Mutant

Before going to bed, he had set the moss to automatically grow. Instead of waiting an hour, growing the moss for a few seconds, and then waiting again, he created a continuous stream of mana, passively expanding the moss even as he slept.

Now he reaped the rewards, the total area of the moss had grown to around eight squared meters and nearly doubled his mana income compared to when he arrived.

With a satisfied smile, he smelled the fresh smell of moss and scratched under the chin the brave little worm that had woken him up.

To be honest, Azorious felt very lonely. Day in and out, dragging a coffin full of heavy memories had taken a toll on him. So, as he looked at the shiny worm enjoying his scratches, he decided to open up a little.

"For your meritorious service, I bestow upon thee the name... Sir Wormy, and as a reward..." He sent a trickle of mana into the Sir Wormy, hoping nothing wrong would happen.

Without a will to shape it into something, the mana sunk into Sir Wormy's body, fusing with it without producing any visible changes. However, he could hear the tiniest satisfied burp from the shared connection.

Reassured nothing terrible would befall his new small friend, he sent some more, curiously observing the small body absorbing mana like a bottomless pit.

"Now, time to experi-" Growl, his stomach stopped him.

As Azorious got ready to take advantage of his mana windfall, his stomach demanded attention. It had been close to twelve hours since he got into the cave, and he hadn't eaten anything all this time.

"But what could I eat?" His eyes lingered less than a moment on Sir Wormy, then a nameless beetle rolling a ball of feces, and finally landed on the moss.

"Better than starving... I hope." With the look of a criminal going to his execution, Azorious kneeled and ripped a small patch of moss before shoving it in his mouth and chewing.

"Mhh, not the worst." The fresh moss tasted like old lettuce with a strong earth after-taste. Thankfully it also contained some flavorless water-like juice that quenched his thirst at the same time.

"Sorry damp wall. I'll lick you the next time." He 'promised' the wall before eating some more moss and getting to work.

"That's enough moss for the moment. Let's see what else I can do."

He took a few samples, A to E, and began feeding A with mana. Instead of ordering it to grow, Azorious wanted the moss to become red just as an experiment to see what would happen.

The moss absorbed the mana and... began spreading as if it didn't hear his order.

Azorious frowned and started guessing what could have gone wrong when an abnormality caught his eye.

The new moss looked different. Some darker, some with pointy or longer leaves.

Every new plant being born mutated slightly from its predecessor. And as time went on, their offspring retained their mutations and mutated further.

Azorious saw that around seventy percent were dead-ends where the newborn plant died soon after being born or did not even germinate properly. Those failed paths would then be discarded and the products recycled to fuel the race between moss offshoots to stumble on the correct gene that handled pigmentation.

And even more impressive, Azorious felt a wave of information enter his head. He couldn't make sense of most of it, as it appeared like tangled squiggly lines. Yet he thought that he would understand more of their functions as the mutations went on.

Azorious concentrated all his mana into the experiment, cheering and betting on which side would reach red first. "Look, Sir Wormy, that one has a bud-like growth! Do you think a flower will come out eventually?" He joked with the worm, feeling the long-forgotten excitement when he had just started studying magic, and the world felt like a dream.

As the patch of moss grew bigger as time went on, so did the expenditure of mana, and soon enough, Azorious ran out of mana.

"Damn, we were so close, Sir Wormy."

He collected the most promising sample, the bluish A1, for the next attempt.

After replanting A1 away from its failed brother and sisters, he repeated the quest and began feeding mana.

Immediately a slightly darker blue offshoot sprang next to its father, accompanied by a dead end and a yellow one.

"Whoo, getting close, buddy, but no cake yet." Snacking on some moss, "mental note, ask for better taste when experimenting on sample B.", Azorious watched the moss spread and mutate into a rainbow of hues and color grades.

Apparently, whatever led the mutation progress had stumbled on the genes that controlled pigmentation and were now focusing on them. That meant a degree of intelligent design Azorious didn't know what to think about.

Not only that, he himself could perceive that the information in his head had gotten clearer. The squiggly lines were somehow the instructions and characteristics of the plants, written in a language he couldn't understand.

Yet as he could observe in real-time what each change to their structure caused, a partial translation was well underway.

Failed gene combination after another approached the red from both sides of the spectrum in a head-to-head race. The blue side had reached purple and fuchsia, very close to red. The brighter yellow side had discovered orange and was trying out all hues. Just a matter of time before the legendary red moss would appear.

When the race reached a photo finish moment, Azorious mana hit bottom again, and he had to take a breather, deciding to continue the experiment from samples A2 and A3, the two closest to the red.

Twenty minutes later, he finally had his winner. A bright shade of red moss germinated successfully from the orange moss. Azorious cheered and picked up the plant, waving it in the air like a cup.

"Here, Sir Wormy, try the winner and tell me what you think." He offered a small blood-red leaf to the Sir Wormy, that swallowed it whole.

As Azorious placed the new red moss, examing the information in his head, pained signals came from Sir Wormy's connection.

"The plant was poisonous!" Azorious belatedly realized. Desperation rose as a familiar sense of loneliness and grief poked their heads out from his heart, ready to torment him once again.

Sir Wormy wriggled in Azorious hand as he sent mana into it. However, before he could order the mana to fix Sir Wormy, he received feedback on Sir Wormy's insides, where the damage done by the poison glowed with mana and returned to normal.

"What's going on?" He wondered as he sent more and more mana in. He could feel every muscle and vein that his mana traveled into being mapped as they regenerated and strengthened.

Illumination came to him. "I can't change pre-existing life, but as it grows from the beginning, like healing a wound or a seed, my mana can change its direction or speed up normal processes."

For example, he couldn't change a regular leaf into a mutated one, but he could rip the same leaf and then make a mutated one grow instead.

Azorious kept observing Sir Wormy going through the cycle of deteriorating and regenerating. As the Intelligent Design behind his mana had already identified the culprit substance that wrecked the brave little worm's insides, Wormy's intestines mutated hundred of times to target the poison.

Every mutated section would react differently, and the one that lasted longer against the threat would become the new baseline for future mutations.

2 hours later, Wormy stopped wriggling in pain and became calmer. The intense pain had been replaced by a slight discomfort, and Azorious guessed that if he fed again on red leaves, Sir Wormy would probably become able to fully digest them, poison or not.