The gardens, I never thought that we would ever have a castle back then when we were living inside a cave with Benladann, let alone a garden with it, but after a lot of development with Fuyu, who only started as a two-floor house-sized ice fortress, all the way into this massive tower-like castle with a large garden around it, we found ourselves living our dream.
Fuyu had truly become the castle of our dreams, a flying castle, a vessel that travels across the skies and brings us anywhere we want. In the skies, we felt the freest. And in here we enjoy all the life we want without being bothered with the affairs of the world below us. Or well, we did, until we meet Cassim and everything else regarding him… but nonetheless, even with him, things are still easy-going here. There's certainly a bigger picture to everything going on, but we are taking it easy while we do whatever we can to survive and thrive. The first thing we must do is… relax!
Yes, relax, we must relax, this is the first rule ever. Without relaxing or having a calm mind without stress, we cannot possibly face the dangers we had faced all this time, the Vampires were a pretty big challenge, but we went through them because we were well prepared. But things won't go easy all day all the time, so we have to appreciate every day of peace and be thankful that we can enjoy it thoroughly.
We walked across the beautiful gardens. Most of the floor was paved with beautiful white and azure-colored ice ceramic, but the gardens were in patches of dirt in the shape of squares and rectangles of several meters, all of them were well-organized and looked like they were flourishing.
The plants in here were a variety of plants we picked up from the surface, with a few exceptions. However, the gardens here were not really green. The green color in plants was actually rare in these cold and harsh areas, as most herbs and plants were blue and azure-colored, due to their ice-attribute elements infused into their bodies, these plants didn't directly absorb the sunlight, so their pigmentation was different, usually absorb the ice attribute mana which was very abundant in areas with a lot of ice everywhere. It was an interesting way of how they evolved in a world of mana, but I guess there are two types of plant classifications.
There are the normal plants, the green plants that are not mana-based and function like regular old plants on Earth. They're more susceptible to environmental changes and are overall more delicate with the exception of certain ones such as pine trees, which grew and adapted to be able to grow even in the freaking coldest of temperatures.
And then there are the mana-based plants, or well, the plants that utilize mana passively one way or another. Some of them are capable of absorbing mana directly from the environment, so they grow immensely big in areas with a lot of mana, becoming giant trees or massive flowers, or even seas of vines and grass… there are also the plants that passively utilize the mana of their environment to nourish themselves, but are not completely specialized in that, and also need to photosynthesize and cannot survive in colder regions.
The plants that grow in these frozen lands, or well, of the previously frozen lands we had landed into when we were reborn, were mana-based plants, all of them. This is why they can grow even in the harshest of cold regions. But this isn't exactly the truth for some of them, like the pine trees, who are normal plants that are just amazingly adapted to temperature changes.
In our garden, we don't get pine trees because they're just a waste of space and don't produce much. There is a certain species of pine tree that produces pears, so we have planted them, but this species of pine tree is half mana-based, so we don't classify it as the pine tree.
Anyways, there are also many other plants growing here, we also planted the mana-based trees that produce fruits of all flavors, and even ice cabbages, winter tomatoes, and more. They are all like earth's versions of fruits but made with ice mana. They're tasty to most of us as we are all ice-based beings, but even the beast-kin who doesn't find them tasty.
The area of the garden where we moved for the picnic was a larger patch of grass, we were surrounded by ice roses and all sorts of grassy plants, aromatic herbs, and beautiful flowers, there was a big Ice Apple tree right behind us, so it gave a nice shadow from the strong sun outside. being above clouds means you get hit directly by the sunlight, that can be a problem sometimes when you're an ice-based being.
Nonetheless, I couldn't help but praise Fuyu for their excellent work here. Although there is a specialized gardener group that had begun to emerge lately made by me, she had also been doing the most here. She had been using the help of her new Abilities such as Farmer and Agriculture to enhance the power of the plant's growth and so on, making them flourish beautifully into things one could bȧrėly think of as little plants. They were truly beautiful.
We sat down below the tree's shadow, as we saw Miranda walking here leisurely. She was wearing a cute white dress.
"Phew, she's here! She took a while preparing herself. I think this is the first time she does it so much…" said Benladann.
"Well, that means she really loves us then," I said with a cheeky smile.
"Hehe, maybe…" giggled Benladann.
"I am late… I brought a few things I made myself, let's eat already!" said Miranda, as she arrived and sat down in front of us, she brought a basket filled with food she prepared.
"Oh?! Sandwiches?" I asked.
"Y-Yeah… It took me a bit to make them." She sighed.
"Hm~ They're tasty anyways, well done!" said Benladann.
And like this, we spent the rest of the day below a tree, as the calm breeze soothed our hearts.
