Over the course of the next two hours, the necromancer spends their time stirring a pot ‘because your mother’s arms are tired’, setting the table in the small back area behind the shop proper, and eating dinner with the family. Kobold stew, a staple food for a wide portion of the city’s less affluent citizens. It’s another half hour to wash the dishes, after which the mage can finally escape up to the upper floor and peruse the spoils.

Shucking the robe directly on the floor, Avery tosses herself onto her bed. It’s tempting to just close her eyes and go to sleep, deal with all possible things to do in the morning, but she is fully aware that rather than spending extra time in the morning doing work, she would instead continue to sleep the extra hours and only get ready for the day’s activities five minutes before they were set to begin.

And so, she burns the mana needed to light a candle next to the bed, and digs into the book. About three hours in, she finds the section the poor, unfortunate soul who previously owned this tome seemed to have been using, notes and formulas written up and down the margins.

“These hardy plants, once grown to sufficient size, can wind their vines together into an approximation of a typical animal. After forming an outer shell, the tangled plants bloom within the core; at this point the mass shows a rudimentary intelligence, sensory ability, and mobility. In the wild, it has been observed wrapping itself around trees; the individual vines tapping in beyond the bark to drain the sap from its much larger, less mobile cousin. They also perform as ambush predators. In the presence of an unwary potential food source, the mass of vegetation can uproot itself and fall directly onto the unfortunate animal. Mice, rabbits, shrews, elk, and humans have been observed to provoke the response. Once a creature is constricted by the vines, it will return to an immobile state until its meal has been thoroughly pulped and absorbed by the root structure.

While cuttings have proven to easily grow additional vines, attempts to integrate new growth into already merged vegetation have ended in failure. Burning sections of plant matter away from the main body proves less than effective, as the living plant is highly resistant to extreme temperatures. Additionally, while it is possible to use electric shocks as a means to keep the specimens under control, it is only effective as a method of positive reinforcement.”

The book goes on about how the plants perform when placed in containments with puzzles, locks, and octopi, and how further experimental tests would keep the subjects separated, but what Avery was more interested in was the notes. It seemed that the formula and notes were on the possibility of using a high powered necromantic spell to transplant the user’s consciousness from their body into that of the ambulatory murderplant. Judging by what the notes said, the spell would last for a matter of hours, during which the caster’s body would be rendered completely motionless, appearing to any form of inquiry to be dead.

“Huh. Well, everyone figured they were dead before I tossed them into a canyon full of flesh eating slimes. I’m not losing sleep over it.”

What she was going to be losing sleep over, would be the fact that with this book, and the enormous gem she had run into completely legitimately, there was every possibility that she could cast the spell as well. It took years for wizards to learn enough magic to turn themself into a dragon or whatever. The possibilities with this were fairly extraordinary. Since the wizard in question would still be in complete command of their facilities, they could have an extremely hardy monster caged within the lab to take command of during the portions of experiments that were most likely to explode. According to the notes, a sufficiently large gem was used as a storage medium for the souls of whichever creature was going to be bodiless for a time. If the body the wizard is using at the time happens to die, they just get returned to the gem, with no repercussions other than the loss of the creature and creature’s soul. At that point, the wizard can possess their own body, and reset the experiment with a new subject.

Noting that removing the body of the person in question from a straight line of the gem acting as a tether prevents the soul from returning, and that the same applies to a creature killed out of the gem’s range, Avery shelves the idea of stealing a kobold and using it as a second life out in the city. If she was going to do this, she was going to start with less deadly initial experimental conditions. It would take an hour or so to get the spell to work, just on its own, so she was going to take tomorrow off, and mess with things until something worked.