Tartu didn’t know much about Verdago until a few weeks ago, when this journey started. Now, he knew a lot… comparatively. Compared to the average person, anyway.

  The Farmer Daniel Greene, the man who would become Verdago, was Australian. He took a great deal of pride in turning much of the ‘Outback’ into ‘usable land’ (though the validity of that statement was up for debate, in Tartu’s Mind) and in helping the native population regain a great deal of property and natural places after the Reveal. Tartu would have to make a pilgrimage to some giant rock in the middle of nowhere called Uluru, but that was for later.

  For now, Tartu cradled a small seed pod called a ‘gum nut’ in his hands, and he set it into some soil.

  Gum nuts were a weird thing to call a seed, Tartu thought. It was also weird for a god of farming to venerate a plant that didn’t actually produce any fruit or food at all. There were hundreds of types of gumtrees. None of them made fruit. Why didn’t Verdago make one of them make food? Tartu had no idea.

  Verdago was kind of a weird dude, or ‘bloke’, as he would have called himself.

  The guy was a ‘nativist’, which was almost like the opposite of an imperialist, which Tartu was having some difficulty with. The Farmer God liked supporting natural systems and doing minimal changes to the natural world. So Tartu and Verdago had something of an opposing ideology on life. That was one of the main reasons that Tartu had been hesitant on Choosing him and getting Chosen by him in turn. But they did agree on one big thing, which made the decision possible at all.

  The Wilds were not natural.

  Burning down the Wilds and replacing them with natural environments? Not exactly what Tartu preferred doing. He’d rather put down farmland and civilization and whatever. Verdago, though, wanted natural environments back. Those ‘natural environments’ included humans and their creations at least some of the time, though, so there was a lot of room for Tartu to agree with Verdago on basic things.

  And Verdago knew he was never going to get an opportunity like this ever again, and he liked Tartu well enough; the god had said as much in Tartu’s dreams. And so… Verdago Chose Tartu, and Tartu Chose Verdago, because Tartu also knew he was literally never going to get a better offer in his entire life.

  And now Tartu had a whole lot more power to his person than he ever imagined, for instead of the Simple Powers of a low Farmer, Verdago had given Tartu the entire suite of Farmer, from the least-strong ability to simply grow plants, to the strongest forms of Farmer, which were practically Chlorokinesis, Civilization Manipulation, and a hundred other nuanced flavors of Power that Tartu had never hoped to attain. It wasn’t True Farmer; it was still a grafted Binding. But it was 95% of the real thing… which was like saying someone was 95% pregnant.

  Tartu knew that True Farmer would be a whole lot different than this grafted Skill, but the grafted Skill was great for testing and seeing. It was all bent toward bolstering everything present, but with some tweaks in the mind you could absolutely blight an area.

  Tartu had already done such a test, and though he didn’t really ‘blight’ a bunch of plants in a grow box how he wanted —he wanted dead, grey ground— getting a box full of high quality fertilizer with a few tiny, beneficial mushrooms growing in the box was almost the same as a true blighting. He could probably make a box of grey, lifeless dirt, if he really wanted.

  Tartu was pretty good with magic, but Natural magic was different. More nuanced. But that continual test was for later.

  For now, it was time to turn this gum nut seed into a shining rainbow eucalyptus.

  Tartu gently focused on the gum nut, which was shaped almost like a 2-centimeter-wide brown cup, with some soft green/red/yellow seeds in the middle. It looked like someone had jammed a few small chips of colored wood into a wooden teacup without a handle.

  With great astral control, Tartu latched on to the gum nut and flooded Farmer into the nut, and the nut unfurled. Tartu felt his astral body twist in weird ways as he continued to channel into the nut, but it was exactly the strain of using a brand new spell, so it wasn’t anything unusual or bad. It was an expression of mana sort of like enchanting, soul work, and Binding work, all at the same time, because that’s what Farmer was.

  Farmer was all about creating functional plant life, animal life, and environments, and more.

