After getting acquainted with his new fried, the hive mind collective which he now affectionately called Mint, Novus life was quite slow. For the moment he had nothing to teach, after all it only understood emotions, images and some simple concepts.
[On the up side the whole glade had some mana in circulation, which was surprising to say the least, unfortunately it wasn’t consciously gathered and as such it can’t grow its reserves and density. The only a small amount it has is used to manipulate the plants for defense against predators, which for plants are herbivores, and some limited mana sense.]
On the 17th day of his new birth, Novus noticed for the first time what the glade can do, а rabbit with floppy ears hopped in to the glade, it sniffed around hopping and smashed some grass, nothing happened until it started to eat the grass, then the very same type of grass it feasted on elongated above him pinning him the ground. Even though the rabbit tried to rip the grass away there was always more replace the lost ones, in the end it fought until it was tired out, the tiny green blades slowly constricted the tiny ball of fluff until it suffocated.
What followed were roots growing from the ground, which slowly crept up and crawled through it orifice and in less than 8 hours it was drained like a mummy, in 16 there was only bones left and in 24 it was like nothing disturbed the glade. How a patch of grass can devour bone, he didn’t know.
Most of the nutrients went to border of the glade to reinforce the grasses fighting against the trees encroachment, and the rest was distributed almost equally giving almost trice to the grasses that did most of the work, surprisingly the mana was constantly going up and down, but almost never depleted, that would mean that the glade has quite a bit of regeneration but lacks capacity.
With that knowledge Novus tried teach the glade mana manipulation, core formation, mana gathering and mana compression and maybe mana refining, but nothing really stuck and his lack of skill in most of those can be put aside.
In the end he chose focus on maxing out his only two skills. And by the end of the month it was so.
Time wise the calendar of this world is quite interesting, each month is 30 days and each day is 24 hours, with a 360-day year, strikingly similar to the one from is past life and surprising, considering that the little knowledge he has a bout the world says that it’s a lot bigger than good ol’ earth.
The creator of the calendar was a quite the pragmatist as seen by the total lack of cultural and religious input in to its making. The months aren’t fancy named like “Month of Apollos Grace” or something, just simple 1st to 12th month, there are no actual weeks in the calendar but the commonly used one is a 10-day week with 9 work days and 1 rest.
What weird is the seasons, there is barely any change all year round and the more you go to the north the colder it gets and further you got south the hotter it gets, it is to the point where there are some folklore stories about Ice queens in their crystal castles and burning demons in their fortresses. Or it could be just the terrain, he was never interested in it too much, at the time of his farm days, if you could think about useless stuff you weren’t working hard enough.
After maxing out his Growth and Photosynthesis skills, this normally this is the part were his lesser skills upgrade themselves minor, but no luck. Maybe they need some prerequisites to be met or for him to be an evolved form of grass or something. In the end Novus will have to develop new skills from scratch in order to get those levels.
The first one he thought about was growing tubers, and maybe condensing nutrients somehow, reason being his seed or core as he now calls it, due to its central place and contribution, is starting to get a bit small. And he won’t try to grow it due to its exposure above ground, if could somehow burry it underground he would try again.
He is already close to 30 cm height and 1m long main root with around half a meter wide. So far the only notable thing was a few rocks he grew his roots around and the increase in moisture as he went down, thankfully the glade was protecting him from predators and there were no bug problems for now, but things could change.
First things first, due to his superior capabilities as a grass he was producing far more than he needed so he was giving the surplus to Mint, and now he was going to try and fatten some of his roots with the extra.
The first rays of morning showed the beginning of a new day and with that, Novus chose one of his deeper side roots as a guinea pig and slowly thickened it so that it can transport as much as the main one. Then he limited the growth length to a growth of width and started to pump it full of nutrient without any sense or reason, just pump it till its full.
At first the root started to grow but he willed it to stop and as the nutrients started to build up he could feel his limb clogging and cracking bit by bit so he tried to will it to grow sideways a bit more and so the root fattened up over and over until it cracked on the surface. It now looked like an old white-ish cucumber full of cracks, and from the cracks themselves yellow sap was flowing.
[Damn that was unpleasant, not painful but definitely not something weak willed individuals would try again. So why did I fail? From what I know tubers are like underground fruits, so they are filled with nutrients either for the new seeds to grow or for winter. In my case I was filling the root, maybe I should try and compress the nutrients?]
First thing first, clean up duty. The mess will be hard to clean first he has a big deformed and barely usable root leaking nutrients, second he can’t just reabsorb it and be done with it. Wait, why can’t he?
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
And that’s what he did, he pulled back overflowing juices and tried to squeeze it out of every last drop, when the root was mostly empty there was a type of resistance, at first it was slowly drying up and after a few more pulls it felt like a crack and started to shrink and wither leaving behind only a tiny withered root.
After a quick check he had gained a new skill not the one he wanted but, it was better than nothing.
