Chapter 41: Chapter 40 – Unnatural Growth

The plan for the next few days was to bring the seeds back to life and studying the alchemy manual.

Me and Ai sat down together to work this out. Unfortunately for us, there are no instructions on how to farm cultivation ingredients.

There are a few references to gathering techniques and the properties of them as they grow, but only as it pertains to using them as ingredients.

 Honestly, it makes sense. An alchemist in this world is typically supported by backers, who handle getting the items that they alchemist needs. So, really all the alchemist needs to know from a manual is what they need and how they can use it.

 Since this was the case, I chatted with the group and asked them to give me the next couple of days to scan how to grow them properly.

The first day I spent just scanning them and getting information.

Normally, I would go all in, in a single instant to pull up the scanning information. Alternatively, I also have the low-tier version of the scan. My newest idea though, is to increase the amount of time I spent collecting information, but make the tier even lower.

The way it works is that I will use a version of the scan that doesn’t pull up a screen, but still gives me specific knowledge about what I’m looking at. This should give me a headache, but instead of doing this all at once, I only have the scan pull up a small portion of information.

If it is pertinent to how to farm, prepare, and store the seeds and their resulting cultivation ingredients, I write that down and continue on. Ai actually helps a lot with this process, by providing context, based on her knowledge base.

Specifically, she assists with what is common knowledge and can be abbreviated vs specialist knowledge.

I’m really glad we bought that paper and ink earlier, it’s definitely useful. It doesn’t actually cost that much, since apparently it is simplistic to make in this world.

Even though we have plenty of paper, I still make sure to only put down what I’m sure is useful. 

What I found to be the most surprising aspect about some of these ‘seeds’, is that a few of the ingredients naturally and easily grow underground, typically in the crevices of caverns. They grow even better in soft, tilled soil underground. This actually gives us a good excuse for some underground farming.

While we initially worried about keeping some aboveground and other underground, having some be naturally underground, takes some suspicion away from our underground farms. The plan is to keep the unnatural farms hidden away, with the normal farms accessible.

Regarding the seeds, it seems that the germination rate on these are extremely poor, which is why they were thrown out. Apparently, if they don’t sprout within a certain period, they dig it back out and throw it into a pile. They don’t allow seeds that aren’t germinating well or fast enough to stay, because they could just get a better crop in that spot instead and don’t want that seed to steal away nutrients.

Being a cultivation world, some of these seeds have strict requirements to grow. Many of which we do not satisfy. Of the ones that we can satisfy, relatively easily, those are planned to be the ‘open’ ones above and below ground.

The others, we will be relying on my healing to remove the need for nutrients from the seed. Based on a cursory scan, it appears that it can work. However, it relies on a concept I am not quite sure I can do.

Constant, slow, remote healing.

 

As Ai and I sit here, debating this idea, we come up with a few ways we could use this in other situations, by priority: remote healing for the four of us; remote healing for the tamed creatures; and remote healing for the plants.

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Adding onto that priority scheme also the level of priority of research to achieve this. I attempted to do dedicated remote healing, but it actually became cost prohibitive because of the low level of my healing aura. My scan showed me that as I progress with the levels of this, I will be able to essentially reduce the effective cost of the action. Eventually, I may even be able to have constant instant healing on everyone, including the tamed creatures.

We both agreed that since that will require more dedicated research, we would table it for another day.

Until that time, I will visit the plants once a day to heal them of their inevitable conditions. As long as one of the requirements are filled, the plant will grow. The optimization effect of the healing will allow it to grow even better than before, with some of those requirements going away. Likely, it will allow the plants to survive off of artificial light.

The only thing I fear, is how this may affect several generations of the plants. However, that is probably a question for another day.

By the time we had gone through this research and discovery, it has already been about 2 days since we had gone to the market.

I spend the next day working with Gong to refine the procedure for the spiders to farm for us. While Ai and I was working on the specifics on the previous days, Gong was strategizing defensive scenarios, planning where to put the various types of seeds (as we fed her basic information) and training the spiders to perform the necessary actions to make this work.

I was initially a bit confused on why she was ‘training’ them on this.

However, I realized that even if you use the taming connection, because they are becoming sentient, they will have their own individual ways of performing actions. By working with them and drilling them to work together in the same way, she’s really training them to be an army. At this point, probably an army of engineers, with the crazy web structures I’ve seen around the caverns.

The third day consisted of planting all of these seeds in the areas that Gong had the spiders create. Aboveground, she had turned a relatively large warehouse space that was above one of her holes, into a farm of sorts. Using her previous shown strategy of the exterior looking normal, but obscured, with the interior being webbed and reinforced, she had made this place into a spider fortress.

She had a decent population of the spiders live directly near these areas. Since they don’t need to eat as much, they are basically like living traps. The area is so secured by the strong webs, that it reminded me of reinforced concrete from back home.

Gong asked me if I would like to test the security of the two places. I steadfastly declined. No getting insta-webbed for me.

What I found most interesting, was obviously the secret farming areas. With all of the layers of web in the caves, I was almost totally sure she would hide it behind them.

Which she did. However, she had two layers of secret farming areas. Behind an inconspicuous wall of web, she had a decently sized farming area. About the size of a large garden. What was genius though, is that it was clearly shown to be THE secret area.

However, beneath a large slab of webbed rock in this area, completely inconspicuous was the actual room. This little passage way, leads to a giant cavern where the spiders are quickly working to increase the size and place dirt inside. They have also connected a tiny portion of the underground river to the room, leading to a stream going through the center. How they managed to regulate the water pressure, I can’t even imagine.

Either way, based off the size, which I would estimate is more than a few acres, it will be plenty for the experiments.

After planting and setting schedules, Gong actually let me know she was going to be heading to the surface again, to handle some business.

This might be a good opportunity to heal some people discretely again and practice using my scan more effectively.

Let’s head out of here.

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