Manning

My little hybrid had returned safely. Although I did not personally care for the thing I knew Ash would have been devastated if anything had happened to him, so I was happy that he managed to return.

I watched as he sprinted through the forest in a beeline to my new grove, moving far faster than I would have assumed possible for him. He burst into the clearing with wild eyes, chest heaving, and locked onto the Ash tree that I was residing below. I watched him stumble over to the tree and start rubbing his back against the trunk with his eyes closed, before eventually collapsing.

"Ash, your pet is back and it is being weird." Although it had collapsed it was obvious to me that it was still alive because if it's erratic breathing. I decided to let Ash know so she could stop worrying, she was currently at the tree line near the bridge waiting for him. Judging by how wet he look (he only had sweat glands on his hands and feet) and the angle he took to get to the grove, it seemed that he had jumped into the river and swam over.

I felt Ash heading back to the grove and decided to put my attention back to what I was doing. Obviously I hadn't really spared a thought for the hybrid since the stupid creature fled the forest, ignoring my orders, and spent the day being productive.

Ever since the incident, Cara and I had been working together a lot more closely than before. Just this morning she explained to me how her near-sapient creatures, she was calling them Troglodytes, bred. It was absolutely disgusting, fitting the way that they looked. When she had taken over their warren, she found a prisoner which she rushed to claim as well.

"It was called a Gnoll, and the poor thing was suffering and died soon after. The troglodytes do not breed females naturally, but still breed using them. They usually kidnap female animals but apparently this prisoner was a spoil of a recent war they had. They... impregnate the females they manage to capture by laying parasitic eggs in their wombs, usually 5 or 6 of them hatch, and then hold them prisoner until the clutch hatches. None of the troglodytes know what they are descended from, but if I had to guess it would be some sort of miniature orc offspring, a descendant of a descendant.

"Their appearances vary based off what they breed with, and if it looks too different than the tribe they usually kill the child when it’s born. I also learned that because the area around us was very sparse of life they'd been breeding each other recently."

"I thought you said that they didn't breed females in their species."

"They don't."

"Oh."

"It’s far less effective without a womb apparently. Instead of the half dozen they expect from a female insemination, the other regions they can place their eggs usually only hatch one or two."

I found myself hating the creatures more and more with every word Cara told me, not that I expressed that opinion to her right away. It wasn't until she offered to trade two of them to me for two of the boars that had recently been born that I told her how disgustingly unnatural those things were, and how they made my proverbial skin crawl. She shared the sentiment and apologized for bringing it up. I was happy that she was talking to me and wanted to show her, so I asked if she would want to trade the boars for two bats instead.

That is how I ended up with the two of the unmodified bats I now had hanging from a nearby tree branch. At first I thought I got the better end of the deal, after all the flying creatures were mammals and that made me excited to work with them, until I thought of why she would need the boars.

If I could shudder I would.

I continued with my metal wood tree seeding, the other project I'd allocated my attention to so far this morning. Cara had given me the pattern for iron and suggested I work it in somehow because sapients loved the stuff. Apparently it was like mana [1] for them, and they could not get enough of it.

A couple hours later I had a breakthrough. I'd been putting the normal amount of ore I would usually seed into the acorn, but the iron took far more ambient mana to grow than any other ore I'd used before. Because of this the seeds were not growing correctly, either stunted or growing like a regular tree. Once I increased the initial amount of iron seeded into the acorn the oak grew slowly but correctly, with a slight red gleam to betray that it was not a regular oak. Although the concentration of metal was not as high as with my other trees so far, I considered this a victory.

Around this time Ash re-entered the clearing, and spied the hybrid who was curled up at the base of the tree with his head on this back legs.

"Spikey! You made it back." Ash ran across the clearing, her bare feet kicking up dirt and leaves, and scooped up the creature to give it a big hug. If I was being honest with myself, I was jealous of the creature.

She tossed the hedgehog in the air a couple of times, ignoring its protests and wide eyes, before clutching it against her chest again. She was almost in tears and that did nothing but make me more annoyed with the hedgehog. When she finally set him down so she could go observe our new ironwood tree, he stumbled towards the water. I watched as he threw up whatever he had eaten on the shoreline, and I was fascinated.

How could such a little creature have so much food inside of him? There were a few things I did not recognize, and when I saw him sniffing the puddle of vomit I ordered him not to eat it. The little hedgehog looked at my tree and then back at the puddle a few times. Much to my surprise he then walked away after drinking a bit of water and curled up under the Ash tree again. I'll take progress where I can get it.

