Regulus hadn't noticed any of it.
Three days in, he'd slept fewer than six hours total, but the imprint in his consciousness grew sharper with each passing hour.
The Mandrake's decomposition tendency was no longer an abstract magical property. It was becoming concrete. Tangible. Something he could call upon.
Before dawn on the fourth day, Regulus stepped out of the greenhouse.
Sea wind hit him full in the chest, rushing down his collar. He followed the stone path toward the east side of the plantation, where a gnome burrow nestled against the base of the wall.
He crouched, reached into the hole. His fingertips met warm, rough skin, still squirming.
He pulled one out.
The gnome thrashed in his grip, stubby legs kicking wildly at the air, producing a grating noise somewhere between a shriek and a cough.
Regulus held it by the scruff of the neck, but unlike a cat, it didn't go limp.
The thing was vermin. Aside from skinning them for cheap glove linings or feeding them to certain picky magical creatures, they served no purpose.
Perfect for testing magic on.
Back in Greenhouse Number Three, he set the gnome on the edge of an empty planting trough.
It bolted immediately. A Levitation Charm caught it mid-stride, all four feet leaving the ground, limbs still scrambling at nothing.
He drew magic from the sixth Mandrake.
Three days of practice had sharpened his efficiency considerably. The moment his fingertips touched the leaves, magic flowed back through the established channel, steady and continuous.
Within moments, three globules of grey-green light hovered above his palm, their edges rippling with waves almost too faint to see.
Regulus merged the three droplets into one.
Slightly larger now. About the size of an adult's pinky nail.
He guided the droplet directly onto the gnome.
The creature had still been struggling, its stubby legs pumping hard enough to make the air thud softly around it.
The instant the magic made contact, it stopped.
Not the rigid freeze of a Petrification. Not the boneless collapse of a Stunning Spell. It simply lost all will to move.
Then decomposition began.
Starting from the point of contact, the skin lost its color. But it didn't turn white or grey.
It lost every visual characteristic skin was supposed to have. Texture, sheen, elasticity, boundary.
The area looked like a smear. Something caught between existing and not.
The edges spread outward.
Within this zone, skin ceased to be skin. The keratin layer, the granular layer, the basal layer, all the stratified structures that defined skin as an organ, simultaneously lost that definition.
They became a loose scatter of protein fibers, lipid molecules, melanin granules, no longer related to one another.
The skin vanished, but no blood flowed.
Blood, too, was a unified whole composed of countless cells, plasma proteins, and electrolytes.
When the Mandrake's magic swept through, the connections between those components severed.
Red blood cells were no longer red blood cells. They were membrane fragments carrying hemoglobin.
Plasma was no longer plasma. Water and dissolved solutes, nothing more.
Nothing was destroyed.
Throughout the process, no cell ruptured. No molecular chain snapped. No chemical bond was forcibly torn apart.
Things simply ceased to constitute any functional whole.
Muscle lay exposed.
Skeletal muscle fibers that had once been arranged in precise order, each fiber a multinucleated cell packed with meticulously aligned myofibrils.
The Mandrake's magic passed through, and the banding pattern of the myofibrils blurred, then disappeared.
Then tendons.
Cartilage.
Finally, bone.
The gnome's entire body, outside to inside, lost its order in layers.
Every substance that had once composed the gnome remained in place, reduced to its most fundamental, most primitive state.
At the end, all that sat on the edge of the planting trough was a small heap of dust-like residue.
The most thorough reduction imaginable.
Regulus stared at that dust. He crouched there for a long time.
A mature Mandrake's cry could kill, but the victim's body remained intact afterward. Skin was still skin, flesh still flesh, bone still bone. The person was simply dead.
The Mandrake's innate gift of death stopped there.
What he'd done was something else entirely.
He had extracted in one go magic that the plant would have released slowly over decades.
Regulus looked down at his palm. The magic had dissipated, leaving no trace.
He understood what he'd done. He'd erased the foundation of a living thing's existence.
Regulus said nothing. He swept the dust from the edge of the trough into an empty pot.
A success, but he felt none of the satisfaction that came with reaching a goal.
The Mandrake's decomposition tendency could be extracted and deployed independently. That was step one. Nowhere near the finish line.
This wasn't a sustainable model.
Was he supposed to carry Mandrakes around with him every time he needed decomposition magic? In a fight, when he needed it on the spot, would his opponent wait politely while he extracted magic from a plant?
This wasn't a spell. It was a craft piece. Impressive, powerful, and utterly impractical.
The Black family could certainly supply him with limitless Mandrakes. Nothing but time, labor, and gold.
He could also pre-extract enough magic from these specimens, seal it in specialized containers, and carry the supply on his person.
But that was still just sustainable fishing rather than learning to fish.
Magic should not be so inconvenient.
Regulus pushed open the greenhouse door.
Outside, deep night still held.
Still a while before sunrise.
He drew a long breath, filling his lungs with briny air, and let it out slowly. Then he shut the door and returned to the planting troughs.
Twenty Mandrakes waited in their pots. Six were dead, drained of magic.
Regulus sat before them.
Extraction was only the beginning. The next step was understanding.
Understanding the decomposition tendency encoded in the Mandrake's magical core. He needed to take it apart, see its grain, trace every turn.
He placed his hand on the seventh Mandrake's leaves and began extracting.
This time he wasn't after volume. He pushed his magical sense to full power, shaping his magic into the finest possible thread and feeding it in reverse along the extraction path.
The Mandrake's magical circuit unfurled in his consciousness, far clearer than it had been three days ago.
Then he found the core. The gate through which all magic passed and emerged bearing the quality of decomposition.
His magical tendrils circled the core without touching it. First, he wanted to observe.
Watch how magic flowed into the core, how it circulated through its interior, how it emerged carrying a new attribute.
Entry and exit were different points. What flowed in was neutral, pure life-magic. What flowed out had become something else.
He watched for a long time. Then he began committing every detail of the process to memory.
The position of the entry point. The angle of the exit. The number of loops the internal circuit completed. The speed at which magic traveled through.
In a blank space within his consciousness, he built a miniature model replicating those conditions.
Failure.
The model didn't turn. Magic entered, stalled at the intake, and refused to advance.
He adjusted the entry angle, bringing it closer to the curvature of the Mandrake's actual core. Tried again.
Magic advanced an inch, then stopped.
He widened the diameter of the magic thread. The Mandrake core's input channel was broader than he'd assumed; he'd built his too narrow.
Again.
Magic flowed in, completed one full loop, and emerged from the exit.
No decomposition attribute.
Regulus paused, dismantled the model, and started over.
By the time the seventh Mandrake was drained dry, he still hadn't succeeded.
The eighth. The ninth.
Failure.
Failure.
Failure.
He wasn't frustrated. After each attempt, he stopped and compared the actual core against his model, cataloging discrepancies.
Sometimes the circuit was half a loop short. Sometimes the flow rate was too fast. Sometimes the entry angle was off by a fraction.
On the tenth, he began recording the magical fluctuations that occurred as magic circulated inside the core.
On the eleventh, his model produced decomposition for the first time, though at only a tenth the concentration of the original.
The twelfth brought it to a third.
The thirteenth, half.
The fourteenth...
Regulus lifted his hand from the fourteenth Mandrake's leaves.