The wastes were a bit unusual for a desert climate due to one simple fact: there was plenty of water. Hundreds of streams came down from the mountains, and near their banks, short grasses or scraggly bushes did often grow. But without mana from the world core, nothing was vibrant. Nothing was healthy. Plants lived or died on their own mana production, which was generally insufficient even with a ready source of water.
It was the soil that did it, or rather, the lack of soil. The island had never been good, arable farmland, but the cataclysmic disaster that was Ammun’s breaking of the world had driven it to its current state. I doubted so much as one part in a hundred of the island was capable of supporting human life.
“And you plan to change that,” I said to Hyago, who stood proudly in front of a grove of close to a thousand large, healthy trees.
“Oh, not in my lifetime,” the druid said. “But I can get it started. I have gotten it started.”
I glanced at his work. Admittedly, it had only been a year or so and it was impressive how far he’d come, but a century of work just like this wouldn’t be enough to cover even a fraction of the island. I doubted the trees he left behind as he continued to expand would remain healthy without his care, either.
“This doesn’t seem sustainable to me,” I said. “How much can you really do when every tree you grow operates at a mana deficit?”
“By myself, I’d be limited,” he admitted. “But I’ve got eight assistants now.”
“You know that won’t be enough. It wouldn’t even be close to enough.”
His voice turned sly and he said, “We might not be able to cover more than an acre or two, but with you helping us…”
I laughed. “Hyago, I came to you because I don’t have enough time in the day to do everything that needs doing. I do not have the time to help you.”
“No, but you have ember blooms. I’ll do your herb gardens for you in exchange for some cuttings.”
While that was true, the cuttings hadn’t done nearly as well as the original I’d taken them from. Without that one anchor tree, my whole system would have collapsed years ago. Fortunately, I didn’t strictly need the ember bloom anymore, not now that the petrified forest was complete. It produced more than enough mana to power the wards and enchantments in my valley, and as soon as I got around to redoing those with the same techniques we’d used on Eyrie Peak, even the living stone trees would be unnecessary.
I couldn’t produce the mana Hyago needed out of nothing, but I could ease the amount of mana the trees used to the point where they started generating excess. Teaching Hyago how to make the enchantments would take far too long, but if I could get Querit out here to set them up, that would certainly help continue the expansion efforts.
“I don’t think an ember bloom cutting would help,” I said. “And the tree still hasn’t dropped any kind of seeds that I can find. However, I have an alternative proposition.”
“I’m listening.”
“You’ve got some enchantments running to keep your trees healthy, to protect the soil against erosion, climate adjustments, so on. That’s got to be hard on your budget. How much more could you do if you didn’t need to keep the mana batteries topped off?”
“A lot,” the druid admitted. “That’s an unexpectedly generous proposal, though. Can you really afford to spend that much mana just to avoid a bit of gardening?”
“I’ve learned some new tricks since you left my employ,” I said with a grin. “Remember what those giant birds taught me?”
“The mana recycling thing? But you said it was only useful for certain kinds of spells…” Hyago trailed off. Then he laughed and said, “You sly bastard. You figured out how to adapt it.”
“I can’t take all the credit. I had some help from my new assistant.”
“Ah, right. I met him – seemed like a nice enough fellow.”
“He’s a golem,” I said.
Hyago’s eyebrows climbed up to his hairline. “That was a golem?”
“The most advanced one I’ve ever seen in my life. I found him deactivated in some old ruins and fed him some mana to get him moving again.”
“Incredible,” Hyago said with a laugh and a shake of his head. “And the two of you cracked your infinite mana trick for enchantments. You’re willing to redo ours?”
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“It’s not infinite,” I said. “More like… ninety-five percent reduction in cost. If the enchantment could have run for a day without being refreshed, it’ll last about three weeks instead. Maybe a bit longer, depending on the enchantment.”
“That would still help us expand quite a bit. Would we need to do anything?”
“I’d expect you to grow some plants for me,” I said dryly.
“Besides that. Would we need to do anything special to maintain them?”
“No, they act just like normal enchantments. Feed the mana batteries regularly and they’ll last forever.”
Hyago nodded along and regarded his little oasis in the desert. “Okay, you’ve got a deal. Let’s talk about what you need grown and how much.”
* * *
By the time I left, I’d invested far more effort than I’d planned. Monsters were a bit of a problem for the druids, specifically some sort of ringed serpent that apparently loved trees. How or why those existed in a desert was a bit of a mystery, but I suspected they were used to climbing cracks in rock walls and had simply adapted to Hyago’s forest.
