First things first, I need to recover the core.

  During the explosion of my first semi-successful golem prototype, its limbs were ripped from the torso, which was also broken into several pieces. Frankly, the whole thing would be just as useful as mulch now.

  I searched the debris for the precious monster core, but I found it almost a hundred feet away from where the golem blew up. Unfortunately, though, it had a large crack running down the middle. As soon as I tried to pick it up with a leaf, the core crumbled into little shards that quickly became dust in the wind.

  Just a drop of water in an endless sea.

  All we do crumbles to the ground,

  Though we refuse to see.

  Duuuuuuust in the wind.

  The song by Kansas ran through my head while I watched the first monster core I’ve ever seen float away on a strong breeze. I would have panicked, but I’ve been seeing a lot of the things in the remains of the Orcs the Wolves have been leaving behind.

  That’s right, BBW’s hunting grounds are still around here, but he and his pack have been making sure to stay very far from my clearing. They’ve still been marking their territory, but I’ve been letting it slide since it hasn’t been on my main body.

  But anyway, the wolves hunt the occasional orc group for dinner, and in the leftovers, I’ve seen the occasional monster core left behind. I have noticed that the orcs that put up a better fight against the wolves are more likely to leave one behind.

  I’ve been tempted to start hoarding them, but I haven’t really had a reason to other than “ooh, shiny!” But now that I have a use for them, I might just make a spot to store them.

  The basement of my severely underused motel has been getting repurposed as a mana water tank, and I’ve been getting a lot of use out of it. My mana regeneration is through the roof with all the trees I’ve been acquiring lately, and I’ve been storing some of the extra as mana water. In the time it takes me to create a few drops, I’ve already regenerated the man required to make the batch I was working on. Frankly, the limiting factor keeping me from flooding the room right now is how boring it is to do.

  As of right now, I have about 3 feet of mana water sitting in the basement. The water used to flow through the hallways that made up the bottom floor of the livable areas, but when I decided to remodel it as storage, I went ahead and removed most of the walls and doors, and spread my roots out. If someone were to look down here, they would see a flooded, open space with a few supporting pillars and hanging roots all over the place.

  It's in here that I want to store the monster cores.

  At the top of the inner wall of the mana water tank, I created a small shelf of compacted dirt. The monster cores are relatively small, so that’s all I’ll need for now.

  “Ah, screw it. Might as well make room for extras if I can find any.”

  I decided to extend the shelf to encompass the entire wall. When it looped around to connect to itself, I went ahead and made a few more. It’s not like it takes much more effort to do it now, given that the whole area was overly saturated with mana.

  With storage finished, I went on the hunt to find more of the monster cores lying around the forest. Of course, that required me to dig through bodies.

  I go on autopilot and snag a few that I found in the area of my constantly growing control. It takes only a short moment to wash them off with Water Magic, followed by Earth Magic to put all but one of them in storage. I definitely don’t want the spares anywhere near where I plan on conducting my experiments in case they blow up again. As a matter of fact, I don’t want my bees near it either.

  I went ahead and walked the puppet I had made for the next trial outside of the fog-covered clearing and kept going in the opposite direction from the road. When I felt that I had covered enough distance, I stopped the doll and had it lie down.

  I reconnected to the doll and prepared to make some last-minute adjustments before inserting the core. Right now, it was nearly identical to my first attempt. The first change I plan on making is shrinking the housing chamber for the core. There’s no reason for the doll to have a giant cavity in its chest when the core is as small as it is.

  The next change I plan on for this round is to remove the Stamina Berry and Health Berry juices from what I’m calling the ‘battery compartment’. From what I can tell, Elvis and his girlfriend didn’t need access to those types of things when they were using his horse-type golem. If they don’t need it, then I shouldn’t either.

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  It only takes a second for the dirt puppet I made to carry a bowl of mana water over to the puppet to reach it. I just tossed the three berries I had planned to use over to a thorny bush I knew housed some rabbits and poured the water into the appropriate compartment.

  The last thing I need to do now is throw the monster core in place.

  I elongated a nearby vine to use as the surgical instrument and slowly placed the core into its hopefully new permanent spot.

  The puppet immediately started to seize, its wooden limbs twirling in ways I didn’t think it could without my direct control. Soon, smoke started to come out of its chest, and the would-be wooden golem was no more.

  Five more variations later, and I was down to my last monster core again.

  “What am I doing wrong? I’ve tried changing the amount of mana berry juice in the battery compartment, but no matter how little or how much I use, it always ends in catastrophic failure. I’ve also tried changing the thickness of the ‘circulatory system’, which should allow for far easier movement of the ‘battery’ juice, but it still doesn’t work.”

