Divinity Rescue Corps
130- Cure For What Ails You

Performing the instinctual spellcasting, which took a good ten minutes of casting, was sort of like exercise: it would tire me out and require an extended rest. Exhausted and out of both breath and mana, I’d be bent double with hands on knees.

In the middle of this, Vellenia showed up and cheerfully dragged me into the bedroom for a roll in the hay. I started to protest until I mentally slapped myself. What was I even thinking that for? If a young fairy and water creature wanted to help me relax and recover my mana and stamina through vigorous licking, sucking, back arching, penetration, moaning, groaning, cries of bliss and finally release, who was I to stop her? Luckily, Drive In Deeper gave me what I needed, including another Token to help replenish my stores.

After the thirty minutes of vigorous sexercise and the twenty-odd minutes of cuddling, I felt refreshed. More oil production ensued, along with cultivating all my odd flowers, herbs, and other plants.

We still needed black cherry wood pulp to lend the strength the cure would need to course through the large god’s… bloodstream? Gods didn’t work like organics like you and me… most Nakamamon didn’t even function like you or me. The black cherry wood pulp was necessary to fight through whatever divine immune system it had. That wasn’t the perfect comparison, because again the god didn’t work like you or I. However, it was too strong and would simply reject the cure without the hardwood to weaken it.

I briefly wondered what it would take to weaken a huge god’s immune system… petrified wood? I was glad I hadn’t worked on a huge one yet, or been subjected to its influence. The area affected by the God of Productivity was rather enormous, so it stood to reason that huge gods could blanket, what, a whole country-sized area? Something the size of France maybe?

As always, it depended on the god in question. The God of Footfalls had affected the whole HQ, though it was small.

I let my thoughts drift like this as I worked, tending to my plants. We had enough oil, and by the next day we’d have the bluegrass and the purple morpheus. Then, after drying, we’d commence with the soaking. Bluegrass in the oil, purple morpheus needed grinding.

The blue passionflower appeared the following day, lazily placed in my hand by none other than Drat. He still had that same look of utter disinterest verging on mild contempt, but I certainly detected some smug self-satisfaction.

“There we go,” he said.

“Any luck on the cherry?” Fletcher needed to chop down his cherry tree, George Washington style.

He arched an eyebrow. “How’s this?” He produced a chewed-on pit and grunted in amusement. 

It was definitely a cherry seed.

“That should work,” I said thoughtfully.

He snorted again, louder this time, before he straightened and stared at me. “What, you’re serious? How in the hell are you going to get hardwood out of that?”

Transmutation, followed by Verdant Rejuvenation, was the answer. The special ability mentioned ‘plants and cuttings’ planted and tended by me, and I hadn’t tried seeds yet, but I thought it would work. The other option was to send Tara on another away mission, something nobody wanted. Airaconda wasn’t a commercial jet, and took time getting places, then time getting back.

The check for Transmutation was practically identical to the one made for converting sundrinkers into oil. It was really hard, but I passed by the skin of my teeth.

Instinctual Casting (Transmutation) check:You are attempting a tier 2 Transmute Object spell. You have the Transmutation skill at level 1, Instinctual Casting at level 8, Mana Shaping at level 3, and Affinity at level 7. Since you have never cast a Transmutation spell and shaped mana only a handful of times, this check is Extreme, and requires 11 successes. Would you like to spend 11 Tokens for an automatic success?

Total Tokens: 6 Affinity and 7 Free Tokens.

I blew out a huge sigh. I didn’t think it would be possible to handle this with my current skill level, but I wanted to give it another try for the sake of compiling data on my success rate. Between Instinctual Casting, Mana Shaping, and my Affinity, which needed raising, I had 19 skill levels. Hopefully I would average 9 or 10 successes, with occasional spikes and troughs.

I was right… I only scored 7 successes this time. It was still higher than the 33% success rate I had had previously.

So I ended up spending a Token to retry the check, along with the 11 Tokens to succeed the check.

And by the gods, the Tokens did the job. A whole cascade of tinkling golden circles appeared, going cla-cling one after another in rapid order. They all had the same fairy on one side, and all of them puffed out of existence and into pure mana.

That pure mana directed my hands and the flow of my internal mana out into the seemingly impossible construct I was supposed to create in order to turn this regular cherry pit into a black cherry seed. The thing coalesced in a fraction of the time. I could barely track its formation as it drew my mana out of my belly button, and out of my third eye. I just managed to see how it split into four tendrils that all created the three dimensional construct. Those tendrils literally wove down in and around one another.

