The Mushroom Garden was sandwiched between two rock walls that looked like the gnawed bones of some colossal beast. The dark-gray stone surfaces were riddled with honeycomb-like erosion holes.
In certain depressions, clusters of dark-purple crystals had formed, scattered sparsely across the entire wall. Around these purple crystals, the ambient mana density was always noticeably higher than elsewhere.
The so-called mining zone existed solely to harvest these purple crystals.
Embedding them in the soil wouldn't turn them into direct nutrients, but they could attract free-floating mana from the surrounding air and dramatically boost the mycelium's mana-collection efficiency.
Many Puji in the mining zone had the Chitin Shell skill. They grew thick layers of armor over their caps and used them to chisel crystals out of the rock face.
To be honest, a mere LV4 shell wasn't nearly hard enough; mining was painfully slow and the Puji often shook themselves half to death in the process. Still, given the limited conditions, managing to harvest any at all was already a win.
Inanna had locked onto a fist-sized purple crystal that had just been mined. She was clamping it desperately between her stubby little legs.
"What are you doing?"
"L-Lin Jun?"
The pink Puji jolted hard and immediately tripped over the crystal at her feet, tumbling in a dramatic heap.
"Don't just pop into my head like that…"
"What other way do we have to talk? Get used to it."
Inanna thought about it and realized he was right, but she still doubted she would ever get comfortable with someone speaking directly inside her mind whenever he felt like it…
"There are so many magic crystals here." She clamped the purple crystal again, unable to hide the excitement in her voice.
"Magic crystals? You mean these purple crystals I use as fertilizer?"
"Fer… fertilizer?"
A teal-capped Puji hopped over, used its short legs to lift the cap of a large mushroom beside it, revealing half a purple crystal buried in the soil underneath.
"Y-y-you're actually using magic crystals as fertilizer?!"
"What else would I use them for?"
"These are magic crystals! They can be crafted into magic items, used as the core of magic arrays, or even broken into casting materials! How can you just use them as fertilizer?!"
Inanna looked utterly heartbroken, as if Lin Jun were committing an unforgivable sin of waste.
"You forgot this is a dungeon? Besides fertilizing the fields, they do have other uses, though."
A mycelium tentacle extended from beneath a mushroom, activated [Entangle LV3], wrapped around a purple crystal the size of half a palm, and bound it tightly to a Puji.
Then a steady flood of mana poured into the crystal. It shifted from dull to lustrous, then from lustrous to brilliantly sparkling. The overwhelming mana pushed the entire crystal into an overloaded state.
When cracks finally spiderwebbed across its surface and it let out a pained groan, the Puji hopped wildly across the ground, carrying the crystal to an empty clearing.
Boom—
It exploded.
The shockwave knocked Inanna off her feet again.
"Pretty powerful, right? Works great against monsters."
Inanna, sprawled on the ground, was speechless.
A C-grade magic crystal—something that could be lightly processed into the main material for a silver-rank adventurer's staff—had just been treated as a disposable explosive right in front of her, releasing a blast with power equal to an LV4 Flame Blast spell.
Even the most ignorant nouveau riche in the Federation wouldn't waste such precious magical materials like this!
Even the crystal embedded in her own personal magic staff was only B-grade.
"By the way, you still haven't told me what you wanted the magic crystal for."
The sudden return to the main topic caught Inanna off guard while she was still internally cursing Lin Jun for his outrageous extravagance. She blurted out her true intention:
"I… I wanted to use it to cast spells."
The moment the words left her, Inanna felt a pang of guilt. She had no idea whether Lin Jun would see spellcasting as a threat. If he decided she was dangerous, her little life might…
"Oh? Didn't you say you couldn't cast spells anymore after turning into a Puji?"
Lin Jun didn't sound the least bit threatened—only genuinely curious.
Inanna secretly breathed a sigh of relief and quickly explained, "I was just testing it. Using a magic crystal might let me bypass the restrictions of this Puji body."
"Then go ahead and try."
Another tentacle extended from under the mushroom, picked up the purple crystal beside Inanna, and held it out to her.
Facing the suddenly approaching tentacle, Inanna instinctively backed up two steps, but it still wrapped around her.
The tentacle looped around her twice before securing the crystal firmly on top of her mushroom cap.
"Careful—these tentacles are really fragile. Don't break them."
After all, it was a stolen skill being forced through mycelium; it couldn't be expected to hold very tightly.
Inanna didn't dare move recklessly. She focused her entire mind on casting—Glimmer, a spell even apprentices could perform effortlessly.
An orange-yellow orb of light appeared above Inanna's head, flickering unsteadily as if the mana sustaining it was unstable.
After a few moments of flickering, Inanna seemed to find the trick. The light finally stabilized.
"It worked! It actually works!"
Inanna was so excited she started hopping in place with her tiny legs.
Snap—
The bound tentacle instantly broke. The magic crystal dropped to the ground and the Glimmer spell winked out—the mycelium tentacle really was extremely fragile.
"S-sorry…"
Lin Jun didn't care at all about the wasted mycelium. His full attention was locked on Inanna's casting process.
"Try casting it again now."
"I can't without a magic crystal."
"Failure is fine. Just cast it—I want to see the difference."
See?
Inanna wasn't sure what Lin Jun meant, but she still tried to cast Glimmer on her own.
As expected, it failed—just like the countless times before.
But Lin Jun, who had been watching her closely the entire time, saw far more.
[Mana Perception LV4]
He had plundered this skill from a magic vine called Noctis Tendril that used to live in this area of the garden. They detected prey through mana perception and then strangled them with vines. The Entangle skill had also come from them.
Although those magic plants were fairly high-level, since they couldn't move, they had basically been free meals to Lin Jun. They had already gone extinct in this zone.
Lin Jun felt a little regret about that. Both skills were quite useful. Back then he had only cared about securing territory and hadn't thought ahead. Otherwise he could have kept some seeds and raised them like the Roll-Armor Beetles and Slimes in the breeding zone—regularly harvesting them for skill proficiency.
In his mana vision, Lin Jun watched Inanna's mana flow smoothly at the start of casting, but the energy would stall at every node, never forming a complete loop. It was as if her casting method itself was wrong.
Inanna had just successfully cast Glimmer with the magic crystal moments ago, so it obviously wasn't that her technique was fundamentally flawed.
To Lin Jun, this looked more like a hardware-and-system mismatch caused by the difference between human and Puji body structures—the spell simply couldn't run properly.
A magic crystal acted as an independent environment that could better match the spell's required operation.
It felt a lot like how he had to modify the Puji before they could use certain skills.
"So, can you cast other spells now?"
Lin Jun knew she was a dual-element LV4 mage and was eager to see more.
"Um… I'll need more practice. I'm still not used to outputting mana through a Puji's body, and this crystal hasn't been polished. The cloudy patches inside will interfere with casting. I need to get used to it."
"Cloudy? The purer the magic crystal, the better?"
Lin Jun genuinely had no idea. He only knew embedding them in the soil helped gather mana. Any difference in effect he had assumed was just a size issue. As for using them as bombs… purity didn't seem to matter.
"Of course! They say Archmage Zorya's staff has a completely pure S-grade magic crystal embedded in it. Any spell cast through that staff has its power tripled!"
"S-grade? So they're actually ranked by grade… Wait a second."
A short while later, under Inanna's puzzled gaze, two Puji arrived together, carrying a large, crystal-clear magic crystal between them.
"A… A-grade magic crystal?! And it's as big as an arm?!"