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Seta hadn't been awake from cryostasis for long before the scientists aboard the Jaded rushed them off to the pods that would take them down to the planet's surface, barely even given a briefing on how the mission had changed. They had initially been sent as a last resort, an expert (or as much of an expert as the crew could bargain for; not that Seta wasn't competent, but they had a feeling everyone involved knew that they would be a little out of their depth if anything really went wrong considering their actual experience had very little to do with whatever skills would be needed to help secure an entire planet for settlement) in case the promising scans of the planet turned out to really be too good to be true. They were beginning to realize that Space Command may have understated the chance that actual danger would be in store for them. After taking a bit of time to consider the merits of each biodome that was offered to him, he touched the floating crystal marked as being for transport to Biodome Alpha, barely managing to keep his balance when he was transported all the way to the planet's surface in an instant.
Seta soon realized that other than the relative safety of the biodome, the tree in the center of Biodome Alpha was the only comfort they had been given. It was unlike anything they remembered from the worlds he had visited previously, exuding an aura of magic that they wanted to bask in forever. They sat on the tree's roots and flipped through the questbook. With the sheer size of the Jaded and the crew that had lived on it for so long, they wondered why they had been sent alone on the planet with nothing but the questbook in their hand. Purifying a whole continent by themself with almost no information, where acquiring most of the supplies that had been set aside for them would take completion of their tasks and careful rationing of the faith their accomplishments would grant them...Really, how could the Jaded's crew think they could understand what progress and setback looked like on an unfamiliar planet they had never even landed on themselves? At least having a bit of armor to start with would have been nice with how much everyone was pushing exploration. They knew all the previous scouts had died, so why would they think a solo mission given fewer resources would turn out any better?
The sun began to set soon after he had arrived. He chose a bed that allowed him to rest his hand on the silverwood tree as he slept. His excitement for finally being able to touch the ground again after so long in space had quickly been undercut by the landscape around him, the blight that had overtaken everything outside of the far-too-small glass dome he had been sent to. The scientists' reports hadn't been enough to prepare him for the desolation he faced, not that he'd had much time to read over them before being sent down. Everything in sight was a sickly purple. He'd been told it was autumn in the area of the planet he had been sent to, but that seemed to be the only way he could have known. All the trees' leaves were an unnatural purple. The reports had said that the blighted land seemed to override the usual weather an area would have had, too, so it didn't seem like it would ever snow even in the coldest parts of the continent in its current state. The trunks of the trees they could see looked like they were in the process of being fully consumed, turning from wood into some strange, useless material.
Outside of the dome, they saw familiar animals, but they were…wrong. A pig covered in the same purple tendrils as the ground had its snout pressed up against the glass, watching him. A similarly purple-covered chicken ran restlessly back and forth in front of his eyes, its clucks strange and deeper than they should be. After a moment, it stopped, its singular…eye? staring blankly at Seta. He would later learn that the animals were almost like zombies when he saw a sheep transform after having died to the blight's poison.
When he returned from his first scouting mission, an assortment of normal animals had spawned inside the biodome. A few chickens had already begun laying eggs, their clucks comforting after being around so many tainted chickens. He was most glad to see two cows because so many cooking recipes required milk. He made a quick pen for them by the small wheat farm he'd already set up, breeding them once to get started on collecting beef as well. He left the horses alone after petting the closest one a few times. Horses didn't seem like the most efficient mode of transport on a planet like this one.
His first time holding a wand, he stared out at the blighted landscape, feeling the intermingling of the twisted, corrupting magic that blanketed the world with the more neutral magic from the wand that was already starting to feel more like an extension of himself than a simple instrument. It was a rough tool, with no magic going into its creation, fashioned only of a stick and two hastily-made iron caps, and the magic it allowed them to access was frankly pitiful in comparison to whatever had caused the world to end up like it did, but it was a start. And when he pointed the wand at a bookshelf to see a book transform into a magical-looking tome which promised a guide to unlocking the secrets the world's magic had to offer, something inside him settled into place at last. This was it, this was what they needed to cure the planet! As soon as they could figure out all the steps in between, that is.
