That night, Mahakam held a grand feast.
All the dwarves were welcome to attend.
At that moment, rank and position made no difference.
Everyone was equal.
There was all the beer and roast meat anyone could want.
It was both a thank-you and a farewell.
The raucous feast lasted well past midnight before it finally quieted down.
Geralt had been plied with so much drink that he was already unconscious by the time he was taken back to the guest room.
Fortunately, Lynn had quietly slipped away halfway through.
That had spared him from being made to drink too much.
Sitting on his bed, Lynn began inspecting the spoils from this trip into the mine.
First came the pile of ashes the Red Miasmal had turned into after its death.
Lynn and Geralt had gathered the ashes, wrapped them in felt, and brought them back.
Of course, this was not because the two of them had some morbid taste.
It was because these were not ordinary ashes.
They were specter dust.
Basically, any evil spirit would drop this material.
Specter dust was an alchemical ingredient.
With the addition of buckthorn and arenaria, it could be brewed into Petri's Philter.
That was the potion that increased the power of a witcher's Signs.
Sorcerers could also combine it with other alchemical ingredients to make potions suitable for their own use.
As a result, specter dust usually fetched a high price.
It was even sold by the gram.
Looking at the bulging bundle of specter dust, Lynn happily put it away again.
He could make another tidy sum by selling it to a sorcerer later.
Next, Lynn took out a glass dish with a lid.
Inside was a red ball of flesh resembling the brain's thalamus.
This, too, was loot dropped by the Red Miasmal. It was called a mutagen.
Mutagens were extremely important loot for witchers.
Unfortunately, not every monster dropped one.
Mutagens had three main uses.
The first was brewing the Potion of the Grasses.
Yes, the very decoction required for the Trial of the Grasses, which induced the mutations that turned ordinary people into witchers.
Each school's distinctive traits differed because each school used different ingredients in its Potion of the Grasses.
What they all had in common, however, was that preparing the Potion of the Grasses required mutagens.
Second, mutagens could also be used to brew special decoctions.
These special decoctions were more toxic than the ordinary potions witchers commonly used, though their effects were naturally better as well.
For example, the Noonwraith Decoction could shorten the time a witcher spent hypnotized, unconscious, or blinded.
The Ekimmara Decoction, meanwhile, could drain an enemy's blood to heal the witcher's own injuries, and so on...
Finally, mutagens had another extremely important use.
They helped witchers undergo a Secondary Mutation.
Mutations were the greatest difference between witchers and humans.
Although the survival rate of the Trial of the Grasses was low...
Although even after all that effort and such a tremendous price...
The resulting witchers still fell about a billion steps short of the super-soldiers people imagined.
But!
Pay attention-here came the "but."
Witcher mutations were not truly worthless.
Although witchers were not impervious to weapons, their resistance to poison far exceeded that of ordinary people, allowing them to take potions with all sorts of wondrous effects.
Mutation gave them the ability to cast Signs.
Just because sorcerers called witchers' Signs parlor tricks, one should never shallowly assume those Signs were nothing special.
Sorcerers could think that way because they were exalted spellcasters.
But ordinary people had no business sharing that opinion.
You could fool your buddies, but not yourself.
The power of the Signs of any fully trained witcher was absolutely not what certain country bumpkins imagined it to be.
After all, Signs were a witcher's indispensable weapon against monsters.
A little thought made it obvious: how could something capable of dealing with monsters possibly be as pathetic as those deliberately spreading rumors and slandering witchers claimed?
Lastly, mutation also enhanced a witcher's physical functions.
Their strength, agility, reaction speed, physical coordination, stamina, physical recovery, immune system, poison resistance, senses, and other abilities were all further enhanced.
All of the above were the changes the Trial of the Grasses brought to witchers.
A Secondary Mutation built upon the Trial of the Grasses to enhance a witcher's abilities further.
The direction of that enhancement differed according to the mutagen injected during the Secondary Mutation.
Mutagens were divided by function into red, blue, and green.
Red enhanced strength, blue enhanced Signs, and green enhanced vitality.
Each type of mutagen was further divided into lesser, regular, and greater varieties.
What Lynn held in his hand now was a greater red mutagen.
"A Secondary Mutation?"
As someone who had transmigrated from Earth to another world, he naturally knew where the formula for the Secondary Mutation was.
It was in the Duchy of Toussaint, a place as beautiful as a fairy tale.
Of course, Toussaint offered more than a Secondary Mutation. There were also grandmaster equipment diagrams for several schools, along with some side quests that would affect the "future."
Looks like I'll have to find an opportunity to visit the Duchy of Toussaint someday.
Two days later, having recovered from the battle in the abandoned mine, Lynn and Geralt followed Istredd's caravan down the mountains and left Mahakam.
They picked up Yarpen and his companions, who had been waiting forever in the village at the foot of the Mahakam Mountains, and headed together to Dorian, north of the range.
Dorian lay in the Pontar Valley, built along the upper reaches of the Pontar River and surrounded by impassable brush and forest.
In Dorian, Istredd hired a boat that would take them downstream along the Pontar River, straight to Novigrad.
The Pontar River was also called the Ponta River.
The elves called it Adal yn Pont ar Gwennelen, meaning "River of Alabaster Bridges," and it was one of the largest rivers in the North.
Like the Yaruga River to the south, the Ponta River rose in the Blue Mountains and flowed from east to west, emptying into the sea near Oxenfurt and Novigrad.
Passing through four countries, the Ponta River formed the northern borders of Temeria and Aedirn to the south, and the southern borders of Redania and Kaedwen.
The region where these four countries met was called the Pontar Valley, or simply "Pontar."
Since ancient times, the Pontar River had always been an important trade waterway in the North.
As a result, the countries surrounding the Pontar River had shed no small amount of blood throughout history in their struggles to control it.
A saying had long circulated among the people-whoever controlled the Pontar River could control the entire North.
Yet despite that saying, no single country had ever occupied the Pontar River alone, and the North had consequently remained divided to this day.