Zeal of the Mind and Flesh: A Cultivating Gamelit Harem Adventure (Spellheart Book 1)

by Marvin Whiteknight

  “Lucky for me, my mother managed to obtain permission for me to be granted access to one of the more powerful accumulation techniques. The process is kind of like fishing. You use some of your own mind zeal as a fishing line and gather up little fragments of stray mind zeal. This is much faster than trying to pull them right into the stone. Considering you have so much mind zeal concentrated in an elixir, this should be even easier, and far, far faster. I think Mistress Gurthari was jealous of that. She was stuck with the basic technique, and she didn’t have a connection higher up in the organization to get her anything more advanced. Otherwise, she would have made it into the mage acolyte ranks long ago.”

  I followed Illiel’s instructions, for the basic technique. She explained that she was only able to tell me an extremely abridged description of the more advanced technique. Part of the deal in getting it was that the Unblinking Eye planted a compulsion in her head that would render her unable to teach the technique to others. By now though, she’d figured out that I was quite gifted in terms of these zeal accumulation techniques, and that it might be possible for me to figure it out on my own just from what abridged description could slip by the compulsion.

  I started with the basic technique Illiel described and slowly bit by bit I was collecting all the mind zeal from the outer edges of the container and bringing them closer to the center. Bit by bit the mind spellheart was growing. It was expanding rapidly and by the time the hour was up, the spellheart was twice the size. Soon enough it was half the size that Gurthari’s had been, but of a higher quality, partially thanks to just barely managing to do something resembling the technique Illiel described, and partially thanks to the recrystallization process I’d worked out.

  “Amazing.” Illiel gushed again. “It’s so pure. Better than the one Gurthari made with years of work. It’s no wonder alchemists are so highly valued. This one is even purer than mine with my advanced accumulation technique.”

  “Want me to do yours then?” I asked.

  Illiel glanced up at me in surprise. “Wait, really?”

  “Why not? I did it once. I’ll probably be able to do it again.”

  “No, not that. Alchemists in big clans refine spellhearts for their fellow clan or sect members all the time. Some in the cities will even refine the spellhearts of strangers, for a price. My mother had such a wandering alchemist refine her ice spellheart before she bound it to her body and ascended to the mage acolyte ranks. It’s just that such things cost a fortune even if you are a fellow clan or sect member. If you aren’t, it costs countless precious treasures, on top of ten fortunes worth of money.”

  “Well, if you insist on paying somehow, how about you help me refine the process? The part I’m most unsure about is this accelerated recrystallization. You’ll have to do that part yourself if we’re using your mind spellheart. Also, we’ll need some raw materials. You wouldn’t happen to have any mind spellheart fragments?”

  Before I finished speaking Illiel thrust her hand out, holding a bunch of tiny fragments of amber colored stones. None of them were big enough to be a spellheart, but all together they made up a sizable portion.

  “When the Unblinking Eye sends us out into the field, it isn’t just to spy or assassinate. We’re also supposed to be cultivating. In fact, we’re supposed to be cultivating constantly. Most other kinds of cultivators have a hard time fighting mystic beasts that use mind zeal. They almost always have some sort of inconspicuousness spell around them, making them tough to target.

  “But for us mind cultivators, it’s actually quite easy to hunt down mystic beasts of the mind aspect. We have ways to get around their distraction auras. In fact, their own natural defenses often make them easier to spot, since we’re trained to look for and deal with structures made from mind zeal.”

  “Not too long-ago Mistress Gurthari and I ran into a cave that was populated by mindslaver parasite slugs. We wiped them out and collected their spellhearts. I’ve been crushing them one at a time before using my zeal accumulation technique when we’re out in the middle of nowhere, where there are no minds nearby to naturally generate mind zeal.”