At least the paranormalist on the Jaded was just as interested in the magic as he was, he thought as he turned another bookshelf into a thaumonomicon he could send up to the ship to fulfill the scientist's request. With all the time they had spent reading through the quests they had been given, they had grown irritated with the apparent sense of superiority and lack of regard for other disciplines seeping through some of the scientists' messages. It was humiliating at times, always having the Jaded check in on his progress, having to prove he wasn't wasting his time, needing to follow their exact steps and show physical proof at each stage, knowing the supplies they were willing to provide him and the continuation of the mission itself were all contingent on whether he could perform to their expectations well enough. They expected their lone scout on the planet to master every subject with little help when they sometimes weren't willing to support the obvious way forward because of their overwhelming bias for their chosen field? He still felt angry that the xenobiologist had written off the mystical flowers so quickly, to the point of prohibiting the paranormalist from performing a simple scan to help him find the other colors of flowers. Even if those flowers in particular couldn't purify anything on their own, he just knew they had to be important! How could science ever move forward if everyone gave up on learning more about something after the first disappointing result?
The thaumometer he created allowed him to finally understand the tree that had been keeping him company. Looking through it, he could see the aura node, its brightness unaffected by the blocks between him and it. He chopped away parts of the trunk as gently as he could to reach its heart, a circular black spot that radiated the comfort he had grown used to. The node was pure, which he knew meant it was strong enough to change the biome around it to a magical forest while resisting the tainted biome. They raised their wand to draw magic from the node (vis, they remembered reading) before pausing, thinking about the entry within the thaumonomicon that warned of the imprecision of wands as simple as theirs. They wouldn't risk damaging the node that protected them, especially with how little vis it held to begin with, so, packing whatever food they could find, they left the biodome for the first time in several days to search for other, stronger nodes out in the world.
The search was fruitful, but it left them feeling drained. Unlike the node within their silverwood tree, almost all of the nodes they encountered while exploring were just as sickly as the land around them. Maybe worse, with how the nodes seemed to be spreading the blight faster and more insistently than it would spread on its own.
With the excuse of teleporting to a safe place where they could recharge their wand's vis, they ended up resting on the island in the lake they had been directed to scout before, sitting with their back to the silverwood tree and watching the waterfall. They breathed in slowly, relaxing more than they had been able to for a while. With the tree's magic (well, the magic of the pure node within it, although did the distinction really matter when it was the tree that had grown the aura node anyway?) warding off the tainted biome and the lake providing a larger barrier between him and the undead wildlife, it was the safest Seta had felt since he first set foot on the planet. The biodome, for all the safety it provided, had grown more suffocating each day. It had become a mess as soon as they'd managed to make tools that were more advanced than a flint pickaxe and they'd never found it convenient to organize beyond generally clustering related items together. The tainted animals were always pressed up against the glass, watching him, with their cries that were just wrong enough to startle him each time he heard them. The spiders were the worst, with the way they would climb on top of the dome and follow him around, their crawling making sounds that seemed far louder than they should have been. It was enough to have them retreating underground as they expanded their base's infrastructure. With more and more of his time spent hiding as he worked, it started to feel like the ground, too, was pressing down on him. Reducing the amount of space he felt safe in made his task feel even bigger, without even having the visible barrier of the glass walls to show him how far he could go before the silverwood tree could no longer protect him. Surely they'd done enough to impress the Jaded's crew to justify a moment of rest. They sang to themself until their voice got tired, then began fishing in order to get a bit more variety in their diet. Something about the planet seemed to demand healthier eating habits than they were used to getting by with, a requirement that didn't seem to extend to the Jaded's crew considering how much bread they'd been sending up to them. (A good quarter of the grass in the biodome was taken up by a wheat farm for bread production, while a much smaller portion of the remaining space was used to grow food for Seta himself)
After sitting in silence for a few minutes as the sun rose, he looked around and noticed an aura node very close underground. Not wanting to deal with mining underwater, he swam to the waterfall, intending to see if there was an opening nearby or a convenient place to build a bridge to stand on. He soon saw a lever on the cliffside. Pulling it opened up a door into what surely had to be some sort of long-abandoned secret base. The walls were rough, made out of the same green schist as the rest of the cliff. There was even a bit of coal ore exposed. The floor was also green schist, but it had been made into bricks to give it a bit more of a finished feel. Other than the research desk in the entrance, which was made of greatwood, all the furniture in the secret base was made of silverbell wood. They stopped to gaze at a candle on a desk for a moment, half-remembering a thaumonomicon entry detailing how to make one. Couldn't that type of candle be used as an infusion stabilizer? They turned to look at the entrance to a separate room. The node looked so bright and close, it had to be in there. Several mystical blue flowers were planted along the wall, looking to be in pristine condition despite being trapped underground in an enclosed room for who knows how long. A table, also made of silverbell wood, held two dayblooms. They scanned the node with their thaumometer, seeing that it was significantly stronger than any of the silverwood nodes they had scanned. After refilling their wand a bit and gathering the flowers, they searched the base for anything else that might be useful, coming away from it with an inventory full of phials of essentia and various language samples.
