Apinsig
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Chapter 164 Homesteading in a fantasy world
🕑 Added 2023-02-13 19:33:13 +0000 UTCI so wanted to test out the new ability right away but my need to do things efficiently got in the way. We could continue working on the grain field and finish it today and have enough time to store and clean everything before I had to go and meet the goblins or I could just start messing around with the new ability.
I groaned out loud but told Francis to start pulling again. I don’t know if to be proud of myself or disappointed and it was hard to focus on anything when my mind wanted to think about what the new ability can do.
Familiar work got me back into routine and soon it felt easy to work again. I continued to work on releasing my energy in a controlled fashion so I could give all the seeds the best opportunity to grow. I think I’m starting to get the hang of it, but I will still have some time to train it as I will need to make some more fields on the other side of the road.
Every time my mind starts to think about all the different seeds I have I have an irrational need to let out a giggle of happiness. Now I don’t know if this is a part of some new trait influencing me or if I'm really so happy about some new seeds.
I have slowly noticed that it’s getting hard to notice what actions are trait influenced and what are things that I used to do. One thing I’m certain of is that I didn't use to stretch so much and want to sleep in places where the sun would hit me.
I still have sometimes trouble not moving. That trait was still the hardest to get used to as its inference was strong even after taking control of it. This scared me somewhat. I know that there are traits a lot strong than what I currently have, but then again there must be something to help otherwise every strong person would be a bit of a looney. I pushed those thoughts to the side and finished up the field.
After I cleaned up the equipment and stored it for the night, I cleaned myself up a bit by taking a swim in the river and then it was time to meet the goblins. This time the meeting went fast. They didn’t have any important things to say just that they brought the first load of copper and tin. I did ask some vague questions, but they didn't seem to know anything about the expanded land or the new nation. Perhaps there won't be any troubles for some time which was good news for me.
They left quite quickly and happily as they didn't need to pull heavy carts anymore. I now had another problem. What to do with so many copper and tin-bearing rocks? One good thing was that distinguishing them wasn't hard as they looked completely different but I will need to melt both of them down to separate the useless rock from the metal. Tin will require a smelting process where no air will get inside, and copper will just need strong heat. The ores were not the ones I was familiar with so I wondered how they were formed.
The other problem was of course how much ore there was. If I would have to estimate there was about one ton of ore for each of the metals. I started to look at the pieces with my abilities and quickly figured out that I will probably get around 120 kilograms of tin and about 80 kilograms of copper. That was actually a bad percentage of metals for each of the ore to have.
I looked at the six cards that were holding the ore and I was impressed with the craftsmanship. Their woodworking ability had increased by a lot and it was a simple matter of just pulling all the cards across the bridge. Not knowing what else to do with them I just left them next to the temporary forge. One thing that was good about ore was that it wasn't going to go bad so I could deal with it at the later date.
When I finished securing the last cart, I rub my hands together and activate my new ability. The immediate headache threw me off a bit, but I figured out what I had done wrong. I need to focus the ability on one single plant so my mind wouldn’t be overwhelmed but when I activated it all the information from the surrounding grass flew into me overwhelming my mind. Note to self, start testing out any new ability with a modicum of self-control.
I lay flat on the ground and separated one of the grass blades. I activated my ability again and I was amazed at the information that I got. There were traces of dozens of different possible evolutions. They were shown as different geometric shapes and colours. It was hard work focusing on them but slowly I could understand what every evolution meant. Most of them were meaningless. Like the one that will make the grass blades a bit wider.
But some were interesting ones. One made the grass blade edges sharper for example. When I tested another grass blade to my surprise I noticed and recognized some of the evolutions without having to focus on them. It seems that with enough tries and memorization looking for and figuring out what evolutions the plant has will be quick. Only one of the evolutions was different from the first one. It was an evolution that would make the plant blade start to curl up on itself. It was a useless one but still different.
It took me an hour and four different spots before I figured out another thing that my ability let me discover. The evolutions that I was seeing were caused by energy or mana and possibly holy power although I have not seen that kind of evolution here. But there was also the normal kind of evolution similar to the one on earth. Just simple genetics.
Noticing this was a lot harder but still possible. What I learned was that energy evolution and natural evolution could work against each other, but they could also boost one another.
For example, plants could have a natural evolution to produce fewer seeds but have them more protected but then energy-based evolution would want more seeds with less protection. That could happen and the plant will most likely fail in the long run. Of course, it might happen that both evolutions target the same thing the same way. While it wouldn’t mean that the plant would necessarily be successful and survive it could certainly produce a better effect.
While I tried my best, I could not influence the natural evolution that would still need to be done the old-fashioned way selecting the seeds that has the properties you're looking for then planting that seed and hoping for the best. Although now I will be able to do that a lot better. While finding out about all this was interesting the main focus of this ability was to influence energy-based evolutions. I couldn’t instantly give the plant a new evolution but what I could do was focus the plants towards a particular evolution which was incredibly powerful.
I finally finished inspecting the grass like a crazy person and decided to go and test the most evolved plant that I possessed. The iron oak was perhaps too simple of a name for this plant. When I activated my ability, I almost blacked out from all the information and my eyes were filled with colourful spots for quite some time afterwards. I quickly came to the realization that cultivating a plant to have similar properties will take a long time and a lot of trial and error.
It had hundreds of evolutions all of them fully developed and it was like a family tree where you could trace back evolutions to the very beginning. I sat beside the Iron oak sapling in a meditative position for a long time trying to puzzle out this magnificent wonder of nature.
It seems that some of the evolutions were building blocks for other evolutions and wouldn’t work if one of those was missing. Some of the geometric shapes were so complex it was actually hard to wrap my mind around them.
I was finally able to pull myself away and I was completely tired and drenched in sweat. Just the implications that I learned were staggering. A completely new world opened up to me and I couldn’t wait to continue to dive into it.
I knew that I was tired and should have stopped but I just couldn’t. I located my bag of special seeds that I collected during the last harvest. This bag contained the seeds of plants that I noticed were healthier or had more grain to give. I started to go through the bag separating the seeds on the kitchen table.
Eventually, Goose was able to get me out of my fixation and I could finally see how tired I was. I thank the little fellow and start to make myself some food before I went and slept. But before that, I took out the dungeon book that I got and started to go through it.
I was still bad at reading but David at the others had helped me a lot. I was able to understand some of the other books I was given fairly well but this one had so many words that I didn’t recognize that I just closed the book and returned it to storage. I would have to look at it when my mind wasn’t so tired.
Comments
Tiresome
Ty, I forgot about the saplings
Apinsig
He did take sapling the oak could not reproduce with acorns. And there are good reasons why evolved plants aren't dominant everywhere but there are many places where they are
Tiresome
The genetic aspect wouldn't make sense due to being fitter than the other plants. If a simple acorn was enough to make a new iron oak with the same or more evolutions, then why would grass be grass? You'd get the most prolific plants dominating all life on the planet very quickly. Maybe retcon him taking saplings instead and keep genetics out of it imo