Nutrient Absorption (Lesser) (2/25)
Forcefully absorb nutrients from friend and foe alike. The more skilled you are the more nutrients you can take with better quality and at faster rate. When used, it depletes available resources, using it against valid targets will cost more depending on its resistance.
Thankfully the skill was kind of easy to increase, and now he has a way to grow backwards, kinda. However, he still needs and try to try and make tubers, storing materials will be viable and maybe he could turn them in to mana fruits or cores of some kind.
So he repeated the same process, before the root could be damaged, he slowed down the input and focused on the already present nutrients in the root. He started to will them to stay together to compress and become solid. This roots expansion was restricted to growing only in width not length. Just like the previous one, and when it was about to get cracked he would stop and try and compress the nutrients over and over, it kind of reminded him of the mana compression method which mages usually use to increase the size of their mana pool and increase the pressure for refinement.
Then again the only mage who he heard talking of magic was the mind mage and that one was only interested in warping the minds of others so the techniques he used were more or less self-made.
After almost the whole day the root he experimented on was ten times its original size, even bigger than the main root, the only difference being the large amount of nutrients in it, he checked his skill and found no change other than an extra 2 levels in Nutrient Absorption, it was probably due to the use of Mints resources once he ran out of his, a bit before sunset.
Well the night is still young so he decided to continue, he slowly syphoned resources from the system and fed them to the tuber it grew and grew until it was almost a 5cm wide elongated sphere of about 7cm, then it started to slowly shrink with the compression of nutrients. Until finally when the first morning rays came he decided to stop.
[Mint was a bit upset about the large use of nutrients but it was also curious about what I was doing. Let’s see… I got two skills? Isn’t that a bit too easy? Well let’s see]
Nutrient Compression (Lesser) (3/25)
Allows you to compress nutrients in a more compact and practical form, increasing the ease of transportation and usage. With higher proficiency you can compress faster and waste less materials.
Tuber Growth (Lesser) (7/25)
You can saturate your roots with nutrients storing it for later use, ease of storage and speed of growth of said tuber increases.
[It feels like I am developing too fast, then again those skills are quite useless by themselves. What can I do with tubers other than store food? Feed someone to death? What’s surprising though is the nutrient compression, with it I can increase the energy density of my nutrients and store more in less space but if I read the description right there is the tradeoff of losing materials as a whole, but its good. All my skills are lesser but that’s even better, I can build solid foundations with those]
[Usually when someone is though a skill from a teacher they get the common version of it and when the master it, it becomes Greater and finally Grand grade. But training lesser abilities to minor and then common is a lot better, you get the bonuses from the lower tiers. Classes give a free rarity upgrade if you have the given skill present or an entire new one, preferably a unique. I still remember my starting combat class was lesser mind mage and sense I already had Mind Flay (Lesser) it was immediately increased in rarity to Mind Flay (Lesser) (Uncommon).
I wish I could see the look on my face when I found out that you can buy a class based on your skills, then again I also remember the shock of learning the price of 5 skill points, my poor 3 skill heart couldn’t take it.]
[So if it’s something similar I should save my points for later and maybe buy a few lesser species jobs and become a hybrid, maybe some magic plant and a plant monster would be fine, I do like the glade but… I should probably stay here and improve as much as possible, a tree in a forest will gain much less attention to itself than an overpowered root monster.]
[I do hope no humanoids will find me, cuz I know what they do when they find something new and unknown, they rip from its home and sell it the highest bidder. Elves will probably try to enslave me with nature magic and when they can’t they will mark me as an abomination to be hunted.]
After the small walk on memory lane Novus started to teach Mint how to make tubers and compress nutrients. It took it a while to understand the need for them but soon it understood that sometimes, the glade produces more than it needs and becomes either wasted or thrown against the tree roots in a desperate offence. Not long after some roots from the shared system started to grow downwards until they reached 2 meters in length, recommended by Novus, and started to from tubers. Soon the roots of the whole glade started to grow longer and wider, the grass blades bigger and stronger.
Not to lose Novus started to grow his roots rapidly. But he knew that there is more to skills than the description shows and after some experimentation he found a good synergy between his last two skills. The tubers could store a lot more, when the nutrients in them are compressed, unfortunately there is a limit of about 5 times the standard and it requires about 7 times materials in conclusion there is about 30% loss of food but it is a good backup in case of needed resources.
After the rapid expansion Novus was the tallest grass blade around towering at 1.2m meters, with a width of 4 centimeters with a curve on the blade to support his weight. His roots were coming close to 3 meters and he was sure that he was the richest blade of grass there is If someone was to ask him he would say that he felt more like a leaf than a grass.
***
On the mysterious glade another change occurred, over the course of two weeks the grass grew both day and night tall enough to reach a man’s waist, it became thicker more lush and had an aura of unmatched vitality not losing even to the trees around it.
Many herbivores watched the miracle happen with hungry eyes and watered mouth but none dared to intrude on the glade known to devour anything that wanted a bite out of it.