"So our people will be free?" It was Xochipilli's uncle who asked the question.

"Indeed," the Mother of Plants nodded. "I have personally talked with the calipha, and this mass kidnapping is not an act of the state, but a nefarious organization. Any illegally enslaved Tecolatans will be freed, but as for your return home… I have no answers for that."

"Uhm, goddess?" Instead of being irritated by such unknowns about their return, the mature man professed politeness.

"Yes?" The druid's mind was so absent as she spoke that she no longer cared for the fact that they were referring to her as a goddess.

"If it is not much to ask… could we stay here?"

The petition left the vegetable woman speechless. "Why do you not want to return to your motherland?"

For centuries, that was the only thing the Mother of Plants had wanted. Even if technically she had never left Ydaz, her heart had ached to see her hometown back again – and she was now even staying at it – even if she was a bit separated from the sprawling metropolis of Sadina, so she couldn't comprehend the Tecolatan's reasons.

"Tecolata was our land, indeed, but it was a cruel mistress," the wrinkled man continued. He needed not to justify himself in that aspect, for those wrinkles were answer enough. He should be around forty, yet he had nearly as many wrinkles as the cowardly bicentennial woman. "But yours and your daughters have greeted us with open arms, even if it has been for a few days, and the Evergreen has blessed us with more food and temperate temperatures than we have ever experienced. So I ask you, no, I implore you," the man threw himself to the ground, "let us stay, goddess! We will work for it, we swear!"

The Mother of Plants saw no adoration in the eyes of the Tecolatan man, but necessity. He was not her disciple, and even if he may call her a goddess, he was only a man looking out for his community. It wasn't adoration in his eyes, but respect. Respect… it was a feeling the druid could never say she had truly felt, and it wasn't half-bad. It beat pity, condescendence, and hate with all certainty, so that was enough for her.

"I see…" Her words were the slow groans of the bark as the wind passed through. "Your devotion to your community is commendable. If my daughters are fine with it, you and any Tecolatans that may arrive are welcome at the World Tree."

Those words were a veiled lie, of course, for her daughters would never go against her. An act of courtesy rather than an actual condition.

For the years to come, every Tecolatan in Ydaz – the entirety of Ydaz – gathered at the World Tree under the embrace of the Mother of Plants.

"Ah, you are back! I had been waiting for you!" It was the head of engineering of the Imperial Laboratories that spoke, Nesrine. "Where have you been?"

"At Asina," the druid taciturnly answered. Without needing to carry around her disciple, moving became trivial. The airships may need a couple of hours to move between Asina and Sadina, but Aloe needed minutes, and that was without haste and trying to not wreak havoc on the environment. "I only came back because I had some businesses to attend."

"Indeed you did!" The coated engineer mistook her words, but the vegetable woman didn't correct herself. "Well, I have prepared many things, besides soil and pots, for the experiments. Could you produce your monster flora again?"

"Monster flora, huh?" The Mother of Plants hummed lethargically. "I must say I do not dislike that term."

The druid produced the many evolutions she had shone beforehand all over again except one, and the engineer noticed.

"Where is the Grace's Exaltation?"

"I have deemed it that this world has no use for it." Many calamities had taken place because of debauchery, and the Mother of Plants realized that no type of progress would offset the debauchery that the Grace's Exaltation would initiate. If I only noticed that sooner…

"Well… I guess it's not much of a problem… I was having problems myself creating uses out of it when considering that the vital arts exist… But let's get back to the subject at hand, the Radiating Undergrowth!" With powerful joviality expected more of a teenager rather than a scholarly woman of her age, Nesrine presented a ball of steel with her open palms in a theatrical manner.

"And what is that?" The druid wasn't fazed in the slightest, though the contraption kindled the faintest ember of curiosity inside her.

It quickly died.

"A steam engine!" The head of engineering announced. "The Radiating Undergrowth can produce unlimited heat from what you have commented, and from my observations and own experience, we have devised this little fella at the laboratory. It should contain the fungi easily but also drop water on the mushroom and evaporate with even more ease. This valve here is the input, and this one is the outtake for the steam."

There actually were multiple intake valves for the water placed all around the metallic sphere that was the engine around its equator, but only a single outtake for the steam atop of it.

"Now! Let's try it!" The Mother of Plants almost felt jealous of that energy Nesrine had.

Whether it might be luck or thanks to those observations, the steam engine was able to fit a mature Radiating Undergrowth that wasn't limited in size with a bit of room to spare.

Because the evolved fungi constantly emitted heat, there was no way to turn off the engine, but at the same time, it hadn't been turned on yet. It was quite an intelligent piece of engineering because even if the steel was close to the glowing mushroom and therefore very hot, the distance was more than enough to not reach a boiling point on the metal's surface. Only direct contact with the white silhouette would provoke that.

