The central region of wilderness had become quite greener over the course of three years.
The woods, which were barely in the 100 meter range of our house before, had also expanded its scope to 500 meters.
As long as there was a fixed environment, mana would give birth to even more potent mana.
The grown-up plants would absorb the mana I released everyday and then release it in even greater amounts. This cycle has considerably raised the mana density inside the barrier.
There was the possibility of powerful monsters or dungeons spawning spontaneously, but even if that were to happen, we would just return to square one if I cut off the barrier isolating the mana flow.
I decided to first set up another barrier magic tool outside of the 100 meter range of the existing barrier so as to not cause any drastic change in the environment. Then, I erected a second barrier.
After that, we planted trees there to increase the scope while gradually transferring the concentrated mana in the second barrier region to achieve equilibrium of mana density.
"Haa一 but this also made it a pain to manage the barrier magic tools."
After the barrier’s range was expanded, I removed the previous stone pillars. However, this forced me to fuel more than 80 of those magic tools one by one every day. It was a pain to deal with.
In the meantime, on our first winter here in the wilderness, I found the ruins of the ancient magic civilization underground when I was exploring the wilderness alone, leaving Teto behind as the development of plants had reached the stangated state due to the limitation of the area.
All of their traces had vanished from the surface due to the aftermath of the magic experiment, but it seemed that there were still some facilities left underground.
Although I really wanted to do a thorough investigation, I found something even more gravitating first there.
I had found out about the existence of a magic tool that could control/supervise other magic tools from the ancient magic civilization's documents about magitech in that facility.
With the help of records and «Creation Magic», I created a remote controlling magic tool to manage and transmit my mana to the base.
It couldn't be any more ironic that the same technology that caused the catastrophe of mana disappearance was playing a role in restoration of mana and nature.
"Finally, I won’t need to check up on the tools so many times."
The controlling magic tools monitored the condition of each magic tool so that I could quickly know which one was damaged or malfunctioned without the need to personally check them out.
Managing the tools had become much easier compared to before. However, this also increased my mana consumption when I sent my mana to fuel the other magical tools.
My mana consumption for fueling 80 tools one by one until now was 20000 units, but with the centralized management, it had nearly doubled to 40000 units.
But since the lost mana also played the role of increasing the mana density as it decayed and blended in the air, setting up those magic tools wasn’t a waste at all.
"I think I should stop the development of the forest here for now."
Just replenishing the mana of those barrier magical tools was consuming around 80% of my present mana.
"I would absolutely love to avoid regressing to square one like last time by forcing the expansion and destroying the balance of mana to replenish the barrier."
At present, the miniscule amount of grown-up plants were filling the inside of the barrier, and I also needed to increase my own mana.
The «Empty Wilderness» had an area of 2500 square kilometers, and this tiny forest we had raised after so much effort only covered 0.01% of the whole map.
"We’re still so far from our goal of cultivating the forest."
"We still have a lot of time, Majou-sama. Let's take it easy!"
"You're right, Teto. But we still have to think about new methods."
The environment has finally begun to form a stable ecosystem in these three years.
"Mama~ Big sis Teto~ look, a butterfly!"
We had also created a small field by clearing away a tiny region of forest since the forest had already stabilized enough to not wither away like earlier. Our house was a cozy log house made of a combination of wood and stone. Also, a few rooms had been expanded.
The one who came trotting towards our direction was 3-year-old Selene, clasping a butterfly in her hand. Apparently, she found it hovering over the vegetable flowers.
She had grown up into an adorable little girl with deep green hair. Now, I was more excited to see her growth than the forest's cultivation.
As she came running一
"Ah......"
一She tripped and fell, maybe because she was still a child.
The butterfly that was in her grasp fluttered up to her head and immediately flew off to somewhere when Selene freed her hand to support herself on the ground.
"Are you hurt, Selene?"
"Uwaaaa, Mamaaaaa一"
"There-there, it must've hurt. Let mom check your hands and knees,” I said as I hugged the fallen Selene and consoled her.
It seemed that she had scraped herself when she fell so her knees were now bleeding and a bit dirty.
I cleaned her wound with magic and used healing magic.
"Pain, pain, go away~ Alright, the pain is gone."
"......Yeah. It doesn't hurt."
As I pulled Selene into my embrace, Teto praised her.
"Amazing! You immediately stopped crying. You're a strong child-nanodesu."
"Hehehe...... Big sis Teto praised me."
Our days passed like this; revolving around Selene as we cultivate the land.
Selene was seeing me as her mother while admiring Teto as her older sister.
I should have been more like an older sister due to my appearance and height, but strangely, Selene was seeing me as her mother figure.
‹Your biological mother passed away after entrusting you to me. This is your mother's hair.›
I had explained to her the whole situation while showing the hair I had cut off from her mother's dead body before being attacked in the Darryl town, but I guess she was still too young to understand this. However, she seemed to have understood that she had a birth mother, and I was just her caretaker mother.
"What were Mama and Big sis doing?"
"Hmm? We were planting a new kind of tree."
"New trees!? I also want to help!"
"Hmm… alright. I guess we can use your help."
I created a new species of tree with the «Creation Magic».
I had created various types of helpful medicinal herbs like those used for soaps and the likes. In the same way, I was going to plant a tree that was called «Word Tree». It would produce the most amount of mana out of all the other trees I had planted.
With a scoop, Teto dug up a hole in the ground which had now become soft. Selene planted the seeds that were the size of a walnut that I had created beforehand, and sprinkled the water mixed with liquid fertilizer from a watering can.
In the end, I decided to feed them a large amount of mana to make their germination easier and planted them uniformly in each location in the forest.
And when an orange hue was dominating the sky一
"Hmm, *Zzz*......"
"Fufu, she's adorable, isn't she?"
"Majou-sama and Selene are both cute."
"Selene will grow up one day and leave for the world, won't she?"
Selene was currently sleeping on my back, apparently tired after planting all the seeds.
Good grief, I hadn't grown up at all in all these years. It was all because of the skill I got when my magical power surpassed 50,000 units as the result of eating those «Mysterious Fruits» in these three years of raising Selene.
一一It was «Eternal Youth».
I feared that I might stay as a 12-year-old forever, and that Selene would grow bigger than me one day.
In the first place, our current lifestyle was something unhealthy from the perspective of human society.
"Hmm, I guess it's time to think about moving our residence for the sake of Selene when the seeds of these world trees germinate."
If the world trees germinated and began to produce a large amount of mana without any hindrance as I was expecting them to, I would add a new feature to the Barrier maintenance tool.
The new feature’s function was to give the barrier the ability to maintain itself by absorbing magical power.
Currently, it took around 40000 units of my mana to preserve the 500 meter range barrier.
In order to reach that amount of mana units with the mana produced by plants and trees, I planted many ‹World Trees›.
If I was no longer needed to manage the magic tools everyday as I hoped, then all I would need to do was yearly maintenance of the magical tool.
Just like that, in our third winter in the wilderness, the seeds of the world trees sprouted. Just a single sapling produced around 1500 units of mana, which was more than what I had initially expected. They produced enough mana for me to leave the barrier’s maintenance to the planted world trees.
In addition, as the world tree continued to produce mana without withering away even in the harsh winter, I decided to release a portion of the high density mana inside the barrier to the wilderness outside.
Thus, In the winter of the third year, we moved our base from the central region of the «Empty Wilderness» to the outer region of the south-east direction near the Gard beastkin nation since all the problems needed to be tackled over there were resolved.
