After one of the squirrels got killed, and with nothing seemingly exciting around the few available trees don’t provide enough appeal, so the rest of the squirrel family does not take long to take off again.

Today I  have planned to do a mana test with my grasses again to see if I can figure out mana behavior if there are different options. Grasses all feed the same way and behave similarly enough that mana used should be equal. So I choose a few blades and decide to send mana into their roots. While doing this, the roots grow deeper, so I would expect them to have access to more water.

Setting an expectation, I can see three possible outcomes here. First and most optimal would be if certain grasses in specific environments follow either of the two routes depending on where they grow. This would indicate to me that mana flows through an optimal path either based on natural means or based on instinct and will.

The second option would be one of the two solutions crowding the other out. I could imagine that for an individual blade, deeper roots would always trump more reproduction even if reproduction would be preferable for the species as a whole. This would mean that the particular blade of grass would have some control over the mana distribution even if it isn’t on a conscious level.

Visa Versa however, should the reproduction crowd out the roots then this would indicate that mana is controlled by something outside of the blade of grass which is trying to benefit the species as a whole. This would then open up a new host of questions for me, starting with if there are any more beings like me with which I will have to share possible progression paths.

The last option is that grasses find a way to mix the two solutions. I haven’t seen this happening with the spiders, but spiders change much more slowly than grass does. This would be a risky possibility considering any future developments as it would mean I would have to micromanage everything I want to control the enhancements of.

So as I am doing this test with the grasses, I need to think of the next steps. Being the only one around here without the possibility to talk to anything else, I need to keep busy or else I might drive myself crazy.

With my spiders turning out to be a success and not needing more mana, and the visitors having left already, I take some time to reflect. At the end of my seventh week alive, I look back at all the things I have done and learned. I have taken over a small plot of land. Though I haven’t been able to grow it yet, I have been able to stabilize the mana and make sure it doesn’t leak out anymore.

I have gotten the lowest part of the food chain, the grass, to grow fast enough that it can sustain a broader community of animals higher on the food chain than I currently have. I have some flowers hanging around, which I haven’t done anything with yet, but which I am hoping will attract something to me, or keep something here sooner or later. Then there are five trees, the behemoths in my area, which I now view as the next most essential attractors of guests to my area.

I have a bunch of insects buzzing around. I haven’t done much with them, except for combining them under the collective moniker of insects. In reality, they are not all the same. It is just that they keep leaving and coming back into my area constantly. They die frequently, and new ones enter my zone just as much as old ones go.

I can’t risk enhancing one of them for fear of them not coming back, and my spiders use them as food anyway. They seem to be attracted by the grass and the flowers somewhat, but I haven’t cared enough about them to see what they eat.

The rabbits are again my largest animal group, though they lack the means of being predators, so to them too I haven’t done much and besides maybe increasing their breeding rate I don’t see what I can really get them to be to help me out more.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

The most essential inhabitants I have are my spiders. They are the most upgraded and the ones I have spent the most time on. The ones I have now I will keep as they are, little pockets of mana and death, while I monitor them for any signs of things unknown.

With predators in my area able to kill weaker guests that stop by, and grass plentiful to act as food, the next step is housing. My rabbits dig holes and spiders too stay within their own regions. Insects and birds are always transient, so trees to see if I can keep anything around longer is my next target. The tricky thing here is that if they grow larger or broader, then it would impact the sunlight available to my grasses and flowers, and more trees would show the same result.

Without any predators improving the bark or sap would not give it any improvements and more or longer branches would be such a small improvement for anything looking for a home I might as well not spend the mana on it.

Perhaps if I could make the trunk stronger but thinner, I could achieve the effect of longer branches without sacrificing sunlight to anything else, but I don’t know how to do this. Adding mana to the trunk would either make the trunk denser and stronger or broader or maybe even make the tree grow taller as a whole.

That leaves me with the leaves. There is a chance that adding mana to the leaves will make them grow larger, leading to fewer leaves overall, or maybe it would make the leaves stronger. However, somehow, I feel that the leaves would become more efficient, getting more energy out of the light it absorbs and growing more green as a result. In time this would mean more tree growth, but that is a problem for future me, who would by then hopefully have more land to control and distribute any adverse effect over.

Not knowing how animals choose a tree to reside in, improving the trees health and color might do the trick, so I have the next step.

Before I can start my new task however, a day and night have gone by, and it is time for me to see if there are any changes in my other tests. First up are the spiders. They are passively taking in mana, though still at rates which are negligible.

The further enhanced spiders, as expected take in slightly more mana due to their increased mana having a higher attraction rate. But nothing of note there. They are still contend feeding on insects.

My assassin hasn’t started showing any of the adverse signs of my first test subject when I overfed it mana, so I am hopeful that things are going to turn out alright. With the hunting method of ambushing, it is difficult to determine if it has an increased appetite or it is just eating anything that moves in its path.

Though now that I think about it, I hope it doesn’t leave its tree, as I don’t have a way of keeping the rabbits away from it. If it can kill a squirrel, it will be able to kill a rabbit.

The grasses I have changed the mana percentages of are turning out the way I had planned. Their roots dig a little deeper, but they don’t propagate as much. It is a bit too early to tell which of my predetermined possible outcomes I am seeing, but I see little relation between which of the paths the new grasses take and from which of the older grasses they stem. This leaves me hopeful that we are seeing the first and best possible outcome.

So now on to the tree. I start with the smallest of my trees and choose a single leaf and add the tiniest amount of mana I could manage to it. An entire tree only has about five points of mana in it when it is mature, so with my old calculations that would mean half a point of mana would be needed for one improvement.

With around two hundred thousand leaves, that means that each leave would get an amount of mana so small, I won’t even try to describe it in numbers. The upside of which of course is that if I make a mistake, the change in each leaf would be so small that it wouldn’t matter too much. Of course, if I see the desired effect happening, I would need so much mana to have all the leaves in all my trees enhanced that I might not even be able to bear the cost if I wanted to.

Either way, the minor enhancements on the leaves don’t have an easily discernible effect. I can tell that the leaves haven’t grown, but measuring the efficiency of photosynthesis on such a small scale is close to impossible to do. I think this is one of those; I will get back to it later when results are showing moment. That means I also shouldn’t enhance the other trees and leaves yet so that I have a point of reference to measure the difference with.