  I picked up the biggest spellheart fragment that Illiel was holding. It was an ugly little thing. Not really amber colored, more brown than yellow. It was also misshapen. From what I’d seen of Illiel, Yorik, and Gurthari’s spellheart, mind aspect spellhearts were supposed to approximate a flattened disk, with smooth rims, two flat faces, and rounded edges. Mine was the closest to that perfected shape, after my recrystallization. Gurthari’s had been similar but not quite as well developed. Illiel’s was close to what Gurthari’s had been like, though a bit smaller. Yorik’s was a distant third, but even her spellheart looked beautiful compared to the dirty globular mess before me.

  “Why does it look so ugly?” I asked looking at the spellheart that had come out of one of these parasite slugs.

  “That’s because mindslaver parasite slugs live short and brutal lives. They need to find a host quickly and then dominate their minds. They can’t survive on their own. The ones we found were mostly attached to a bunch of rats and fish in a brutal little ecosystem from a river contaminated with cold iron,” Illiel shivered at the mention of iron. “To grow the size of spellheart you’re holding, the parasite had to have gone through several hosts and probably cultivated like mad for its entire lifespan without care for impurities. And look, that spot right there?”

  Illiel pointed to a region of the spellheart, which was slightly clearer and poking out of the bigger spellheart as if it had been only partially fused to the main spellheart body.

  “That’s from a different mindslaver parasite. The slug must have gone cannibalistic at one point and devoured one of its own kind. That’s the spellheart of a full-grown adult too. If we pulled that thing apart we’d probably see lots of smaller spellhearts that have been fully fused with the whole.”

  “Oh? It’s possible to fuse spellhearts together?” This was news to me.

  “Possible, yes. It simply involves adding more of the right kind of zeal and using it like glue. Before long both spellhearts will become one. It’s not recommended though. It’s extremely difficult to get the spellheart crystals to align properly unless you’re using perfect, flawless crystals. It will almost always lower the quality of your spellheart. That is, unless you bring them to a talented alchemist who can break one of them down and add it to the other, one particle of zeal at a time. That’s the most efficient way to use the things, but the time and talent of a master alchemist isn’t cheap.”

  “Huh. That’s what I just did with my recrystallization I guess. And what I’m going to do with yours.”

  I actually improved the technique considerably with Illiel’s help. After all, I wasn’t really working with chemistry here, but with alchemy. Of course the procedure wouldn’t be exactly the same. I was able to vastly accelerate the dissolution of the parasite slug spellhearts by adding a drop of my own blood into the water. Apparently having some of your own blood in the solution makes it vastly easier to apply the force of your own will. Sort of like building a lever. Now I had something in the solution itself to use to grip. Kind of.

  “Here you are, one concentrated solution of mind spellheart solution! Now comes your turn.”

  Illiel accepted the cup of elixir with trembling hands. She popped her own spellheart out of its casing around her neck and dropped it into the container slowly. That little crystal represented not only years of work on her part, but her path to power by becoming a mage acolyte. Risking it in any way had to be extremely painful. Still, the allure of easy progress was too hard to ignore. She dropped her spellheart into the container.

  She cradled the vial of elixir in her hands, concentrating as she did so. I’d supersaturated the solution, so the physical material that represented the particles of zeal mystically would come out of solution easily, bringing their zeal counterpart with them. Unlike most heart wielders, I had the advantage of being able to verify that this was indeed hap
pening with mage sight.

  I let her work in peace and quiet, simply observing as I did. She was using her advanced zeal accumulation technique. I could tell there was something special about the way the zeal was moving around in there, and could sense some differences between the true version of her mind zeal accumulation technique and the technique I’d came up with to copy it. Mentally, I jotted down some notes and corrected a few flaws I’d fallen prey to. I realized that Illiel was purposefully making her motions with zeal clear and precise, just so I could observe the process.

  I activated my mage sight. I’d gotten better at doing so recently. In it, I could see the zeal particles squirming around, like little worms. Just like Illiel said. From Illiel’s own brow there sprouted much bigger tendrils, which coiled together like a rope. That paled in comparison to the waving sea that surrounded her spellheart. That thing was like a giant octopus, waving its tentacles around and quickly drawing every particle of mind zeal into it. And it wasn’t like the little zeal-worms were trying to escape. If anything, they were almost eager to jump in. To join with the collective and become a part of Illiel’s spellheart.

