Anything ~ 18!

- Andre -

The Druid swept his long hair out and back, calming himself down as he inhaled and looked up at the ceiling of the cave that he had claimed as his own. The scents and familiar air of the area allowed him to unwind rapidly. Andre didn’t know what it was exactly that made it harder for him to be around people after so long in a solitary state, but he was ready for some personal time.

A deep chuffing made him freeze a moment, and then he slowly turned to see an absolute wall of a bear rushing at him. He tossed his arms to the side, shot back stabilizing vines, and grabbed the Cave Bear in a hug befitting the creature's namesake. “Arthur! I’ve missed you so much!”

They wrestled back and forth a short while, increasing the force they used until they were suddenly forced into a relaxed state of mind and body. Andre looked off into the distance, seeing a single shaft of light that came down to rest on the Tier ten Sanctuary Lily in the distance. “Got it, got it! Too much, I was going to hurt him!”

Arthur scoffed deeply. Clearly he was going to hurt the fragile Druid. They turned and started walking around the area, looking to see what all had changed in the time he had been away. The last time he had been in his world was when he had been trapped here for training, and Andre had been sure to plant some flora that needed a long time to grow.

A quick check showed a series of low-light growth trees in the area that had grown into towering pillars that nearly touched the ceiling. He had originally been concerned that they’d have trouble with water or nutrients, but he couldn't find a single issue with them: unnaturally so. His mind went to the Lily again, and he harrumphed as he remembered that things couldn’t ‘deteriorate’ while in the area of effect from the plant. “Perfect growth as a side effect, hmm? Better set up my workshop for testing my Ability outside its range, or I’m going to have a lot of problems getting multi-generational seeds…”

Another thought rolled across his mind, and he looked at his bear. There wasn’t a sign of aging on him, no wounds, no starvation. “You haven’t gone out hunting at all, I'm sure of it. You aren’t even hungry, are you?”

The bear sent along feelings of contentment, confirming Andre’s thoughts. “Excellent. Want to come with me as I expand this area some?”

Walking side by side, Andre and Arthur moved to one of the plants that the Druid had focused on earlier. An effort of will had the plant rearranging its roots, and a seemingly natural tunnel appeared where once a completely tree-clogged knot had stood. The path was wide enough for both, and they walked for a full kilometer before escaping the range of the Sanctuary Lily. Andre added on a few hundred meters so that there would be no concerns, then planted an acorn and started dumping mana into it.

A watermelon began growing, rapidly reaching the top of the tunnel before expanding to cover the entirety of the open space. Once it was fully braced, the woody rind and vine it grew on began tearing into and absorbing the surrounding stone for nutrients; growing in hours what would naturally take centuries for a fruit of this size. When Andre judged that the interior of the fruit had reached a few hundred square feet, he stopped the growth and instead began cutting a door into his new workshop.

Once there was a wide, clear path through the rind, Andre rapidly aged the rest of the fruit. The interior turned to mush, then a sludge that was absorbed into the massive amount of seeds in the area. Soon only vibrancy-packed seeds, a petrified rind, and a lightly sweet smell were left in the room. Andre shook his head as he cleaned off the floor. “So much that nature can do, and I’m here to find ways to make it far more unnatural.”

Andre dumped a bag of sand onto the floor, staring at it and sighing. It was the most dead and filtered sand he could find, and even this would still be considered a better soil than what was in the Scarroco Desert. “Well, Arthur, I hope you’re ready to hear all my hair-brained ideas.”

The bear scraped at the floor and looked around for fruit to snack on. Andre huffed and grew a more standard-sized watermelon to chew on, then turned his attention to the various plants he had seeds for. “What I need is an entire ecosystem, not just a few basic plants. I need to get fertilizer into the sand, get mold to grow and start pulling nutrients out of the sand proper, then a layer of small plants to start holding the ground in place.”

He had been working on this plan for years, and had a solid framework for what he needed in  order to make this work naturally. However, doing it as naturally as possible was going to be hundreds of years of effort. Now that he was able to add ‘Abilities’ to them… that would reduce the needed time by decades. “What I really need to do is just start making things and hoping that they’ll be useful later. If only I had better seeds!”

In fact, if he were to go to the surface and begin gathering plants from The Grove, they were sure to be more potent than anything he could find on his base world. There were two major issues with that: one, if he went topside, there would be a good chance that anyone hunting for him would finally pick up his trail and be able to attack him. He had run into the wastes of his world to escape the powerhouses that didn’t want him around.

Two, there was no guarantee that those plants wouldn’t be wildly invasive and destroy any natural plants around them on the base world when he transplanted them. It was rare, but it did happen.

Realistically, he was far more concerned about being found than anything else. He had his Sanctuary Lily, but all other defences and protections were… nonexistent. With that thought in mind, he added more to his to-do list: create plants that could help him defend his territory. Thorny bushes meant nothing, no matter how poisonous they were. “What If I could make plants that hunt? Is that too dangerous…? What about trees that fought fire by dropping and rolling? Or maybe just make them fireproof?”

The Druid decided that planning was all well and good, but nothing beat just getting to work and doing what needed to be done. A flash of a thorn on his hand, and he had enough blood to marinate the seeds he was going to be working with for the next few days. “Thinking logically, the very first issue is the poor quality of soil. I can rectify that with fertilizer, but I can’t do too much about the lack of water in the area.”

He shook his head and furrowed his brow, “Actually… the issue is mainly what’s on the surface. The expanding desert shouldn’t have been able to alter the underground water sources. If I just made a plant with a long root system, I could have it reach down and pull water up. That. Hmm. I can’t expand the roots of each and every plant, that would take-”

*Crunch.* Andre was sprayed by juices as Arthur crushed an entire watermelon in his maw. “Gah! Arthur! You’re disgusting!”

He looked at all the juice flowing out of the bear’s mouth during its nonchalant mastication. The juice pooled below the bear, thick, viscous, and sticky. “I think this is the first time someone chewing with their mouth open has actually been appreciated by me. Thanks for the cool spray, Arthur ol’ chap!”

He took a watermelon seed and tried to impart the idea of the watermelon growing to a huge size, then stopping and converting the juices within to a spray that constantly released water when it had excess. “Just like that, watermelon irrigation plants. If it works, then we’ll be able-”

The seed in his hand exploded into shards that left nasty splinters in his flesh. He stared at the single seed that he had worked with using Hemoflora’s new effect, and sighed dramatically. “Good thing I have six times the time dilation here. It’s gonna take forever to figure out each step in the process.”

He got to work, rapidly achieving the single-minded focus that he could only reach when working. A stray part of his mind chuckled as he thought about how meticulous he was being immediately after going off on wild tangents… then his entire focus was devoted to his work. He could feed thousands by making viable farmland, empower millions by collecting more Potentia in the land, and protect all of them by proxy.

Andre wasn’t about to allow himself to slack off. He couldn’t. The land needed him to be it’s Druid, and he needed the land to be whole.