Like always, they trusted their steadily growing sense for magic to guide their focus when exploring and looting abandoned structures. They gathered every scrap of writing they could find everywhere they explored and sent most of it to the Jaded for analysis, but one tome in particular they had found in the secret base caught their eye. It felt important enough to keep so he could read it once they translated the language. It was yellow, with pictures of magical-looking flowers inside and a wealth of diagrams detailing how to create an overwhelming number of things. He noted the recipes he could understand down in his NEI so it would be easier to refer back to them in the future, even though he had no way of knowing which ones, if any, would be important.
Even though they couldn't read a word of the tattered documents they found, they lingered on some of them, tracing the lines of messages written before all the life had been snuffed out of the world. So many of the texts seemed to be letters. This world must have once had the infrastructure to transport all those piles of messages, and the population to necessitate such a large volume of communication. The only thing those lives left behind were messages he couldn't even understand. It was always easy to grieve for a world that had clearly thrived once, but seeing the evidence of people who cared for each other right in his hands made it sting more than usual.
Whatever the scientists aboard the Jaded had to say, Seta knew it had to be the right decision to pursue the flowers he had found. Like with the silverwood trees, Seta felt drawn to the magic they could feel within the pure daisies. The magic sense they had developed had only been growing stronger as they learned more about the world, so that even the very limited strength of the pure daisies' purification effect registered in their mind. (The very visible effects on the world around each pure daisy he had collected had, of course, prepared him to look closer into the flowers' nature, but he liked to think his new knowledge of the world's magic would have enabled him to notice it even without having seen the patches of purified land around them)
How long had it been since he last slept? He had hardly seen any of the usual monsters due to the tainted mobs' dominion over all times and places. Day and night had almost become meaningless to them; when going out at midday or midnight still meant facing the same twisted wildlife, if they even left the underground of their biodome at all, why would they wait until morning to continue their work? The world lacked anything like the phantoms they remembered from back home to mandate a minimum amount of rest every three days. Even the oceans, tainted purple as they might be, held nothing but the squids they had slaughtered to provide ink for their research. The only change time would bring was the further progression of the blight blanketing the world and the reversal of any progress they didn't choose to guard with their very limited resources. Some of the silverwood saplings they had managed to harvest from across the continent had grown into trees with more pure nodes outside the biodome, making new spaces where they could walk without being poisoned, but the land they had gained only lifted their spirits for a moment. It was such a small victory, and even though it was more permanent than an ethereal bloom that could be moved like any other flower, the time and luck it had taken to gain so little ground was just a reminder of the magnitude of the task ahead of them. Every patch of untainted land was very visible on the map in the scanning room on the Jaded, but the scan they started out of curiosity showed that their hard-earned progress wasn't enough to move the purification progress bars at all.
The translated Lexica Botania in their hands was exactly what they had been longing for since they picked their first mystical flower. After reading through it, they shared their excitement with the Jaded's paranormalist, having found that it was the key to understanding an entirely new sphere of the world's magic. They could finally understand the pure daisies they had collected beyond the echo of purifying magic they contained, finally see that the mystical flowers could be made into new kinds of flowers with even more potential like they had suspected. They left the molten metal sitting in their smeltery for later, crafting a petal apothecary and placing it next to an infinite water source they had created weeks before. They ran through their base to find where they had left the mystical flowers (cursing their lack of organization), briefly pausing when they noticed a research scroll they had abandoned halfway through completing it before continuing their search through the entire base's chests.
They'd been saving the bonemeal the Jaded gave them each day, and faced with such a pitifully small supply of mystical flowers, they finally knew what they wanted to use it for. Burying a petal of a blue flower in the ground, they used the bonemeal to grow it into a much taller flower, harvesting it with shears due to how delicate the flowers had become. They quickly lost track of time, only stopping once they had a sizeable pile of each color of petals they had found so far. Once they were done, they left to visit a skeleton spawner they had found on one of their mining trips. Growing the flowers had almost exhausted their bonemeal supply, and with the lack of non-tainted mobs spawning naturally, the spawner seemed like the best place to get bones. They ground up the bones between each wave of skeletons in preparation for growing more of the mystical flowers they were missing once they acquired them. Fibrous taint was growing all along the walls of the dungeon, and it grew back quickly whenever Seta tried to break some of it away to have a safe place to stand. The distraction made it bother them a bit less.
