The Mushroom Garden was backed by rock walls on two sides. These rock faces looked like the gnawed remains of some colossal beast—dark gray strata riddled with honeycomb-like corrosion holes.
In certain depressions, dark-purple crystal clusters had condensed, scattered sparsely across the entire rock wall. And around these amethyst crystals, the concentration of mana was always noticeably higher than elsewhere.
The so-called mining area existed precisely to harvest these purple crystals.
Although burying this kind of crystal in the soil wouldn't directly turn it into nutrients, it could attract free-floating mana from the surrounding air, greatly improving the efficiency of mana collection through the mycelial network.
There were many Puji in the mining area equipped with the Chitinous Shell skill. They would form a thick layer of armor over their caps and use it to chisel the crystals out of the rock wall.
To be honest, with the skill only at level 4, the shell's hardness was far from ideal. Mining efficiency was quite low, and the Puji would sometimes even shake themselves to death during excavation. Still, given the limited conditions, being able to mine anything at all was already decent.
Inanna had set her sights on a freshly mined amethyst crystal about the size of a fist, gripping it tightly with her short little legs.
"What are you doing?"
"L–Lin Jun?"
The pink Puji trembled violently and tripped over the crystal beneath her feet, tumbling forward.
"Don't suddenly talk inside my head like that…"
"Do we even have any other way to communicate? You'll get used to it sooner or later."
Inanna thought about it and realized he wasn't wrong—but she still felt she might never truly adapt to someone being able to speak directly into her mind anytime, anywhere…
"There are so many magic crystals here," Inanna said, picking the crystal back up, excitement creeping into her voice.
"Magic crystals? You mean these purple crystals we use for fertilizing the soil?"
"Fer… fertilizing?"
A green-capped Puji hopped over, using its stubby legs to flip open the cap of a nearby large mushroom.
Beneath it—half-buried in the soil—was unmistakably a purple crystal.
"You—you—you actually use magic crystals to fertilize the soil?!"
"Then what else would I use them for?"
"These are magic crystals! They can be used to craft magic items, serve as the core of magic formations, and even small fragments can be used as spellcasting materials! How can you use them to fertilize fields?!"
Inanna looked utterly heartbroken, as if Lin Jun were committing an unforgivable act of wasting priceless resources.
"Did you forget this is a dungeon? That said, aside from fertilizing the soil, they do have other uses."
As he spoke, a mycelium-woven tentacle extended from beneath a mushroom and activated the skill [Entangle LV3], wrapping itself around a purple crystal about half the size of a palm, binding the Puji and the magic crystal together.
Streams of mana then poured continuously into the crystal. It shifted from dull to glossy, then from glossy to shimmering, until the excessive mana within forced it into an overloaded state.
When cracks finally appeared on the surface and the crystal emitted a strained, mournful sound, the Puji—still carrying the crystal—began hopping frantically toward an open area.
Boom—
It exploded.
The shockwave knocked Inanna flat on the ground once again.
"Pretty powerful, right? This thing works great against monsters."
Rolling on the ground, Inanna found herself completely at a loss for words.
A C-rank magic crystal—one that could serve as the primary material for a Silver-rank adventurer's staff with just a bit of processing—had just been used as a disposable item right in front of her eyes, releasing a single explosion comparable to a Level 4 Fireburst spell.
Not even the most uncultured nouveau riche in the Federation would squander such precious magical materials like this!
After all, even the crystal embedded in her own personal staff was only B-rank.
"By the way, you still haven't said what you want the magic crystals for."
The sudden return to the topic caught Inanna off guard. Still cursing Lin Jun's outrageous wastefulness in her mind, she blurted out her true purpose without thinking:
"I—I want to use them to cast spells."
After saying that, Inanna suddenly felt uneasy again. She wasn't sure whether Lin Jun would see the ability to cast spells as a threat. If he did… her life might be in danger.
"Oh?" Lin Jun replied, seemingly without any sense of alarm. His tone was filled only with curiosity. "Didn't you say you couldn't cast spells after turning into a Puji?"
Relieved, Inanna quickly explained, "I just want to try. Maybe casting through a magic crystal can bypass the Puji body's limitations."