Hell with increasing my Affinity, I needed to boost my Ingenuity so I could handle splitting my attention a bunch of different ways at once. Right now I felt like it would take extra brains to handle this kind of task, and Fletcher currently had only the one.

When some minutes had flown by and my mana flowed away, I was left with a strange peanut shaped constructed that sucked my cherry pit from one side, through a funnel-like center, through to the other side. At the other end, it still appeared like a cherry seed, but much smaller and differently shaped.

“Let’s hope we can plant this bad boy.”

“I’ll do it!” Vellenia shouted, and grabbed it from my palm before racing off. One of the things she could do was act like a squirt gun, channeling her mana through her body to expel a forceful jet. She filled up the watering can, planted the seed, and passed it to me with the sweetest, most enormous grin on her noseless face.

I thanked her, watered the area, and spent some time with the other herbs and flowers in my garden.

“Now we wait,” Vellenia said.

We did not have to wait. 

Now, Verdant Rejuvenation helped plants and flowers to grow over the course of 24 hours. To maturity, in a single day. That meant we were getting a fully mature black cherry tree in a single day. These things could take decades to grow to full size; we’d be getting that in a matter of hours.

The shoot appeared in under a minute, and sprouted leaves in another two. It continued to lengthen and soon had a teensy trunk with dark gray bark in under ten minutes. It went from zero to five inches in about 10 minutes.

Naturally, this drew a crowd. Drat sauntered up to me. “That’s some hard wood you got there.”

I snorted. “Yeah, and it’s only going to get harder, thicker and longer.”

He peered around at the magical garden. “I didn’t think you’d actually be able to do it,” he told me.

“What? Why not?”

“Alan’s always complaining about how hard spells are to learn. He has to spend hours, or days, practicing all the hand motions and words and stuff.” He shrugged as if he didn’t care. “Anyway you just turned a seed into a different seed. No biggie. Not like you made a dragon out of nothing.”

“Right. Just a seed.” Just transforming one species into a different one, rearranging it at the level of DNA.

The sapling would soon double in size, and it would have a trunk and branches by the time evening came. But there was still a lot to do.

Vellenia reappeared, and wrapped herself around my arm and side. “Oh, Fletcher, how wonderful! Did you need another break? And afterwards a nice, relaxing nap?”

Do not look at Drat, I told myself. Do not.

“I’m okay,” I said, though I knew that wasn’t entirely true. I was down to a single Free Token, and needed all the Tokens I could get if I had a chance of synthesizing this cure successfully.

Thankfully I had more options when it came to regaining them.

We headed back to my house and laboratory, and spent the time separating out ingredients, placing them in bowls, drying out the ones that needed drying in the tiny heat room. This was where Larelle’s Magmamander normally lived. We could handle a whole lot of herbs and flowers at any given time, but they needed near constant supervision or else they’d eventually burn. The room had a sort of metal hammock for the creature, and we could raise and lower it while it slept. Which it basically did all the time.

The cure was coming together. This time tomorrow, we would be able to harvest the necessary amount of hardwood. With any luck, the girls would find the blue passionflower—

“Fletcher!” Regina came racing up. “Look at this.”

Tweedle Dee bounded up, his ears and tail full of blue passionflower. They had the same five-fingered greenish protrusions from the center, the same rings of color and white. Instead of purple, though, these were a light blue, like a cloudless sky. And also, they were enormous. The five flowers we saw were essentially the size of Tweedle Dee’s head.

“Okay hang on a second,” I said. “How… what… I don’t even know how to begin.”

“I showed him a picture from the clay tablet where you guys had the cure written down, and described it. He can grow almost any flower you can think of.”

“Umm… is it going to hurt if we clip those flowers to use in our cure?”

She froze, then turned. “Uhhhh… I don’t know.”

“You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could,” I said, smirking. “You never stopped to consider whether or not you should.”

She waved a hand. “Aww I think it’ll be okay.”

Well, I set up Mending Aura to handle any pain that Dee might feel. Indeed, the adorable fox with the flowers on his ears and tail yelped and turned a betrayed look on his bond mate, but quickly healed the tiny pinches of pain when she clipped the single flower we needed. It began to grow back under the influence of the healing aura.

“Okay,” I said. “If you don’t want us to take anymore flowers, it’ll take a couple of days to make cuttings and go from one flower to the amount we need.”

Regina wiped the threatening tears from her face. “What do you think, buddy? Can you be brave?”

All his fluffy tails wagged, and he put on a brave face.

