Wizard: Starting With Synthesized Gems

Locke summoned a Full Moon Growth, reflected the collective consciousness resonance of the Dune People, and through magical amplification, focused it onto a single person. He looked at the Dune Person on the rock and found... there was no change whatsoever.

Locke promptly used the moonlight to deliver a trace of Holy Spring Nectar potion, diluted a thousandfold, into the Dune Person's body. Only then did he prevent the man from dying.

Locke said, "I miscalculated. My collective consciousness resonance evolution hypothesis was immediately disproven by me. I captured the echo of these Dune People's telepathy and was indeed able to capture those needs that arose from the drive to survive, projecting those thoughts onto this Dune Person, but it failed."

"There was absolutely no change. This means the hypothesis I proposed earlier was wrong."

Locke was unconcerned. Proposing a hypothesis and immediately disproving it was just part of the process.

Even if the Full Moon Growth he had just used had successfully accelerated the evolution of the Dune People, he would still have needed to determine whether a separate group of Dune People without the Stone Spirit belief would have shown similar evolutionary changes.

Locke thought, "My reasoning just now was indeed a bit outlandish. Wanting to evolve, and then simply evolving? Thinking it through carefully, that's really quite absurd."

"Alright. I may have been led astray by the ritualistic elements of these Dune People. This ritual of theirs is simply a product of their own lack of deeper understanding, a result of their having no choice but to follow a path of dependency."

Locke walked around the rock and immediately furrowed his brow. Growing all around the rock were many tiny fern plants, all of which had horizontally growing, fleshy rhizomes.

He plucked one of them, held it under his nose, and sniffed it, while furrowing his brow at the same time.

As a potion master approaching the Second Circle, he immediately recognized that this ordinary plant contained several components that played a decisive role in the physical changes undergone by mortals.

"I may have guessed wrong earlier."

Locke thought, "Collective consciousness resonance may exist, but perhaps it does not act on the Dune People's own bodies. Perhaps it acts on these plants."

"Animals and plants are two sides of the same coin in nature, intimately connected. Perhaps it is not the biological will of the collective consciousness resonance that causes a living organism to evolve."

"That is baseless speculation."

"The leap is far too great. What if plants themselves had some kind of mechanism that allowed them to receive the desires of the animals in their environment and undergo a corresponding change, in order to help those animals survive?"

Locke put forward his second hypothesis. "The Dune People's rudimentary telepathic ability then amplified this effect."

"Ordinary life forms may lack the capacity for communication, or lack sustained and intense enough emotion, to cause plants to produce a corresponding change within a relatively short period of time."

"In botany, there are already many documented phenomena of magical plants interacting with animals, forming co-evolution through the exchange of sound and natural magical force components. It's just that the plants of the Dune Plane are only ordinary plants, and most importantly, there seems to be some kind of mechanism that accelerates the evolutionary speed."

He was genuinely interested in this on its own terms.

But it was also possible this would turn out to be a false alarm. If it was simply a matter of plants affecting the human body, that would be nothing remarkable.

Because the relationship between plants and animals was a well-established topic.

Early potion science, and what is now herbalism, was specifically dedicated to extracting special components from magical plants to produce certain specific effects.

The key lay in the mechanism that might be capable of accelerating evolution, not in what changes the Dune People were undergoing.

Disproving this was simple enough.

Locke immediately used Full Moon Growth, shining it on a fern plant growing at the corner of the rock. At the same time, he refracted the collective consciousness resonance that had gathered from the Dune People during their ritual onto the fern plant.

Locke also used the First Circle spell, Rapid Growth, to urge the plant's growth along.

The fern plant went through a period of flourishing, then decline, scattered its spores, and finally withered rapidly.

"No change whatsoever. This idea is also wrong."

Locke furrowed his brow.

He walked into the natural caves where the Dune People lived and did indeed find some simple stone tools used to grind and mash the rolled leaves of fern plants.

"That Dune Person suffered from severe magical contamination. An ordinary mixture of mundane herbal plants would have absolutely no way of extending his life."

"So it can't simply be viewed as some basic application of herbalism. That would be completely absurd."

