Merrick, refreshed from chewing on the mulberry mint plant which thankfully didn’t share a tolerance with his rejuvenation potion, managed to make quick work of the rest of the alcoves in the fourth segment.

  He’d merged a mutated version of the weird potato-like tuber, something that looked a bit like a carrot, a ball of honeydew vines, and a few more plants that were unique to the dungeon. Out of curiosity, he’d even tried to set the mutated bramblekin horn into an alcove and that had also triggered a reaction.

  He did find out, much to his annoyance, that after placing an item into an alcove to make progress with the puzzle he was unable to retrieve it. The same invisible walls that separated the segments before the ring was lit up appeared to shield the items from his grasp. He wasn’t sure what he would have done with the bramblekin horn in all honestly, but he wanted to keep it as a bit of a trophy so the loss stung a bit.

  Half way through filling the fourth segment’s alcoves with mutated items, the ring finished lighting up and the fifth segment was illuminated. Merrick counted eight alcoves in the new room but, glancing backwards, decided he’d like to finish filling the ones in the room prior first. The walls of the cornucopia had lit up most of the third segment and he had a feeling he was playing catch-up on account of not putting in mutated variants for the first three sections.

  How Merrick was supposed to know that was the goal when a regular [[Merge]]’d item was allowing him to progress through the puzzle he wasn’t sure, but he knew that if a dungeon puzzle offered extra credit it was always worth taking it.

  By the time the fourth segment’s alcoves were filled, the blazing colors had reached a bit over half way into the room and the ring of light between the fifth and sixth segment was almost completely illuminated. It was obvious to him that the bottleneck would be the wall’s brightness and he worried about what would happen if the final ring of light between the sixth segment and the tip of the horn lit up before he was able to catch up.

  To that end, Merrick began trying to create another second tier mutated [[Merge]]. The fungus had filled up the ring more than a standard item but it had also lit up a great portion of the cornucopia’s depths as well.

  The item Merrick elected to use was a pepper because of both its small size and plentiful abundance. He was able to carry bushels upon bushels full to his workbench and work in peace. Several merges later, Merrick discovered that the peppers tended to hit a ‘Critical Success’ on the second merge, into their third tier, rather than their fourth.

  Naturally, for the sake of more experimental data, Merrick continued trying to merge the peppers that didn’t mutate beyond the third tier. Although it appeared to skip over the fourth tier, Merrick found a lot of success when it was time to create a T5 unknown pepper, with 80% of the ones he attempted hitting the [Critical Success] threshold and shrinking down to their original size. Naturally, after five merges of that caliber Merrick was starting to feel strained again.

  By that point, he’d chewed through a few batches of the mulberry mint to fresh himself while finishing off the eleven different mutated merges for the fourth segment. He’d tried to chew the T2 mulberry mint sample but it hadn’t seemed to have much of an increase in potency. It worked about 10% better but lasted for the same length of time before having to be swapped out with a fresh leaf. Overall, that meant merging the mint caused a large loss in efficiency so he’d been gumming the standard plant since then.

  At that point, Merrick’s internal clock was almost dead to the world. Between the fasting, delving, and general sleep deprivation, he’d lost all track of his sense of time. Somehow, however, he got the feeling that it was nearing noon. The tiny voice in the back of his head was whispering to him that he had only a few scant hours left before he missed his ride.

  As if that weren’t enough, he could tell that the mulberry mint was starting to have diminishing returns as well. If the merged pepper, when was finished merging three mutants together, didn’t take him most of the way to the end of the puzzle then he’d just have to take a nap and hope the distracting voice in the back of his head didn’t bother him when awoke. It was hard to miss a caravan that was already gone, after all. Even as he had the thought though, he felt sick to his stomach and knew sleep wouldn't come easy to him until the puzzle was finished for some reason.

  He shook his head as if to attempt and dislodge the intrusive voice and refocused his attention on the peppers in front of him. The singular un-mutated tier 5 had ballooned in size to almost be as thick as his thigh and as long as his forearm. Apart from that, it looked much like its tier 1 siblings, a long crescent shaped pepper with a dark green coloration that smelled vaguely spicy.

  The five he’d managed to hit [Critical Success] with on the third tier were the same shape and size as the other tier ones, but were a light green color and smelled a bit richer. The four he’d mutated on the fifth tier were a bit stranger. Two of them looked much the same as the mutated tier threes and the un[[Merge]]ed specimens in general, but were a vibrant orange color. The other half were no longer crescent shaped but looked a bit like a church bell and were still the same dark green as the original peppers.

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  Merrick selected three of the five mutated tier 3 peppers and [[Merged]] those first, since it seemed easier than trying to get another T5 Merge. His curiosity was only increased when the output was a pepper that looked exactly like the orange ones but twice their size.