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"The tree is nice, it is a lot more subtle than the other metal trees you've made and feels more like a tree than an ore. I like it, we should grow more."

"Absolutely Ash, I think these will be part of the reward in one of the trials." We'd been speaking about it and decided that we did not want to hide the beauty of our forest from everyone. I'd been trying to find a fine balance between letting people walk where ever they wanted and hiding my core and Ash's hearthtree away for safety. I decided finally that my forest would behave a little bit like a dungeon, that’s what I was after all, and if the adventurers could pass all of my trials they'd be allowed to the clearing.

I justified this by saying if we were going to convince them that Ash was a nature deity, one in charge of the forest, that we needed to display some power. What are gods known for, if not for putting mortals through challenges filled with mortal danger to prove themselves? Or for fun, really the gods did whatever they wanted.

Ash of course called me on it right away. "You just want an excuse to make a bunch of different forests within the forest." Guilty as charged, I can't lie about my desire to have the largest forest in the world. Size isn't the only thing that mattered through, I wanted to squeeze in a bunch of diversity and micro ecosystems for my kingdom to flourish. It's all about the rhythm of the forest.

My first trial was not ready yet as I had not yet found a worthy creature to defend it. I felt like I was close, I just had to wait until the next generation of piglets was born. I hadn’t tried to modify these ones when they were born because I wanted a nice supply of unmodified (mostly) boars to live in the forest as well.

Turning my attention back to the vomit pile, I had a hedgehog (one of the normal ones, not the hybrid) pick up a strange seed and plant it away from the waterline. I suffused it with mana to accelerate the growth and found that it was a new fruit tree for me. The fruits were gourd-shaped and a light green. With my new discovery, and a new fruit to play with, I decided it was time to go back to one of my original experiments. One that had failed time and time again.

I rapidly aged the fruits until they fell from the tree, and then ordered them planted around as well. A whimper caught my attention and I noticed the hybrid staring at the fruits while lying on his belly, his head on both of his front hands.

"Go ahead, I suppose you've earned it."

Apparently that was all it was waiting for because he shot off and snatched one of the fruits instantly. He was the one who brought it back for me after all, so he had actually earned it even if it was on accident. I started infusing the buried fruit pits with mana, three parts water and two parts nature, and seeded it with one of the first metals I'd ever learned.

Because it wasn't an ore I did not know what to expect from it, but after several failures I finally managed to get one to begin growing. It was far more mana intensive than even the Ironwood tree, but before I knew it I had a Silver pear tree. The bark sparkled in the daylight, and the tree was scarcely taller than Ash was. Even the leaves took a metallic sheen to them, and lost most of their pigment turning a very pale green that was almost white.

After flooding it with more mana, I saw a fruit growing very slowly. It had a very thin shell of nearly pure silver, and if my theories were correct, the fruit should have minor healing properties as well. Because I did not feel like testing this out on my creatures, I decided I'd let the sapients figure that one out for themselves.

The sun was getting ready to set, and I'd finally accomplished one of my first mutation goals. It did not take me long to figure out where to place the tree, a certain hill no longer had a beautiful white tree after all. I allowed the hybrid to climb aboard the tree as I pushed it off with the earth spell I'd stolen from the dwarves, giving him orders to not eat the silver fruit. I was skeptical that he'd listen, but after today’s progress I hoped that it was close to understanding me.

* * * * * * *

Unnamed

Far above the forest, floating on the winds that circulated over the continent, an entity took notice of the forest below it. With no idea how long it had been floating the winds, and with no real care either, it looked down to the surface for the first time in a long time.

It did not remember there being a forest here, yet alone one so large. There was a large influx of nature mana exploding forth from a clearing in its center. With a tilt of its head it wondered if this was worth investigating. Why bother when it can just keep floating, free of all cares.

Even as it contemplated its decision, it felt the new beacon of nature moving rapidly through the forest. By this point the little mote was sufficiently distracted and watched it as it moved amongst the trees. It could not see it specifically, due to the canopy of large trees, but it could see the rustling of the leaves when it passed trees. Finally it watched as the rustling stopped and a shining white tree adorned the tallest piece of clear land in the forest, gleaming in the sunset. It was truly beautiful.

The calling. It could feel that clearing calling for it, telling it to come home. It looked like its journey was over. With one last look at the horizon, the entity began spiraling. It picked up speed as it descended from the skies, torpedoing down into the clearing, to the beacon calling its name, the name it did not yet know.