The region was shrouded in, not mystery, but rumors and myths. Everyone who had talked about it spoke about what had happened three years ago. A massive explosion had rocked the surrounding area, disrupting a lot of normal folks’ lives - and the tower that had been in the region for decades was just ruined, a shattered edifice that had clearly been damaged in the blast. Beyond that - strange plants and creatures had begun appearing in the surroundings, distorted and warped versions of normal animals that spread out and rapidly pushed out the mundane counterparts.
Those were the things everyone knew. But there were more things that they had no idea on. What had caused the blast? Some failed experiment of the Mage who had lived there, an old man who nobody could remember the name of? Or had he been attacked by a rival magic user? Or worse, had a deity decided that the mortal man was reaching too far, and had decided to put him down before he stepped into territory where none should tread?
And the creatures and plants - what were they? Were they magical? Mundane, but warped? Was there some new kind of race hiding in the region, protected by the dangerous beasts that now roamed? The questions seemed to outweigh the answers.
For Nevin, two questions had driven him to this place. First, were the new plants and creatures different enough to possess different alchemical properties? While this drive to explore and know more about alchemical things had bitten him before, he found that even then he could not resist the allure of learning more.
To make matters worse for his personal resistance against coming to this place and exploring it, the Mage who had lived here was rumored to have been highly skilled in several arcane arts - including Alchemy. And this interested Nevin greatly. If he could find texts or documents on transmutative Alchemy that had survived the explosion, then he could finally start making progress on learning the magical side of Alchemy himself - which would advance him in leaps and bounds in his profession.
So here he had come, to one of the furthest, most remote regions of Corone’s isles, and now he was staring into the thick woods that surrounded the ruined tower. He could already see signs of mutation and change in the vegetation around here. Some of the trees were absolutely massive, far larger than they should have been with only a few years of growth. Their size wasn't the only thing that was decidedly wrong to the eye either, they were also discolored, not a lot, but with his years of experience and exposure to different forests and woods, he knew trees shouldn't be this color. They were too… Red, too purpled.
The other vegetation here suffered the same effects. Normal plants were larger than should have been possible - rosemary bushes that rivaled normal trees, briarpatches that had spines growing longer than some daggers would be, other herbs and hay just looking at, Nevin knew did not carry their normal properties. He was actually decidedly hesitant about trying to gather any samples from this place in fact; too much was changed and went. There was too high a chance of mixing one of these distorted samples up with a normal plant, and that would either ruin his potion or turn it into something entirely different.
