“We only do fetches with people we know,” a Valiant in scale armor said. “Sorry, cherche.”

  Caen sighed and walked away.

  “The guy moves like he's injured,” someone said in a low voice.

  This was the seventh party Caen had approached.

  Gatherers weren't allowed into the Redshadow Plane unless they were in a party of other Valiants or Gatherers. He'd had no luck so far in joining a party.

  He had come down to the Redshadow archway late this afternoon to forage for some Planar materials to feed his fragment.

  It was evening right now.

  Instead of wasting the rest of the day here, I'll just head down to Mal-dawn.

  He’d intended to go there next, and it wasn’t even an hour's trek away.

  Caen needed more vines for Flora magic, and Mal-dawn was the place to get them. The ones he'd brought from Parthra had been soaked in chymical fixatives to delay their decay.

  Plants from the Mal-dawn Coppice Plane were very popular among Flora practicians because it was unusual for Planar materials to be easily influenced by people with low affinities. Plants from that Plane could be manipulated by a Flora practician just as easily as any other plant on Saffron.

  Caen was currently maintaining a restrictive Body-enhancement spell that made it slightly difficult for him to walk. The grace granted to him by his passive augmentations had been drawing far too many gazes from onlookers. Mimicking Chasma was an easy way to halt all his passive augmentations, but this way, he could learn to control his movements better… or less.

  Nearly an hour later, Caen walked past a much shabbier and rather rundown lodge built after the same pattern as the one by the Redshadow archway.

  A pair of Watchers sat to the side of the Mal-dawn archway. One of them was sleeping while the other was flipping through a grimoire.

  Caen stepped through the Aperture, tingles washing over his body. He stood on a flat, grassy outcropping surrounded by several such mounds with varying degrees of vegetation. Some of the outcroppings were much, much taller than the one the Aperture sat atop. He could see craggly hills far away and heard the cacophony of cutting weapons resounding all around, as Valiants in the distance chopped down trees.

  The bark of the various species of trees from Mal-dawn could be used for all sorts of chymical and medicinal purposes. This applied to the other plants and the water of the Plane as well. Before he'd discovered Mimicry, Caen had made money fetching Mal-dawn water and specific plants for the Chymistry guild.

  Below him, and stretching out as far as the eye could see, was a shallow body of water that partly reflected the cloudless blue of the sky above. It wasn't quite a lake or a lagoon, but allegedly spanned the entirety of the Plane.

  Caen made his way down the outcropping and splashed into the pristinely clear water below, which was nearly knee-high. It lapped gently against his shin and the top of his boots.

  He reoriented himself and began wading towards another outcropping with a promising copse of trees and lush-looking vegetation.

  Mal-dawn possessed various wildlife of its own. Most of them were fairly mundane, however. Still, as he walked, he remained cautious.

  He'd put on his crafting goggles so that he could rely on his speculon’s sharper vision, which had also improved. He hadn’t realized that higher affinities would influence his speculon so well.

  It helped that he could now simultaneously look in two different directions using his speculon.

  As he made his way to his destination, he felt the subtle weight of something, a presence, approaching.

  He had no idea where it was coming from, so he glanced around and quickly found something moving in the water towards him. A slender snake with blue and purple stripes on the back of its head. These were venomous and quite common in the Plane.

  Connecting to the approaching snake now, he was rather surprised to find that it had a prominent Body-enhancement affinity cluster in its soul.

  He held still so that the snake would move past, but it continued in his direction. Months ago, he'd always been careful to avoid these. Now, he waited. The snake sprang out of the water with preternatural speed. Caen reacted faster. He caught it by the head, grabbing its tail with his other hand.

  Caen briefly inspected the snake’s soul structure as it wriggled vehemently in his grasp. Nothing stood out to him immediately.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He sighed and flung the snake a good distance away. It plopped into the water, and he watched as its soul structure receded quickly.

  His foray in the Plane was uneventful. He met a few docile creatures on the outcropping with lush vegetation and even a rather large snake. But they ignored him, and he chose the path of wisdom: ignoring them as well.

  The next few hours saw Caen visit a few more of the islands of outcroppings, one of which even had a team of Valiant Gatherers working together to fell a tree. He searched for vines of exceptional quality; variety was crucial. The first he picked was barbed, mean-looking, and nearly forty feet long. Another was as thick as his thigh. Three others were slender and much more maneuverable. He gathered ten separate vines in total.

  He stopped to feed Chasma a few times and stored away some Mal-dawn water and soil for later.

  By the time he left the Plane, two of the sacks he'd brought were chock-full. He'd borrowed a large bag of holding from Zeris, so he placed the sacks in there.

