The animal goblins did not lie. It took almost four days of travel to leave their territory. When even the hidden watchers left Jason couldn’t help but sigh in relief.

“I wasn’t in danger that whole time. Though that is part of the problem. My cultivation continued on at a steady pace sure but the only other thing that grew was farming. Less than a percentage of experience point in my Blast Punch Skill? No stat gains at all? A waste of my time out here! It is almost to where I should have just fought the animal goblins. They won’t be the only somewhat intelligent monsters I will encounter. I can’t exactly stay my hand if I am fighting a sphinx and it starts having a conversation with me. Meh, lets see what is next. Though with my luck it will be the land of cute puppy kitten hybrids who want to have a tea party with.”

Then for the rest of the day despite his attempts to jinx himself nothing of note happened. Jason even let it get darker than usual trying to bait an encounter out. Disgusted with the lack of enemies he can only turn in for the night and cut short his nightly training. Frustrated he spends a bit of time trimming his plants to settle himself. The six short and pudgy Energy Herb plants all are coming along quite well. His careful trimming over the last couple of days and the extra growth speed from his Farming Skill has caused them to form buds.

“Hmm, at this point I have a choice. If I let them bare fruit, a lot of their energy will go towards growing it. Especially since with my trimming there are many more blooms than would be usual. My guess is this will cause them to for a night or so absorb much more energy than usual as they work on maturing. Then that will be followed up by either the plant outright dying or at the least going somewhat dormant. On the other hand if I trim the buds before they can get going things might not work out how I want either. There is no way to know how much the plants natural cycle requires the berries. I don’t even know if it is a perennial or not. In fact, this is a ‘magical’ plant so maybe without berries to grow it combusts from too much Energy stored. An unlikely outcome but possible. I guess this means I need to experiment some.”

With six plants to mess with, Jason decides there isn’t room for some control plants. He can only shrug at this before proceeding to count the number of potential blossoms on each plant. The results while expected are still somewhat shocking. During his time hunting turtles, he had noticed most Energy Herb plants would have one to three berries. Rarely would he find a plant growing a fourth berry on it. With that in mind it is easy to see how unusual it is that even the plant with the least number of buds has 17. The rest all break 20 buds with their counts being 23, two at 24, 28, and the last with a shocking 37 buds. While uncertain Jason suspects that last one was his original test plant and so had been trimmed for longer.

“Okay now how many buds should I trim off? Obviously I want one with no buds left. That should be one of the 24 count so there is a similar plant to compare it to. With that in mind the other plant with 24 will have the second highest number of buds remaining. Besides that I obviously want to leave Mr 37 alone. Though I must admit I wish it had an even 40. Anyway, that is half the plants accounted for or almost. That 24 count plant, hmm, I think I will trim down to 20 buds. A nice round number even if my most prodigious plant won’t fall in line with that. Though I could trim it down to 35 but I really want to see what it does with as many as possible. Meh, moving on I think I will trim the 28 count plant down to just a single bud. That way if the plant with no buds dies I can check if leaving even just a single bud will prevent problems. After that I guess the remaining two will be 5 and 10. That way I almost have a doubling pattern.”

Plan in mind Jason starts to trim. Being careful he finishes just before it is time for his nightly cultivation. Now after a quick recount to make sure he missed none his plants have 0, 1, 5, 10, 20, and 37 buds. All as evenly spaced out around the plants as he can make it. Though while observing his plants something pops into his mind that he had forgotten about.

“Right! I need to check the rabbit situation tonight. Was that one time just a fluke? That whole thing flew my mind because of the animal goblins. I need to keep an eye out tonight anyway to observe how my plants are absorbing waste natural energy from my meditation. With that already being needed me sparing a bit more to check for rabbits shouldn’t be much of a problem. Besides, there should be about three weeks left before I am out of the wasteland area. Though thinking about that I am worried I might not cap my level at the bottleneck before being done here. If I find a place with good enemies, I might need to camp out in one spot for a bit and grind. Not exactly one of my favorite pastimes but after reaching the next town I want to focus on boss hunting. Besides Blast Punch is close to ranking up and I want to see what the system thinks of it. I have put a lot of work into it and should be able to profit from it.”

Finally, after tossing these thoughts around more and getting nowhere Jason settles down to meditate.