"Then give it a try."
Another tendril extended from beneath the mushroom, wrapping around the magic crystal beside Inanna and reaching out toward her.
Faced with the suddenly approaching tendril, Inanna instinctively took two steps back, but she was still caught.
After circling her twice, the tendril bound the magic crystal to the top of her mushroom cap.
"Be careful. These tendrils are very fragile—don't snap them."
After all, it was a stolen skill, and forcing it to work through mycelium meant it couldn't really be expected to bind things firmly.
Hearing this, Inanna didn't dare move carelessly and focused all her attention on casting a spell—
Light.
A spell so simple that even an apprentice could cast it with ease.
A faint orange-yellow orb of light appeared above Inanna's head, flickering as though the mana sustaining it were extremely unstable.
After flickering for a while, Inanna seemed to grasp the trick, and the brightness finally stabilized.
"It worked! It really worked!"
So excited was Inanna that she actually jumped in place with her short little legs.
Snap—
The bound tendril instantly broke. The magic crystal fell to the ground, and the Light spell extinguished at the same time.
Mycelial tendrils really were very fragile.
Lin Jun, however, didn't care at all about the mycelium that had been lost. All of his attention was focused on Inanna's spellcasting.
"Try casting it again."
"I can't cast without a magic crystal."
"It's fine even if it fails. Go ahead—I want to see what's different."
"See?"
Inanna didn't quite understand what Lin Jun meant, but she still tried to cast Light on her own.
And, unsurprisingly, it failed—just like the countless times she had tried before.
However, Lin Jun, who had been observing her the whole time, saw much more.
[Mana Perception LV4]
This skill had been taken from a magical vine that originally lived in this area of the mushroom garden—Noctis' Tendrils. They relied on mana perception to locate prey, then strangled it with their vines. Incidentally, the Bind skill had also been taken from them.
Those magic plants weren't low-level, but since they couldn't move, they were basically walking meals in Lin Jun's eyes. By now, they had gone completely extinct in this area.
Thinking back on it, Lin Jun felt a bit of regret.
Both of Noctis' Tendrils' skills were extremely practical. But at the time, he had been too focused on securing territory and hadn't thought that far ahead. Otherwise, he could've left some alive, cultivated them like the pill bugs and slimes in the breeding zone, and harvested them regularly for skill proficiency.
Within his mana vision, Lin Jun observed that Inanna's mana flow during spellcasting was smooth at the initial stage. However, at every node, the energy stalled and failed to connect into a complete loop, as if her casting method itself were wrong.
But she had just successfully cast Light using a magic crystal. That meant her technique wasn't the problem.
To Lin Jun, this looked more like an incompatibility caused by the difference between a human body and a Puji body—
Simply put, the hardware didn't match the system, so the program couldn't run.
The magic crystal, on the other hand, functioned as an independent environment—one that better matched the operational requirements of magic.
It felt very similar to how Puji needed to be modified before they could use certain skills.
"Then can you use other spells right now?" Lin Jun asked.
He knew she was a dual-element Level 4 mage, and he was curious to see more magic.
"Well… I'll probably need more practice," Inanna replied. "I'm still not used to outputting mana with a Puji body. And this magic crystal hasn't been polished—there are cloudy regions inside that interfere with casting. I need time to adjust."
"Cloudy?" Lin Jun tilted his metaphorical head. "So purer magic crystals are better?"
He genuinely had no concept of that.
All he knew was that sticking them in the soil helped gather mana. When effects differed, he'd assumed it was just a size issue.
As for using them as disposable bombs…
Whether they were pure or not didn't seem to matter at all.
"Of course," Inanna said. "It's said that Archmage Zorya's staff is inlaid with a perfectly pure S-grade magic crystal. Any spell cast through that staff becomes three times more powerful!"
"S-grade?" Lin Jun paused. "So there are ranks, huh… wait a moment."
Before Inanna could even figure out what he meant, two Pujis appeared in front of her, working together to push forward a large, crystal-clear magic crystal.
"W-What!? An A-grade magic crystal?! And it's as big as an arm?!"