Kestra estimated it was close to seven days to the hour, if not the minute, when a CRACK sounded out from the sky. The light from Graemire's second sun spiked, and Yorgin barely managed to get a mana shield over Kestra before the explosive wave of mana-fueled wind blew out over the watchers.

She still had to cast Minor Healing on her eyes, but at least her mana veins weren't hammered anywhere near as badly as when he went into that light ball.

Notices pulsed for her attention. The fact she was currently blind, but she still saw the blue screens felt very strange to Kestra, but it was what it was.

Rejoice!

Enlightenment has elevated an Elemental of Wood into a new Emperor of Wood within your Horizon! All present upon this Horizon shall receive the Blessings of Creativity, Harvest, and Benevolence for the next five years.

Blessing of Creativity

Creative endeavors are more fruitful under this blessing.

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Benefits

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+5% EXP gain when crafting

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Blessing of Harvest

Whether grown or gathered, yields are greater under this blessing.

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Benefits

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+5% to gather results

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Blessing of Benevolence

Kindness provides more tangible rewards under this blessing.

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Benefits

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More quests will be generated throughout this Horizon to promote harmony among the residents.

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That was well worth the seven day wait!

When her healing was done, Kestra looked around. All the people around her had lowered themselves. All in a humanoid form knelt on their left knee, their right leg forward like the leading edge and top of a square. It was a peculiar genuflection, and she didn't really understand what was happening so she kept to her "don't move" strategy.

That was, until a freaking, sapphire blue serpentine dragon with green washes of color over his scales descended from the sky. His mere presence matured the plants around them by several months growth. The dragon shifted between one moment and the next into Graemire's humanoid shape, with a few differences.

His hair was now made of much finer leaves with blue veins throughout, and pulled up into a bun at the back of his head, its center above his ears. His eyes were still a single solid color, but now they were blue. Delicate scales that matched his new dragon body covered his forearms, the backs of his hands, and his feet.

He smiled and took a few steps on the ground until he stood before Kestra. He bowed deeply from the waist to her, which drew hisses of surprise from those witnessing.

"Thank you, little one," he said. "Your innocent eyes gazed upon an essential truth of my nature, which had grown occluded to me through familiarity. Your reminder came at a fortuitous moment for me, and I am now indebted to you for this. Speak and that which is within my power to give shall be yours."

Kestra turned up her palms. "Honored Divine Graemire, I don't want to insult you though my lack of comprehension, but I don't have any good understanding of what happened, or why you feel indebted to me. Without that understanding, I'm concerned that anything I might ask for would be wildly inappropriate."

He rose from his bow and smiled at her. "Then I must mentor you until you gain such an understanding, at which point you may make your request of me."

Kestra bowed from her seated position. "You honor me."

Graemire moved among the Divines attracted to his light ball, accepting congratulations and renewing acquaintances. Yorgin had a harder time keeping the others away from Kestra.

She had unconsciously adopted the attitude she used when she had to work with the elves of the Arltare Archipelago. Technically, Druerjan and the Arltare elvan nation had been at peace, but the elves resented that humans had out-bred them on the two north-most islands of the archipelago and joined Druerjan instead of constantly being suppressed by the far longer-lived elves and staying under their rule. Most of the elves arrogantly thought that their longevity alone made them superior enough to the shorter lived humans to "force" them to take on an attitude of paternalistic oppression toward them.

Telleranhook had been located on the southern human island, and had a lot more contact with elves. It was far easier for Kestra, as a Free Lancer, a kind of mercenary, to smile with child-like cuteness, nod with wide-eyed pseudo attentiveness, and privately roll her eyes over most of the elven shenanigans. Then again, she had also had the option of shoving arrows into sensitive places with the elves, an option she lacked with the Divine Creatures. She was pretty sure that killing monster commissions with brutal efficiency wouldn't be quite as much of an attitude check with the Honorable Divines as it had proved with the elves.

Regardless, the muted version of her child-like persona did appear to aid the social pomp of the Honorable Divines stepping into a protective role with her. When she was called on to speak, she demurred answering as much as she could with the excuse of being so ignorant that she feared being accidentally inappropriate with them, and flattering them for their patience and generosity with her deep ignorance.

Graemire tapped the shoulder of the first of them to attempt to use some kind of mental attack to loosen Kestra's tongue, and that apparently was enough of a breech of Etiquette to shut them down and send them fleeing the impromptu celebratory gathering.

It also gave Graemire an excuse to take Kestra, Yorgin, and Vostler off, "to continue our adventures".

The newly advanced Emperor of Wood simply wrapped the four of them in a bubble of mana and flew them off, toward the mountains.

