The Trip back to my pod was uneventful, not even a bird overhead or anything. Just silence and me walking. I push my way through the bushes and come out in the small clearing surrounding my pod. My pod is still in the center of the clearing, taking up most of the space and looking like a drug trip manifested. I take off my shirt and homemade skirt and throw them onto a bush to finish drying. Next I do the same with my chest sash then fish the pants out of the sack and hang them up too, best to keep it all together. Now, I’m debating whether or not I want to keep the leftover goblin blood crust on me or go full gooey sap monster. Eh, I think podding up is the best call, I’ll also be experimenting and renovating here soon.

I turn around and take the all of two steps needed to reach my pod and climb on. The connecting tail, vine, thing starts to move around to its usual spot and with a quick shock it’s connected and everything on my network becomes clearer. You know what, I’m just going to start calling it a connecting vine, which fits the theme better too. It’s not really a tail, since it’s not always attached to me. It looks like a vine too, just with less leaves. I think I might be getting used to it too, the shock it sends up my back is definitely less than the first time. I lay down and sprawl myself out across the flower as the inner petals close, the soothing feel of the sap runs across my back.

While the sap starts to fill the pod I think back to today's events. specifically the goblin incident, and how much fun I had smashing them apart. It’s scary when I think about the joy I felt while crushing their skulls. I’ve never felt anything like that before, the closest thing I could compare it to would be the thrill of getting your favorite candy as a kid. Fuck me, I know I’m physically a monster now but I don’t want to become one mentally too. But it was only goblins right? So it’s fine right? But what if tomorrow I kill a person and get hooked on the rush? But the wolves I killed before were not giving me that kind of rush. So what triggered that effect? Was it the overwhelming odds, the fact they were sentient, or that they were so over confident? I didn’t get a rush when I was fighting Alex before, not that it was much of a fight. I can’t think of anything, and if I keep trying my head is going to explode and it will be tomorrow before I blink. So for now I shelve that train of thought and opt to just keep an eye on myself, as much as I can anyway.

With my reflective thinking out of the way I turn my attention to my pod and see that the chamber has finished filling, leaving me floating in the sap. I open my eyes only to find it’s still pitch black in here, guess a light bulb is too much to ask for. Closing my eyes I turn my vision outward to survey my domain.

The area of my network is definitely a lot bigger, covering about a hundred feet in every direction. A large assortment of trees, bushes, shrubs, grass, and everything in between covers the area. I see a few Corso and Whichi bushes scattered about and even find the fabled Halix Bush, two of them in fact, on opposite ends of my area.

Halifax Bush

Halifax Bush

So I did have some in my area, that explains how I recognized it in the field. Seems I don’t necessarily need to see a plant on the network for me to recognize it elsewhere for the first time. That has its ups and downs, but is more of a bonus overall. Now, let's get to renovating. First I try manipulating the bushes around my pod without the skill, just to see if my baseline has changed. I try to grow one of the bushes around my pod, giving it more height, size and density to improve their coverage of my pod. Slowly it starts to expand and grow more leaves, but the process is as slow and mana consuming as before, especially mana consuming for a plant of this size. Thankfully my podded regeneration is enough to keep up by under normal circumstances I would be out of mana in under a minute trying to grow this thing.

I stop growing the bush and take a moment to examine the progress, definitely working but it’s still slow and costly. Next I try activating the skill, and immediately notice there is so much more to it than just growing plants. I can feel a few aspects to this skill, first is the growing part, it will let me freely grow and change the shape of any plant I desire. Next is the breaking down function, I think this will let me turn any plant into base materials to be used elsewhere, what those base materials are I have no idea. The third is a change of function, it’s distinct from the growing because changing the shape and size is different from what the plant actually does, makes sense. Then the final one is, well it’s like a designer function, letting me plan out and save designs of my plants and …. minions? But I don’t have any skills or spells for minions, why does it specify minions? I look a little deeper into the skill and to my surprise find a few pre-made plans already included, ranging from just bushes, to fancy bushes, defensive trees and thorns, and then I see it, a twigling. I’ve never seen a twigling before but the image of one pops into my head vivid as the sun in the daytime. It’s what I can only describe as a stick figure with an afro made of leaves, a bulb of roots emulating a plump belly, and claws for hands, close enough to regular hands to use tools maybe, if only barely. I don’t know why, but I like where this is going.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

Unfortunately it has to go onto the back of the list, as much as I want to play minion master I can’t get down another rabbit hole until I’ve finished covering my ass, or pod in this case. I try to shift to the shape changer but can’t get it to do anything, so instead try to use it to grow out the same bush I was working on before. Unfortunately, nothing happens. The bush doesn’t move a centimeter, and I can’t feel any mana flowing or anything. Well great, of course using the skill doesn’t do squat. Maybe I need to start manually then apply the skill? So I try starting with my natural control and to my surprise feel the skill kick in and speed things up. Oh, ok I see, it’s acting like an augment to my natural abilities. Now the bush is changing and growing very quickly, gaps between the leaves being filled with new growth to create an opaque barrier between my pod and the world. As the bush nears the two thirds mark for what I want it to grow to it starts to run out of energy and starts drawing from the network instead. I can feel my pod providing it something, being drawn out and sent to the bush, which continues to feed of the network while growing. I open my status to check on my mana, only to find the resource that it’s drawing out.

Nutrition: 74/100

Nutrition: 73/100

Nutrition: 71/100

I’m losing a nutrition point every second, thats not good. It makes sense that it’s using nutrition while growing, but I don’t want to find out what happens when that reaches zero. I let that bush finish growing, only stopping after eating most of my reserved nutrition.

Nutrition: 47/100

I don’t know what my nutrition was before I started this but I know this bush ate a shit ton of it. Now I’m hungry and still exposed on most sides. I start the process to draw in nutrition from the network and enjoy the warm feeling running up my tail and into my back. That gives me an idea, I wonder if I can see how much nutrition something on the network has, so I try feeling it out over my network. I pick a specific tree and try to gauge how much it has left to contribute and find it easy to measure how much is left. I don’t have a meter for it like in my status but I can easily see it has a little over ninety eight percent of its stores left. That gives me another idea, can I maybe get the bushes to pull from the network instead of me and my pod.

I decide to give it a try, worse case scenario I can just keep replenishing my nutrition. I pick the bush to the right of the finished one and start growing it out with my skill active. Sure enough it starts to grow quickly and once it gets close to the two thirds threshold it starts to pull nutrition from my pod. I try nudging it to pull from the network not just my pod but get no response. Not that easy, I might be able to do it if I had a better idea of what is actually going on. I try again, this time trying to get a nearby tree to provide but again have no luck. Maybe one day I’ll get it to work the way I want, but for now I’m stuck playing middle man. I give drawing nutrition while the bush is pulling a go, and to my surprise it works. At Least I can pull and give at the same time.

Well, my plan is set. So for the next hour I work on expanding my bush wall into a hedge wall. Slowly but surely it starts to take shape, creating a visible barrier between me and the rest of the world. Hopefully that is enough to keep any peepers out. I’m interested in the various other plants laying around but I put experimenting with them on the back burner for now. The pre-made plans that came with my skill currently have my attention. I’m going to admit I didn’t see the whole pre-made plans thing coming but it’s a welcome boon. Scrolling through the pre-existing designs for plants the only one that sticks out to me is the twigling. I get the feeling I can make it, but it’s going to be expensive and take a while. It took me an hour just to grow the bushes out, so creating a twigling will probably take close to three if my guess is correct. Well, not what I expected to be doing with my afternoon but a good way to spend it nonetheless.