Karam wasn't certain about this plan as he stood at the front of the makeshift slime raft while Jin pulled it along with a rope that was also made of slime. He glanced back at Alim and signed while mouthing the words, "Are you sure this will work? It seems like cheating somehow."

"The zones are bound to their delineations," Alim signed back with a huff, bending over for a moment to get a closer look at one of the fragrant candles that Karam had conjured at the edge of the raft. "Unless stated or sensed otherwise, there's nothing that prevents those delineations from moving."

"The raft can't go on the land, though," Karam pointed out.

"If it really comes down to it, the rest of us will hop off, and Jin can keep pulling. I'm sure her Strength is up to the task."

Karam didn't argue anymore, instead focusing on renewing his [Light Among Darkness] Boon on each of them as they approached the island with their supposed new home. "Become the light in the darkness," he muttered softly, making sure he would gain a boost to friendly Light and Life abilities while gaining better resistance against Light and Dark attacks.

He also began breathing deeper through his nose, trying to practice his first [Aromatic] Perception ability that had been mostly a curse on this floor, with how awful this bog smelled. The Cultivating Guardian Home, however, didn't smell nearly as bad as the other plants and monsters had been. The tree smelled almost sweet, like perhaps it would one day hold flowers and fruit. There was something else, though, a hint of sourness beneath the sweet.

When the tree got close enough that his Aura brushed against its own, which seemed to only go so far as the shoreline, he used his second Perception ability, [Lifesense], to get an idea if it was truly an ally or not and what might be wrong with it. He hadn't brought it up at the time with the others when he unlocked it, but the only reason he had managed to unlock a second one was due to the Natural Talent he had been born with.

Natural Talent: Extra Support

You can have one additional ability unlocked for each limited type. Your actions that benefit others have an increased effect.

That Talent had been another reason nobody rejected his transfer as a baby to the Service Sect, not for the Limit Breaking potential, but because benefiting others was a Servant's purpose.

Now, though, he was grateful for the second Perception to be able to understand the target in front of him better. Its overall health pool was sitting at ten percent of its total, but even that felt like more health than any one of them contained on their own. It also had a Death Bane sitting on it that he could sense only three ways to remove.

The first way was to simply remove it with a Cleanse ability. None of them had unlocked one of those yet, but he planned to ask Alim if there might be a ritual he knew now that could do it. The second was to heal it up to twenty percent of its health. He was grateful it wasn't a hundred, considering that would likely take him days or weeks to accomplish with his current capabilities. The final way was odd, though, and he wasn't sure how to explain it to the others exactly.

Karam turned to his best friend and signed, "Any chance you know a ritual to cleanse a Death Bane?"

Alim looked thoughtful for a moment before shaking his head and replying, "Only ones for Fire and Blood, and they take a while to set up with ingredients that aren't exactly common. They're mainly for burns and bleeds that linger and don't kill you fast."

With a sigh, Karam tried to sign and speak at the same time for everyone else to hear. "I can try healing it to clear its Bane that's keeping it weak and agitated, but it'll take a while, or we can give it some kind of tribute."

Jin slowed in pulling the raft across to ask over her shoulder, "Is 'tribute' some Tower thing I still don't know about?"

"Not that I know about," Hadia replied, giving him a raised eyebrow and signing for Alim's sake. "Are you sure you're sensing that right?"

"I told you we need to give it snacks!" Clover called out, flying from Jin's shoulder to land on Kar's. "Can you tell if it prefers meat or cannibalism?"

Karam chuckled softly at the joke as Hadia rolled her eyes and interjected, "I don't think snacks are really 'tribute' worthy of a home guardian that is capable of cultivating."

"Wait, what do you mean by that?" Jin asked, slowing even more as they were almost in range of stepping onto the shore. "I thought it was just a fancy name."

"If it's really a magic item like you said, then Cultivating means its Caste can increase somehow. We won't know until we can analyze it more," Alim answered, and Karam wondered if his new Crystal Caste Mind was actually helping with his lip-reading capability or if Jin's obvious confusion was easy enough to assume the question.

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"So are we really going to try tossing food at it?" Jin asked with a raised brow.

"I guess it won't really hurt to try," Hadia replied, then shrugged.

With at least the next step determined, Karam turned to ask Liraz for some of the snacks from her dimensional storage, but she wasn't where he thought she had been. He glanced around, looking for her, and had a sudden sinking feeling that they had left the quiet little girl back on the other shore all alone or had been silently snatched by a monster lurking in the depths that was sneaky enough to avoid the various perception powers, and he called out in mild panic, "Miss Li?!"

"Yes?" her voice said from right beside him, and Karam jumped in surprise, shocked that he hadn't noticed her so close.

"Oh, um, sorry. I didn't see you there."

"I didn't either," Hadia interjected, narrowing her eyes on the blue girl. "Did you get some sort of stealth Talent?"

Liraz shook her head and squeezed her glob of slime like a round pillow to her chest as she explained, "Boxey makes me less noticeable when she's merged and I stay still."

"Huh," Jin said in interest. "That's pretty useful."

