CHAPTER 1496: CHAPTER 1495: CLAN HELP

Looking over the vast fields, I nodded to myself and took a deep breath of the fresh air before turning over towards Nakith, who was standing just beside me with a stone tablet in her hands, scratching away at it and constantly reconfiguring the Ritual Circle she had etched into its surface.

"So? How bad was it?"

The Cimeriesa futanari hummed softly and continued to work at it before blinking a few times and looking up at me, confusion filling her eyes only for her to say "Bad? It’s not bad; if anything I am really impressed you got this close!"

"Really? I thought I had messed something up terribly..."

"Technically... kind of, but it isn’t something that I can really ’blame’ you for not understanding. As an Ice Magic wielder I am certain you understand how fickle the ratios can be, right? Too much of one element creates something that isn’t technically ’Ice Mana’, but it’s close enough..?"

I nodded, far too aware of the wet, ’heavy’ air that I make use of often as well as the slush that can happen if I rush the process and add too much Water Mana, which happened a lot in the beginning when I was learning from scratch.

"Well, the same thing applies for all of the combinations. After you do the merging in your Core it becomes a non issue, which in turn makes enchanting something with said element easy, but when you start experimenting to do things like this... things get ’difficult’.

Finding that exact ratio is a pain, and you seem to have forgotten about needing that exact ratio because everything else here is pretty much golden... you’re just trying to run this entire Ritual Circle on impure Nature Mana, which is very much not golden."

I let out a hum of my own this time, staring at the tablet with intrigue as I tried to figure out the changes she had made, only to end up staring back at her as she let out a sigh and lowered the tablet to her side, no longer working on it.

"Thankfully Heqet knows that ratio pretty well since she helped establish a large amount of Ritual Circles back at one of the other Arx, so she can implement that and show you what it is. Once we have it we can start setting it up across the fields and begin sowing the seeds for the future."

"How quickly will they end up growing..? I believed it to be about a month and a half, but... I’ve never done something like this before - obviously - so I have no idea if I’m understanding everything correctly or..?"

"That’s... about right? It really depends on the grain seed variants that we have, because some need more time than others... but they also produce way more grain because of that time. As for the vegetables and berries, they shouldn’t take longer than a month, maybe even three weeks..?"

I turned back towards the field and imagined what it would look like a month from now, only to then immediately try and imagine how much food that field could produce for the city and how long it would last.

"You’ll have enough, trust me. To start they might not be able to indulge in large, abundant meals, but it’ll be enough to keep them full and healthy. At worst the grain will need to be turned into porridge..."

That made me blanch a little since the idea of having to eat porridge with little else sounded like hell - especially after so long of cooking amazing meals for myself - only to then calm down when I remembered that Jahi would never let that happen...

The amount of meat she would bring back just because the idea of porridge only dinners would ’scare’ her would definitely be enough to keep us sustained, and if the growth time of these grains wasn’t even that long then we had nothing to worry about.

~~~

Anput PoV

"I never thought of it like that... though, does it really warrant the extra effort?"

The tall, lithe red skinned man shrugged his shoulders and watched as I placed the ingot back into the forge, his eyes never straying anywhere they shouldn’t; the control was appreciated, though there was that tiny voice that wanted to know if they would have strayed if I had a body like Kat’s or Leone’s...

I ignored it, of course, and instead I focused on the conversation at hand, which was a discussion about the potential profitability of only alloyed metal over ’raw’ metal; obviously I knew that alloying would be ’better’, but the effort never really seemed to be justified when it came to the pricing.

"Perhaps, perhaps not. All I know is it adds a layer of ’credibility’ and allure to a blacksmith in the eyes of merchants and other potential buyers. A more simple alloyed blade tends to sell more often than a refined, polished blade made from just a single material. The ’illusion’ that alloys are ALWAYS better is very prevalent amongst non blacksmiths."

"Well, even if it might help me make more money I don’t really have that many good secondary metals to be using for alloying. Also, I don’t know how often I’ll be forging high quality things to be sold..."

He shrugged again and turned to study the wall, which already had a few pieces hanging up that were either finished or close to being finished; after a few moments he said "The Clans can send some decent secondary metals that we have in excess. Trade some of the excess grain or potions for it and use it to make a profit.", giving me pause as I mulled it over.

"I’ll think about it. I don’t really know if it’s worth it, especially not since I was thinking of shifting over towards ornamental items sometime soon..."

"Whatever you decide, just know you have the option. I will just say that the alloyed weaponry tends to sell for upwards of a quarter more in price and twice as often as the unalloyed weaponry, especially in adventuring cities."