I raised walls to keep out the less nimble monsters and crafted some strong vermin repellent wards under the theory that without any mice or the like to pray on, the monstrous snakes would quickly abandon their new homes under threat of starvation. I also opened a portal to a far greener land, one which Hyago eagerly sent his underlings through to collect copious amounts of good soil and a few new tree species.
Finally, I opened portals to a few specific locations I’d marked during my travels to allow Hyago to gain access to several breeds of tree I wanted to see flourish on the island. It wasn’t so much that I thought he had a chance of succeeding at his goals in the next century, but if he was going to try, there were a few fruits I’d like to see readily available.
First was a peculiar type of apple tree. Its bark was a rich, distinctive gold color, quite beautiful in its own right. But the tree’s true value was the fruits that it produced. Each harvest took years to come in, or at least that’s how long it had been back in my original life. With the limited mana available now, we’d probably be measuring its fruiting cycles in decades.
But those apples could be eaten raw and would grant increased health and longevity. Properly prepared, the effect could prolong a life by a good century. They were so famous that there were all sorts of myths and stories told about them. Having spent a few hundred years eating them myself, I could confidentially say that they worked well at first, though with diminishing returns until they finally did nothing at all.
Less impressive, but far more practical, I led the druids to some vines that grew grapes bursting with mana. It was no substitute for a good mana crystal, and they would draw monsters to them once they ripened, but they had plenty of alchemical uses.
Finally, they obtained three shield willows, perfect for travelers seeking shelter. The thick, flexible branches could easily protect against bad weather and hide whoever was camping inside. Even better, a mage who knew the trick of it could convince the tree to fend off predators when needed.
I got a bit more than I was originally looking for as payment for the extra work. Alchemy relied heavily on various plants grown in mana-rich environments, but it could also make use of monster parts. Those were significantly more difficult to get hold of, for obvious reasons. While the druids weren’t hunters, they were already fending off all sorts of monsters. Adding the mana-bearing grape vines to their orchards was going to make that problem worse.
It wasn’t much of a stretch to get them to save certain parts for my use. All I needed to do was get a look at a few of the more common monsters while they were still alive so that I could point out what to harvest off them, which was easy enough to do with a few simple divinations pointing me in the right directions.
“I think that’s everything,” I said as I glanced at the setting sun. “And I am officially out of time now anyway.”
“Got somewhere to be?” Hyago asked.
“Family thing. I’m probably already late.”
“Say no more. You’ll send your golem assistant over to do the enchantments tomorrow?”
“Maybe not tomorrow, but sometime in the next few days. We’ve got a lot going on right now.”
Hyago shrugged. “Take your time. Can’t start growing your stuff without the seeds anyway.”
“Right. I’ll get those to you.”
It was technically possible to store seeds in my phantom space, but organic matter was always tricky even if it wasn’t really alive yet. Some of the seeds would inevitably end up damaged and fail to sprout if I went that route, and I wasn’t in that much of a hurry. I’d get Hyago the starter samples soon enough.
“Good luck with all of this,” I said, waving a hand at his miniature forest. “I’m hoping to get the world core itself fixed in the next decade or so. It’ll take a while, but if I can pull it off, mana will start flooding the land again. That’ll make everything a lot easier.”
“Why?”
“Huh?” I asked.
“Why the obsession with the world core?” he asked. “I know things aren’t the same as how they were in your last life, but you’re plenty powerful. I know how much mana your demesne makes. And I know how little you care about helping strangers when there’s nothing in it for you. So… Why?”
“It’s not for them. I just… It’s for magic itself. I know I’m not good with people. I’m impatient and rude and have no empathy for them. I run roughshod over everyone I meet, and I get away with it because no one can actually stop me. But magic…”
I trailed off and gathered my thoughts while Hyago waited patiently. “Magic saved me,” I said. “I’d have died in the gutter without it. It’s everything to me. I want mana to come back so I can rebuild what this world lost. You’ve lived your whole life with things like this. You can’t even imagine what it was like before Ammun. If you’d experienced it, you’d understand why it’s worth the effort.”
The druid glanced around at his grove. “I think I get that, a little bit. Living in your valley for a few years really showed me how much better our lives would be if this whole island wasn’t an endless desert.”
“That’s true enough,” I said. “But I don’t think you’re going to be able to scale this up to accomplish your goals. Still, it’ll be a nice few miles of green amidst an endless yellow and brown. That’s worth something.”
“Says the man who turned his whole forest to stone,” Hyago snorted.
“It wasn’t because I thought it looked better this way.” I looked past Hyago to the setting sun again and sighed. “Good luck with all of this, though. Honestly, I hope you prove me wrong. Now, where would you like me to leave this teleportation platform? I need to drop it and get going.”