  The entire process was fascinating, and by the end of it I was pretty sure that I had a better idea of not just Illiel’s advanced zeal accumulation technique, but a better idea of zeal accumulation in general. I was beginning to think that if I applied the concepts I’d learned here to the stuff Sava had taught me for use with my earth spellheart I would be able to make the process even more efficient.

  While Illiel meditated, I got to work on the little bit of elixir that was left from what I used to enhance my own spellheart. There was certainly mind zeal left in this thing. It’s just I’d lowered the concentration to the point where the elixir was no longer saturated. If I had kept my spellheart in there any longer I would have been losing zeal as fast as I was gaining it. There had to be a way to raise the concentration again.

  The way I saw it, there were two options. The first involved simply dissolving more mind zeal into the solution. Now that I had a mind spellheart bound to me, it was possible for me to draw on ambient mind zeal and force it into the elixir. The other option was for me to lower the amount of solvent in the solution.

  I decided on doing both. I needed to get some practice with this mind spellheart, so why not?

  I sat down and meditated not far from Illiel, drawing on the ambient mind zeal of the surrounding environment. There were bits here and there, concentrated around various people. It was flaking off them a little at a time, some in greater degrees than others. I noticed that there were greater concentrations of mind zeal around those doing thinking-intensive tasks. The elf making wood joints was generating more than the elf taking a late lunch. Perhaps mental activity affected the concentration of mind zeal a person generated?

  That’s when I spotted one of Yulli’s mage acolytes. She was sleeping in a hammock that had been built for her recently. She was spouting off buckets of mind zeal. Her own mind tendrils were far bigger than either mine or Illiel’s as well. I wasn’t sure if it was because she was at the mage acolyte rank or because she was dreaming, though instinct suggested it was more the latter than the former.

  I swept out with my own tendrils. Luckily the mage acolyte’s hammock was right next to the door the building I was in. Likely, Yulli had intended the position to be a guard post for me disguised as a place to relax. Yulli’s mage acolyte had taken it to be more a place to relax than to guard though. Discipline for her troops had taken a serious blow in the last few days. My guess was that now that they were somewhere safe, Yulli would be having a much harder time keeping her mage acolyte’s under control. They weren’t fighting for their lives anymore and were probably reverting to their old lifestyles. Sava would constantly complain about how the higher ranked elves lounged about all day without a care in the world whenever they weren’t cultivating or working.

  At any rate, I was grateful that the elf standing guard over me had decided to take a nap by my side. It made collecting a sizable portion of mind zeal quite easy. Getting the mind zeal to go into solution was harder than it was to get it to condense onto my mind spellheart, but I managed it. Slowly, the elixir container filled back up with mind zeal. It was nowhere near the supersaturated solution it once was, but I had enough in there that maybe I could think about building up another coat on my own spellheart.

  Illiel was still concentrating on her spellheart, so I got to work. The first thing I did was try to replicate Illiel’s advanced zeal accumulation technique. I had to extend tendrils of mind zeal from my spellheart and stick them throughout the solution. It was a little tougher to figure out how to get the tendrils to extend directly from my spellheart rather than from my own forehead, but I figured it out.

  The rest was surprisingly easy. The countless little tendrils of mind zeal extended out around it and drew the particles of zeal in like fish in a pond. Bit by bit they were swallowed up. I quickly ran out of mind zeal in the solution, but luckily the sleeping elf had accumulated more around her. That made up a sizable portion of my second harvest, with the rest coming from scattered bits and pieces in the air and clumps from all the elves working nearby.

  I pulled all those into the solution and started again, letting my spellheart grow a little larger yet again. I couldn’t fuel the bowl this way, and I wasn’t taking time to ensure purity in what I was adding. Such sloppy and inefficient technique would have lowered my spellheart a grade, if I didn’t intend on using recrystallization to melt off this new layer and reform it more efficiently later.

  As soon as I finished with this, I was going to have to try going through this same process with my earth spellheart. Earth zeal was so much easier to find. With more zeal I’d have faster accumulation and this process would doubtlessly go countless times faster.