  Not only their appearance was shared, however, as Merrick discovered that they somehow weighed the exact same when he placed one of each on either side of the scale that had been provided for him. The only difference he could identify was that the newly designated [T? unknown pepper] smelled much milder than its smaller cousins that were half its size. Merrick could only postulate that was due to the higher tier merge compressing much more magicka, matter, and flavor into a much smaller package.

  Of course, this gave him a new dilemma. Logically, he knew that the peppers weren’t clones of each other. He’d known this from the moment he picked each individual pepper off the plant, but more importantly he knew that they weren’t identical either. The T? version of the mutated peppers was different both in size and, as far as he could tell, magical presence than the T5 mutated pepper.

  He didn’t think, however, that the coloration was a coincidence. The fungi had already shown him, and the peppers to a lesser extent, that there was some level of genetic variance between the various dungeon spawned plants. Otherwise it didn’t make since that he got so many varied results from using his innate skill on the same plants.

  The fact that the T3 mutated peppers didn’t just merge together into a larger version of the light green pepper he’d created also hinted to him that he didn’t quite have an understanding of how his ability worked yet either. The result ran directly counter to everything he’d experience thus far. Unfortunately, Merrick knew one of the best ways to gather new information while experimenting was to act against his own theories and attempt to disprove him.

  By his logic, attempting to merge the two T5 mutated peppers and the new T? mutated pepper would fail. By his logic, the T3 mutated peppers would have kept their coloration and merely increased in mass when being merged. If he was wrong once, he could be wrong twice.

  “[[Merge]]”

  The transparent grid appeared before Merrick once more and he went through the motions of dragging the peppers together onto the grid. Starting with the smaller peppers, the first one was as difficult as the T5 green-frilled fungus variation had been. Then, the second pepper matched the intensity as well. He’d hoped it would be easier, like working out a muscle to increase the tolerance of physical activity. He still wasn’t sure that it wouldn't work that way, considering the body needed to rest to digest gains from exercising, but he’d hoped to see instantaneous improvement.

  With nothing else to do for it, Merrick attempted to drag the larger of the three peppers into the center tile. Instantly he noticed a difference.

  The resistance he felt was far, far greater than what he’d felt doing the fungi [[Merge]]. It reminded him greatly of when he was approaching a [Catastrophic Failure] and it was only the reminder that he’d have to eventually run the experiment to gather empirical data that prevented him from attempting to bail on the [[Merge]].

  Luckily, the resistance was still within the realm of possibility for him to power through and so he carried on. All three peppers slammed into each other, somehow phasing into the same spot as if they existed on different planes of existence and were thus able to occupy the same point in reality. A bright light flash and Merrick winced away, only daring to check his [[Skill Log]] after a moment to collect himself.

  [Merge Failed. One T#! Huh? Merged.]

  [SML: ::90%, GRW Mod: 0%, GTR Mod: 0%, RFN Mod: 0%, CFT Mod: 0%. TP: 90%]

  [Total 90% Potential. No Excess Detected. No Personal Blessings Detected. Variant Change +/- %.10. Inferior Output.]

  “Huh?” Merrick double checked his [[Skill Log]].

  [Merge Failed. One Inferior Mutated Pepper Merged.]

  [SML: ::90%, GRW Mod: 0%, GTR Mod: 0%, RFN Mod: 0%, CFT Mod: 0%. TP: 90%]

  [Total 90% Potential. No Excess Detected. No Personal Blessings Detected. Variant Change +/- %.10. Inferior Output.]

  “I’m losing it, I swear I’m going to take the longest nap if this doesn’t work out the way I want it to. Actually, forget the nap. I'm going to eat every berry in this glade and go into a full on hibernation coma.” Merrick looked at the pepper in his hands, slightly larger than the bigger [[Merge]] component and a darker orange color as well. The smell told him the potency of the pepper hadn’t scaled quite the way he expected it to, though the Inferior modifier probably had something to do with that.

  Merrick amended his notes on ‘Mutated Merges’ that he’d been taking thus far to signify that there was a fourth result for merging that he suspected might only be possible when combining previously merged products.

  ‘Catastrophic failure’, ‘Merge Successful’, ‘Critical Success’, and now just ‘Merge Failed’.

  With little time to lose, as the voice in the back of his head was only so eager to remind him the moment there was a second of silence in his mind, Merrick jogged around to the front of the catacomb and ventured into the fifth segment.

  He peered around at the eight alcoves and the half-completed ring of light that separated it from the next area of the cornucopia.

  “Here goes nothing,” Merrick placed the darker-orange pepper onto an alcove, then with a jarring noise and an even brighter flash of light, everything around him changed once more.