"Though if it were that easy to figure out, this phenomenon would have been common knowledge long ago." Locke crouched down, examined the types of fern leaves the Dune mortals had ground and mashed, and used an archaeology spell to reconstruct them in their original form.

"All common ordinary ferns."

"There is no way they could produce such remarkable effects. Unless these fern plants specifically evolved for the Dune People."

"And therefore have a special effect on the bloodline essence of the Dune People, helping their bloodline essence undergo corresponding changes. But I have already tried reflecting the demand echo that the Dune People formed through their telepathy and ritual toward these fern plants, and there was not a single corresponding change."

Locke fell into prolonged thought.

Either he would find a way to have the Dune People consume these plants and repeat the verification process, or he would think through the problem and directly reconstruct whatever mechanism allowed the Dune People to cause these fern plants to undergo a specific evolutionary change that accelerated their evolution.

"Could it be that the failure was simply due to insufficient time? No, that doesn't work. I already used Rapid Growth."

"The plant's growth cycle was compressed by me. These are only ordinary plants. I can easily make them flower and wither dozens of times within one second. Several cycles have already completed just now."

Locke thought, "Could it be that this line of thinking is also wrong?"

Setting everything else aside, just the bizarre vitality of that Dune Person was highly abnormal.

Either the Dune People were far tougher and more gifted than wizards had assumed, or there was definitely some mechanism at work here that had not yet been discovered.

"Could it be that it's not collective consciousness at all, but rather some kind of spiritual fusion?"

Locke blinked, then immediately dismissed the thought. "No, that's not right. The grafting cultivation method already involves grafting magical plants with magical creatures. When a magical plant absorbs the spiritual power of an animal, it tends to go berserk."

Locke looked at the rock being worshipped as a divine being. "Let me reverse my thinking. If a life form has some kind of mechanism that can influence plants, accelerating the evolution of plants, which in turn accelerates the evolution of the life form, why would wizards have gone so long without discovering it? It is very likely that wizard society lacks this element, or rather, not that wizard society lacks it, but that wizards themselves lack it."

"And that would be religious faith."

Locke's eyes lit up. "I've been going back and forth in my thinking and have been off track the whole time. Thinking about it carefully, special plants only appear around this stone. After consuming these plants, these Dune People receive benefits, and that is precisely why they believe these benefits are being bestowed upon them by the stone."

"So what actually happened?"

Locke activated his wizard's vision, his spiritual sight. He saw that the spiritual power of the rock was extremely peculiar. It was clearly a dead object, yet it had accumulated a vast amount of the spiritual power of living people.

Because of the Dune People's worship, this spiritual power had remained within the rock over a long period of time, and some of it had drifted out and settled upon the fern plants growing nearby.

"So spiritual power may very well be the key." Locke thought, "The spiritual power of animals, when it directly fuses with plants, causes a short-term enhancement in the plant followed by a berserk state, then rapid decay. Successful grafting methods are less than one in ten."

"But that does not mean there are no successful grafting methods!"

"If, through the transformation of faith, built up over years and years, a spiritual power is produced that has shed its animal nature, something that could even be called a special spiritual power of a particular unique kind, and if this merges with a plant, it seems as though a very particular kind of change would be born."

As soon as Locke realized this, he immediately reached out his hand. With a single palm of Myst's Power, he seized the rock and extracted from it a portion of this special spiritual power. Then, rather than choosing to pour this precious special spiritual power into the ordinary ferns nearby, he poured it into an ordinary climbing fern he retrieved from his astral ring.

Locke used Full Moon Growth, using the connective property of this Grand Magic prototype to link the spiritual power of the climbing fern with the special spiritual power. The two blended together as water and milk do, merging into one.

Then, under Locke's tense gaze, the fern leaves of this climbing fern began to tremble abnormally, teetering on the edge of going berserk. But very quickly, this abnormality disappeared.

The entire climbing fern underwent a special change, and serrations appeared along its leaves.

A surge of joy rose in Locke's heart. "I guessed correctly. This method of fusing special spiritual power can cause a plant to undergo a special evolution of a certain degree."

"So it was never collective consciousness resonance. What happened was that over a long span of time, this special spiritual power passively merged with the spiritual power of the plants growing around the rock, and these plants underwent corresponding changes."