"One brown petal, one red petal, one light gray petal, one mana petal each of the first two colors…" Seta mumbled to himself as he tossed the petals into his petal apothecary. He was making endoflames in between replenishing the supply of logs for smelting charcoal to eventually feed to the flowers. Something about the planet made it so none of the generating flowers would wilt after three days, but flowers like dayblooms were still too slow at generating mana for his purposes. Between the runic altar, the terrestrial agglomeration plate, and the mana pools used to open the portal to Alfheim, he would need a dizzying amount of mana to achieve his Botania goals. With how many tasks had been piled up on him, anything easy to automate seemed like a good choice to invest in.
After seeing that the infusion enchantments were hidden behind a moderately shadowy research node that seemed to have little relevance at first glance titled "Brain in a Jar" he had become a bit of a completionist when it came to research. (Decorative banners with the thaumcraft aspect symbols on them. Why the hell not) Nothing particularly bad had happened so far as a result of the warp he had gained from doing forbidden research, and with the promise of a way to reduce it somewhat using soap, most of his early inhibitions regarding forbidden magic had vanished. No one else was around to save the planet, after all. Seta could worry about the consequences when the mission was complete. The rough stone boxing them in served as a good reminder when they started having doubts.
Their planning session late that evening was interrupted by a brief headache that felt slightly more ominous than usual. Maybe they'd consider sleeping a bit more often if that kind of headache continued. Their wand, a new one made from part of the greatwood tree they had been able to see on the horizon from within their biodome, couldn't provide enough comfort to get their mind off the feeling of wrongness that had taken root in the headache's wake. His concentration shaken, he walked back to his steadily-growing patch of pure daisies and began placing stone around them. There would never be enough livingrock, would there? His hands formed yet another mana pool, ready to be perfected within the mana reserves of one of the many pools he already had set up. At least some of the varieties of stone he had mined could be turned into livingrock directly without having to smelt them or use silk touch. A lot of his fuel lately had been fed to the endoflames or used to bake stacks upon stacks of bread to send back to the Jaded. It was the easiest way to reassure them about the mission's outlook when the progress he was making couldn't be easily quantified in the scientists' eyes. He didn't remember seeing a single enderman in his entire time on the planet (though the questbook assured him that they did exist) so he had spent a significant amount of his reputation points on ensuring he would have enough mana pearls.
With the voices Seta had concluded were probably a result of his research in the thaumonomicon, the whispers coming from the magical flowers he had spent so long tending to, and now the new voice that did nothing but demand blood, he felt like he had reached a fairly absurd level of being haunted or whatever was going on. At least all the noise in his head drowned out the tainted animals enough that he almost forgot they even existed at times. Still, it probably wasn't a good sign, and with no real ideas for how to fix any of those problems, he started melting down rotten flesh in his smeltery in hopes that providing the newest voice with blood would at least make it start having a bit of variety in its demands. They decided to worry about the logistics of providing blood to one of many mysterious voices in their head later.
They planted the umbral rose bush outside the dome in one of the small spaces they had carved out from the tainted biome, hoping the thaumonomicon's promise to quickly grow roses they could use for ink would hold true. Another alternative solution whispered in the back of their mind, of a way they could write their research in blood. The thaumonomicon entry they had read by torchlight appeared in their mind, a discovery close in subject to those tinged with the shadowy mist of forbidden knowledge. Again, they decided that the convenience wasn't worth even the small sacrifice it would take. As if in response, a thought came to them that didn't quite sound like their own, of how the roses' thorns and the squids' deaths made every option the same in the end.
Like the warmer oceans, the frozen-over parts of the continent were safe from tainted mobs. On another day where the claustrophobic nature of their base started getting to them, they rowed out to the frozen ocean to take a bit of a break. For about the millionth time, the boat went flying off in a random direction when they exited it. It went towards the ice this time, and Seta had seen this kind of thing happen enough times that they didn't even try to stop it before it hit the ice, broke into planks and sticks, and sank. He checked his inventory, relieved when he saw that he had remembered to bring a few spares. The boats he could create on this planet were simpler than the ones he was used to, but that also meant they were easier to carry. It helped balance out the inconvenience of having to use boats that completely broke apart when they brushed against a block. Seta quickly forgot about the boat issue once they got out onto the ice, shivering despite having put on as much warm clothing as they could pull together underneath their armor. They began to skate across the open expanse of ice, the wind whipping through their hair (thanking their goggles of revealing for shielding their eyes). The aura nodes scattered across the world were especially visible in a wide open space like this, so he chose his path to visit as many as he could, scanning each of them and drawing their vis until his wand was full. The carefree moment ended when they strayed too close to the land. A tainted chicken spotted him and started chasing him, its speed still startling even after he had fought so many before. He was a bit unsteady on the ice, slipping a bit as he swung his sword and missing his first hit. He recovered quickly, then scooped up the tainted goo it dropped, pushing it through his magic hand mirror before it could dissolve and poison him. He knew it would reappear at his base, coming out of the magic mirror the hand mirror was linked to and getting picked up by the hungry chest he had set up below the mirror.
