Most of the time, the lingering connection between me and my Astral Power, even after it ostensibly had left my direct control, was an incredible boon. It allowed me to wield my powers over a much greater distance, to infuse objects in ways other people just couldn't and accomplish a few other things with impossible ease. I didn't need to channel my magic through the Astral River if I had an anchor in place; the connection forged during the initial channelling of my power lingered and gave me access. It even infused Lia, though that was one connection we had yet to explore deeply, as I had a feeling it would deeply impact Lia's bodily autonomy and maybe even her sense of self. I had no desire to turn my daughter into a puppet, even if I might have the ability to do so.

Now, as I was working with Luna and Lia to create the seeds of the guardian's destruction, that connection came back to haunt me. Or maybe I was being unfair. I could have severed the connection between myself and the targets I had conjured to test our experimental seedlings, leaving the Ice in its ordinary, conjured state, but that would have been too easy. It was fair to assume the spirit had at least as much control over the Ice it used to create its body as I had over the Ice I conjured. It might have even more control; it was hard to say. It certainly had more control than I could exert over a distance; we had already seen that. In the context of our seedlings, that meant we needed to make them as aggressive and oppressive as possible, able to tear apart Astral Power regardless of any attempts to control it.

Our initial experiments had focused on things Luna and I had learned while trying to impart various plants with different elemental affinities. Ice had been one of the earliest one we had worked with, simply because it was one of my primary affinities, so we had quite a bit of experience with the process. Then, the challenge became to turn the ivy-like vines we had chosen as our base-organism from thriving in a cold climate, which was the first result of the experiment to change its elemental bias to Ice, to a plant that would devour that elemental energy and use it to fuel itself.

For that, we had dusted off some of our experiments into vampirism, combining lessons learned in the past with insights provided by Lia and quite a few experiments, until we eventually managed to get vines that fed on Ice Astral Power. That was the big breakthrough, the creation of a plant that wouldn't just survive in an atmosphere of extreme elemental cold but that would thrive there. Hel, it would only survive in such an environment. Temperatures above freezing were quite hazardous for our little vine, and if the temperature got above roughly ten degrees Celsius, it died off swiftly. Similarly, direct sunlight was very effective in killing the vines off, likely a result of their vampiric nature but we could accept the current state of affairs. We preferred to travel during the night, anyway.

With the initial creation completed, we needed to turn the relatively harmless vines into a weapon we could deploy reliably. And that is where the lingering connection between me and my Astral Power came in. Given that we wanted to create a weapon capable of striking at the Astral Power of a target, none of us was willing to use the experimental seedlings on anything directly connected to my Astral Power, just in case the seedlings worked better than expected. Hel, even if they only worked exactly as planned, having one drain the Astral Power from my body in an attempt to fuel its growth would be debilitating, possibly leaving me crippled for a long time. Not something anybody in the family was willing to risk, even if the experiments might be interesting. There were lines we weren't willing to cross during our experiments; they might not be where others would draw their lines, but we had them.

The lingering connection was the compromise. Close enough that I could continue to influence what the Astral Power the seedlings were supposed to feed on did, distant enough that I could easily cut the connection, something I had a fair deal of experience with. It gave us a fairly safe way to test our various experiments on useful targets, letting us evaluate how well the different ideas worked.

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If only it weren't so uncomfortable.

Having one of the seedlings, a product of dozens of different experiments and almost two weeks of constant brainstorming, debating and testing, get introduced to one of my constructs was infuriating. It wasn't painful, not really, but more along the lines of an itch, constantly burrowing deeper into the Astral Power I could vaguely feel, impossible to scratch and slowly worsening.

Luckily, trying to scratch or remove that itch was my task in this particular experiment. Find a way to dislodge the seedlings, to keep them from devouring the Astral Power the conjured Ice was made of. Then, whenever I found a way to do so, and the way seemed to be replicable by the guardian, we tried to prevent it from working in the next iteration of seedlings, until, eventually, we were confident the seeds wouldn't be dislodged once they were applied.

So far, the moments right after the application were the most troublesome ones. At that moment, it was fairly simple to dislodge them by physically separating the Ice affected by the seedling and letting it fall away. Even without the fine control a direct connection granted me, I could change the Ice enough to encapsulate the seeds and toss the capsule away. We hadn't found a way to stop that from happening in the early stages, the seedlings needed a minute or three to have their roots penetrate, every moment exponentially increasing the afflicted area.

Initially, the ivy-like plant we had chosen as our base had extended its roots in fairly thick strands, making it comparatively easy to dislodge them. But one of our first changes, beyond those needed to make it feed on Astral Power, had been to add feelers to the thicker, root-like vines the ivy was made out of. These feelers rapidly burrowed through Ice and even through packed earth, as I had found out, allowing the effect to propagate incredibly quickly. Within ten minutes, an eternity in a fight but a heartbeat for a plant, one of the Eisblumen, named for the accessory I had worn on Mundus, could spread through three metres of Ice, or two metres of Ice and half a metre of packed dirt.

Rock could stall the vines' progress, but only to a point. Their feelers could, and would, find another source of Ice Astral Power and start reaching for it. Then, thanks to a few nifty ideas exchanged between Lia and Luna, the vines sought to envelop the rock and squeeze it together until they could create cracks and penetrate whatever obstacle they encountered. It was a fascinating reaction, one I wanted to study at some point, but, for now, I was just happy they had managed to set it up.

All in all, the little plant was a surprisingly effective tool, swift and deadly. But the best part?

We could prepare them by the dozen, infusing them with Ice and Life Magic beforehand, until they were primed to go off at a moment's notice. The biggest limitation there was the number of seedlings we had in the first place, something Luna was working hard to correct. She had started to deliberately breed these vines in cold and dark places, trying to have them shed as many of their seeds as possible, with a special emphasis on having the new seeds inherit the alterations we made to the originals.

A small part of me looked at these vines, these Eisblumen, and wondered if they should have a place in the Pale Lady's cult. They were a fascinating plant; even if they had only been created for a single purpose, it felt a little wasteful to just let this project wither away once their purpose was fulfilled.

It was an odd sensation, but I soon rid myself of it by focusing on the battle ahead. There, the Eisblumen would have a chance to show their worth, to let us see their glory, and their fate afterwards would depend on their performance in battle.

But, as I was reminded by the sturdy crack of breaking rock, thanks to the ever-increasing performance of our Eisblumen, we now had a tool to deploy, a weapon we could use to break the guardian's sturdy shell.

Now, we only had to find a good spot to confront the guardian, plan out our schedule and face it once more, now equipped with a little more knowledge and prepared for the massive threat it posed.

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