Locke's eyes shifted slightly. "Since this spiritual power was originally generated from all manner of wishes and desires, after passing through this rock's special transformation, the human element of the spiritual power has been washed away, converting it into a spiritual power in a unique state."

"So after these plants passively absorbed a portion of this special spiritual power, they produced a means of helping the Dune People evolve, and may even be capable of helping the Dune People break free from their current predicament."

Locke thought, "Of course, for this special rapid evolution mechanism to be achieved, several conditions must be met. Gathering them all together is indeed quite a coincidence."

"First, this must be a race that likes to worship a particular dead object."

"Second, this race must enjoy making wishes before a dead object and hope to receive some form of evolution from it."

"Third, this race must possess an ability similar to telepathy, capable of creating collective consciousness resonance, strengthening the residual spiritual power they leave behind. No matter how much an ordinary life form worships a dead object, it may very likely be unable to preserve its spiritual power within it."

"In the endless void, there are certainly many races that meet these requirements. But it is genuinely not that common. Just the single requirement of a race with a relatively high-intensity innate telepathic talent already cuts out a great many civilizations."

"Beyond that, this civilization must also have a preference for worshipping dead objects." Locke thought, "A dead object may then become a special divine state."

Locke's expression turned odd. "Having a racial talent for telepathy is a condition that is relatively easy to meet in the wizard world. But wizards in the wizard world have no access to religion."

"At least not to normal religion. Much less something like this primitive religion. And moreover, I suspect that only this specific form of worship of stone-like objects, perhaps even exclusively the worship of stones, is capable of producing this special spiritual power."

"The world rules of the wizard world also seem to be different. Worshipping dead objects simply cannot produce any special changes there."

"And in the various colonial worlds, there is instead a lack of races with such high innate telepathic intensity..."

Locke realized that this special circumstance was very likely also connected to the world's rules.

That is, the world's rules must allow for a person to worship a dead object, and for the dead object to possess the rule of transforming and storing a person's spiritual power.

This rule does not exist in the wizard world.

So it was destined that wizards of the wizard world could not discover, at least not within the wizard world, this mechanism in which special spiritual power can merge with magical plants to accelerate evolution.

And when wizards of the wizard world ventured out to the various colonial planes, it was genuinely very difficult for them to notice something so imperceptible.

Especially since something this imperceptible would be exceedingly rare in any given colonial plane.

Races with such high-intensity innate telepathic ability rarely still remained at the level of primitive worship.

The Dune People were simply a special case, having undergone a severe regression of their civilization.

Locke said quietly, "It really is quite difficult to notice. If I hadn't been lucky, I would never have caught this detail. And this was built entirely on the fact that I'm a potion master, which made me sensitive enough to calculate exactly how many minutes a mortal could survive, so that I could notice he had lived three minutes longer than he should have. If it had been any other wizard, why would they ever care about a difference of a few minutes in a mortal's lifespan?"

"Even then, my earlier ideas were all guesses that turned out to be wrong."

"But this mechanism can indeed cause plants to undergo a degree of rapid evolution. The wish of these Dune People is for evolution so they can survive. But if I were to gather all three conditions and find a race whose wish was purely for a magical plant to evolve, what then?"

"Could I drive a magical plant to evolve in a purer, more direct way?"

"Only, to do that, I would need a race with high psionic talent to worship a dead object for me, helping me collect this special spiritual power." Locke looked at the group of Dune People. "These Dune People could do it, only their numbers are far too few. I would need far more, far more of them. Their population is now less than a tenth of what it once was, and even if all of them came to help me, they still could not meet my needs."

"No wonder wizards need to conquer colonial worlds. This... I need more races similar to the Dune People before I can collect enough special spiritual power to conduct magical plant spiritual grafting experiments."

In and of itself, producing this kind of special spiritual power was not something just any race could do.

It required a race like the Dune People, one that naturally possessed high innate psionic talent.

Locke swept his gaze across the group of Dune People. "In that case, I'll find a way to take them with me afterward. For now, let me first help them clear away the surrounding contamination and let them maintain their current state."

"Besides, if an opportunity to leave the Dune Plane ever comes, these people probably won't have much attachment to the land holding them back."