The Next Step

Going down the stairs, leaving the castle and going to where the cake table is, I see the bakers handing out pieces of cake to the people who are standing in line.

The queue is huge and even curves...

I think it's better to wait for the queue to thin out a bit...

"Light!" I hear William's voice calling from behind me.

"I finally found you, or you found me..." I say.

"I noticed you were on the balcony together with the princess, what were you doing there?" He questions.

"Well, I just handed her my gift, and coincidentally, you guys started singing." I answer.

"Now it makes sense." William looks at the line going on and looks back at me. "Do you want to join that line?" He asks dejectedly.

"To be honest, yes, but I don't really feel like eating cake." I speak. "I'll ask Ryza to save a piece for me later."

"Ask her to save a piece for me too!" William exclaims.

"I'll see and let you know."

After the party has ended and the employees are dismantling the tents, Ryza appears, handing two pieces of cake, one for me and the other for my brother.

"Thank you very much..." I thank him with a little embarrassment.

Looking to the side, William already has cake in his mouth. He could at least wait for the princess to leave...

We said goodbye to the princess and headed to our house.

This same month, I was studying the process of creating trees. The time has come for me to create another magic.

My desire is to be able to make a tree in a matter of seconds and to be able to control it the way I want.

I have been studying the process of tree formation, the first step is to create a seed. Thanks to Forest Magic, this is a somewhat easy task.

When I think this is "a little" easy, I'm not taking into consideration that there are different tree seeds.

It seems like a lie, but I had to study the anatomy of a tree seed, something my biology teacher taught me in my other life, but I completely forgot about it because I thought I would never need to know about it...

I don't want to review in detail what I studied about the development of gymnosperm trees because that would take hours, and it's boring as fuck.

Forest Magic allows me to perfectly create all the components of a tree or a seed, however, the magic doesn't make me skip steps, so I need to know what to do and how to do it.

It's similar to a cake recipe, you can have all the ingredients, but you need to know the quantity and the exact procedure for the cake to be made perfectly.

The same thing happens with magic. It doesn't do much good if I know the ingredients but don't know what to do with them, so you have to study them, which would be similar to a recipe.

Details aside, now, at the end of the month, I have a prototype of this magic!

A spring day, with the sun already illuminating the plants and the flowers standing.

Going close to the forest, I prepare to test this magic for the first time.

I've done tests before, creating just the seed, but this one will be different.

I've been thinking about a way to inject mana into the seed so that it can develop more quickly, however, I haven't found a way to do this without modifying the structure of the seed.

So I thought of another alternative: enveloping the seed in pure mana.

A lazier and easier alternative, but the important thing, for now, is that it works.

In theory, when the seed touches the ground, it will open and end up using the mana to grow, however, this alone would not be able to make the tree grow.

Then, the seed will also use mana to accelerate the nutrient absorption process through the roots.

There are several possibilities for it to go wrong and the tree to end up not developing well, but that's why it's a prototype.

As I extend my hand, a small seed resembling a long pine cone begins to form. She has a thin white veil of mana around her form.

I have doubts if I need to leave it buried in the ground. If the plant could grow just by touching the grass, that would be good. Maybe with more mana she can.

I add a little speed when launching the seed, and it ends up being partially buried in the earth.

It worked?

Suddenly I see a plant slowly growing and branching, and quickly creating a thin trunk, and growing upwards!

The trunk starts to get wider, and the branches start to have leaves. It's like I'm watching a time-lapse.

And finally, after a few seconds, the tree fills with leaves and branches.

Her height was very normal—neither tall nor short. The trunk isn't that great, either. The color of the leaves is saturated green. It looked like an apple tree, but without apples.

Her growth took longer than expected... I must have put too little mana around. Or maybe the soil doesn't have many nutrients.

From what I analyzed, the beginning of the growth was accelerated, but its end was slow, which means that the mana must have been depleted or weakened.

Trees take years to grow, and each phase of their growth takes a specific time, so it may be that for a tree to become an adult, it takes longer than for it to sprout, so the mana must be greater.

Even so, seeing a tree growing in seconds is surprising. The problem of global warming would be easily solved if magic existed in my other world...

This was just the first test, and I will still make hundreds of improvements until I can do it quickly and effectively. Basically, I still have a lot of work to do, besides having to study plant biology...

I don't hate having to learn about plants, I hate having to learn things that in my other world I could have learned.

Stone thorns, controlling roots—I didn't need to study these two things in depth to know, but that's life...

In fact, I think the seeds could be a good substitute for the stone thorns, but I'll see about that later.