After turning Aura down, Locke immediately returned to his laboratory in the Saffron Peach Orchard.
As soon as he entered, he saw Wizard Wood and the Mario Brothers holding up a mushroom taller than all three of them. It was a cross-shield genus star-ring mushroom magic plant, and the three carried it over to Locke together.
Wizard Wood told Locke joyfully, "Leader, look! I've finished the Mycelium Fusion of this magic plant with that of another star-ring mushroom magic plant."
Locke looked at the layers of mycelium piled atop the mushroom magic plant they were holding. The mycelium produced by the spores of two star-ring mushrooms had tangled together, forming a dense, black, felt-like mass. Not only had it stopped developing into fruiting bodies, but it had also achieved perfect fusion.
The Mario Brothers said, "Leader, Wood put a lot of effort into this."
Still carrying the mushroom, Wizard Wood scratched his head with his free left hand. "Not really. My efforts took me down the wrong path. At first, I wanted to use the magical magnetic field in the Finite-Element Single Cultivation Method to cut the plant factors in the spores and forcibly fuse the mycelium of different mushroom magic plants. You said we needed to fuse the mycelium of many mushrooms to meet the requirements for a wizard robe."
The Mario Brothers nodded.
Locke's plan was even more ambitious than those laid out by the previous two Moon-Ring Wizards.
Those Moon-Ring Wizards had understood this too. With the development of wizard robes, the Textile School had long since stopped using just one material in a single
wizard robe. Usually, a robe had several primary materials, with at least a dozen more used in its various small details. Under those circumstances, they certainly could not use the mycelium of