"Hey! I'm useful too!" Clover piped up, flapping back to her normal perch on Jin. "You gained all that useful information on the tree thingy."

Jin shook her head and chuckled, "You can both be useful, Clo. It's not a competition."

Clover gave a melodramatic huff, tossing back her new fancy mane and replying, "Clearly you've never met dragons before. Everything is a competition and we're always the winners, obviously."

A small ball of slime suddenly smacked into the back of Clover, drenching the tiny dragon in goop, and the Familiar seemed to freeze for a long moment before saying, "You dare to besmirch my magnificence," while slowly turning a murderous glare on Liraz, who was staring back with wide eyes and pointing at Alim.

The slitted green eyes slowly turned on Alim, who was smirking, and he began signing so fast that Karam couldn't actually keep up with it, only catching a few words here and there.

"What is he saying, minion?!" Clover cried out as Jin snorted a laugh.

"Nothing, really… um… he was apologizing… uh… said he was aiming for the tree, but you know, his Class isn't really built for throwing things," Jin said, and even Karam was pretty sure she was lying through her teeth. "Anyway, we should really toss those snacks now," the Wayfarer redirected, beginning to sign back to Alim. "Burning daylight and whatnot, right? Should we trigger those Zone Spells now? Or wait to see if it starts attacking again?"

"Let's wait. I think both of ours only last about ten minutes and have long cooldowns, so we'll want to get the most out of them," Alim replied, slowing down to a more normal pace with his hand movements.

"Alright, I'll go ahead and try dropping off the bait then," Jin offered a palm out to Liraz, who responded by pulling a small sack out of her own palm and handing it over. Opening the bag, Jin raised an eyebrow and asked, "You really think we should give the good jerky? What if it actually does eat it all?"

"Then I can make more in the hopefully decent kitchen inside it," Hadia retorted, giving Jin a flat look. "Now go try to feed the tree, Sky Girl."

Jin let out a pained sigh, her shoulders slumping slightly, as she turned and began jogging the few yards left to the island's shore. She paused for a while before stepping onto the muddy ground, watching the tree swaying gently in a non-existent breeze, but it didn't seem to react to her at all.

Once she took a careful step forward onto the semi-solid shore, the tree seemed to immediately come to life again, vines whipping out angrily towards the Dragoon, but Jin was ready for it this time and jumped backwards. As soon as Jin wasn't touching the island, the tree seemed to settle again and go back to its neutral swaying.

Karam thought that if that's how it would normally act towards an enemy, then that would be a fantastic defense enchantment for them, and he wouldn't need to worry too much about getting ambushed on his night watches. With that thought, though, he wondered why it was attacking them at all if his own ability clearly indicated it was an ally. Maybe because he was the one who saw it as just an injured creature lashing out in self-preservation?

Cautiously, hoping it didn't trigger some kind of attack again, Karam tried pushing his Aura out further in a single direction towards the Guardian. If he were lucky, it would be smart enough to realize that his Aura was healing it, even if it was slowly. Getting his Aura to obey was a struggle, though. There had been plenty of interviews with past Champions before who explained how Auras naturally wanted to expand out in every direction as far as it could go, but with dedicated practice, they could learn to control that instinct—make it smaller or extend it further in a single direction. One of the Champions had used the analogy of a ball of dough. It always took up the same amount of volume but could be stretched or molded into different shapes.

He watched as Jin tried throwing a piece of jerky at the tree while still standing on the water. He was impressed by the distance she managed, but the Guardian didn't react at all. Next, she tried one of the heavier fruits, but the same thing happened. The fruit simply brushed against the leaves before falling on the ground untouched.

Karam was surprised by the next thing Jin pulled out and asked just to make sure he was seeing that right, "A bone?"

Jin didn't look back as she kept aiming and replied, "Yeah. Dogs back on Earth loved them to an unhealthy degree, in my opinion. I bet the monster box would love it too." Then she chucked it forward, letting it spin end over end until it reached the tree's natural line of draped vines, but again, nothing happened.

With another push against his Aura, Karam finally got it to respond the way he wanted, and it stretched like putty towards the Guardian. When it finally got far enough to put the tree's actual body within his Aura, it didn't seem to react at first, then its Aura burst forward from the shoreline to encompass all of them within it. Suddenly, his [Lifesense] got a much clearer picture of what he had sensed before, and he smiled broadly.

Everyone else around him seemed confused, and Jin asked, "What in the Abyss just happened?"

Karam stepped forward and excitedly explained, "I managed to touch it with my Aura, and I think it recognized my intent to heal it. Can't you feel its Aura now? I think it won't attack us anymore, and I know what it really wants now to remove the Bane."

"Alright," Jin replied, nodding along with the explanation before giving a smirk and asking, "So, you gonna tell us how to train your treehouse?"

Karam's smile grew brighter as he gestured towards the tiny dragon Familiar and said, "Lady Clover was partially right, but the kind of snacks it wants are Divine Tower ones."

Jin slowly grinned back at him and finished the thought, "And we have three pretty golden eggs to give it."

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