Chapter Seventeen: Improving the Product Line
“Is that it?” “Yeah, we’ll leave the rest up to the villagers.” The miracle seed… We’d dispatched with the BioPlants that Motoyasu
had woken up… and now we were collecting seeds. We had fistfuls of seeds, and I went ahead and let the shield absorb the wilted plants as we worked.
BioPlant Shield: conditions met
PlantRiwe Shield: conditions met
Mandragora Shield: conditions met
BioPlant Shield: ability locked: equip bonus: plant reform
Special Effect:
Hook PlantRiwe Shield: ability locked: equip bonus: intermediate compounding recipes 2
Mandragora Shield: ability locked: equip bonus: plant analysis
The plant-type shield unlocked a tree that connected to the others. It looked like there were other things I could access as well, but the tree hadn’t advanced enough.
“Plant Reform?”
I’d received an interesting-looking ability from the BioPlant, but I’d have to experiment a little to see how it worked.
An icon appeared that indicated I should select a seed to imbue with magic.
I decided to try it on one of the BioPlant seeds that I had just picked up.
The seed slowly rose and floated in the air.
Special Abilities: propagation 9, production 9, vitality 9, immunity 4, intelligence 1, growth 9, mutation 9
What was this all about? I decided to put the seed down.
There was a quick series of beeps, and the numbers fell quickly. Hm… I didn’t understand.
I decided to try lowering some stats and raising just one.
Special Abilities: propagation 1, production 1, vitality1, immunity 1, intelligence 1, growth 43, mutation 1
Oh, okay, so I just had to focus on raising the growth stat. Oh, hey now—when I used the skill my magic power dropped dramatically.
“Mr. Naofumi?”
I dropped the modified BioPlant seed on a dry patch of ground nearby.
“Woah!”
Nearly instantaneously, the ground was split and covered in green vines.
But…
“Huh?”
The plant grew to be about three meters in size before suddenly drying up.
“What are you doing?”
“I got this new ability, Plant Reform, and I wanted to try it out on this seed here.”
“You shouldn’t do such dangerous things!”
Raphtalia was upset with me. Whatever. Had I watched someone do what I’d done, I’d probably have been angry too.
But what an ability it was! If I gave serious thought to it, I could probably make a real miracle seed.
“Mr. Naofumi… that’s a weird smile on your face.”
Damn… she’d found me out.
“Anyway, let’s head back to the village.”
“Okay.”
We turned our backs on the newly silent, brown land and made for the camp.
“Thank you so much, Hero!”
People were all about cash. After I saved their village, here they were, waving to me.
Still, the village would take a lot of cleaning before it was livable again. It would be a lot of work. We spent the rest of the day disposing of the wilted plants.
The main body of the plants had wilted away, but the fruits and potatoes they’d produced seemed just fine. They would have food for a while here.
But I was a little worried about the soil. Had the plants sucked all the nutrients from it?
“Well, this is the opposite of a famine, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so, yes.”
In the near future, this village might need to pack up and move on.
I was thinking it over, and it inspired me to look deeper into this Plant Reform ability. I still didn’t know what it meant by “special ability.”
I tried to look it up, and an icon appeared saying that I needed the plant analysis ability.
That had been part of the Mandragora Shield, so I would have to wait for the ability to unlock.
I actually thought that the Mandragora Shield abilities would unlock faster, so I switched my shield to the Mandragora Shield before I went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, the ability had been unlocked, so I switched back to the BioPlant Shield and tried my hand at plant reformation again.
Special Abilities: propagation 9, production 9, vitality 9, immunity 4, intelligence 1, growth 9, mutation 9,
Dried Seed Growth: mutation range expansion
I was starting to get it… This must have been the abilities of the BioPlant.
It must have meant that the seed was developed to produce a lot of food, but its mutation rating was so high that it got out of control.
To think, the old alchemist had gone out of his way to leave that message of warning too… he couldn’t have been all bad.
And the immunity rating was low, which must be why the weed killer had been effective.
I looked for the special ability icon, and when I selected it a number of different options appeared, along with a few special messages. It was possible to sacrifice or augment different attributes.
It would be a real shame if the village had to return to its days of famine.
So I decided to experiment a little.
