60. Success (Patreon)

The answer was no.

The glass was, in fact, not usable.

Aloe tried everything to make the Myriad work. Maybe approach a bit of fire and the glass would become soft or break a piece of glass and use it as a torchlight or something, but everything failed. The Myriad’s glass was normal if hyperreflective glass.

“Whyyyy?” Aloe groaned from side to side of the bed, the experiments had exhausted her mentally and physically. “It’s a useless plant! I only wanted something remotely usable, but this is outright useless!”

The glass of the Myriad couldn’t even be used as a light when night came by, because it didn’t produce light, just amplify it. And no matter how bright the moon may shine, it only worked to make a piece of grass into a rainbow-ified nightlight rather than a working lamppost.

“Ugh... I guess this is the first actually useless evolved plant I have found, but damn, it hurts to see it. Especially when I’m in need of something useful.”

Aloe grabbed the piece of glass she had torn apart from the main plant and held it on top of her head. It was morning, but her bedroom was mostly dark as she had all the wooden window doors closed. Yet with the faint trickles of sunlight that filtered through the slits, the glass piece produced enough light to match that of a scribe’s light.

“I guess if I had a lot of them I could sell the glass to a glassworker to reheat it? Maybe they would buy it, the glass is kinda good, pretty clear, and wouldn’t that save them time?” Aloe sighed. “But that would only grant me a few coins, nothing business-worthy. I’ll need tons of glass to make an actual enterprise, but right now, I will take whatever I can. Yet another item on the list of: maybe I can sell it?”

That list was only populated by the Aloe Veritas ink and now the Myriad glass. The greenhouses didn’t produce many exports at the moment.

After the unfortunate discovery of the Myriad’s usefulness, Aloe’s time continued to be fully dedicated to making a working irrigation system before she had to come back to Sadina, and that day was approaching rapidly.

Palm tree leaves were strong and rather hydrophobic, so that allowed her to make somewhat long pipe circuits without the leaves collapsing with the weight or losing any water.

Even if the pipes were important, more so was the water production rate of the Flourishing Spring. Aloe thought it would have been easy to calculate, but after running numbers with her current two grown specimens.

“There are some serious discrepancies between the amount of water produced between the spring at the greenhouse and the one with the potatoes.” Aloe wrote in her notes as a manner to continue her ink tests. “The one in the greenhouse produces a full bowl every three hours, whilst the one with the potatoes does so in just two hours. Reason? I don’t know.”

That had caused her some confusion for two straight days, but the Aloe Veritas came to the rescue. Or at least, allowed her to make some theories on the why.

“My current hypothesis is this ‘mana’. At the greenhouse, I have two evolved plants with the same description of ‘survive with mana alone’, the ter’nar and the spring. I don’t know what mana is, but it seems to be some kind of esoteric energy, perhaps similar to vitality, but I cannot confirm or deny that. My idea is basically that both the spring and the ter’nar are draining the mana on the greenhouse, therefore sharing it. Much like when trees fight for nutrients on the soil, rather than now we are talking about weird arcane shenanigans.”

Her hypothesis was full of holes, as she didn’t even know what mana even was, but it made sense. She didn’t see the ter’nar suffer from the lack of mana, but the tree didn’t seem to use it a lot in the first place. It seemed that the ‘survive with mana alone’ was quite literal with it. And because Aloe was constantly watering the ter’nar, it didn’t have much mana to survive.

“I should focus on the Flourishing Springs at the outside,” Aloe commented as she carved yet another pipe. “Two hours per full bowl means twelve bowls a day. Taking into account that the bowls are rather small, around four bowls per watering can, that means three watering cans per day of constant irrigation.”

The simple calculations relaxed Aloe’s mind, she had always found solace in numbers. Her knife steadily chipped away the leaf. She wasn’t a carver, but this was far easier than sewing a button together. Sleight of hand wasn’t her forte.

“Now, that sounds like a lot, but there are a lot of plants here. And the position of the Flourishing Springs matter. The pistachios and the bananas would have enough with one, but they are far away from each other. Should I replant them? Or rather, do they need water?”

This was something she hadn’t pondered until now, but flowers, grass, and other palm trees were able to survive without water in the oasis.

“Hmm... Good question...” Yet again she cursed herself for her lack of farming knowledge. “I think that is because they have long roots and can get more water, but seeds need more help... And even if the plants in the oasis don’t need help, the ones in the greenhouse certainly do.”

The greenhouse plants always needed more water when Aloe irrigated them. In the oasis, the soil was mostly moist, so after passing by the watering can, the soil wouldn’t take more water than that. Even if she wasn’t a farmer or didn’t have much knowledge on the subject, she could understand that. At that point, giving them more water would be counterproductive. But in the greenhouse, as it was probably because it was further from the oasis, the soil was drier.

Thankfully, all plants in the greenhouse were rather resilient. The cacti would survive easily without water, and the ter’nar was a tree that technically didn’t even need water to survive, even if it greedily drank several watering cans every day.

The only weak plant currently on the oasis was the cannabis. But she also had that covered with the Flourishing Spring, and there was no need for complex infrastructure to water those seeds. They were more than satiated enough with the production of the greenhouse’s Flourishing Spring, even if it produced suboptimal levels of water.

“Ha,” Aloe sighed, “now that I think about it, I don’t even need to water the seeds directly, don’t I?” In her dreams of self-sufficiency, Aloe had forgotten how plants work. “If the water hits the soil, that’s kinda enough? Bowl per three hours means seven bowls per day, therefore almost two cans. That’s more than enough water to make the soil moist for the seeds to drink, huh.”

Aloe felt rather dumb now.

She had opted to make her life more complicated than it needed to.

A sigh escaped her mouth, and she let the leaf fall from her hands.

“It doesn’t hurt me to water the crops and the medicinal plants, though,” Aloe told herself to protect her sanity. It would severely hurt her if all her work was for naught.

The fantasy that the Flourishing Spring offered had blinded her too much.

Aloe stood up and started to set up the pipe system, the leaf on her hand was the last one she needed to make it work.

The irrigation system, whilst complex sounding, was rather simple. Aloe used the cut palm tree leaves as pipes for the water to flow, and she put very small holes every few centimeters so the water could trickle in without disturbing the whole flow. The idea was simple, the closest holes to the Flourishing Spring were smaller than those at the end.

This system needed some elevation to work, so Aloe used discarded coconut shells to give not only the height but also the inclination for the water to flow effectively.

Overall, she was proud of her ingenuity.

It was makeshift and unstable, yes, but she did what she could with the tools at her disposal. And a very good job at that.

More Flourishing Springs had grown whilst she was occupied with the Myriad and pipe tests, but her attention was focused on first making the potato section work.

From the bowl of the Flourishing Spring, two leaf pipes came out. She had planted the evolved plant in the middle of the potato field, so one went east and the other west. Her system wasn’t perfect, far from it.

Even if she added more pipes, the system could only water a single stream. It was impossible to cover blind spots with this system.

“I won’t be able to free myself from watering duty just yet, but at least, this should fend off drought and death from the potatoes and other plants for the days I’m out.”

Automatization was Aloe’s true goal, but right now, what she needed most was for her plants to survive whilst she was out.

She lay her hands on the soil, it was humid.

That enough told Aloe that she had succeeded.