Chapter 78: Damned Tarma root

Rising with a yawn and a stretch, I lean over to check my notes for what I’ll be doing today. My tired eyes come into focus… “Air guardian; tarma root.” And back to bed it is. “I hate tarma root!” It’s such a pain in the arse to gather. I am strongly considering just grinding until I can unlock the growth spell.

Eventually, I get out of the mound of welcoming fluffiness to go eat. My stomach grumbles angrily as I descend the winding staircase. “Don’t worry, we will have breakfast soon,” I tenderly say towards my stomach in the hope that it will stop twisting and grumbling.

My breakfast plans are delayed as I am tackled by a rather fat Sling. “Is it about time for a divide? You're getting big.” Unresponsive as always, they just jingle while jumping on me in some kind of strange form of affection.

Escaping the gelatinous clutches of my excitable pet, I continue on with haste towards my destination. Completely walking into a bundle of webs, they stun me for a split second as I wipe my face. “Really, today's the day you choose to prank me? I am famished. I need a meal and not more delays.”

Grumbling as I finish the last leg of the journey, I step over a carefully planted web tripwire within the kitchen. “Maybe next time.” I loudly say before mumbling, “I swear Chic things I was born yesterday, using 2 back-to-back traps.”

Finally entering the best room in the building, I bite into a massive apple while preparing a more complex breakfast. Combining 100g of flour and 300g of milk with 2 eggs, I let the mixture rest in the fridge. Taking a nice pan, I place it on a roaring flame. I lightly drizzle it with oil, making sure to evenly spread it across the whole pan.

Taking the mixture out of the fridge, I pour a small amount of the runny mixture into the pan before spreading it across the whole pan. This creates an extremely thin layer. While allowing it to cook, I gather some lemon and sugar. Placing the sugar in a dry pan, I begin heating it rapidly. Once the edges begin to turn into a golden brown, the pan is tilted in contrast to mixing to minimize the crystallization risk. By this point, I've created several crispy pancakes, all waiting for me to eat them.

Once the caramel is complete, boiling water is added to stop it from setting. Then it's poured in a light drizzle over each of the pancakes before squeezing and zesting lemon onto them. Finally, I roll them up and stack them neatly to be devoured.

It doesn’t take long before half of them disappear to the bottomless pit I've awoken to. The remaining pancakes are either stored or donated to my greedy pets, who enjoy them thoroughly. What caramel remained was put in a glass jar and stuffed on a shelf for another day. I have made quite a lot, after all.

I pat my satisfied belly and sit on a soft sofa to burn some of the food off. The sugar content is likely sky-high, but I’m happy, so I don’t care. While lazily resting, I take out an ender letter and send Jengal a note with the details for the tarma root and how it's found. I can't guarantee that I will find any, and even if by some miracle I do find some, it's unlikely to be enough. I make sure to sign it as important and not impossible to gain. In other letters like the one detailing the Kontron crystal I signed that “I haven’t got high hopes. It's likely virtually impossible to gain normally; good luck.”

Hopefully, he has more luck in finding this damned plant. I wish avoiding the tarma-hunt was possible, but it is desperately needed to summon the air guardian. Why is an underground plant needed for air essence? I haven’t the faintest clue, that’s for sure. Now, is there an easy method to find caves? Wait, I have just the thing; a distortion flame.

Spending 4 nether stars and a diamond results in 4 purple eery flames within my hand. They don’t burn, rather, they are cold if anything. Shaking the creepiness of the flames out of my mind, I immediately test them. After placing one against the ground, the flame begins to increase in volume from the size of a coin to a fist. They release a glow in the process. When looking at the glow, I see the ground become transparent. It seems that wherever that light touches, it becomes see-through.

I step back involuntarily as the light stops creeping towards me. Peering down, I see that the hollow center of my island is riddled with slimes. After spending this whole time convincing myself this isn’t a game, it's freaky seeing such a game-like effect such as a see-through world.

At least cave finding will be vastly easier now, I think? Descending from my floating fortress, I quickly find a perch on the ground. Placing down the distortion flame, I watch with fervor as the ground becomes transparent. Peering through the crack in the world, I see the veins of the world in the form of caves crisscrossing deep underground like a complex tapestry.

Using my advantageous position, I attempt to spot tarma root. Unfortunately, my night vision isn’t good enough at this distance. Although, I did see a lot of complex and interesting cave fauna. There’s glowing mushrooms in massive varieties, mosses, small plants, and I think I even spotted a tree or two.

After selecting a nice cave to begin my hunting, I collect my distortion flame then head towards it. After reaching the place above the cave, I begin to tunnel down. Having not spotted any lava pools in this spot, I have the utmost confidence that I will not die in the process of descending.

Descending further and further into the earth, I watch as the colors bleed from my vision, turning into a varying pallet of greys and blacks. With an audible ‘whoosh’ as air rushes into the cavity I've just opened up, I drop down into the cave. Looking around, there are no monsters to be seen. “That won't last.”