The druid helped the engineer – only now did she realize that the woman with the glasses had heavy bags under her eyes – to attach the tanks of water to make the engine work.

"Now… let the magic begin!" With the turn of a valve, the pipes filled with water as they let gravity do its job. It didn't even take a second for steam to come at high speeds and pressure from the top. "It works. Oh, it works! How beautiful!"

That enthusiasm was nearly contagious. Nearly. The vegetable woman couldn't help but think of how upon a time she would have shared that enthusiasm at the image of progress and creation. But now… calmness. Only tangible and thick calmness was what guided her thoughts.

"The sheer possibilities! Trains and airships will no longer need to carry coal! We can also cool down the water as it will no longer produce fumes and only steam, so we don't need much water either! Even less if we try to generate it with Flourishing Springs! We may be talking about a zero-weight infinite energy generator! Even the perpetual machines of dreams fall short! Aren't you amazed?"

The Mother of Plants simply smiled at that scholarly enthusiasm. Nesrine's infinity felt small to her.

The druid found herself at the School of Pill Manufacturers of Asina. She had the personal recommendation of the calipha, so it was easy to enter the place. It felt a bit strange taking classes after this long, but even in two centuries, the concept of teaching hadn't evolved much, unlike society. Or perhaps, society hadn't evolved much either.

The Mother of Plants wasn't there to make friends, so after the first day of taking classes with a classroom full of students, she understood that pace wasn't enough for her. Abusing her recommendation, the vegetable woman grabbed a handful of teachers and petitioned them to teach her personally.

Her understanding of the vital arts as a whole was far superior than what those people had, but they knew way more than her about the synergistic properties between Nurture and Enlightenment.

In the end, the art of creating pills was trivial. At least the Haya pills that the modern world was crazy about.

Whilst not equal, it reminded the druid about Evolution and infused blood. There was a small sacrifice in the creation of the pill, but trivial compared to the former two. So trivial in fact that it couldn't be used to grow one's personal deposit.

To create the Haya pill, the pill-maker had to induce themselves to a trance – normally by taking a type of pill that the people of the modern age called 'painkillers' – to partially situate their consciousness in the world of ideas thanks to Enlightenment, just a fingernail inside by her standards. Then they had to use Nurture's flowing stance to activate a technique similar to the Mother of Plants' forceful growth so they could pour the vitality into a pill. This pill was rather special as it was made from confidential materials, but it was obvious that it was just another type of drug.

In other words, a Haya pill was a multiple-stage endeavor that required the use of vital arts in different stages. A pill to induce the correct infusing state, a stance with the right technique, and a pill so the consumer could activate the lingering vitality without knowing a thing about Enlightenment or Nurture, though the latter was rather commonplace now.

A long and tedious process, but not complicated. The only amazement the vegetable woman had was how people managed to discover something that obfuscated.

The reason why there weren't many pill-makers producing Haya pills even if they were sold at a premium was because the method of infusion they used was… unnatural, according to the Mother of Plants. By not sacrificing maximum vitality, the pill-makers instead strained their whole reserves, basically putting a block on their vitality. Some pill-makers were unable to use their vitality after creating a Haya pill – which also made using stances impossible – and some were so deeply affected by the blocked reserves that they remained in bed for days as vitality continued to be in some ways the lifeblood of the person. Or vital force, as Aloe herself had called it once many centuries ago.

Not that many people wanted to suffer that much even when it made them rich.

The Mother of Plants found by herself a new method of creating Haya pills, but she didn't share it because it was virtually useless to anyone but herself. This method allowed her to completely and perfectly store a single Haya in a pill from her own reserves at no added cost whatsoever, not in pain or vitality losses. Considering no cultivator wanted to lose vitality, and that losing a whole Haya would outright kill normal citizens, she kept such a method to herself and just shared the finished product with her disciple.

Whilst her stay at the School of Pill Manufacturers was short, she also tried every pill that could grant her a new flowing stance technique. From a lone technique, Aloe went to hoard so many in a matter of weeks that she forgot about most of them. She didn't need them, and her interest in the flowing stance was null – even if it was by far the most complex and held the most potential of the stances – but she still wanted to learn all of those techniques so she could give them to her disciple if they were needed.

Now that the school had nothing to offer to her, she simply left. Nothing was keeping her bound to Asina any longer, and the only links that remained were those of Sadina in the form of her disciple and her daughters.

She was the most powerful being in Khaffat, the foremost eminence in vital arts, and if she desired the richest woman in the world, yet little mattered to her. No matter what she did, the gates couldn't be barred. Oblivion crept closer and closer by the day much like the darkness of that damp and frigid chasm. The only thing she could do was take root and think as little as possible of how miserable she felt.

The success was debatable.

Epsilon_Twilight

I'm close to finishing my degree and dunes, this lowered update schedule is certainly a heavensent.

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