  Taking all the necessary precautions, he returned to Redshadow quickly and without incident. It was well and truly nightfall.

  A fair number of Valiants loitered about the archway in groups.

  “Gatherers!” called out a woman wearing a spiked helmet and leather armor. “Any free Gatherers looking to join up!”

  Caen walked up to her. There was a man in similarly styled leather armor, though his helmet covered his face, and he held a crossbow in both hands. The man tapped the woman and gestured at Caen.

  “Hello there, friend,” she greeted.

  “I'm looking to forage,” Caen said.

  “Oh, a Gatherer then? We’re Gatherers too. Got some business partners waiting for us in the Plane, even. You can call me Mozzer.”

  “Caen,” he said. “As soon as we walk through, I plan to go my own way. Will this be a problem?”

  “Hey, we don't want any trouble. Splitting’s fine by us.”

  She kept trying to source personal information through small talk, but Caen kept his answers terse. At the Aperture, they bared their insignias to the Watchers on duty, who were barely paying any attention. He parted quickly with Mozzer and her companion once they entered the Plane.

  The sky above was gray, and the black grass of the Plane swayed gently even though there was no breeze. There were trees with the occasional bush of purples and reds. Stout hillocks and mesas littered the terrain, and on one of them in the distance, he saw a rundown and terribly dilapidated building: the remains of an abandoned research facility. Redshadow had several of those.

  Caen headed towards a hillock upon which sat a copse of trees and patches of kromroot.

  He retrieved some rope, his Parthran vines, and several of the vines that he’d taken from Mal-dawn today. He scattered them in a wide perimeter around himself.

  It helped that none of the vines or lengths of rope were shorter than ten feet in length and were partly hidden by the ankle-high, black grass of Redshadow. Using spell chains, he secured a few of the vines to the bases of some nearby trees for better leverage. Just an extra layer of precaution. He'd yet to come across a single shadeling, but that was no reason to let his guard down.

  He knelt by a bush of fentils, took out a knife, and began harvesting them carefully. A pair of one-tailed shadelings prowled towards him. Caen manipulated three ropes on the ground to capture one of them, tying up its limbs quickly. The second shadeling slipped gracefully out of the way of a vine and ran away.

  He kept the captured shadeling bound there till he was done scouring the nearby bushes. It continued to writhe and thrash all through, trying to inch closer and snap at him.

  He killed it swiftly with his glaive, recovered his vines and ropes, and moved in search of another foraging ground. He dissuaded a couple of one-tails with forceful prods of his glaive and killed a few aggressive ones.

  Hours later, he'd made his way through some tall trees to the foot of a mesa and was harvesting kromroots from a lush bush there. His vines and ropes were strewn about, and he'd placed his glaive and bag against a nearby tree.

  He heard some people speaking sharply from a few hundred yards away. They were moving closer. One of them sounded like the Gatherer he'd entered the Plane with. Mozzer.

  “You keep lying!” a woman growled. “There's no one here.”

  “No, no, no, please,” Mozzer answered in a desperate tone. “I swear, I have associates waiting with the package. Biggy! Shorty! They’re here somewhere.”

  Caen tied up his sack hurriedly and shoved it into his bag of holding with the other sacks.

  “Just kill her already,” said a man’s familiar voice as a group of five marched into view about two hundred yards away.

  Caen recognized all of them.

  The first was an armored woman of average build wearing a helmet that covered most of her face. Hez, the Fire practician that Caen had fought on the night he'd discovered his missing bloodlines. She held a helmet in one hand, and her other hand held Mozzer by the hair, dragging the smaller woman along as they walked. Mozzer had been stripped of her gear. The same went for a young man who followed along with his hands raised.

  Binam, the Lightning practician, swaggered beside Hez, carrying a sack over his shoulder, a medallion hanging around his neck.

  Affen, the bulky wereperson, trailed them, and he had the most vibrant soul structure here, which placed him somewhere between mid and late Attuner.

  Caen began slinking away quietly. Maybe if they didn't see him—

  Affen sniffed and whirled his head in Caen's direction. “It’s that fucking Gatherer!” the wereperson snarled, and his companions all turned to look.

  Mother of spirits. Caen sighed and whipped out his revolver.

  “Yes, that's my—”

  Hez shoved Mozzer to the ground, pulled out a pair of short swords, and started running towards Caen.

  Caen shot Binam twice. The Lightning practician was the only member of this group with a ranged attack, as far as Caen knew.

  Both bullets were repelled to the side as wind picked up in front of Binam. The medallion hanging around the man's neck glowed bright.

  “Let's do magic, then,” Caen muttered as he holstered his gun and split his mind in two.