Book 3, Chapter 49

I found Hyago down in the valley floor taking mana measurements off our sample trees a few hours later. He glanced up at me as I flew down through a gap in the canopy and said, “Hey, boss. I didn’t know you were back.”

I’d literally dropped in on Hyago too many times for him to be surprised at the sight of it by this point, and we’d never grown past polite acquaintances, so there was little to distract us from business. “I just got in around noon. Short stay, I’m afraid. Three days at most, then I’m heading back out. But while I had a bit of time, I wanted to show you the soil samples I’ve been collecting during my exploration. I have a few that I think will help if we can replicate them here.”

“Sure thing. I’ve got two more spots to take measurements on, then I’ll meet you back at the lab?”

“Actually, head to the grove. I want to do some seed tests before we look at reproducing the soil composition,” I said.

The valley was made up of a lot of what I had termed scrub pine – evergreens that didn’t get all that big and were kind of scraggly. Mixed in with them, especially on the west side where water was more abundant, was a smattering of oaks, a few ashes, and the occasional copse of cedar. There wasn’t much in the way of underbrush, the larger trees’ canopies having effectively cut off the sunlight at ground level bushes would need. That did make it easier to walk around the valley floor, but it wasn’t necessarily ideal for my goal of having the flora produce enough mana to fill the valley.

Hyago didn’t actually live up with the rest of the villagers, but instead had his own home nestled into a grove of trees. It sat twenty feet off the ground, supported by a trio of tall, straight-trunked trees with thick, reaching branches. I wasn’t sure what had possessed him to decide to live in a tree house, but he’d managed to talk Tetrin into making the trip out there to do the enchantments on the building for him.

I had to admit, Hyago had a knack for artistic transmutation. He’d used wood to build his treehouse, something I would not have done, and willingly paid the inordinately large mana costs to transmute the dead wood into a more appealing shape. Even though the lumber had already been cut, transmuting organic objects was such a pain that it wasn’t really worth doing. It would have been cheaper and easier to shape the lumber by hand.

As long as Hyago was capable of doing what I needed him to, it was none of my business. I hadn’t said anything when he’d been building it, and I wasn’t going to change that policy now. Instead, I pulled a few large pots of soil out of my phantom space and started arranging them around the space under Hyago’s home. He had his own projects scattered around the grove as well, and I was careful not to disturb them.

I’d just finished setting everything up with Hyago appeared at the edge of the grove. “Right on time,” I told him. “By the way, how are the measurements, lately?”

He grimaced. “Still generally trending upward, but slowly. Instead of a constant, steady rise, it’s more of a ‘two steps forward, one step back’ thing. I’m not sure we’ll ever get to where we want them to be like this.”

“Well, that’s what the soil samples are for,” I said.

I actually wasn’t much of a gardener, despite my association with the Night Vale in my previous life. I’d simply found an area rich in life and mana and poured my own power into it to nurture it further. It had made for an incredible genius loci, one that I doubted I could ever hope to reproduce in this new world. For all the effort I’d put into transforming this valley into my new genius loci, it wasn’t an ideal location. If I had to draw on the mana in it now, things here would start dying.

I still had time to try to fix it, but I was starting to get worried that I’d stall out when it came time to grow my core to stage six and there was no good demesne to claim as my own. It might be better to search out somewhere near the Sanctum of Light where there was at least some level of ambient mana, but I was wary of forming a genius loci so near what could rightfully be considered an enemy stronghold.

At this point, I had no real fear of any single living mage. The intervening years between the breaking of the world core and today were too great for me to concern myself with other archmages from my past seeking me out. But that having been said, I was still just one man. An entire city of mages could still overpower me, and giving them easy access to my home was a foolish idea.

Hyago and I went through the various samples while I explained where I’d gotten each one, what kind of plant life was growing there, and what the ambient mana levels were like. Ideally, we wanted something that would nurture the trees so well that they wouldn’t need to consume mana to survive and grow, but that was a tall order. This planet had been so thoroughly devastated that much of it was barren and the only reason any plant life thrived at all was because of its own instinctive use of mana.

“I don’t know,” Hyago said, half an hour later. “It’ll help, sure. We can run some experiments, but I don’t think it’s going to be enough to get us where we want to go.”

“You might be right. I’m open to ideas.”

“You ever heard of petrified wood?” my druid asked me, a frown on his face as he stared at the soil samples.

“Trees that have minerals growing through them, yes.”

“Right, it’s incredibly rare.”

“There’s nothing like that here,” I pointed out. “And it would be the opposite of what we wanted if there was. Stone doesn’t produce mana.”