Kestra waited a few moments to make sure they had gained distance from the crowd, and cleared her throat. That seemed this realm's polite way of asking if it was safe to talk.

"What is it, little potential?" Graemire asked.

"Safe to speak freely?" she asked.

"Yes," he assured her.

"Ambrose came to check out your shininess, and Vostler found a nature sprite the needed a new home. They're in with Eilith, Nicada, and Ralouf. The sprite's been planting a lot of the seeds I brought with me from my realm, but there are a few that too precious to me to easily hand over."

Graemire turned a skeptical look at Vostler with the mention of him "finding" the sprite. For his part, the Fire Elemental only flinched a little at his name, then turned a pathetically obvious smile of relief at Kestra. At the mention of transmigrated seeds, though, Graemire's eyes gleamed with interest.

Kestra pulled out some of her spare seed stock. "These are a few of the ones the sprite has planted. I think if we can find a safe enough spot to leave me be, you could all take a tour and see what you think."

"We need a dungeon, then," Graemire mused. "You gained the Dungeon Hunter title when you took up the mana seed, yes?"

"Yep, and it's up to Low Base grade, if that means anything to you," she said. Since Graemire hadn't taken the seeds, she sent them back to her storage.

Graemire looked impressed, but Yorgin and Vostler exchanged uncertain looks. Graemire spoke to them. "The seed was quite small, and … neither of you were ever dungeon-bound, right? It takes more mana to improve each step of quality for a seed than to raise a Fifth Horizon snake into a celestial dragon."

Kestra frowned. "I'll expect that to be truer the more it improves, but it feels a bit like the proportions between the steps are something like the proportions of E.X.P. needed between levels."

"Do you have a stone generator yet?" Graemire asked.

"Yes, Base mana stones. What are they for?" she asked.

He said, "Dungeons feed them to bound creatures and use them to purchase upgraded facilities. I expect you can do the same with mana wells."

Vostler opened his mouth, a bright, excited look to his face. Before he spoke, though, his expression collapsed into a sad thing of regret. Kestra pulled out one of the Base mana stones. "You wanted to see one?" she guessed.

"Ah, eat one, actually," he said, looking bashful. "I'm, ah, getting hungry. The mana's just so thin down here."

She handed him the stone. "Let me know if this small bit actually helps with that. Now that I know they're supposed to be a kind of creature food, the quantities the generator's making are more sensible." She felt a weight of fear lift from her shoulders. Maybe she wasn't breaking the system quite so badly; she just wasn't using it to the fullness of its intended purpose.

Vostler smiled with bashful eagerness. "You're, ah, you're a lot nicer than I would have been to someone like me," he admitted, taking the stone. It melted into him, and he looked a little brighter.

Kestra passed over four more, which Vostler eagerly slurped down. She also passed five over to Graemire and Yorgin. Each absorbed one with a considering look that relaxed into a kind of mild approval, as if the taste of the stones provided a bit of pleasure.

"How many has your well made so far?" Graemire asked.

"Um, it's around two every three hours, and the generator's been running for a few days already, so a bit over halfway to a hundred," she admitted. "It took something like ten thousand mana to mature the generator, and each of the Base stones costs five thousand mana to make, so with that rate, I'm thinking the generator's getting around a mana per second of the mana well's output, and the well is getting all my recovery when my pool's topped off. Hold on a sec while I send over some for everyone else to snack on."

Inspri had made a crate from mana to store the two centimeter wide stone, and at her prompting shoved the entire box of them into her storage ring. From there, Kestra was able to send the mana-formed crate to her retreat realm. She divided the mana stones into sets of five that went next to each of the occupants in her realm, which left twenty and some that she stashed in the crate in what she expected Ralouf had intended to be the cooking room of the new structure he had replaced her cabin with.

«Hey, guys, Graemire said these things the mana well makes are supposed to be a kind of creature food. There are some more in the cook room.»

The Elementals and the nature sprite made appreciative noises and absorbed the mana stones immediately. Ralouf, though, grinned with a different kind of gleam to his eyes. "Ah! Thank you for your kind hospitality. Would you mind if I used them for crafting instead of eating?"

«Have fun!» she answered.

Returning her attention to the First Horizon, she noted that Graemire and Yorgin had acquisitive gleams in their gazes, while Vostler just looked hungry, still. She pulled back another five of the stones from the cook room and handed them to the Fire Elemental. "Are they helping?"

Fiery tears of joy beaded up at the corners of Vostler's eyes, absorbed back into his skin before they fell to his chin. "Such a holy woman! Yes! It's better in your realm; the mana's stable and even if it's thin, it doesn't pull the way the mana of this Horizon pulls at me."

"Well, let's go find that dungeon so you can get some relief," she said, finding herself feeling pity for the Elemental.

