The idea that shot up Merrick’s spine lodged itself into his mind with a viciousness. Perhaps he’d been visited by the good idea fairy he’d heard about in passing or maybe he was finally losing it from the stress. Regardless, he decided that he didn’t have much to lose by conducting the next experiment, assuming he could work through the problems ahead of time.

  With forty-five or so minutes left, he didn’t have to worry about running out of time. If it took too long he could just stop what he was doing part way through and go toss one of the berries into the alcove. He made pad in about five extra minutes for crawling through the seventh segment, mentally rolling his eyes at the shape the dungeon had chosen for the puzzle.

  Sure, a cornucopia was thematic for what he was doing, but there wasn’t really any reason he should have to crawl on his stomach to get to the last alcove, it could have just made the tip inaccessible and the previous rooms a bit shorter to accommodate a seventh segment that he could stand upright in.

  His first real issue was that he was absolutely sure that even at his best, he wouldn’t have enough energy to actually merge the mutated berries together. Honestly, even if they were all perfect matches he wasn’t sure he’d be able to pull it off. With the variance between the three he intended to merge, however, it was a near impossibility.

  Luckily, he’d already discovered a formula for a potion that would allow him to go over his maximum. Assuming he didn’t blow up or outright die from the strain of that over-full feeling he got previously, he just needed to figure out a way to concentrate the effect and intensify it.

  He was even provided a few distillation flasks he could use to boil the potion down. He was, however, out of the previous batch of potions he’d made and concentrating took time.

  He'd be cutting it close and he didn’t actually know if concentrating the potion would do him any good. He’d had products where the effects improved, worsened, or all together changed in the past. There was a very real chance he’d use up all of his allotted time and be no closer to solving the first issue than he was at that moment.

  “Stupid dungeon, if you’d been more obvious about what you wanted with your puzzle I would have had plenty of time to figure it out. I don’t understand how you can make this massive space for me so quickly but a simple sign with your list of demands is too difficult.” Merrick decided he’d let his discontent be known even as he already started working on the solution he’d come up with.

  It was actually not unrelated to the confusing puzzle parameters. He’d spent so much time and effort creating a mutated version of literally every other plant harvest he’d had access to in the dungeon while trying to find the key to unlock the rest of the cornucopia’s light. Along the way he’d made several discoveries about his skill, but most importantly in that moment was the mulberry mint rejuvenation potion recipe.

  A clean cutting board and knife were located in one of the drawers on the desk that he’d previously checked. Annoyingly, beneath the cutting board appeared to be some sort of clock, one that wasn’t ticking. He recognized the general shape of it though from his alchemy master’s workshop, it was a clockwork timer. They were vastly expensive little machines of intricate cogs that were used for time keeping. Quickly counting the notches, it looked like the timer went up to 60 minutes, so he pulled it out and half-cocked it before setting it off to the side of the workstation.

  For his improved improved rejuvenation potion attempt, a rejuvenation potion++ he supposed, Merrick decided he needed more than just opposing dusts to act as a catalyst with the teal mulberry mint reagent. He didn’t have a lot of experience with using multiple solid ingredients in his potions, since that was the realm of proper alchemy that he’d never really picked up on, but that was why he was calling it an experiment.

  Merrick grabbed one of the two remaining mutated peppers, the smaller bell-shaped orange ones, and carefully sliced it into smaller pieces. He also separated the mulberry mint into quarters, worried about messing up the entire batch on his first attempt. Employing all the mental power afforded to him by his [[Quick Math]] skill, Merrick adjusted the quantity of all the ingredients of his previous potion batch down to scale.

  The first potion batch failed with the entire thing going up in smoke shortly after he added the portion of pepper to the mix. His eyes burned as he theorized about what could have gone wrong there. He decided to increase the amount of mint-dust powder he added and ran the experiment back. This time, instead of going up in flames, the entire batch seemed to turn into a sludge.

  By the fourth and final attempt, Merrick had adjusted the quantity of several of the ingredients and decided to start the potion with the pepper rather than the mint. He wasn’t sure if that would accomplish anything, but there was simply too few ingredients and too many possible combinations of steps and ingredients to brute force the answer.

  Surprisingly, Merrick successfully brewed a potion on his fourth and final attempt. Somewhat disconcerting, Merrick found that the color had all seemingly evaporated from the potion, leaving the contents of the flask looking much like the distilled water it had started as. It also had no scent and if it weren’t for the fact that it felt heavier, he’d wonder if he hallucinated doing the entire fourth attempt.

  There was scarcely enough liquid left in the batch after refining to fill three of the smaller vials he stashed into his bandolier. Luckily, or unluckily depending on how one looked at it, he’d used up much of his emergency stash of potions while he was in the dungeon and had space to store the new potion.

  Now, all he needed was for the potion to actually do what he needed it to do. Glancing at the timer, he saw that all four attempts had taken twenty minutes, which was exceptionally fast. For that, he was thankful that his previous attempts at this new potion had at least failed quickly enough for him to move on to the next one.

  Telling himself that he didn’t have enough time to deal with his potion testing trauma, Merrick knocked a vial of the new potion back instantly.

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  The first thing he noticed was that the potion didn’t have a taste. It didn’t even taste like water. Drinking it felt like he was breathing in extremely humid air and it was only his sluggish response time that prevented him from reflexively trying to breathe the potion in instead of sending it down to his stomach.

  His stomach began feeling bloated almost instantly, grumbling away as it protested its mysterious new contents. It was then that he realized he’d been ignoring the age old adage to avoid potions on an empty stomach. Luckily, it seemed that the worst he was going to have to deal with as far as stomach problems went was unexpected flatulence. He was thankful Mary wasn’t down there with him to observe that particular side effect.

