Chapter 15 - Field of Poison

The sirens put Peter on edge. He had always been a bit flighty, especially when it came to blaring sounds. As a poisoner by trade he had to always be on his toes, just in case he needed to leave in a hurry. That had only become more of an acute sense when Rose died. From then on his flightiness had become borderline paranoia, fleeing from large places if they ever discovered the truth about his corpse bride.

He knew the situation was not the same as one where he had to flee, but this did not make the sirens any more palatable. As he walked through the throngs of people running about he began to get some sense of what was going on. The town was arming up, preparing for war in all ways they could, and this was a perfect moment for him. Although he was not a fan of being in the middle of military incursions, he did not snub his nose at the chance to collect more souls than he already had. With each soul he collected he would be able to layer protections upon his oversoul, effectively giving him invulnerability. He could still die, and had several times, but his body would restore itself to peak performance the moment that the soul was destroyed. In some ways it was incredibly similar to the absolute restoration of the Absolution clan, but it was externally focused rather than internally, requiring hundreds of souls for each stage to increase. This was the perfect chance for his defenses to increase, and with the incoming journey he knew that it would come in handy eventually.

After making up his mind, Peter began searching for Yun. He recognised that Laurence was just an outsider in this place, and was unreliable to boot, so instead he hunted for the man that he knew was at the top. It did not take him a long time, in fact Yun was the one that found him.

“Yun I have a request,” Peter began.

“Help me,” Yun replied, before letting Peter even begin talking.

“Oh... I wasn’t... Never mind, I want to make poisons and harvest the souls of the incoming people. I thought it prudent to ask you before just doing it. Do you have a place I could make them, and perhaps some people who are familiar with the processing of poisonous plants in order to speed my production time up?”

“It’s certainly possible”. Yun looked around before motioning Peter to follow him. He lead the man to one of the more central buildings within the town. It was of middling height, and had a clean exterior. Unlike the other buildings in its vicinity it was unadorned with any form of facade or frieze, making it seem slightly out of place. They walked into the building and through the main hall, which was just as sparse as the exterior, before reaching a stairwell that was centered on the back wall of the building. They walked up the stairs, their boots clicking against the hardwood that lined the floors of all the buildings in the town. Peter was not sure if it was a style choice, but it was something he noticed; all the buildings looked different on the outside, had different styles inside, but they all had the same material on the floors. It was such an oddity around such creative people that the moment he realised it he could not stop noticing it. As they reached the second floor of the building Yun lead Peter into a room with walls that were completely covered by arrays. “This is a sterile area for you to work in. the arrays purge any contaminants the moment that they enter into their vicinity”.

“Do you have any preference on the poison? I have a few ideas but they depend entirely on what you want the use to be,” Peter said.

“Kill as many of the bastards as you can while not hurting as many of my clan as you can,” Yun growled before placing a small box on one of the nearby tables in the middle of the room.

There were several sets of three kinds of tables in the room, which Peter assumed were separately for presenting, processing and production. Each table was meticulously crafted, and he could not help but sigh over them. If I had a set of these for myself then my production rate would speed up by an entire fold. Softly he stroked a processing table, set up with knives, crystal vials, dark stone cutting boards at a very slight angle with an abattoir for any fluids running into their own vat near the head of the table. Without a doubt, these tables were made to make sure that processing any sort of living organism was as lossless as possible and that was incredibly appealing to any master of medicines or poisons.

The final set of tables were just as special, if not more-so. Fire-pits sank into the middle of each table with transparent pots suspended above each flame. A simple wheel beside each pit decided the depth that the pot would hang at, while rich arrays carved upon each pot stopped them being contaminated by anything. Lines of vials hung against one side of the table, ready for use or storage as necessary, while on the other side two large jars sat stationary as if bookends between a rack of tools, from simple pokers and prongs to tweezers and a variety of knives for all occasions. On top of the table there were a variety of obvious heat zones, getting cooler and cooler until the layer before the edge which was sub-zero. The longer he stared, the harder Peter found resisting the urge to salivate. To him these tables were absolutely perfect for any poison he required making, and were even the right kind of tools to make some of the legendary poisons that he had only read about, never hoping to truly see, let alone make.

Looking back, he noticed that in his reverie Yun had long since left him, so all he could do was walk over to the box and look inside. The moment he opened the box he saw a small room; unadorned by any frivolous artwork, it was closer to a very large box than a room. He swallowed. Lining each wall were hundreds of perfectly arranged terrariums, filled with every poisonous insect, reptile, amphibian, and fish that Peter could think of living amongst almost all the toxic plants, roots, trees and fungi that he had even heard of. This box alone rivalled his clan’s core repository, and took up a millionth of the space. Peter was unable to imagine the damage his clan could cause if every member was gifted a room like the one he was in and a box like the one he held in his hands.

He shook with excitement as he slowly put the box down. Taking deep breaths he let go of the box and began pacing round the room, his mind whirring and turning. Occasionally he would stop, walk over to the box and check one of the terrariums before he returned to his pacing.

He was torn. Before he walked into the room he had a few ideas that he might have been able to pull off with scarce resources, but the wealth before his eyes opened his mind to a million different ideas that could do the job. Finally after much debate he stood near the tables and narrowed his choices down using three criterion: First, the poison had to kill as many as possible. This was the easiest to pull off, he just had to make the poison fast acting. Second, the poison could not harm the soul. This was far harder than the first, but still not impossible. Most poisons harmed the soul in one way or another, but Peter absolutely needed the souls to be intact for him to harvest them. Finally, the third thing he had to think of was that he could not do too much damage to the surrounding land. This was the true bottleneck in his decision-making, as a poison or toxin that killed quickly, did not harm the soul nor leave a trace upon the earth was rarer than finding a unicorn in the wild. It was possible, in theory, but in practice a task beyond daunting.

Fortunately Peter was left with three possible answers. They would still tarnish the ground, but the damage would repair itself over the course of about five years. It was not entirely satisfactory, but it was as close as he was going to get.

He reached into the terrariums and took a few plant clippings, taking care not to let them touch anything other than the tools he used to harvest them. He put the plants in the pot to simmer and began taking a vibrantly coloured millipede out of a terrarium, once more being extremely careful. As he placed the millipede into a vial he stoppered the vial and just held his hand there for a second before walking over to the large jars on the other side of the table. Almost immediately Peter started laughing, the longer he looked the harder he laughed. He had come up with a ridiculous idea.


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