“One type does.”

“The costs, though,” I said. Living stone was ruinously expensive. It had taken me months of saving to produce what amounted to nothing more than a rock I could hold in the palm of my hand. On the grand scale of things, it would be a net gain, but that would take years to come to fruition.

“What if we introduced it into the trees?” Hyago asked. “Could it feed on them and grow?”

“A petrified forest,” I murmured. Then I shook my head. “No, it wouldn’t work. Living stone doesn’t grow like that.”

“Right, that’s what I thought,” Hyago said, but he didn’t look like a man who was admitting defeat. “But draw stone does.”

I considered that for a second. It was true that draw stone would pull in mana and use it to grow larger, but that wasn’t immediately helpful. If I put a piece of draw stone in a tree, it would just kill it. The environment was too hostile for the plants to live without their mana. That was why the Arborists back in my home village made sure their draw stones were carefully placed a specific distance from the rows of neat, orderly trees, far enough away that they wouldn’t kill the plants while they pulled mana from them.

“I’m not a rock person; you know that,” Hyago told me. “But I figure if we can graft ember bloom cuttings onto new trees, maybe you know a way to graft living stone and draw stone together.”

“If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying you want me to come up with a type of living stone that eats mana to grow, but somehow doesn’t cannibalize its own mana?”

“Um… Yes? I think?”

“I’ll think about it,” I said. I wasn’t sure if something like that could be done. There’d never been any real use for it in my previous life, and living stone was both vanishingly rare in nature and ridiculously expensive to create artificially that even as an archmage, I hadn’t spent much time working with it.

But if Hyago’s idea led somewhere, then I could effectively feed a small sample of modified living stone into a tree and let it grow, feeding off the trees own mana until the entire thing was petrified. If the process could be made to work similar to natural petrification, then the living stone would stop growing once it had taken over the entire tree.

The timeline might be a bit of a problem, though. Petrification could take thousands of years on its own. Even with magically modified hybrid living-draw stone, I couldn’t begin to guess how long it would take to consume an entire tree. Though perhaps we could encourage its growth by feeding it the mana it needed to grow instead of just letting it take from the tree that hosted it.

I was getting ahead of myself. I didn’t even know if it was possible to make a form of living stone that ate mana and grew like draw stone did. And even if it did, we’d still need to test it to confirm that it stopped growing once it had fully taken over its host tree. And even if that worked out, there was still the matter of how long it would take.

It was a lot of ‘ifs’ stacked on top of each other, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. At least, it warranted investigation. Maybe Hyago was right and this was the key to success. Our experiments with the ember bloom had been mildly successful, but not replicable on a grand scale. Still, to date it was the only tree producing excess mana and the cornerstone to the ward that would keep all the theoretical mana the rest of the forest produced inside the valley.

At least that one part of the plan had gone off without a hitch.

“For now, I want you to try some of these soil compositions. See what works best. I’ll try to figure out if I can cobble together some sort of stone splicing spell and get back to you,” I said.

“Do you think it’s possible?” he asked.

I sighed and shook my head. “I don’t know. We’re treading on new ground with this idea. That’s why I want you to keep working on other possibilities.”

“Hedging your bets?” Hyago asked.

“I suppose I am,” I said.

He snorted a laugh. “It’s not like you to be indecisive.”

“I’m as human as the rest of you. I have doubts. I make mistakes. I’m not all-powerful.”

“Could have fooled me. I remember your rampage through Derro. Could hardly believe it, just some little kid, barely even a child, taking down full-grown mages left and right. That was only a few years ago, too. Somehow, you’re taller than I am.”

“The power of alchemy,” I said.

“I wouldn’t know. I just grew what they told me to.”

There was some truth to that. Hyago had been a self-taught mage with only a loose affiliation to one specific member of the Wolf Pack cabal, and I’d cut him adrift when I killed that mage. Fortunately for both of us, a chance meeting had brought us together. My plans for this valley would have never worked without Hyago here to help.

I glanced up at his tree house and said, “I wonder if your home will survive the petrification of the forest.”

He stared at me, stricken. “I… I didn’t think of that. It should be fine, right?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure how the process will work, or even if we can get it to work. You do understand that if all the trees turn to stone, you’ll be out of a job, right?”

“I’m sure I can find work somewhere else,” he said.

“Oh, that reminds me! My father is talking about starting a secondary location to set up farms with bigger fields. They’re feeling the squeeze of so many mouths to feed and such limited room to spread. I have no doubt you’ll get dragged into that to help with the initial planting.”

Hyago groaned. “Whhyyyy?”