Askos has taken to this exercise better than junior has. She is the better healer, but he is better at prioritizing who to heal when as well as knowing what he is and isn’t capable of. Junior always goes to the most injured body and starts healing them, and often succeeds, but in the time it takes her to do that several others die because they were wildly unstable already. Askos, on the other hand, gets just barely enough information about everyone to figure out which ones he can completely ignore, which ones he can heal easily, and which ones will die without his immediate attention. He then gives the ones in critical condition a little bit of healing to patch up the most fatal wounds before working on them one at a time, only getting them to the point that they are stable before moving on to the next one. His method would work if he had about five times as much mana as he actually does, but it is a vast improvement over what Junior is currently doing. I don’t want to tell them directly what they need to do, it kind of defeats the whole thing I’ve got going here, but she needs to either figure out that she needs to change how she approaches the exercise or dramatically improve overnight, I’m not sure which will come first.

As for my personal project, using Whitelock to hold up a tree does work, but nowhere near the scale I need it to. I can get a small shrub to float by creating a balloon that is lighter than air and having it pull up on it, but not anything bigger. Still better than nothing but not nearly enough. Plus it tends to prevent light from reaching the plant which prevents them from producing mana, and whatever else it is they do with light. I know plants are able to survive off of nothing but mana, but they don't like it.

Now I’m trying to use Water Lotus to maybe try moving the water around the tree in a way that will help it float, but I’m having issues with that. With Whitelock I am able to have it far above the water line, keeping it from being splashed with the acidic ocean water, but with Water Lotus I would have to have it in the water, which destroys it. Using Shimmerleaf and Mirthrilwood I think I can pull it off without the plant being destroyed, and I am having some success there. But it is hard and I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing, which seems to be a major theme of many of my recent projects. But regardless, I’m sure I’ll figure out how to get other plants to survive in Shimmerleaf, and once I do that it will be much easier to anything with the stuff. Maybe then I can even explore under the ocean without worrying about being burnt alive and melted simultaneously.

Parius is going back to the front lines today, things have been getting steadily worse for our side while he has been absent. Not to an alarming degree or anything like that, just a couple small losses on our end that wouldn’t have been loses had our great Emperor been there. He’s taking his kids with him again, apparently, they have started to become pretty good tacticians under his tutelage, though I often hear them complaining about being forced to read history books a lot.

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Tiddol was a bit lonely with her kids heading off to war with their father again, so I hung out with her today. She ended up giving me a really long and in-depth lecture about alchemy today, I’ll admit it wasn’t all that interesting, but I can see that information coming in handy if I ever need to create my own alchemical stuff with my plants. Of course, the only way I would ever really need to do that was if I was somehow captured again as I highly doubt anyone would be able to take not only Tiddol but also all of the alchemists she has trained away from me. I highly doubt anyone would ever be able to lock me up again, but it is at least more likely than every alchemist around me disappearing.

There has also been a lot of progress with developing our metalworking capabilities. A massive excess of very valuable metal tends to speed that process along pretty quickly, and our stock is still growing faster than it is being used thanks to people expanding the caverns. None of them are actively looking for metal either, only digging up veins when they come across them.

From what I hear the biggest progress has been in the refining and purifying of various ores, which makes sense, cut out all of the rock and dirt and there is a lot less stuff you have to store. Plant manipulators using Pyre and Digger Root have been leading that particular endeavor. But there has been some progress in creating actual metal items, at first it was mostly utensils made out of iron or lead, but a particularly skilled healer noticed that lead was poisonous pretty quickly so we no longer make anything relating to food out of lead. Now we are making a bunch of small quality of life items out of metal, mostly iron, but the plant versions of them are still strictly better, and I doubt that will change unless I get ahold of a plant to manipulate metal.

Now there is an idea, I am sure I could make one if I work with Digger Root enough. I wouldn’t really use it myself, but it would be a good thing for the people. And I know the plant already exists, unlike what happened with Shimmerleaf, so it won’t be difficult to get it to evolve into that direction. I might do that next.

The members of my hivemind have been rooted out of the capital of the enemy in addition to a handful of other cities, but everywhere else it has successfully taken root. Unfortunately, it seems like their supernatural luck has come to an end, but it achieved more than I expected it too.

Other than that not a lot happened today.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.