Jien opened his eyes to see his room, just as it had been while he had begun to meditate. The time spent in the Mindscape had felt like hours spent slowly dissecting what he had imprinted on his mind to break it out into sub categories to his satisfaction. This in itself wasn't as easy as it sounded. Some topics could be easily broken down, much like the three guides that were gifted to him by Runa. The other pieces of information such as his summarizations of the history books however, were much more of a grey area in terms of breaking them up into subcategories. This was especially the case for periods between different eras.
This is all to say that Jien felt like he had spent what had to be seven hours sorting through everything, and yet there was no sunlight starting to drift in through his windows, there were no sounds of the manor's staff preparing for the day ahead. Runa hadn't come to disturb him despite the fact that he would have been meditating past the time that he would on average prepare and head out for his training. Nothing seemed to make sense in the slightest.
Jien stood up from his lotus position and stretched with a yawn. He didn't feel rested at all either. It was as if he had spent an all-nighter and was about to go back to work. This didn't bother him particularly though as he was used to the concept of late nights and maximizing short rests when necessary.
However, when he looked to the clock that was ticking away on his desk that he noticed that only an hour had actually passed in the outside world. To this Jien had absolutely no idea what to think. At this point the only thought that crossed his mind was relief that he could actually sleep before he would have to return to training. With that thought in mind he walked over to his bed and laid down, falling into a deep slumber as soon as his face touched the cool fabric of the pillow.
The next morning Jien awoke refreshed, in fact he felt so fresh and his thoughts running so smoothly he wondered if perhaps his previous nights work helped him more than he originally thought. He, unfortunately didn't have time to think it over that thoroughly at the moment. He scrambled to get ready for his daily training, donning his training clothes that now included a heavy chain mail shirt as well as the weights on his wrists and ankles and the bracelets to restrict his mana. At this point he had gotten so used to this type of training that he didn't even realize how ridiculous this all was. Not many would choose to train a child with such brutal methods. Heck, the academy didn't even do this to their students in preparation to send them into battle, though they arguably had their own grueling training.
While Jien marched out of his room to gather his breakfast and then work at his training for the day, Runa was working on something to help Jien with his goals. It had been a while since Jien had read the alchemy guide the first time and came up with the idea of using Serpent Vine for his project regarding the fencing style. The issue was that Jien didn't have a sample of Serpent Vine to experiment with and it, while being fairly common wasn't so common as to show up in a city setting.
Runa had been working with Earl to procure a sample or two since they had heard about Jien's plan and they had finally found what they were looking for. There were many forests in the surrounding areas of Afrem City, though a bit distant. Runa had been searching these different forests for a young sapling of Serpent Vine while Jien was busy. She had finally found one and collected it for Jien to use. In fact she had been able to find a small number of them and collected all of them so that even if he failed in his first attempt he would not have to worry so much.
She had also collected a few other plants that had similar properties in the way of how they acted. Plants that were known for showing what could almost be mistaken for sentience. Though, arguably plants were sentient there were some that had habits closer to that of an animal than that of a plant. These tended to be magical plants and other than Serpent Vine, Runa had been lucky enough to be able to buy a live and whole magical mandrake. These were were a magical plant version of the average mandrake plant and often acted much more like mammals than plants. She hoped that even if they weren't useful to Jien now that they may be helpful later.
It was after dinner that same evening that Jien was presented with a number of potted plants by Runa and Earl. At first Jien was confused because he didn't remember ever mentioning a need for live plants. This changed when he recognized that four of the plants had Serpent Vine saplings of less than a foot in length each. He immediately knew that they must have heard about his plans for the fencing style and moved to help him.
He carefully collected the different plants with a smile and brought them to his room. He paid special attention to the Serpent Vine saplings, after all, though they were still young they still had the poison thorns of the full grown version. In fact if one wasn't paying attention one could mistake it for a colorful spiked whip like what the bandit leader had used. It was green in color and it's small curved thorns were almost crimson in color.
Once Jien had finally finished bringing the plants to his room he looked over each of them. There were three specific types of plants, once was the Serpent Vines, the next was the magical mandrake, and the final was known as Creeping Moss. Though it didn't necessarily act like an animal in it's behavior the fact that it would move almost like a swarm of insects and consume living beings in it's path made Runa feel that perhaps it would have some use to Jien at some point.
As Jien sat with the plants in front of him at just enough distance that they would ne unable to do him any harm he began thinking about the first step in his plan. How would he use alchemy to improve these plants and make them what he needed them to be. From this thought process there was one answer that came to mind, though only referenced with a short chapter in the alchemy guide. The answer was splicing.