After my midday nap with my mother, it was time to work with my sister. Childcare was a full-time family job now. After my myriad multitude of private little adventures and the pitfalls they had created, it had been decided by all, that it was best to keep a permanent eye on me all of the time awake and asleep. I still had some secrets left from them but our more open policy on honesty meant that they knew most of what I was capable of now.
Our salt selling empire was stalling a little on the local front with everybody in town having more than enough to lower demand. The lower demand would have led to lower prices and therefore profit so we just stockpiled the stuff to sell on to Mecurio when he arrived. If we didn’t the price would have fallen so low as to encourage the locals to resell it at a profit for themselves. A profit that would have been ours if we had only waited a bit. So, although we hadn’t halted production we were in no rush to do so. We hoarded it while we wait for him to return.
We had a similar stockpiling issue with our Caracol Purple although it had a different reason behind it. Purple was the colour of nobility so having it allowed us to pretend to have greater wealth than we truly had but selling it and making a profit from it were a more dangerous proposition. Especially after the warning, we had received from Cadmus during one of his visits. Although it wasn’t illegal to sell the dye or cloth and clothing dyed from it, entering the market with it, or rather being the recognisable source of the dye would only have painted the target on our back to the current noble family who was apparently the sole producer of it. So again we were stockpiling a valuable product unable to turn it into readily usable currency.
The pearls on the other hand had come along very nicely. The deep-sea oyster farms had continued to grow. They were called deep-sea pearls because they are generally only found out at sea, often at deeper levels than the lagoon was. It was only through some weird coincidence that they are able to grow within the lagoon or even more surprising that they had somehow managed to find their way into it in the first place. My grid by grid search of the lagoon for oysters and snails has continued to find more spread across it. But I had been unable as of yet to find what I was sure must exist somewhere within it, a tunnel. There had to be somewhere a tunnel connecting our saltwater lagoon to the sea outside our island. That was the only way I had been able to work out that we would have these sea living creatures within our island walls in the first place.
Either way, most noons, after I had produced a little more salt with my excess mana, boiled the snails for their purple dye again with my excess mana. We quietly sat in our hidden blue cave slowly adding a little more mana to each oyster as Des and Sinis brought them to us. We had discovered that you have to be careful in how much mana you added to each oyster. Too little and there was no noticeable difference in the size of the pearl or the speed at which it developed. Too much and although it greatly sped up the growth and size of the pearl, the oyster itself soon died from mana poisoning.
Another problem of this world that no one had ever bothered to mention to me.
I had a little panic attack that I could have poisoned myself when I gained the trait source of mana. But on further questioning, it sounded like familiars with the trait never poisoned themselves. On the other hand, they added that they had never heard of a human having the trait so perhaps, like being unbalanced, it was possible. As my heart did little flip flops from their disagreeing positions on the matter I was finally reassured by them telling me that this should not be a problem for me either way as the amulet I was wearing would function to absorb both my own excess mana as well as external mana should it rise to dangerous levels for humans.
It turned out that there were areas in the world that were mana toxic to humans, places of power that would burn a being out. Maybe not initially or straight away but in time or rather later cause them to die from mana toxicity that they had built up but were unable to purge.
After our salt, snails and deep-sea pearls, we started to work on our next project. Continued diversification of income and growing self-sufficiency. My former life had taught me that you could not count on the future to stay the same as the past. What you could count on though was some form of disaster befalling you at some point. It was just basic statistics. War, famine, pestilence and death were not called the four horsemen of the apocalypse for no reason. Every civilisation faced them at some point. You never knew what could happen. I might just be being a little paranoid but you’re not paranoid if they are actually out to get you. Everything that we had heard about Solstice city and the capital of Ponente implied exactly that.
An emerging empire built on salt could be dissolved and undersold. Just as we were building a stockpile of the stuff there was no reason not to believe that other nobles might not have similar stockpiles or be willing to build them up to bring us down at a later more critical point. A rising kingdom built on a single dye of purple could equally find itself at war with another kingdom of the same colour. Especially if such a war could restore their monopoly of the product. A pearlescent province founded on pearls could always be held hostage to the tides of fashion.
Father’s fish were fantastic but the amount we were pulling out of the lagoon was enough for self-sufficiency and earning a wage. Again, not enough to support a noble house or challenge other houses. Indeed with the increased speed and efficiency, he was achieving from taking me along I was worried that we were too effective. That although we were not actually trawling the lagoon and damaging their habitat we could indeed be overfishing what the population could support.
Mother’s medley of cloth, clothing and tapestries were filling our façade of a mountain faux palace, but again. One mother no matter how magical could only make so much cloth. If we truly wished to join the noble families with a similar wealth we had to achieve what all barons, nobles and the nouveau rich managed to do. We needed to be making money while we were asleep or we would work till we died and never have enough. We had to future proof not only our family but the whole town if we were to have their backing when or if economic warfare ever became physical warfare.
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So we continued to diversify.
First, there was our aim at achieving true self-sufficiency the family had continued to work on my idea of building a garden of Eden within the cone crater at the top of our mountain home and we had much like the salterns that now surrounded our home at the lagoon level had terraced the interior of the cone crater with terraced steps filled full of soil ready for planting. We had been careful to fill what was effectively a giant set of terraced planter pots on the internal slop of the crater with as close a mixture to loam as we could get. Any knowledge from my old earth I wanted to implement without actually admitting to I simply passed through my ‘grandfather’. The wise to the world ancient grumpy git could simply tell them what I wanted them know without it being questioned and having them accept it as fact. So we had aimed for as close to the 40% sand, 40% silt and 20% clay as we could get.