Sure, he had been aggressive and threatened her when they first met, but he had been severely disciplined for his actions and seemed to grow more and more repentant of his initial actions towards her the more he got to know her. He was also an Elemental, and their alien thinking was in many ways as innocently uncomplicated as a human child's. She wasn't forgetting his capricious nature or the potential threat he posed to her, but Kestra also wasn't going to hold him to human standards of behavior, nor waste her energy keeping to unproductive grudges.

"With that Dungeon Hunter title, you gained an ability to sense dungeon cores, yes?" Graemire asked.

"Within a five kilometer area, once per day for the basis, increased by a factor based on the 'core level step'," she confirmed as she read back the spell description from her Spell Book. "I think Low Base grade is the first step."

"There's a place near by that feels mana-dense enough to host a dungeon. We'll get closer and you can use the ability. If it doesn't pan out, we'll go back to where we found Eilith and search around for the dungeon she found there." Graemire delivered his plan, and no one objected.

Graemire seemed to be concentrating, and it didn't feel like anyone wanted to disrupt that, so Kestra mused on the changes that had happened during the Emperor of Wood's advancement.

She hadn't just been Meditating the whole time Graemire had been completing his transformation. For one, she had applied her boosts. Based on Ralouf's recommendations, she brought her strength and mana up to a total of 25. Then she boosted her agility and mana recovery up to 15. That left her with eight boosts. She kind of liked the multiples of five for her stats, so she held on to eight boosts to apply later. She planned to keep her strength to agility a little more equal than a two to one ratio.

That increase to her mana recovery attribute brought her draw rate up to twelve mana per second, and upon closer inspection of the well, she found the little crystal at the center of it, what had been the mana seed and was now the Low Base grade Mana Well core, was significantly larger than when she first added it to her realm. With her increased draw, she estimated she was sending somewhere around a million mana per day to that crystal. She had no real idea of how much mana was being poured into the plants in her realm, but the crystal itself was obviously soaking up a goodly portion of that.

Fortunately, the Base mana stones were only about two centimeters in diameter, so the crate of sixty of them (created from ambient mana by Inspri) hadn't taken up much room. Kestra had worried about what to do with them all, so now that she knew they were creature food she wasn't as worried about being overwhelmed with too damned many. She knew they were worth 100 gold each, but she still wasn't sure what that meant in terms of goods she could purchase, or the danger she might face with trying to sell them. Mildly valuable was one thing, and highly valuable might very well be more trouble than any pile of monies was worth.

She also figured out how to adapt her Organic Assay spell for use with minerals, which gave her the Inorganic Assay spell. The description for the spell was the same as for the Organic version, only swapping out inorganic for organic.

Part of the reason for developing the spell came about when Kestra decided to task Inspri with organizing her knowledge of alchemical ingredients. The little Inventory Sprite had fun developing the cataloging system, and adding in all the things Kestra knew.

While looking over her inventory, Kestra remembered the scroll she gained for reaching the Apprentice ranks of Alchemy. Inspri duplicated the scroll for her, and then used it. Kestra verified that what Inspri learned, she gained. The Control Fire spell was added to her spell book and worked under her control within her realms.

Kestra decided to be cautious in that duplication ability. It took mana, though doing it in her storage realm meant the mana came from her mana well and not her pool. Still, if people knew she could just duplicate useful scrolls like that she rather expected she'd be locked up for that skill alone.

It had taken only a bit of mental realignment for Kestra to turn over the management of her storage and Holding rings to Inspri, which had reminded her of all the seed stock she had brought with her when she transmigrated.

The nature sprite tended its tree first, which she figured was just good sense. That said, it didn't shirk caring for her other plants, going so far as to move them to different parts of the private realm to better accommodate individual needs, and talking with the Elementals about adjusting the soil composition, wetness, and nutrient balance.

She tested the nature sprite's ability to handle her quite foreign seeds, and was pleasantly satisfied with its ability to grasp the plants' needs. She parceled out sets of the seeds that she knew complemented each other's growth when planted together. The sprite had to spend a bit of time familiarizing itself with the seeds before planting them. With a few of them, the sprite did companion planting with plants she had taken from the First Horizon.

Ralouf had hit his stride with redesigning her stone cabin, creating a tower with three sub-floors and five above-ground levels, culminating in a gazebo roof. On the ground level, he had added a smithy, apothecary, and lumber room. He got Nicada involved in making some distilling equipment, and had been doing some ornamental sculpting when she turned over the Base mana stones just now.

Graemire roused Kestra from her thoughts. "Little potential, try your ability here," he instructed once she met his gaze.

She cast the Dungeon Sense spell, and pointed. "Oh! That way, close by!"