Before the kids woke up I decided to go see the ocean. My forest had reached it a bit more than a week ago, but then the whole thing with the Hornmark kids happened and I haven’t had a chance to think about it since.

The first thing I tried was growing a plant in the water, only to watch it simultaneously dissolve, catch fire, and shrivel up. Seeing that my first thought was ‘I wonder if the same thing happens when I poke it’ the answer is yes, it does. I lost a finger. I don’t think that it’s water in there, or at least not just water.

As much as I want to figure out how to expand into the ocean right now it isn’t a priority, I still have a lot of land to expand to and there are more important things to do right now. It’s a shame too, I was looking forward to this challenge. I’ll start working on it the moment I am done with the teleporter design.

When the kids finally woke up I got them back to work and started my own project. I don’t expect the design to be too complicated, I have made similar items in the past, though not ones that work on the scale I want. The plants I’m going to be using are portweed, pipeweed, Requiem, Astrie.

Making teleporters that move creatures from one to another is something I have done before, but only ever with a system of two and always with a physical line going from one to the other. Two issues I need to solve then.

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My current idea to fix both of those problems is to somehow use my trees to conduct things, they are smart enough to do it and adding a bit of singing grass to help them hear things will allow them to listen to where the person teleporting wants to go. It also has the added benefit of not allowing anyone my trees dislike to make use of the network. I just need to figure out how to get it to work properly, which is probably going to consist of a lot of trial and error, like most of my projects.

By the end of the day, my apprentices had made some decent progress towards their goal. Junior had figured out how to take a breath without interrupting her concentration while Askos managed to do it with his eyes open, he didn’t have any problems with breathing to begin with.

The last four of my Paladins that were already skilled with plants is now good enough for me to integrate my plants into their body. The rest aren’t too far behind them, like my apprentices they are also exceeding my expectations. I give it a week before all forty of them are good enough to move onto the next step in their training.

For the ones that have already had my plants integrated into their bodies I am going to give them a couple days before having them go on dungeon dives. I can’t exactly send them into a potentially deadly situation with abilities that they have never used before.

I spent my downtime with Azrezel. He’s still recovering from the invasion, he can only make undead as fast as his soul can recover, and when he needs to make a couple hundred undead it can take a while. So he has been focusing on creating a few very powerful undead, make them as useful as possible so he doesn’t need as many of them. All of them are a lot smarter than they were before, but most of them aren’t sentient. About a quarter of the ones he creates are sentient and it is more or less up to luck as far as he can tell. Still, according to preliminary reports from the scholars that is several times better than what most are capable of.

As for what we actually did, mostly cuddle. I have to keep things pretty warm to drive away the snow, and it feels great to press up against his cool body when it’s warm.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.