Here we planted the rows of seedlings, sprouts and saplings that we had grown from all the seeds within the fruits Mercurio had given us over the last 2 years. Each one had been nurtured at home with the utmost care. Much like our efforts with the pearls we had discovered that there was a sweet spot to the amount of energy that could be imparted to each seed to speed up and aid its growth. Far too much and the seed would dry and crack before it burst into flames. Still too much and the seed although sprouting quickly would still die a day or two later. Seeds and mana were complicated it was not just the amount of mana that was applied but also the location and soil it was provided for its nutrients. Each time we gave the seed, seedling, or plant a burst of mana if there was noticeable growth we discovered that we would have to repot or replant that seedling within another area. It was as if the mana had allowed the seed to pull out all of the nutrients from the soil in a single burst which left it barren and no longer fit for purpose. This initially resulted in a significant amount of stunted plants and barren soil but once we had worked out the cause the solution itself was equally profitable.
Night soil.
Our family was now the sole collector of all the night soil the town produced. We didn’t charge a lot because ultimately we needed it for our new enterprise. Still, it was worth its weight in fruit because that was what it afforded us. Each time we aided the growth of a plant with mana we took care to add nightsoil to its surroundings and the accelerated growth of the plant drained the nightsoil of nutrients rather than its own location. Leaving the night soil no longer soiled as if the burst of mana and the growth of the plant had somehow removed both nutrients and its pungency leaving it much closer to silt in its composition.
We now had a veritable variety of produce from around the compass kingdoms I was most proud of my mango trees. Even though none of the trees had fruited yet. All in all, with the resources we had on hand we could speed the development of the trees 5 fold without killing them or leaving the soil barren and stunting their further growth. This meant that although we wouldn’t see any fruit this year hopefully by next year we would get our first crop from our trees be they, apple, orange, pear, lemon, peach, cherry, plum, apricot, pluot, or fig. We didn’t have the wire needed to make wire trellis for the trees to grow along. However with our mana method for stimulating growth we didn’t need it. By holding the growing branches in the position we wanted, adding the nightsoil and then our burst of mana it meant that the trees more or less grew into the position we were holding them. Now admittedly as the trees grew larger it was less and less me holding them and more and more Aleera, Des and Sinis. However, seeing as pinching the fruits off Mercurio’s plates in the first meeting we had ever had was my idea. This was counted as another one of my projects and the fruits of our labour were mine to decide. If we ever got any to eat that was.
In terms of actually having fruit to eat our vines looked like they were the closest to producing a crop worth eating. We had grapes, melons, passion fruit, dragon fruit, etc. The names might have been different but they tasted and looked the same for the most part. Fun fact a banana is a herb not a tree. So no matter how hard we tried to grow the seeds for the most part we failed miserably. The grapes though came in a variety of colours dark blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and pink so we had been able to plant them against the terraced walls to inline with the countries they came from a mini grape compass if you will that went around the wall of the cone crater. But although they would one day look that way they weren’t there quite yet.
The crops that we had actually managed to get to completion were those that grew on bushes or brambles. The vegetables and the berries whose plants took less time to grow to maturity reproduce and produce their bounty.
We now had potatoes!
I was only a short step away from finally having fish and chips!
The sheer amount of seeds we had planted over the last year along with the lack of night soil was actually what was slowing down the magical expansion of our garden. We needed a sizeable amount of fertiliser if we wished to start producing fruit and vegetables for selling. Still, it was extremely pleasant to have a little more variety in our meals which up till now had consisted of fish, fish and more fish.
The other limiting factor to expanding the garden was water. There had been a small lake at the bottom of the cone crater but we were rapidly using it all up. Sure it rained but it was a warm island generally subtropical in comparison to old earth. We had faced significant difficulties getting enough water up to the crater cone to support the plants before mother had finally solved the problem for us.
Now the majority of salt was collected naturally from the salterns surrounding our mountain. But initially, when it was all from what I could boil within the mountain there was one minor problem, the condensation. The water turned steam had to go somewhere most times it floated back out of the blue cave condensing on the roof and walls when it hit them before running back into the lagoon. But not all of it did that. The condensation within the tunnels got so bad that they ended up installing a rough door at the entrance to them to force the majority of the steam back into the cave and out that way.
However when we realised just how short we were going to be for water at the top of the mountain. She began to bore upwards with her voice. Each day she sang a little higher until finally, she reached the base of the crater cone. Water still condensed on the walls and runs back down but now enough of the steam made it to the top of the bore to condense there and water the garden we were growing. In time it would become an intrinsic initiation well of our own. A tower within the mountain to work your way up. But for now, the bore allowed all the steam made each lunchtime to make its way up to the crater on its own before watering the plants or filtering down to fill the little lake at the base of the crater. This meant every expenditure of mana was killing two birds with one stone. Making the salt and watering the growing garden at the same time. Money did not grow on trees but fruit did.
All of this rapidly wore me out but they were happy to carry my comatose body up the mountain while I had a small nap. Then carry me down the mountain as I had another small nap. Finally, after our evening meal, it was time to do some training with the reformed character that was my grandfather.