A few hours before noon the next day, Grimm and Shade returned from their brief vacation still wearing their spare grass golems like armor in animal forms. It was honestly kind of intimidating to be approached by their winged and serpentine bodies clad in grass polymer armor pieces to maintain their bodies for free. I considered letting them keep a core to maintain and use since it would break their usual habits of laziness.
Their primary grass golems had taken the form of thick fibrous nets to contain copious amounts of gutted and butchered meat wrapped in their hides or beds of matted feathers where applicable. If I could, I wanted to try to save and cure the wild fowl meat by sharply boiling it for a minute or two, quarter-pounding it, and hanging it high over a low fire.
Feeding the serpents right now was a primary goal but their next meals could be hunted on their own down the mountain.
Once their bellies had been filled with a variety of mammals, I set to work butchering birds and boiling small vats of water. This process entailed perfectly separating the meat from the bones and then cutting it into as many half-pound chunks of meat as possible. Three minutes of intense boiling later and they were strung out five feet above a large bed of hot rocks.
The rocks themselves were all about a thousand degrees and sustained by my magic as a form of exercise. I still had a long way to go before I could consider myself powerful near the level of my parents or the fire noble. My parents alone could pave the way for a Guild company of mages and mercenaries right up to the big boss.
I did not know if it was the close brush with a potentially foolish and short future of pursuing this issue or just me, but something made me miss my family right now.
In order to distract myself from these thoughts I busied myself with the mound of uprooted, dirty, and even slightly damaged plants that my wisps had brought back. There were over a dozen different plants here with healing aspects both for the mortal body and for magical energy. On top of this, even the rarest fungus came in a dozen large specimens while everything else came in greater numbers.
With these ingredients, the abundances of lower grade wild iramana flowers, and my previous stockpile in hand I was able to set to work resupplying my potions with alchemy and blessed mountain spring water. The water alone had potential magical properties greater than the waterfall at the valley where I first spawned wisps.
Now that the river passed through the area of an altar as well as directly under it, the water was insanely rich in healing and holy properties. Iramana tea made from just petals and water from the river would have the quantifiable affect of a low grade mana potion. Healing and mana potions made from this anointed mountain river would definitely be a grade or level better than others.
The first thing I did was start cleaning and separating parts of the herbs like roots, stems, flower heads, and leaves. Some of these parts had no uses or conflicting uses while getting dirt in the mix would just degrade everything. The last thing I wanted was to end up sipping something gritty that had spoiled my life-saving potion.
The most rare and exotic ingredients were what I worked on first, hoping to preserve their freshness and efficacy, the fungi my familiars brought back being top among them. Not only did they have potent mana accumulation from multiple sources in life, but the fungi was also a panacea for a variety of poisons and could even be used to treat winter diseases. Even boiling the fungi and drying it out to mix in a yarrow paste could be used on infected wounds.
With ingredients like these to work with, I had to remain self-conscious about about profits and preparation. Not only did I set aside enough yellow fungus sample to make several cures and tonics, I also set aside the root systems of two plants with similar properties as well as a bundle of nectar rich flowers. Just from these alone I could brew a couple dozen vials of poison and venom treatment as well as making a vaporous cream for respiratory troubles similar to Earth.
For now, though, I focused on making time-released potions and even some gels using… high grade keratin… and heavy magic support. Because of the fact my attempt of crude jello was entire an experiment, I only made two types for long-term healing and long-term mana regeneration. Both gels were transmuted into several 'candies' bearing three or four layers of restorative that would break down over time in the stomach.
The effect was estimated to last six hours per layer but the first layer would need around twenty minutes to kick into effect. The same for the mana candies. Because of the crude process of making edibles the affect of the candies was not strong. For me it only matched my natural regeneration time of roughly one percent in three or five seconds but even then that was roughly twenty hours doubled mana and physical regeneration.
With similar affects for healing that do not draw from the body's natural energy like common potions, either of these candies could be a staple in the training of young mages and warriors by the Guild and even the empire.
Gryn and his companions had already spent a few years on a carefully measured diet of magical foods to achieve the same effect naturally. If not, I would feel bad for having discovered it so late. However, I could still give him the recipe for it and plenty of… high grade keratin… and spend some time refining the process before monetizing the candies.
When I was finally done playing around and relaxed I put away all of my new stock of tall vials as well as products for Gryn and his team to put in their med-kits. All that I had left to do was make some final checks to my belongings, feed Sili the recent rock terror body, put together some expanded sacks of bribery material, and then pay my respects to the shrine.
At either end of the bridge I built small marble plaque stones that read some cheesy lines like, 'Shrine of Justice's Light', and then some explanations about the location and future troubles. There was even a bit about pilgrims being able to bond one of the serpents if they swore to the shrine they would one day fight the insects. If my estimates on tunnel integrity from all of those mineral deposits were right, the golems I had left barricading the tunnels would collapse the tunnels whenever they finally crumbled.
It could take a few years before the insects even reached their waste chamber again.
With that done, I gathered Sili and the youngest serpents of either type and left the steppe to ride my wisps down the mountain while Sili and the serpents swam. Because the water was flowing rapidly down the water, I had to lean forward and urge my wisps to spend mana on speed. Sili and the serpents had already left me behind by thirty yards within the first few seconds.
When my wisps finally got moving, through, I was soon racing forty or more miles down the uneven rocky slope surrounding the steeply angled river. Random pieces or piles of rubble aside, hovering on the ground was still safer than managing the water that was mostly foamy rapids with random pieces and piles as well.
Sili and the serpents handled the thousand-plus feet of steep fall wonderfully. Sili's tail and legs were long enough that she could stand in most parts of the water and her general awareness was strong enough to detect nearby obstacles in the water. The serpents were mostly long and light enough that they just spread across the surface of rapids and bounce off of one another.
Then again, both Sili and the young water terrors had experience hunting and fishing in these waters already.
After that first thousand feet slide from the altar the ground leveled out by about thirty degrees. Originally, this had been a secondary waterfall that had splashed out in all directions but over centuries carved itself a small steppe lake that fed behind the secondary waterfall. The lake was large and deep enough to safely deposit Sili and the torpedo-like serpents that came flying down from the falls.
A quick check showed that the several hundred feet wide lake was hundreds of years old with small boulders and copious amounts of gravel under the falls. Whatever did fall into the lake seemed to shatter on a pile of debris behind the fall. Everything that flew out and forward were relatively safe.
Originally this location was probably a veritable haven of sorts for the serpents but had gradually been fished out by their numbers already. There were a few more falls and a ravine between the waterway caverns and the river that lead to the fishing village. After a few months, though, the serpents would probably be living around the ravine and the insects would have dominated the caves.
In about four months the fishing village would have been swamped with hungry serpents. Few of them would be large enough to eat an adult but the water terrors were big enough to gang up on one and rip them apart. Their hunting methods had already shown the rock terrors how to survive on a minimalist diet before I even showed up.
Parts of people would have been more than enough for them at that point.
*