“I think he can do it.” Regina said, sniffing. We couldn’t have done more than a single point of damage to the little guy, but she was acting like we were about to put him down. “Fletcher, can you… can you do it for me?”

Well, I certainly didn’t want to. Causing pain was not in my Healer wheelhouse.

No animals were harmed in the making of this cure. I also planted clippings from the blue passionflower and got them on the path toward growing for the next day. The black cherry still had a crowd of onlookers, including the little Shrubber-Nee! It inspected the cherry tree from all angles, literally putting its face inches from the ground and staring at the burgeoning root structure.

Achievement: cultivate over 100 plants

You really have become a cultivator, haven’t you? Using Verdant Rejuvenation, you have cultivated plants for use in cures and treatments over 100 times. Incredible!

Reward: +1 skill point

I spent the remainder of the day in meditation, regaining a good three Tokens. It felt good to sit in my garden and feel the mana of the earth flowing up into it, bolstering the plants to grow out of their natural environments.

The girls had been instructed to leave me to my business now, though Shakindria couldn’t help but interrupt several times in order to project dirty thoughts my way. Every once in awhile I’d get a mental moan of pleasure, along with a flash of Shakindria’s naked body pressed against me. A little mental pressure of her springy butt up against my abs and my thighs impacting against her hamstrings as I thrust up into her.

It was getting onto dinner time when she did the last one, and I grunted in annoyance.

“You need to quit that,” I said quietly.

It was just me, the Shrubber-Nee! and the cherry tree by now. The cherry tree that was at least fifteen feet tall, and probably taller by now. You know how traffic lights are way bigger than you imagine when you see someone working on them? It’s because distance and size gets really hard above a certain point.

The sentient bush had been pressing its face into different flowers and inhaling deeply, and when I spoke, it looked over and cocked its head curiously.

“Not you. You’re just fine.”

It stood up to its near-human height and ‘walked’ towards me. I also stood.

“Tomorrow I have to cut down this tree,” I told it, “but I’ll plant some more saplings to grow a couple of trees over the next few days. Do you like that idea?”

It bobbed its way toward me, created a couple of arms by twisting its vines up, and hugged me again. I chuckled, enjoying the weird feel of it, and its adorable mannerisms copied directly from watching us.

Over dinner, it was clear that Ivy hadn’t had a good day. She avoided eye contact and ate her dinner in silence, then cleaned up in a hurry and went off to start her watch.

With the god alive and drunkenly walking around, vomiting all over the town and damaging houses, we were working as fast as we could to get this cure going. And that meant we were working day and night. The shifts situation split the team in half, and that wasn’t awesome.

Trent was currently back at work raising the wall to keep out a god, slowly expanding it outward and filling up the hollow part from below. The God of Productivity had stumbled into it just a few hours ago and damaged it, putting him in a sour mood, but it was a war between being ticked off and being exhausted. Exhausted kept winning. Also, Alan was suffering. He’d had divinity poisoning for entirely too long. Cinzy now had the unenviable job of explaining that healing took time. They wanted to know why would couldn’t just steer the sick god out of their town and get them back to their lives. Cinzy was patiently explaining, again and again, that letting the God of Productivity roam the countryside was a bad idea.

That night, stopped by Regina’s house to tuck her into bed. It turned into a make out session, which turned into caressing and groping, and that turned into lubing her up with my saliva.

The higher my Affinity and skills got, the more I could taste mana on my partner’s body. Regina’s body had a floral scent and taste that I associated with springtime, warmth, and newfound post-winter freedom. Regina also had this habit of being extra appreciative at times like these, and vocal. She cried out my name while I got my enhanced tongue all up into her, and then when I got my enhanced girth spreading her lower lips.

She told me I was bigger than before, that I needed to keep doing that, yeah, that right there.

We enjoyed each other’s bodies a grand total of three rounds. Before the third one started, Shakindria entered the house and joined in the fun.

We all knew the situation with the ramped up difficulty and the Token expenditure difference by now. I’d briefed them on my evolution of primary class into Arcane Mender, and what Arcane Alchemy meant for Tokens. The only ones who didn’t know the full truth about my Token replenishing situation were the boys and Larelle. The task was to regain Tokens.

And though Cinzy was a little disappointed to learn it would cost me some 5 Tokens to manifest another me, she admitted she couldn’t be angry at missing out on something she’d only had the once. She would begrudgingly put up with satisfying me any time it was called for, with the full blessing of all six of the others.

This is Christopher about to get a whole lot of Tokens the very pleasurable way.