  A secondary side effect, he noticed, were uncontrollable tears streaming down his face. His eyes didn’t hurt and he didn’t even notice them watering up, but his tear ducts seemed to be dumping their reserves down his face in a steady trickle.

  Thankfully, the third effect was the one he was looking for and it wasn’t only his stomach that felt bloated. His mysterious energy pool was also swelling to incredible size, seeming to fill not only whatever area of his soul it occupied but also his body. His hands, feet, and other extremities began to feel like they were swelling up as the amount of energy continued to ramp up.

  Realizing he didn’t have much time to spare, Merrick reached both of his hands out for the mysteriously vibrating mulberry to start with. Thankfully the vibrating seemed to be an optical illusion, since the fruit would otherwise likely successfully escape from his hands on account of their rapid loss in dexterity. He channeled his innate skill as his symptoms worsened, hoping to skim some of the energy off the top and lessen their severity.

  [[Merge]]

  Instantly, it felt like someone took a hammer to Merrick’s skull as the grid superimposed over the workbench once more. He felt the energy he’d just absorbed from his potion begin abandoning his body like water through a sieve, but his limbs didn’t stop feeling bloated. It was almost as if the energy he needed for the skill was only a small part of whatever the potion had injected into his body, leaving behind impurities as the rest was consumed by the skill.

  He placed the gray fruit down in the top left corner, his favorite starting position by far, and reached out for the floating silvery berry that was difficult to grasp. His pudgy hands didn’t make it any easier to grab but he managed to get it eventually. He went to set the berry down in the center tile but its weird effect made him misjudge where he was setting it and it ended up in the top center square of the grid.

  Merrick tried to suppress the eye twitch, telling himself that he had empirical evidence that his skill didn’t care where he started or ended the merge and therefore he should be annoyed. Unfortunately, he’d become someone superstitious about stuff like placements in the previous years, starting out as a joke to try and inject levity into an otherwise depressing series of experiments with his failed innate skill and eventually becoming ingrained in his beliefs.

  “Come to think of it, my first success was a diagonal too. Ugh, whatever.” Merrick knew that even if he was able to pick the berry up, which he doubted do his hands still not regaining their dexterity even as his energy pool rapidly plummeted toward rock bottom, it wasn’t work restarting the [[Merge]] since it’d abort the moment he picked one of the ingredients back up. The fact that his body was still swelling up told him he couldn’t afford to drink a second one of the new potions either, he might literally pop.

  Finally, Merrick picked up the white-colored sharp-looking-while-still-being-round-somehow mulberry with his bare hands. He would have loved to use the tongs again but he knew that his skill didn’t interact well with tool use and hits hands would struggle to use the tongs at the moment anyways.

  Just picking up the last berry seemed to drain him down to zero, however, and his hands began shaking as he slowly tried to place the berry in the top right corner. A splitting headache roared its ugly head and started screaming its way through his psyche as he felt pain like he’d never experienced before.

  Once again, Merrick was forced to employ his superior willpower, both to stop himself from accidentally dropping the berry as he writhed in pain and to prevent himself from squashing it between his palms. Muscle spams ran up and down his body, particularly bad in his hands where they kept trying to curl into fists.

  After he finally managed to get the berry most of the way to its spot, Merrick was hit with a coughing fit. It wasn’t anything deadly, but the unexpectedness of it caused him to squeeze down on the berry slightly harder than he intended reflexively.

  Somehow, the berry fought back.

  A stabbing sensation shot through both of Merrick’s hands, as if someone drove a red-hot knife through the center of his palms, and he reflexively released his grasp on the mutated dungeon mulberry. It free-fell mere centimeters through the air before landing in the center tile of the glowing grid, forming an upside down L shape with the other two berries.

  At first, nothing happened. It was at this point that the three objects would have usually been yanked into the piece that was placed last and attempt to [[Merge]], successful or otherwise. Instead, all three berries seemed to sit there for a moment as the grid began brightening. If tears weren’t already running down his face, Merrick knew he would have started tearing up from the painful light.

  Seconds later, he realized it wasn’t just the light. A panicked look at his [Status] showed him that his stamina, health, and mana pools were all plummeting, seemingly because he had bottomed out whatever resource that his innate skill usually used. Even his hands were rapidly shrinking down to their usual size alongside the rest of his body.

  Not knowing what else to do, Merrick scrambled to push a handful of the standard mulberry mint leaves that he’d already developed most of a tolerance to into his mouth and began chewing them aggressively. As the juices trickled down his throat, he felt the drain on his other resource pools taper off for a few seconds before resuming in full force.

  The in-progress [[Merge]] looked like the mulberries had started creeping toward the center tile, maybe making it about a fifth of the way there and moving at a snail’s pace, and Merrick realized there was a very good chance he was going to die. He wasn’t sure he’d ever heard of someone dying to their own innate skill before and found himself resigned to be the first one.

  He grabbed the other two potions he’d just created and uncapped them with his once-again responding as usual thumbs and downed them both, using them to wash down the mint he was chewing. He felt like he’d swallowed an entire gust of wind and he once again felt like he was going to pop, but the [[Merge]] up ticked in speed slightly as the grid light up even brighter.

  [[Quick Math]] told him that as long as the resources consumed by the skill were of a similar amount produced by the potion’s he drank, the speed at which the drain was happing would stop his body from swelling any farther than it had after a single potion.

  It was then that he realized he wasn’t able to move his hands anymore, or even turn his head. All he could see was the brightness of his innate skill’s process, with the edges of his vision rapidly darkening.

  Sleep claimed him at last as the willpower he’d dedicated to keeping himself conscious finally ran dry, perhaps drained by the very same process that claimed his stamina, mana, and health.