Askos is still struggling with the current training exercise. He is improving, but not quite as fast as he was. Though to be fair most of his improvement previously was in getting ahold of more mana, which is still happening. In fact, with him not using his own mana pool at all, all of that mana he is gathering is overflowing, slowly driving his mana pool higher. It would take a really long time for there to be a noticeable difference, but there is still a difference.

Junior is doing better. She has managed to stop a body from dying, but she ran out of mana before she could do anything else. It was an easier case and her tactic of understanding exactly what she is working with first and foremost works really well when dealing with limited mana. Diagnostics isn’t exactly mana intensive unless you are bad at it.

The little girl I healed the other day woke up today, so I decided to go check up on her. She is now a happy, and healthy, if a rather clumsy, girl. She isn't really used to her new limbs so it will be a while before she is able to do things like run around without biting the dirt or running into something. She doesn’t let running full speed into a tree three times in a row stop her though, at least not for long. If I had spent the last month stuck in chronic pain while being incapable of doing anything for myself I would probably do the same.

They are going to start heading home tomorrow, they want to be back before their people start thinking they’re dead. I requested that a group of merchants that are part of my hivemind that are going in that direction anyway escort the duo, help them get home faster. I also offered a small gift of healing potions out of my own pocket, much higher quality than the stuff they were using before. It doesn’t cost me much and should hopefully foster goodwill, maybe enough to help turn the people into my followers? It might help with getting people to willingly join our empire as the borders of my forest expand to cover their cities.

As for my current project, my normal methods are completely useless for it. Normally I take pre-existing traits of a plant and expand and refine them, glass has nothing to do with plants. As far as I know, there is nothing in any of my plants that relates to glass. So I have to rely on much less reliable processes that I don’t understand very well, namely the environmental aspect of evolution. Normally I focus entirely with the plant itself when I am evolving it, completely ignoring everything outside of that plant. And that works, and it is very reliable and easy to replicate. But every once in a while a creature inside of a volcano gains powers over fire and heat when they evolve, or a creature in a forest gains powers over plants. One example was way back when Thes killed that dragon and evolved, prior he had nothing to do with fire, but after that he gained abilities relating to fire.

That whole thing doesn’t happen very often and is only noticeable in large populations, but it does happen. I only need it to happen once in order to pull this off, but the problem is I have no idea what kind of environment is necessary to allow it to happen in the first place. So naturally the only reasonable solution to is to try every single thing I can think of thousands of times until something finally clicks. Maybe having thousands of tiny glass shards integrated into the plant itself will be enough, maybe I need a massive sprawling cave complex filled with glass to be good enough, maybe I am completely off the mark and need something I have not yet considered. Who knows? Hopefully, I will in the near future. And if the whole idea is a bust then I could try the same thing with the ocean, only trying to make plants based around acid instead of glass.

My first thought was to just go as big of a scale as possible with this and just go straight for glass caverns. But there was one small problem with that, we don’t really have anyone capable of manipulating glass. It is a bit beyond the average dirt or rock manipulator and outside of the scope of Digger Root. I can’t really call in a specialist from the scholars because no one really specializes in manipulating glass on that type of scale, it’s all on much smaller scales for things like alchemy equipment. The few specialists that do exist I don’t really have the resources to hire as the only ones with connections to the scholars are famous and very skilled artists who can charge anything they want for their services, or true immortals who charge even more. There were resources on how to manipulate glass on the Terminal, but the ones I can afford would be a bit beyond anything any of my people would be able to really make use of. And the ones that can actually help an untrained novice figure things out are super expensive.

I might be able to get Digger Root to the point of being able to manipulate Glass, but I have no idea if that would actually be possible and it would likely take quite a bit of time. Instead, I am going to try things on a much smaller scale.

That being said, I had no success today with imbedding countless tiny glass shards into a plant and then submerging that plant into a glass tub full of those same glass shards.

It might be useful to ask Tiddol about the actual creation process of glass, she should know a bit about that. I don’t actually know anything about how it is made except for the fact that it can be blown into to make vases and bowls when hot.

My Paladins are rapidly reaching the threshold that I had previously set, so I ended up spending my downtime integrating my plants into them. With my Dad’s assistance, they are all rapidly improving their combat skills. And with my assistance, they are rapidly improving their abilities over plants. With each new person added to their closer knit hivemind their skills should improve faster and faster.

I’m sending them into various dungeons that I have made deals with so that they can improve their skills in a practical setting. No group is the same twice, every single time the groups are chosen randomly with between one and seven members. Like that they should get used to working both in groups and on their own.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.