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The group quickly picked out as many of the required reagents as they could possibly carry. Meanwhile, Ghost kept watch of the sky to make sure that they weren\'t being watched by any flying hunters.

~I\'ll come back here with a cart or something. There might be other useful herbs, but it\'ll take some experimenting to find out which ones will be worth it,~ Lucius thought to himself as the group prepared to leave.

"Did your kind ever consider growing these flowers close by your dwellings? Or do they have specific soil requirements? " Lucius asked as they began making their way back to the camp.

"Soil requirements? I don\'t know about that, but whatever you\'re trying won\'t work close to the Dark Forest," the shroom explained.

"I see," Lucius whispered.

"And why is it that flowers like these don\'t grow close to the Dark Forest?" Pagan asked, struggling with the large bundle of herbs that he was currently carrying.

"I don\'t know, it\'s just the way things are," the shroom replied after some thought.

Once they got back to the camp, Lucius set aside a few of the flowers to attempt growing them later, before bringing the arachnid corpse to the ground.

"So let\'s begin the purification process," he announced. It was now a little past mid-noon, so there was still enough time to get both the purification process and photosynthesis done.

"We need water," the shroom replied, attempting to pick the arachnid corpse up.

"Ah, the river," Lucius realized before helping him pick it up.

"No, we need special water. We\'re taking this to a spring a little past where we just were. Oh, and she\'ll have to remain. The creatures that lurk there won\'t take too kindly to an obvious prey creature," the shroom said.

"That\'s quite far away, we\'ll have to be careful moving this around then," Lucius whispered.

"Not necessarily. This flower-" the shroom said, picking out a blue flower from the herbs pile, "masks the scent of meat. It should be enough to prevent others from tracking us. Besides, it wreaks of poison, and there aren\'t many poison-loving hunters where we\'re going."

"Still, we left it out here for quite a bit. Better safe than sorry. Chop it up into smaller pieces, we\'ll hide some in a different location and use those flowers to mask its scent, while we take a few of the pieces for purification," Lucius ordered after some thought.

"Worst case, we dump the small pile we left with, and return here," he added.

The shroom quickly cut the arachnid into several pieces, and Lucius picked out a few chunks.

The shroom also picked out a few of the herbs they had collected and asked Lucius for something to carry some water in. Lucius quickly rushed to the camp and returned with a worm sack in hand, and the group began preparing to leave.

"Am I really staying?" Ghost asked, as if she had been waiting for this moment to speak.

"We can\'t take chances. You can join the leaflings on guard duty while we\'re gone," Lucius replied as the group was leaving.

"Oh, okay," Ghost sighed, before heading back to the camp.

*

The journey to the spring was arduous as they were constantly on their toes looking around for potential threats. After an hour of walking, they got back to the flower bed, and the shroom directed them past it.

After another hour of walking, the vegetation around them was becoming completely alien. Not just foreign, but extra-terrestrial in nature, or at least it appeared that way to Lucius.

It seemed like straight out of a sci-fi nature movie. The trees were now pale white, and incredibly thin. So thin in fact, that Lucius at his miniature size was thicker than a few of them.

The vines that once formed a curtain now formed an actual blanket, but that was beside the point. They now shone with a lavender glow and seemed to be made of some sort of see-through substance, periodically letting our bursts of dim light.

The flowers had completely changed in appearance as well, they were smaller but more complex. Their petals were cut into unnatural geometric shapes, that seemed to change depending on the angle Lucius viewed them.

Not to mention that the once slight tug he felt from the ground was now a full-on pull, making it feel like there was a line connecting him directly to the earth.

"Interesting... is stuff like this normal?" Lucius whispered, feeling completely out of it as he passed by a bush of what looked like crystal flowers.

"Eh? What do you mean?" the shroom asked, still directing them forward.

"You can\'t tell? Everything seems like it\'s from a completely different world," he said after. The difference in appearance between the section of the forest they lived in and this one was too vast. It was as if they had grown in completely different climates.

"That\'s just the way things are. The further away-"

"I get that. But a solid explanation would go a long way right about now. Does it have to do with magic?" ~Or are the climates of this world just that much different from Earth?~ He thought inwardly.

"Lighted One, Look," Pagan said, pointing to the sky.

The trees here had see-through crystalline leaves that created a sort of rainbow-like kaleidoscope effect, making it look like the sky was multi-colored.

Above it, were the shadows of massive creatures, with several pairs of wings zipping through the sky. Lucius wasn\'t sure whether this was his imagination or not, but he could hear their low-pitch calls, like whales singing in the ocean.

"Let\'s hurry up. I have a bad feeling about this place," he whispered, hastening the pace they were walking at.

After about another 30 minutes of travel, a body of water came into view. It was so perfectly clear that it acted like a mirror, creating a sort of mirage that made it look like there was a whole other world in the water.

"So do we just dunk it in here?" Pagan asked as he stood at the edge of the spring.

"Step away from there," the shroom warned, pulling Pagan back. "Creatures lurk in the water as well,"

"There are a few streams that my clan usually used, it\'s down this way," the shroom said, before directing them a little further up the spring. There they found a whole host of creatures, and instantly Lucius\'s body tensed.

"Pagan, don\'t," he said almost immediately, realizing that he wasn\'t the only one alarmed.

"Oi, are you sure this is safe?" he asked, turning to the shroom.

"I never said it was safe. But most creatures wouldn\'t start fights out in the open unless they are certain they can walk away unscathed. There are others counting on someone making the mistake of getting hurt in a failed attack," the shroom said, gesturing towards the top of the trees.

Lucius could just barely make it out, but he saw several figures sitting atop the highest branches of the needle-like trees. Watching like gargoyles, perfectly still.

As the group proceeded to the stream, Lucius was already running through the different ways he could react in a hostile situation. Marking out enemies, and positions he would retreat to if things got messy.