  The gum nut unfolded into descending roots and an ascending stem with long blue-green leaves that rapidly unfurled into splashes of rainbow at their center. The roots quested deep into the soil and Tartu provided everything that the shining rainbow eucalyptus needed to grow, using mana to create matter, to funnel growth into the plant.

  The stem became a trunk as branches spiraled upward, twisting outward into soft branches, the bark smooth and colorful and revealing even more color as the bark flaked off like drying paper. The tree drank deep of Tartu’s mana, and then, like a lightbulb finally getting enough power to ignite and shine, the tree Awakened.

  Tartu’s connection broke, snapping in the light of an astral body that fought back naturally, due to simply existing. The PL 0 gum nut was gone. Here now was a 3 meter tall sapling with blue-green and rainbow leaves, colorful bark, and a subtle glow all around its body, like a density of light to the plant. Tartu pulled back feeling drained.

  But as he looked at the plant he had made, as it naturally existed, and grew, the plant produced mana all on its own and Tartu felt invigorated. His mana came back to him, slowly but surely.

  Eliot was way off to the side, watching and helping, mainly with water pumping to the soil and scanners making sure nothing untoward happened. If the plant suddenly combusted, igniting the soil and the air all around it and threatening to send fire through the ship, then Eliot was there to shut that shit down.

  It had happened once when Tartu experimented with dangerous outcomes. This one worked fine, though.

  Tartu said, “I think this one is working?”

  It was kind of a question, but not really. Tartu could feel it working. He could feel its aura touching his own and feeding him back a portion of the mana he had used to make the plant. Eventually, with enough plants nearby, in a very, very large sense of ‘nearby’, Tartu would never run out of mana ever again. He needed to work on some seer magics to make sure that he could do that even when outside of his future garden, though.

  Eliot checked the sensors, saying, “PL 7 across the board and rising by the minute, fractions at a time. Roots are good. Water intake is good. Weight is increasing unnaturally fast even according to the water trickling in. Are you still feeding it mana?”

  “No. It’s all on its own.”

  “So it’s producing its own mana in order to grow bigger?”

  “A lot of magical plants do that. Are the PLs staying even?”

  “Yes. You tried to do prismatic mana, yes?”

  “It’s a rainbow eucalyptus,” Tartu said, and because he realized that answer wasn’t good enough he explained, “It’s naturally prismatic when you expose it to the cubic function, which is what I did with Farmer. Verdago discovered that on his own, though he had no idea what it was when he was doing it at the time. He was just experimenting. These days the church calls it the ‘cubic function’, but Mage Society knows it as a prismatic injection, which is a specific type of ‘planting the seed’. It’s remarkably easy to plant seeds inside plants with Farmer.” Tartu told Eliot, “You can do that to people, too, and that’s the basis of human experimentation and how Mark got Adamantiumkinesis and Union.”

  Eliot’s eyes went wide. “Ohh… Huh.”

  “You can never tell how it is going to work out, though,” Tartu said, as he turned back toward the ‘shining rainbow eucalyptus’. “People turn into monsters when you plant seeds in them. Plants, however, seem to take really, really well to being seeded… But that’s with Farmer doing the heavy lifting. I’ve never been able to seed a plant this easily, even with Domains and simple plants, like oaks.” He looked at the tree for a little bit, then he asked, “Can you Manipulate it?”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Eliot said, “Not even a little bit. It’s outgrown the Man-Made designation.”

  Tartu nodded knowingly, saying, “Yup. Arch Skills are like that. You could probably Castellan-manipulate it it if you had True Castellan.”

  “I can already do a few things with that,” Eliot said.

  The shining rainbow eucalyptus started to grow stronger, faster, better. The roots spiraled outward, digging deep, the branches lifted to the ceiling, the trunk thickened, and the leaves fluttered out, growing stronger. Brighter. The rainbows on the trunk deepened as the plant grew fast. More thin layers of the silver-brown bark broke away like dry paper, revealing new, younger colors. Pastel rainbows.

