I’ll probably reach the destroyed city by tomorrow, I think at about lunchtime, maybe a bit earlier. I’m not looking forward to dealing with that, it’s going to make this whole process much more complicated.

The mage that uses nuclear fire showed up today, right on schedule. Kind of surprising actually, if you’re that powerful no one is going to look twice if you do something minor like be a little late.

He was outwardly hostile at first, it was obvious that he did not like me. Not that I could do or say anything about that to him, he could probably burn down my forest as easily as breathing.

He asked me a series of pointed questions, a couple of them I knew the answer to, but most of them I did not. What does ‘radioactive isotope’ even mean? In hindsight, he was probably trying to figure out how much I knew about nuclear fire, which is not a lot.

After that, he seemed to like me a bit more, though he also seemed a bit confused. That confusion gradually cleared up as I explained to him how exactly I was disposing of the poison. He didn’t believe me at first when I told him that the stuff is incredibly fragile in the presence of mana, saying that it repels mana. I had to actually demonstrate it to him before he believed me, at which point he got absolutely ecstatic. I have to say, the guy wears his emotions on his sleeve.

After calming down he turned super serious and started talking about business, specifically what it would take to convince me to let him and all of the other wielders of nuclear fire to dispose of the poisonous remains here in my forest. I had to bring Par in on this one, as he is much better at negotiating than me. He was out and about, but it was easy enough for him to teleport into town.

Basically what it came down to is I would dramatically increase the number of buildings able to destroy the stuff as well as train several Ents and other plant manipulators to operate the whole thing. In exchange, they would offer tons of money, which, according to Par, is something he is going to need a lot of soon. This also removes the chance that any of them would be willing to burn down my forest, as any that tried would be murdered by the others. This is the part I was most interested in. The people bringing in the stuff will do so only in large groups so that they can suppress the poison through overwhelming brute force, I don’t want any accidents happening.

Apparently, there aren’t very many groups that would be able to do something this on this type of a scale, and unlike most of those, we are willing to accept money and a promise of safety. I mean it is just a lot of money. I might be able to get some new plants with that money.

After that, I talked with the guy about this particular desert. Apparently, he was the one who created it, which explains why he was so grumpy. He really doesn’t like using his powers, but infectious diseases are more dangerous than ‘nuclear waste’ as he calls it. As a result he tried to minimize damage as much as possible, which means my guess that the person who made the desert really wanted to do just that was right.

I also explain to him that the whole process would probably be more efficient if he would extract the ‘nuclear waste’ from whatever it was embedded into before bringing it to us and then turned into a fine powder, that way we don’t have to destroy the surrounding rock and earth along with what we actually want to destroy.

I should probably focus my mana on making more buildings for now, it’s not like I need to be doing anything else with it yet.

Other than that I spent my downtime with Par. We haven’t been able to hang out in a little while, what with him out expanding his empire. He is very formal while we are in public, but while we aren’t in the prying eyes of the public he is much more friendly. Which, while a little annoying, makes sense, he has appearances to keep after all.

Apparently, his army is on the verge of taking another city and has received letters from the leadership of several other cities ‘requesting to join our great empire’, aka surrendering before our armies even show up. I think one of those cities was the one that Talus was from, I’m not sure how to feel about that.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.