  That’s when I remembered Sava’s grotto. There was that pedestal back there. When I meditated in that place, it was so much easier to accumulate earth zeal. Maybe if I placed a bowl of elixir on that pedestal this whole process could be accelerated to an even greater degree than it was. I’d have to perform this procedure on Sava as well, as a thank you for what she’d done for me thus far.

  Sadly, I was denied a third harvest of mind zeal. The stuff didn’t seem to accumulate that quickly, and I’d already tapped out the area. There were no loose particles of mind zeal left. All there was were the tendrils that were directly connected to the foreheads of the various elves. I’d have to wait for those to naturally break off.

  Or would I? What would happen if I just... encouraged a small fragment to snap off? It would certainly solve my supply problem. I picked the sleeping mage acolyte. She had the most mind zeal to spare, barring Illiel. So, I grabbed onto one of the flailing tendrils of mind zeal around the mage acolyte’s head and tugged. It wouldn’t come off.

  I was about to give up when something beckoned me closer. My own mind tendrils were like sharks that had caught the scent of blood. There was a source of mind zeal around here far greater than the stuff I’d been gathering thus far. It was close to the mage acolyte’s head, at the source of the tendrils.

  I sent a single tendril closer, probing at the mage acolyte’s head. Closer. Closer. Closer still.

  Then suddenly something changed. My vision started to swim, and everything faded from sight. My vision turned black and I started to panic, but before long things started to become clear again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I WAS IN a large chamber, and next to me there was a servant pouring wine. I recognized her clothing as the uniform of the Songstone Clan, though it was pristine, as I imagined it had been before their fall. In the chamber was the sleeping elf I had seen before, though she wasn’t asleep here. Instead, she was sitting on a pile of floor pillows, spread out as she flipped through a pile of scrolls.

  “None of these techniques will work for me. I need something special if I’m to reach the next level of cultivation. Oh, why did I choose to specialize in water zeal? All
the clan’s most powerful techniques are for fire and light zeal!” the elf muttered to herself.

  “Uh, hello?” I asked.

  The mage acolyte blinked at me, having not seen me until I spoke up just then.

  “You’re Theo! That chaka we found! But wait, you shouldn’t be here…” The elf frowned. “This doesn’t make sense. I remember I didn’t meet you until we were fleeing from the destruction of the Songstone Clan... but here we are in my room at... oh I get it. I’m dreaming.”

  The elf tossed aside the last of a pile of scrolls.

  “Leave it to me to waste a perfectly good dream thinking about training. What ever happened to the dreams of my childhood? The ones where a hot, muscular guy with talent and power takes me in his arms and… She glanced at me, both smiling and blushing. “Well, maybe those dreams haven’t vanished completely after all,” she patted the cushion at her side, gesturing me to sit down next to her.

  “You’re right. You’ve been training hard and deserve a break. I’ve been training myself, behind the door you’re guarding.”

  The elf smiled. “Well your situation is a little different. All you have to do is sit around and fuck and you’re still immensely valuable to the clan. But me? I’ve got to work for my keep. I need to constantly be working to increase my personal power to raise not just my own standing, but also the standing of my clan as a whole. After all, having powerful experts is what keeps the enemies at bay. Though I guess we didn’t have enough to save the Songstone Clan...” The elf had a sad look on her face for a while.

  “That doesn’t mean I should slack off. I can still play a part,” I argued in my defense.

  The elf smiled. “That certainly is true. If you made it to the mage acolyte rank you’d be around to serve the clan for a lot longer, and you would win us a great deal of respect for your cultivation base alone. If you made it to true mage, you’d make bigger waves than I would if I advanced to the wizard rank. If you were a true mage, I’d bet that a good portion of your children would be able to breeze through the heart wielder ranks or maybe even be born with enough native zeal to find themselves directly in the mage acolyte ranks. In ten or twenty years, your contributions would double the number of mages the Songstone Clan could field. And if you made it to the wizard ranks? You’d have imperial dynasties and kingdoms eyeing you like unclaimed land on the border.”