Opening my eyes from my latest meditation session I was greeted with a sunrise over the lake. There was still snow and ice everywhere, but the signs of life were there. I can feel and see how nature is waking up. This process is slow but every day it's getting faster.

Yesterday I had to plant a few more seeds from the goblins and some that I have collected myself. The seeds that I put into the ground during fall were all doing quite well and seemed to be starting to grow.

The last few months have been quite peaceful. The few fights that might have happened didn’t because the monsters ran away when they sensed my energy. So, I have had quite a lot of free time to finally finish understanding this new tier of energy and bring it back and above the previous proficiency. Doing that was simply time-consuming and not actually hard but there were a few struggles that took a long time to puzzle out.

The biggest problem turned out to be the environment. It seems that the energy that I’m using acts like it's in a vacuum and wants to disperse into the environment as soon as I start manipulating it. At first, I compensated for it by just using more willpower but that affected my combat sustainability. The solution turned out to be an interesting one.

For some reason, if you’d let some of the energy you are messing with disperse into the environment in a controlled manner it helped. It acted like a controlled burn. Doing that somehow made controlling energy more efficient and required less willpower.

So now every ability that I use looks like it's burning. You could only properly see it with energy sight but even without it, it creates an effect similar to heat waves when you’re looking at something hot that doesn't burn.

I wish Bert was here so I could talk with him if this was the correct way that I found out, but it works so much better than anything else that I have tried. From monitoring my sustainability and resource usage somehow it seems to be the best choice.

I’m kind of happy about it because it looks awesome. But to truly notice this effect I need to be using quite a lot of energy and it's still better to use more willpower to control smaller and easier energy usage.

I pulled up my map which was now filled with black dots that indicated a resource or something interesting I might want to look at later. I spent a lot of the time when I was trying to understand energy while walking around my lands. This led me to find a lot of interesting things. During the last month, I have been mostly focused on trees.

I figured out that the best way to make money would be by making bows and for that, I needed special trees. I have been collecting and marking trees for a month now. While not every one of them is good enough for bows it turns out quite a lot of them are.

This is extremely good news on so many fronts. This will help me level up a lot, it will make me money and more importantly help me keep a good relationship with the rose thorn company.

I was both glad and saddened when I heard the news that they will be leaving. There were benefits and negatives for both outcomes but in the end, no matter what they choose it would be beneficial for us.

Because they were leaving so soon, I needed to push up my bow making plans. While I would have still collected wood, I wouldn’t have spent the last week on making 3 hunting bows that I believe are capable of being used against high silver monsters.

I honestly want to keep one but I think I will need to use them all to make a deal with the company so we could keep them as trade partners and not just acquaintances. While food that we will provide at the end of the summer might be useful for them it wouldn't be necessary but if I could offer high-tier craftsmanship, we might be able to forge a stronger relationship and that might be extremely necessary for the political landscape of the future.

Now I don’t know much about politics of the former Kingdom but I know that this company is in a position to monopolise at least the trade around these areas. Having a positive relationship in not just favourable but actual meaningful trade will be crucial.

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Who would have guessed that having to deal with army politics might help me so much in this life? But now when I think back on that time those politics might have been even more treacherous than in Game of Thrones.

But I did what I needed to do to keep the men that served under me safe at least as much as I could. The politics got even worse when we started to win the war. Rivalries caused a few large setbacks that might have cost us the bigger war.

Luckily there were people like me who saw the bigger picture and deemed that more important than personal gain. But now I will put all those skills to work and make sure that the people that put their faith in me will not find themselves regretting that decision.

I checked the map again and zoomed in on my location. I had to look around a bit to find the correct path but with this ability, it was quite easy to find my way around. I finally made it to the most interesting tree beside the iron oak.

It was also an oak variant, but it was quite a lot different. I am here to find out why it’s so different. I got the feeling from it that it was an old tree, but it was barely 20 centimetres wide. But it was still quite tall about 30 meters matching the trees surrounding it. The canopy itself was massive. The tree should not be able to support itself, but it does.

It looks like something a child would draw that didn't know how trees actually work. All the branches weren’t thicker than my thumb, but they were long, and they supported a lot more smaller branches. The tree looked like it was saying fuck you gravity I do what I want.

There is no way that it should support its weight and yet it does, but I didn’t want to cut it down without getting a clearer picture of what it can do. I feel like it’s really good for bows. I just have to hope that all those acorns are fertile, unlike the iron oak ones.

It was time for another meditation session but this time using nature connection to connect to the tree and find out what its evolutions are. Thanks to the meditation skill it didn't take days it only took about half a day.

After opening my eyes, I looked up to see every part of the tree. This was an incredible discovery. I was so glad that I didn’t miss it and I easily could have. It’s kind of incredible how hard it is to find something in a forest especially if it's a thick forest that has a lot of small hills and valleys.

This tree wasn’t on my land it was past the lake on the east side of my land. It was a bit far away to chop down, but I was still going to do it. The reason was that this was not the only tree of this kind around here.

When I was meditating, I also got a similar signal from five different directions. Going and seeking them out I found that one was quite young and I would guess it would be its first season when it carried acorns but the other ones were older than that and were also quite big.

That was the other great news the acorns of these trees were fertile, and I was already gathering as many as I could and putting them into my backpack. While they were not in the best of conditions after the winter they were still ready to become trees.

I had to cut the trunk in half to be able to bring it out of the forest. On the third trip, I brought along all the branches. The unfortunate situation was that this was going to be the last time I was going to be able to use the frozen highway.

The frozen lake and river were the perfect place to bring in lumber from far away. I might want to make myself a boat or a barge that I could use on the river but that has its own problems. It also might not be necessary as it is not really a good idea to cut down trees for special purposes when they are awakened from their winter slumber. That way the wood got from them will be better for crafting. So, wintertime might be reserved for hunting and cutting down speciality trees.

After storing the lumber, I walked past the smithy, and I had to shake my head. At the beginning of the winter, I had planned on getting a lot better at forging, but I have barely had time to work on it.

This was a problem, and I don’t know how much free time I will have when all to other farm jobs need to be started. There will also be a lot of building this year as we need three new homesteaders’ farms and prepare for a few more in the next year. Although by then everything should be easier as we will have a lot more trained people to handle those jobs.

Tomorrow will be an important day. Not only do I have a meeting with the company it would be the first time that the small group that I have founded will receive true power. Although this power will be quite small and limited to one village and its surrounding lands it is still quite important. By doing this we will be notifying everyone that we plan to rule our land which will come with a lot of problems.

This will also give us freedom and leave us mostly unsupervised although there will still be many people from the company that could spy on us. But I’m not that worried. We will not be doing anything unusual for quite a while. Hopefully, everything will go as planned and we won't have any big problems that will happen.