Propagation…4. This was simple. It was just how quickly the plant spread. It seemed too high, so I lowered it.
Production…15. This, no doubt, controlled how much food the plant produced. It should be high enough to solve the famine.
Vitality…6. This would help the plant grow in any type of soil. I lowered it a little.
Immunity…4. This was how the plant fought off disease. At the current level, weed killer worked fine. So I left it where it was.
Intelligence…1. What was this supposed to be? A monster’s intelligence? Why would you want to raise this?
Growth…15. This was how quickly the plant would grow once planted. I raised the level.
Mutation…1. This must have been what turned the plants into monsters.
Special Abilities: I unchecked the box that would expand the range of mutation and decided to add the ability of quality improvement.
Dried Seed Growth: quality improvement
“There. I’m done.”
“What did you do?”
Raphtalia was fighting off a yawn when she replied to me.
“Oh, I’m just working a bit more on that thing from yesterday.”
“You’re still working on that?”
“Well, we can’t just leave things the way that they are.”
If we did, the famine would just come back. So we had to do something to stop it. I thought about going to another village and buying food for the place, but there were too many people living here to make that a viable option. It would be hard to get them to pack up and move… considering how settled they were here.
“Okay then…”
I climbed down from the carriage and dropped the seed into some dry soil.
It happened so quickly. A large plant emerged from the seed and covered a portion of the wilted, brown village.
“What the hell is going on?!”
Villagers that had been resting came over to us in shock.
“Oh, yeah—sorry. I’m just experimenting a little.”
“What are you doing?”
They must have been afraid of the plants, because their voices wavered as they asked.
“I’m trying to turn this into a safe version of what it was.”
I’d set the propagation level low, so once the plant reached its size it wouldn’t spread beyond a certain range.
And then…
Red, juicy, tomato-like fruits popped into view all over the vine. The majority of the fruits looked just like tomatoes.
“Looks like I was successful.”
“Woah…”
“The main problem is that’s really only making one kind of fruit now. It’s up to you whether or not you want to use it. But if you don’t want it then make sure you to take care of it before things get out of control.”
So the mutation and mutation range expansion were the real problems… they allowed you to grow a lot of different kinds of fruit, but at the risk of the plants turning into monsters.
I sprinkled weed killer over the plant and it returned to a seed. I picked it up and gave it to a man who seemed to be the governor.
“All right, we’re out of here. Later.”
Filo woke up and stuffed her cheeks with the remaining tomatoes before taking her place at the front of the carriage.
“Wait just a minute!”
“Huh? What?”
“We haven’t shown our gratitude yet, so please take this…”
“Those idiots… They just tried to pass their excess onto me. Didn’t they?”
“I…I don’t know.”
Our carriage was now three cars long.
Filo pulled the front carriage, but now we had two additional carts hooked to the back that were loaded down with fruits and vegetables from the BioPlant.
They’d given us the carts and the food, probably because it would have all rotted if they didn’t get rid of it. They just passed it off on me and even had the gall to ask me to come back anytime.
Their faces were beaming when they gave it all to me, so I wasn’t going to refuse it. Even still, I couldn’t help but feel that they were just foisting their problems off on me. Oh, and by the way, even though we were three full carts now, Filo had no problem at all pulling us.
“It’s so heavy, I love it!”
Filolials sure were weird monsters.
Our carriage rattled down the idyllic road, and our journey went on.
But this all had me thinking. I could use this weed killer as a weapon, right? If so, I was determined to try it on any Torrents that we came across.
But when I got my chance, it didn’t work at all.
Apparently it would only work on plants that had parasitic tendencies.
These rules were seeming more random by the minute.
Maybe the BioPlant wasn’t really a monster at all but just a plant.
Whatever, it didn’t matter. With how strong Filo and Raphtalia were getting, I didn’t need to worry about attacking by myself.
The first thing we needed to do was figure out a way to get rid of all this food. The last thing I wanted was it rotting on me. But hey—Filo was chomping it down so quickly… maybe it wouldn’t be an issue at all.
“Where should we go next?”
We were talking it over and trying to figure out where we should go next when we started to hear rumors about a land to the east that was having problems with some kind of infectious disease.
So we decided to make a bunch of medicine and head in that direction.
“All right, we’re going east!”
“Okay!”
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