Chapter 3

  The little gem was currently facing a conundrum. It had made rooms all the way through the mountain, and now it hit open space. Its instincts were screaming at it to close the second entrance to its territory and start to dig downwards, but that was not what it wanted. Its best mana producers were insects, flowers, and trees. All of which were unable to be cultivated effectively underground. The gem wanted to build out of its cave system and generate mana faster than ever, but instincts are there for a reason. What if something goes wrong? What if having to defend two exits made its core vulnerable? It deliberate for days before gathering its courage and starting to claim the valley behind its mountain.

  The gem only got a few feet before realizing the first reason its instincts wanted it to go downwards: claiming territory in the open air was hard. It struggled with all its might, but it was unable to claim more than ten feet outside of its cave. It tried storing mana and then flooding it out all at once as well as slowly and steadily adding mana to the edge of its domain. It tried everything it could do with mana for weeks before realizing something. How had it claimed its little island. While small, the island was much larger than the area it could claim here. What was different there? It shifted its focus to the island it started on and examined everything closely. There was no difference with the rock, the flowers on the island didn’t seem to have any effect, and the air itself certainly wasn’t special.

  Since there was nothing else that could be letting it claim the island, the gem started to examine itself. The first thing it noticed was that it was bigger than it used to be. The gemstone that made up the core of the little being had grown, but that was not what it meant. Before it had been just the stone. It had its domain and could control the creatures within it, but that was like clothing. The whole tree the gemstone was embedded in felt like part of it now. It was as if the gem had a whole new body. Once it realized that it quickly figured out how claiming the island worked. It was because no part of the island was more than a few feet away from its new body. Roots tunneled throughout the entire island, and its branches let it claim more air and open space than was normally possible.

  Having figured this out, the gem came to the obvious conclusion. All it needed to do to claim the valley behind it was to grow roots to the valley. Instead of using its mana to cultivate the plants it already had, all of its mana went into growing its roots. The first place it expanded its roots was straight downwards. It was not the shortest route to the valley behind it, but the gem wanted to test its hypothesis at a closer location. The roots wound down along the walls of its rooms until they got to the bottom of the waterfall. Once there the gem started spreading its roots under the pond. Once the roots had spread it tried to claim the pond and succeeded.

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  Once the pond was claimed the gem filled it with fish before going back to focusing on spreading its roots. With its theory proven correct the gem redoubled its efforts to spread its roots to the back of its domain. Before long it's roots reached the valley and started to spread. The growth speed of the roots fell since they had to claim the living matter near them as they grew outward, but the gem persisted. Eventually it controlled the entire floor of the valley and began its expansion upwards. This was an even slower process, with the gem having to grow new saplings out of its root system every once in a while, but it continued. Eventually the entire valley was claimed and it was time to check and see what had been gained.

  The most important gain was the gems mana generation. It increased by an order of magnitude, and could probably go even higher once the gem personally managed the valley in the future. The other major gain it had was creatures. Being located behind a waterfall and in the middle of a raging river had not done much for its collection of creatures, but the valley fixed all of that. It gained control of all the rabbits, squirrels, snakes, spiders, and bugs in the valley. It also gained control of all the flora. Most importantly, it gained control of a herd of moose and the wolves that were hunting them. These creatures immediately grabbed its interest because they were something that could actually help with the defense. If it had controlled these from the beginning then the bear would never have been able to steal its honey and fish for so long.

  While it was nice to have finally gained control of the valley, the gem felt a strong need to limit access to its territory. Its main island was isolated by the river, and its first entrance was hidden by a waterfall, but here in the valley threats could come from anywhere. To rid itself of this fear, the gem started working in the same way as when the bear was attacking. It would first use the majority of its mana to strengthen the creatures, and then it would focus on shifting the sides of its new valley. It compressed the sloping hills at each side of the valley until they were vertical walls. This continued until there were only vertical walls in the entire valley. There was only one entrance which was small exit made so that its creatures could venture out and bring other species to it.

  With this done the gem focused on the interior of the valley. It may have gotten a large increase in mana, but it had also greatly increased the number of creatures it had to upgrade. To help with this it started controlling the growth of the plants in the valley. It made sure the plants grew quickly and healthily so they would produce as much mana as possible. It worked on this till it felt it had as much mana coming from the valley as possible, and then it got back to strengthening its creatures and growing its territory