Quickly training my eyes to the ground, I begin to wander, fervently looking for the damned plant. As luck would have it, a distinct ‘skuttle’ begins to echo along the stone walls – “Spiders.” Taking a battle stance while grasping a wyvern ax and sword, I consider that maybe ‘bane of arthropods’ would have been an intelligent choice.

It doesn’t take long before the first spider comes into vision. Its many red eyes are focused on me like I’m the best meal. The thing is a hairy beast of muscles and brown hair with a shiny carapace over its joints. It’s built like a brick shithouse and clearly here to cause me trouble.

“Well, let's give it a go” I say before spotting over another dozen trailing behind the first. Shaking the fear from my head, I ran towards the beasts. Reaching the first spider in mere seconds, I lunge at it, my axe descending into its face and slicing its head apart. As its corpse slumps to the ground, I see a little too late a second spider vaulting over the now-dead front runner.

Having been tackled to the ground, I use my now empty hands to stop the spider from biting my head off with its two menacing fangs. Using all my strength, I push it to the side and quickly scramble to grab my thrown weapons. Finding both a few meters away, I jump onto them before turning around to meet two spiders head-on.

After throwing my axe at the leftmost one, I rushed the one on the right. After watching my overpowered axe cleave through it cleanly, I dodged to the right, then swept with my sword, quickly dismembering 3 of its 4 right legs. It topples to the ground with an audible ‘squeal’ before I put it out of its misery.

Seeing an even larger group of spiders rushing me in a frenzy, I hastily run to grab my axe. I slash my sword across the first spider as I reach the corpse holding my axe. The spider falls to the ground twitching as I dual wield my weapons against the onslaught of spiders, cleaving web after web as I dismember the brown beasts. I have the wind knocked out of me on more than one occasion, but by grasping my axe strongly and using my sword deftly, I cleave through the wave with ease. They simply cannot break into my armor, but they can still overwhelm me, though. I am very careful not to get dogpiled as I split several spiders in half, but still get covered with green ichor as they fall to pieces.

Finally, as I come to the end of the last wave, I cleave through a fat bastard to spot a smaller spider at the back. It looks at me in the same frenzy as the others, but the ruby glow of its eyes flickers for a moment as it seems to wrestle with itself. It's common sense must have won, because it fled like its ass was on fire. If you have never seen a spider run for its life, you haven’t lived.

Sitting down in exhaustion, I remove a bucket of water as I slowly scrape and scrub the green goop and webs stuck to my body, not daring to remove a single part of my armor as it’s the only barrier from actually getting it on my body. Finally getting a semblance of my armor to appear through the dirt, I stand up and head away from the direction now littered with creepy-looking corpses.

Weaving through caverns of luminous mushrooms, I spot an unassuming brown plant. It has a woody, root-like structure down the middle turning into moist brown leaves – Tarma root. “Sweet, number one down.” I need 2 per air essence, and the air guardian is not guaranteed to drop said essence. I should gather around 3 more.

In that same mushroom riddled cavern, I found a second tarma root. I nod my head to the lucky boon. Moving past the mushroom cave to a more mundane cave decorated with humble moss, I move through its moist and slippery rocks. Spotting the occasional crystal-like shine from the rock wall, I realize that there must be crystal deposits of some kind nearby.

Along this route, I found a single root. Chuckling at my own bad pun, I grasp the tarma root victoriously. It only took the slaughter of uncountable spiders to finally find these damned roots.

After spending another fruitless hour, I eventually find the fourth and final tarma root nestled between some rocks. I only found it because I was grinding my dig spell on the walls. It’s something I do whenever I am out of the wilderness or flying to gain Ars Magica XP. I am already level 27, which is record-breaking progress. I need to get to around level 60 or higher to cast top-tier spells like changing the time of day.

That reminds me… “Yep, I can find the recipe; wow that’s overpowered.” I say after having just checked if I can find the recipe for silver spells in my NEI. Silver spells are hidden spell components that are a nightmare to unlock and expensive to include, but have amazing effects. Like time set day or firestorm, both of which are broken and overpowered.

Something like star strike, a silver spell, can be changed with different components to make an instant kill annihilation beam. The possibilities are endless. Honestly, in the game Ars Magica 2 was beyond broken. Certain combinations would allow you to place extra things for the cost of said original thing before removing them. Boom, you just created a cheat mechanic. It was that easy. Hence, why the mod was heavily moderated in most servers.

Enjoying the daydream of how amazing this mod is, I teleport home. Now I need to rest, since I will be summoning an air guardian. I am currently exhausted, dirty, and reeking of death. I need a bath. Heading to my shower… with my armor on, I take the opportunity to strip the dirt of the thing, watching green swirls in the water below as it goes into the drain. Once the armor is finally completely clean, it comes off, revealing my pristine white skin. I still clean myself just to feel clean even if the ichor didn’t get on me personally.