I left Toi to create an area suited for ice-infused herbs and ore within the torc. It would serve as a test to see if it was possible for me to grow the supplies and resources needed for the new crafting techniques I had been given.

I spent the next few months exploring the city, adding plants to the herb garden as I came across them, collecting raw ore to stockpile, and watching as Toi tried to influence the Golden Lodecia. If her idea worked, I planned on hybridizing the plant so that the core produced was aligned with other elements.

I claimed anything I felt had any value as I scoured the city but focused my attention on finding quartz tokens, plants, and metal ore. An arboretum that was mostly intact, the plants inside were protected and confined to specific areas by arrays was one of my better finds. It took some work, but I was able to claim the building as well as everything inside.

I wouldn’t have been able to do it before summoning Toi, but with her help, I managed to build a spirit array that worked. The fog that she could release seeped into every nook and cranny of the building, and coated every plant, herb, and supporting infrastructure. Once the building was engulfed with the fog, she transformed the fog with spirit, making it appear as one item to my senses.

An item I quickly stored in the torc.

I had always been impressed with the torc, and the person that had created it, but that initial impression was renewed when I stored the arboretum. The torc was heavy with trees, a world of forest with little clear space, that changed as I gathered larger items. The torc anticipated my needs, transforming to make room.

Trees were removed, the land was leveled and cleared, and a small spring was redirected. How the torc was programmed to not only anticipate my needs but to create the ideal location and divert resources to the arboretum was both uncanny and fascinating.

How did the torc detect the arboretum and realize I meant to leave it here was just one more mystery I would probably never solve.

I wasn’t sure how the torc was programmed, but I was going to take advantage of it.

The area of town that was claimed by the wealthy often had greenhouses. Some had failed, but most had herbs and plants that had become overgrown. I claimed them all, adding them to the torc and extending the area around the arboretum with a network of buildings that would need to be categorized and organized. I wasn’t sure how I was going to have that done.

“I am still leery of letting anyone know about the torc and its function, and really do not want to reveal this hidden world or its capabilities,” I lamented to Toi as I added the thirtieth greenhouse.

“It might be fine if I could depend on Body Refinement realm cultivators to identify, harvest, and repair the buildings and arrays, but I know I will need people that have reached adept, even master level in herbalism at some point. Probably the same level for array mastery.”

“You won’t need to worry about bringing people inside to tend to repair these buildings,” Toi replied. “I have the skills and knowledge to tweak and repair the arrays each building is using.

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“The control arrays, once repaired, automate most things. The only labor-intensive work that needs to be handled is deciding which herb to prune and when.”

“You can identify every plant?” I asked hopefully.

“Unless it is a hybrid that a Herbalist was creating,” she assured me. “I think the first step once each building has been repaired should be adding a grouping of the Golden Lodoicea you are growing. You said that plant leaches any impurities from the ground. That will make maintaining the soil and air even easier.”

“You aren’t worried the Golden Lodoicea will leech something vital for some of the other plants to absorb?” Introducing different types of plants to established ecosystems could play havoc within that system. And the Golden Lodoicea could be invasive.

“I will have to proceed with caution, of course, and devise a system that allows me to test how each plant reacts as an area is purified, but I don’t see any real issues cropping up other than those plants that bear fruit, seed, or leaf that are poisonous or acidic in nature.”

“You think the Golden Lodoicea will leach the poisons and acids that give those plants their properties?” I asked, not having considered that possibility before. It made me wonder if any of the Herbalists testing the pods, I’d supplied were also testing the pod to see how they interacted with other plants.

It would be a great loss if swaths of plants died because the Golden Lodoicea leeched the very properties the plant needed to prosper.

“These buildings will make the area next to the lake I’d worked on establishing unnecessary, unless you hope to farm large swathes of certain plants,” Toi pointed out. “I can use that area for my experiments with the Golden Lodecia exclusively.”

“Can you maintain that field and these buildings at the same time?” I wondered. “I might not have an immediate need for such a large tract of land, but that might change in the future.

“The field doesn’t need any more input from me,” Toi assured me. “What I have established works on the same principle of a rain cycle- evaporation, condensation, and rainfall. Instead of water, the cycle I established uses the ice element I introduced fused with soul affinity.

“I may need to add a minor infusion of soul, occasionally, but a bare thimble full of soul energy compared to the barrels of energy I used to establish the field.”

“What about the ice flows?” I asked.

“That will require a bit more effort before it is completed. I need ten pounds of processed ice ore, and ten pounds of any non-aspected metal you might have. The higher quality of the unprocessed metal, the higher the quality of the ice ore we can produce.

“You might even create ice flows with different tiers of metal by seeding them with different types of raw material. Copper, tin, iron, gold, platinum, they all can be used to seed an ice flow.”

I withdrew the metals she suggested from my storage ring. They weren’t ore and had already been processed, but they were what I had. “Will these work? Or do I need to source unrefined ore?”

Toi released strands of spirit energy, ‘tasting’ each sample, her face filling with delight as each piece of metal seemed to prove useful.

“They will,” she assured me. “Whoever smelted these ores was unskilled, there are enough impurities remaining for the ice flows to treat them as ore, even if they have been slightly processed.”

I wasn’t sure if I should be happy the metal proved useful or upset that the Blacksmiths that served my House and Dojo produced inferior products. Hopefully, the blacksmithing techniques I had learned and been awarded from my trials would help them improve.

If not, I may have to reconsider how resources were being distributed. If I’d realized the inferiority of the product being produced, I’d probably already have made changes. Changes that would require the artisans in every field to conform to higher standards and expectations.

For alchemy, it was easy to determine how well an individual was doing. The impurities that remained with each pill were easily measured. For the other professions, there had to be something just as obvious to measure the final product. Something my people hadn’t mentioned.

Methods that I would make sure to learn about and use to implement some changes in resource allocation when I returned to the Dojo.