  Tartu felt something wonderful in the air as he stood before the tree, which was now 5 meters tall and a few ‘years’ old. There was something good in the air, like a combination of a fresh ‘green’ scent, something almost minty, and also the mana pouring off of the plant. Standing near the tree was like under the first warm sun of Spring after being cooped up inside for Winter.

  Also, Tartu felt his astral body pump up to full.

  Tartu chuckled once. “And I’m back up to full mana… But…” Tartu hummed. Something else was happening right now.

  “What?” Eliot asked.

  Tartu said, “I think…” Tartu felt out the world, focusing on his astral body. Tiny tugs pulled at him where he… where he touched the shining rainbow eucalyptus tree. Tartu followed the feeling he was feeling, and soon, he had a hypothesis. “I think when you imposed growth you caused the tree to be unbalanced, and now it’s… it’s taking my mana?”

  “Ah, no,” Eliot said, “I can explain that. I’m using the mana of every living thing on the ship over a certain size, and plants are good for mana, and the tree crossed the line, so I’m taking from it now, too. Maybe you’re feeling that?”

  “Yes! That’s what it is. You can do that?”

  “Oh yeah. This ship is constantly falling apart but I twisted the mana in a few places with Castellan and the whole thing feeds into itself so that we’re not falling apart. I think you’re the first person who is actually feeling it, and only in a sideways-way. No one else has said anything at all— Ah, no. Derek said something.”

  Tartu nodded a little. “You know…” It was just him and Eliot right now. Derek and everyone else were somewhere else. Tartu said, “I wasn’t too impressed with him at first, but that was my mistake. I’ll be inviting him into my team, formally, when this is over and we’re back.”

  Eliot smirked. “Got any HVP plans with him?”

  “He’s said a few times that he’s up for anything, so I suppose—”

  A great big thump resounded through the hull of the ship, coming from far overhead. Tartu was instantly on alert but Eliot was faster.

  Eliot looked up and out, way beyond where they were. His look of worry transformed into a look of complaint. He grunted, “The fuck… Mark is up to 3 bodies now, and they’re all just throwing each other around. Through 5 decks! Five!” Eliot opened up the ceiling and yelled out, “Stop tearing up the ship, dammit!”

  Mark poked his head out over the hole, saying something—

  And then another Mark cast down a garrote of adamantium and yanked that first Mark up out of the hull by his neck. Garrote’d Mark made desperate noises, garroting Mark laughed and pulled them both back up and out of the Dreadnought.

  Eliot asked, “Is he playing with himself, or is he actually fighting himself?”

  Tartu shook his head, saying, “I bet he figured out he could be both parts of the Union at the same time and now he’s in two real bodies.” Tartu added, “You need to talk to him and tell him not to go for seer. Everyone has been on that shit since Andria got it, but Mark absolutely does not need to pose that kinda threat to the Empire or anyone else.”

  Eliot asked, “You think I could go for seer?”

  Tartu shook his head. “One: There are ways to do that through magic and artifacts. Two: Seers are vulnerable to a lot of shit; it’s a double edged sword. Besides, your range with Castellan is already going to be city-wide.”

  Eliot grinned. “You’ll grow lots of plants in my city, right?”

  “For you to eat the mana from, is what you’re asking?”

  “Yes.”

  Tartu had no trouble at all saying, “You’ll provide water and drones to keep them healthy—”

  “Oh yeah yeah. All of that.”

  “Then yes. I’ll grow you a mana battery forest.”

  Eliot smiled wide. “All of those mana crystal flower plants, too, yeah?”

  “Now those things I’m gonna turn into giant mana crystal vines. I’m thinking several hydroponic warehouses full. You can have a cut, obviously, and if you take care of all of them yourself then you can have a very large cut.”

  Eliot nodded, and then he got into the weeds with specific flowers, asking, “I’m interested in some Castellan Fire vines, if you can make ‘em, and more shining rainbow eucalyptus...”