed, my right arm numb and throbbing. But when I checked with Mana Eyes, the main channel in my forearm shone brighter, denser, and wider. Its capacity had increased by an estimated 5%. The node integration in my palm had jumped from 0.5% to 2%.
It was working. It was torture, but it was working.
I had found my method. The path to D-rank and beyond would not be gentle cultivation. It would be a series of self-inflicted, calculated atrocities upon my own soul, fueled by a dead man's crystal and guided by a dead man's notes.
I was no longer just gardening.
I was conducting frantic, desperate grafts on a tree that was still myself.