A Jaded Life

“Fascinating,” I couldn’t help but mutter, as my eyes scanned the strange plant Luna and Alex had made. It was unlike anything I had ever seen before, both from a purely optical point of view and on a deeper, arcane level. Sure, there were plants I had never seen before, I was hardly a gardener or botanist, but the deep, almost light-absorbently black petals with silvery teardrops decorating them, just didn’t seem natural to me. What’s more, the seeds sitting in the middle of the blossom had the same, deeply crimson shade of red I recognised from my Blood Magic and when I looked very closely, I could see a faint pulsing within them, only strengthening the association in my mind.

Similarly, the view with my magical sight was something to behold. The blossom was, as expected, deeply infused with Darkness Magic, while the teardrop marks were something distinctly different, a flavour of magic I only knew from observation, not personal experience. The marks were made by Lady Hecate’s magic, though how a plant could have something artificial like that was beyond me. Divine Magic wasn’t something that existed in nature, it only came from the associated deity, so either the plant was somehow blessed by Lady Hecate or the marks would eventually fade when the power originally bestowed from Luna ran out. The seeds, as their colour indicated, were filled with Blood Magic and a part of me was curious what would happen if we planted one of them, would we get some sort of blood plant or something entirely different?

Lastly, there was the stem with a few leaves I had ignored so far. It didn’t look like anything special visually, just a green flower stem and some green leaves, about as interesting as any other plant out there, which is to say not really. The blossom was where the action was concentrated, or so I thought. Now, with my magical sight, I could see that the stem was, quite literally, the foundation keeping the entire thing together, it was filled with Life Magic, strong enough to balance the fairly dangerous magical aspects of the blossom and making the entire thing viable.

Out of curiosity, I used Observe on the plant but didn’t get a result, however, when I used Identify, I learned that the thing was called an Umbral Tulip, not that the name told me a whole lot. Well, it told me that the thing was viable enough to be recognised by the System, something normally reserved for things that were made to be permanent, not some temporary constructs. The distinction was fairly fascinating, but also greatly influenced by the intent of the object’s maker, otherwise, there’d be little difference between some of my conjured Icicles, made to last only as long as it took them to strike an enemy, and the Frozen Shuttles I had created shortly after the Change and maintained ever since. The initial creation was similar and yet, the Shuttles had received their label right after their creation. Maybe it was due to the difference in effort but who knew with something as obscure as the system, by now, I was simply accepting that the system had its rules and figuring them out would be a long-term task, if not the task of a lifetime. Or an impossibility in its own right, i hadn’t ruled that one out, but it wouldn’t stop me from trying, once I had the time and leisure to pursue such a project.

“Truly fascinating,” I repeated my earlier statement, now looking at Luna and Alex, both looking pleased and proud of themselves. “Might I ask what you were seeking to accomplish?”

“Well, I noticed that the dust that remained after we tried to restore the Vampire was still infused with power. So I wanted to see if I could use that power, especially as I could feel some of Lady Hecate’s power in there, too. Not something you want to let go to waste, right?” Luna started and I could only nod in return, everything I had learned told me that divine power was something the deities only gave out sparingly unless they sought to accomplish something big.

“Alex helped me to mix the dust with the soil, so the power within the dust could be absorbed and then, I tried to grow a flower inside, a tulip as you can likely guess. Turned out quite differently from everything I have done before,” she explained, a wide grin on her face and for once, I had to agree. The flower was inherently different to anything she had created before, but I couldn’t really tell where that inherent difference stemmed from. It might be due to some special property of the dust, the stuff had been created in fairly arcane circumstances after all, or it might be due to some other reason. The process used by Alex was a possible reason, the sheer amount of power, maybe even something inherent to the earth they used, there were countless possibilities and I wanted to know more. After all, if she could create something living like this, wouldn’t that mean that she was getting close to reaching a ‘Mastery over Life’?

“We’ll have to experiment some more,” I suggested, already trying to come up with ways to prove or disprove factors that had influenced the creation of this tulip. especially if it was something that desperately needed the power of Lady Hecate or if that was just a coincidence in this particular case. Additionally, I really wanted to see if there was a possibility of growing something more complex than a plant from its seed, something like an animal. Something like a tulip would normally grow in a few months, but what about something that took years to grow? Something like a tree, or, once we understood more about the process, an animal and ultimately a humanoid body.

How much of animal behaviour was trained by their parents and how much of it was inherent? I had no real idea, I knew that some animals never received training from their parents, be it because the parents simply laid their eggs and left the rest up to chance or because the parents didn’t survive the birthing process, in either case, the animal’s behaviour had to be entirely inherent, shaped only by environmental pressures. A similar question could be asked about people, a question asked by various writers and philosophers over the years, one I had even asked myself while growing up and having to learn what others could do instinctively.

So, what would happen if we could grow a body, would there be some form of rudimentary mind inside? Would it be the mind of an infant, essentially working with the mental capacities of an adult? Luna, in some ways, was a similar case, her body had matured rapidly thanks to her high level and attributes, but so had her mind, though that was at least in part due to Lady Hecate having her experience additional time and training in her sleep.

The mysteries of the mind might hold the answer to this particular conundrum. The mind needed time and experiences to mature, so maybe the answer was that somebody else had to help the newly formed mind, similar to the way Luna was trained and educated by Lady Hecate, some form of mental construct that allowed the forming mind to experience days and years in minutes and hours of actual time. For a moment, my mind went back to the capsules and their supposed time dilation, allowing the user to experience days within hours.

Wouldn’t that mature the mind at a pace equivalent to the experienced time, not the time their body spent lying in a capsule?

Nodding to myself, I made a mental note to find one of these capsules, there had to be a few out there, and I really wanted to learn more about them. Sadly, the one I had used had been buried in the Change, but there were others out there. Maybe they were destroyed now, or they might need some sort of divine connection to work, to say nothing about the difficulty of reverse engineering them. But even if I wasn’t able to wrest all their secrets from them, I was fairly confident that I would learn something, either in regards to Mind Magic or, maybe just as interesting, something regarding different dimensions and worlds.

Similar to the question about the Mind, what about the Soul? Looking at the tulip, I could see something fairly similar to what I had seen in other plants, but at the same time, I could see that there was something fundamentally different about this ‘soul’. It wasn’t as, well, spherical, looking more like a squashed ball. Curiously, the colours within the ‘soul’ didn’t quite match the elements I could see in the tulip, provoking even more questions. And requiring even more experiments.

“We’ll have to find a good way to get more Shattered,” I sighed, thinking back to my earlier considerations in regards to the necessary test subjects. Now, there was an even greater impetus and need for them but I hadn’t found a good answer. However, regardless of their morality, I knew that we needed to continue to expand our knowledge.