  The last variation, which was also the most successful variation, was the attempt with the least amount of mana berry juice put into the compartment. I even went so far as to dilute the juice with some plain water before adding it in. This was also the variation with the thickest ‘veins’ running through its body.

  The end result was a puppet that lasted almost seven whole seconds before it overheated. It wasn’t enough to burn the wood it was made out of, but a closer inspection showed the entire internal structure was blackened and charred.

  “If I had to guess, my biggest problem right now is definitely powering the thing. Is it just that my mana berries contain THAT much mana?”

  I popped out a berry from my canopy, which was regenerated and replaced in a matter of moments. Then I really looked at the berry, feeling it roll around in the little bowl I had made for it. It looked rather insignificant, but I could feel the mana inside. It was dense. But then again, there was a crap load of mana all around me.

  I made a quick dirt puppet and put the whole mana berry inside a small compartment on its back, then brought it over to the edge of my territory. The farther away the berry went, the more I could see why my golem attempts have been failing.

  The air in the area of my border was much less charged with mana than nearer to me. I’m not sure if it’s because of the Mana Fog skill or the small, but growing, pool of mana water under my body, but whatever the reason, the mana is super dense around my body.

  “I wonder if that would make casting spells easier?”

  I quickly shake my nonexistent head before dismissing the puppet and bringing my awareness back to my main body. The Mana Fog has gotten extremely dense in the clearing. If it weren’t for my Domain of Awareness skill, I might not even be able to see a foot in front of me. Which has me wondering how Honey is doing so well, since neither she nor her hive should be able to see. And now that I think about it, the plants also shouldn’t be growing as well as they are, given how little light should be able to filter through the fog.

  I check in on the plants first and see that they are actually illuminated quite well. It’s almost as if the light from the sun passes straight through the fog as if it doesn’t even exist. They were growing surprisingly fast, too. A few of the flowers I had brought over were little more than buds a couple of days ago, but now they’re starting to grow into almost bushes. A quick flex of Earth Magic created some distance between the plants, allowing them to have more room to grow wild.

  I checked on Honey and her bees next. Her hive had grown fast as well. When I found her, she had almost nothing, but now she had a whole army of drones to do her bidding. I don’t know how I haven’t realized how fast she’s been growing up to now, but ‘fast’ feels like an understatement.

  I felt for the connection with Honey and pinged her to get her attention.

  “Flower God!” she quickly exclaimed. She was in the middle of organizing her troops to go on extended missions to scout the surrounding areas, but dropped everything when she felt my presence.

  “What can do for Flower God?” she asked me.

  “How is the hive, Honey?” I could visually see that everything was going well, but it was nice to ask.

  “Hive good! Hive start spreading Flower God’s flowers! Rich in mana, make hive strong!”

  The flowers are rich in mana? Is that from watering them with mana water? Or is it from the existing in my Mana Fog? Either way, that’s news to me.

  “I’m happy to hear that. Is that why your hive has been growing so fast lately?”

  “Yes! Mana rich flowers make mana rich honey for Honey’s hive!”

  She’s got mana rich honey now, too?! I NEED some! But… I don’t want to hinder her hive. I’ll wait until she’s grown a bit more before trying to snag some for myself.

  “Flower God want try mana honey?”

  “Yes! -erm. I mean. If it wouldn’t bother you too much, I would like to try some. I don’t want to take your hive’s food, though.”

  The bee queen did a little dance and sent waves of happy emotions through the link we shared.

  “Honey’s hive is Flower God’s hive! Honey’s honey is Flower God’s honey!”

  Such a sweet little bee. I’m glad I found her.

  I grew a little root in the canopy where she and her brood were and used it to drink the honey from a single cell. I was briefly overwhelmed with how sweet it was, even when I couldn’t taste the honey with a regular tongue.

  The sugars spread through the root, but when the honey reached the rest of my trunk, it was too diluted to really taste anymore. I wanted to take more and more honey, but I also didn’t want to hurt Honey’s hive, so I settled for the little bit I had and sent a feeling of appreciation and deliciousness to her.

  “It was very good, thank you, Honey.”

  “Flower God likes Honey’s honey? Honey is so happy!”

  She kept doing a little dance, which I assume is her happy dance, and went back to doing what she was doing before I interrupted her. I kept watching for a few more seconds before realizing she was telling her hive they needed to increase honey production so as to offer me more honey on a regular basis.

  The sight filled my heart.

  I watched for a few more minutes before going back to my golem experiments.

  “Enough distractions. I need to get this done. Let’s go!”