I was so excited to show my friends my new skill that I almost ran home. For the first time, I felt like I was going to make a real contribution to our way of living. I had so many ideas about how to use my new skill, from combat too, gardening. I got home an hour after I'd left my Masters's house. I came up to the door and threw it open.
"Hey, guys! Come check out my new skill!" I yelled out. I was greeted with silence as a response. No one was in the house, so I figured I'd go to the back yard and see if anyone was back there. I was disappointed to find out that they weren't. 'They must all be out enjoying their day off.' I sat down close to the fire area and looked around the back yard. There were patchy areas of grass here and there, but a lot of the back yard was just dirt.
'Well, Master did tell me to practice. Maybe I can make the grass grow.' I thought to myself. Never in my life did I ever think that I'd be excited to watch the grass grow, but as I walked over to the nearest patch of grass, that's exactly what I found myself doing. 'There should be grass seeds underneath, right?'
I held out my hand palm down and pointed it at the patch of grass.
"Crescen!" As soon as I said the word of power, the tuft of grass responded. It grew straight up until it was about knee level before I stopped the process. 'That's not exactly what I meant.' I remembered Master said that it would take a lot of practice to control the speed and direction of plant growth, but still, I wasn't happy with my first attempt. 'How am I supposed to do that? There's something that I'm missing.' I sat down beside my first attempt and thought for a little while.
In the end, I considered maybe it was a positioning thing. I stood up and made my way to another tuft of grass on the other side of the yard. This time instead of placing my hand right above what I wanted to grow, I instead angled my hand at a diagonal. I thought of my hand as a magnet that could draw plant life to it.
"Crescen!" I said once more. When I activated the skill this time, I had a better result; the grass from the original tuft did get longer, but two seconds into the process, I noticed that it was starting to spread out towards my palm slowly. I backed away a little at a time and took note of how the grass was slowly creeping towards it. I didn't stop until the spot of grass was triple the size that it was before.
After this, I ran to the house to grab my notebook. Every change that I was able to produce directionally with the grass I took note of for the future. I was out there taking notes and growing turf for about two hours, I think. It didn't take long, however, for me to run out of space. I looked around and realized that I had covered the back yard in grass. Some areas were much longer in places, and I kicked myself for not noticing that it was happening sooner.
'I might have taken notes on what I did to make those areas grow faster.' My internal whining was short-lived, however, as I heard the door to the house close. I went inside to see who it was, and was happy to see Tim standing there a bag in his hand.
"Tim!" I greeted him excitedly. The tall man flashed a smile at me.
"Hey man, how was your day?" I barely heard him, though; I grabbed his hand and swiftly led him out to the back yard. My friend's jaw hit the floor as he saw the grass that had spread to the entirety of the yard. "How did this happen?" He asked me.
"It's my new skill!" He looked at me with a confused expression. "She taught you how to make grass grow this time?" I scowled for a second, then rolled my eyes.
"No, I can make other things grow too! I just don't have any other seeds. The grass is pretty much the only thing living out here." I laughed at the end. Tim turned to me and gave me a big hug picking me up off the ground.
"I'm so happy for you, man! That sounds like an awesome skill!" He said as he put me back down. I adjusted my clothes back and blushed for a second at having another grown man be able to pick me up like I was nothing. 'I gotta start working out again.' "We have got to get you some more seeds, though!" I agreed. Tim suggested that we should go to the Guild and find out if they had anything like that.
I was happy to see my friend so excited to help me get better at my new skill, so I picked up my notebook and fastened it to my belt. We were about to head out the door when it opened, revealing the four other members of our small group. They were each smiling and talking to each other when they were interrupted my Tim.
"You have got to see what Todd did in the backyard." The others looked confused, but still, they followed the chestnut-haired man. When they saw the whole area covered in the grass, the reaction was roughly the same as Tims.
"So..." Derek said. "You can grow grass?" He asked. I groaned and rolled my eyes once more.
"I can do more than grass!" Tim laughed, thinking about how he had said the same thing when he'd seen my work.
"We were actually about to be on our way to get him more seeds right before you got home." Grace flashed us a huge smile.