Seta's mana production capabilities were good enough that they decided it would be easier to make a jaded amaranthus to spawn the rest of the mystical flowers than to continue searching the entire continent, even with the hints the paranormalist had finally been able to provide once Seta gave them a bit of help with sneaking into the scanning room. The flower was cheap, only requiring a few petals, a redstone root, and a rune of spring. Runes weren't the easiest things to make, of course, but the rune of spring was arguably the cheapest of the seasonal runes. (If it had needed a rune of winter, Seta might have needed to spend a bit more time convincing themself to make it rather than fruitlessly continuing to search)
Ten petals and two runes was a bit of a steep price for a single ethereal bloom, but at least Botania's shimmerleaf recipe seemed like the easiest one out of all the options. Other than requesting an artificial shimmerleaf from the Jaded, of course. (The voice in their head started spitting out something very bitter-sounding about having been betrayed before the tainted lands had taken over. The voice they had given blood to, to be clear, not any of the other ones. Seta really tried to listen, to get a hint about the world's history, but they were busy)
After having a long discussion with the voice once Seta took a break from their flowers, they set up the voice's blood altar underground, a level lower than the main part of their base. They'd held off on this for a while after they realized it was an option, but they'd begun to feel like they had no other choice. Like they'd hoped, providing a bucket of blood to the newest voice in their head had unlocked an entirely new subset of magic, one that promised a third way to produce the ethereal blooms that they needed to purify more land around their biodome. It gave so much context to a certain section of the more forbidden thaumonomicon entries. For example, the idea of a wand that drew its vis from the user's soul network started to sound much more appealing.
They disinfected and bandaged their cuts before retrieving their blood orb, standing up, and turning their back on the altar, feeling a bit sore from kneeling on the stone floor for so long. It was almost difficult to turn away, even harder to start walking up the stairs to the rest of their base (not just because of the blood loss, either). It seemed like blood magic had a whole lot to do with binding, and Seta had a bit of a suspicion that the blood orbs the voice in his head had directed him to make had done something along the lines of changing him forever. He wondered if there was any facet of magic he would consider off-limits by the time he was done curing the planet.
By the Dark One's orders, Seta constructed an alchemic chemistry set ("REAL alchemy") that could be used to make ethereal blooms and other useful items. It was easy to make, only requiring a brewing stand (crafted from a blaze rod the Jaded provided, not for free of course), two obsidian, and the use of their blood orb. The ethereal blooms produced with this form of alchemy were cheap, only requiring four silverwood leaves and a diamond. And 2000 LP each, of course, but he always made the sacrifices so long before making anything using LP that his mind barely connected the cost with the result.
Seta placed two of the ethereal blooms he had made with blood magic alchemy on the arcane pedestals surrounding the runic matrix, followed by an order crystal cluster and two paving stones of warding. Finally, he put a silverwood log on the central pedestal, the item that would be infused with the properties of the items surrounding it. He checked over everything one last time before beginning the infusion crafting, making sure everything was as symmetrical as possible and that the warded jars nearby had enough of the right kinds of essentia. He took a deep breath and tapped the infusion matrix with his wand, stepping a few blocks away when it began to shake. The essentia was drawn out of the warded jars towards the matrix in the center, in reverse order of the recipe written in the thaumonomicon. Seta had gone a bit overboard with infusion stabilizers after a few earlier infusions had almost gone disastrously wrong, so there was really nothing to be worried about despite the recipe's high instability. The process had started, which meant he had set it up correctly, so all that was left was to wait.
The only instability event that occurred left a shallow puddle of flux goo that was easy to mop up before it caused any problems. On the central pedestal sat a light gray block with a face on each side. It was a totem of dawn, a way to purify a much larger area by placing only one block. Giddy, they picked up the block, walked out into the tainted biome surrounding the biodome, and triumphantly set it down. Then they ran back to the magical forest biome their silverwood trees were maintaining before the tainted mobs could notice that they were nearby. The purification was already starting before their eyes, patches of green grass starting to poke through the purple blanketing the land. The fibrous taint covering every surface would soon die from being outside the tainted lands. After a few minutes, they placed a few of their remaining ethereal blooms at the closest edges of the newly purified area so the border between the biomes wouldn't be so sharp. They felt the weight on their shoulders grow lighter as they watched the land around their home become safe. They could stay on the surface now, with untainted nature surrounding them and no more unsettling animals to watch them. Just being a bit more free seemed to bring back their energy.