"That's a brilliant idea! I want to see this skill in action for myself. Do you mind if I come?" Of course, I didn't, and I invited the others, but they all decided to stay behind and start prepping for dinner. So three of us set out to the Guild. Once we got there, we saw Sean close to the entrance, and I asked him if there was a store here that sold seeds or plants. Surely enough, there was on the other side of the bottom floor.
We thanked the manager and headed towards the shop. It was a married couple working the store this time; they were friendly and helped us find some cheap seeds. I bought three small bags of seeds, each one holding probably one-hundred seeds each. The first one I was told grew a type of flower. They didn't have much information about it, though, because they just got the supply in for the first time.
The second bag was for something called Swineberries. I asked the shopkeepers about it, and they explained that it was a popular meat substitute that citizens used when they couldn't afford the real thing. I couldn't wait to try both of them, but the real exciting part was the third bag of seeds. Iron Thorn seeds. They were cheap because they were tough to grow, and the only people that ever bought them used them to defend their fields from thieves.
With my new skill, though, it shouldn't take long at all to grow, and I might be able to use them in combat. We gathered up my purchases and began hauling them back to the house. The three of us hadn't been gone for that long. The sun hadn't set, and dinner still wasn't ready, so we decided to test what I could do with the new seeds.
I tried the flowers first. I buried the seed using my spade, then I rose and put my hand over it.
"Don't you need to draw your alchemic circle?" Sarah asked me. I shook my head at her and lifted my hand so the rest of them could see my new ink. Grace, who was a tattoo artist before coming to this world, was thrilled.
"You got a tattoo!" She exclaimed, half questioning.
"Yep! This is how alchemists primarily do combat, according to my Master." I went back to my position, facing my palm straight down over where I'd buried the seed. I whispered the word of power, and the flower began to grow. It was indeed a pretty flower; it stood straight and tall; there was a bundle of green leaves that grew right under the bloom.
The bloom itself was large and white, with petals that grew together to look like a cup. I liked it, and moved my hand to the side, searching for the newly pollinated seed and made another one grow to its side. One of the things that I'd learned during my experiment with the grass was that this skill self-pollinated each plant producing more seeds. Once I had one, I could replicate it as many times as I wanted. I stopped the process when I had a small patch of these flowers.
"That's so cool!" Laura said as she went to sniff, one of the flowers. "And they smell so good!" The group seemed pretty impressed with my new ability and wanted to see what the other seeds would do. I moved onto the swine berries, planting the seed as my first step. As it grew, I realized that it was the same type of bush that my Master had me grow earlier that day. 'Did I just make her dinner?'
Sarah and Derek each pulled a berry off of the bush before placing it in their mouth. They chewed for a second before spitting it out and trying to scrape off their tongues. 'They can't be that bad.' I thought and plucked one of the berries off the bush for myself. The result was the same though, it had an extremely bitter taste to it, and the smell radiated through my nose, making me want to vomit.
"Oh my god, that is so nasty!" Derek exclaimed, and I was inclined to agree with him. Sarah was the only one that had a difference of opinion.
"Maybe it just needs to be cooked first. There are lots of foods that are gross in their raw forms but tasty when cooked." I shrugged if she wanted to give that nasty thing another try more power to her. Sarah gathered a bunch of berries into a pan and placed them on the fire. While we were still waiting for dinner to cook I still had one more plant to grow with my new skill.
It was a more dangerous plant so I took it all the way over to the other side of the yard and tossed it onto the ground. I didn't plant this one because I wanted to see what it would be like to use this in combat. I placed my hand once more and said the word.
"Crescen!" As soon as I did the plant sprang to life. It was much faster than any growth that I had experienced yet. The vines whipped themselves out of the ground almost hitting my hand roughly four inch thorns sprouted all along them like carpenters nails. I had to stop the process almost immediately because the vines were clinging to every surface they could touch.
By the time I stopped it though there was already a tall thicket going over our stone wall.
"What did you do?" Tim asked once he saw it was safe to approach. I shook my head.
"I don't know! My skill hadn't done anything like that yet!" I would really have to practice how to control the growth of this one. But I think I was going to have to practice it somewhere other than the back yard.