Chapter 501: Atomic bonsai

Things like these were the reason building dams took years of work… Even beavers, who could build dams seemingly overnight, were only this effective on relatively small streams.

The rivers we had to deal with were anything but.

No kind of technology besides something truly science fictional or magically miraculous would be able to help us there. At this point, anyone reasonable would’ve started to think that this was a fool’s errand to begin with.

Anyone except my Advisers!

As I thought, they talked over the table, trying to come up with an idea to resolve this situation. One idea was more outlandish than the next one, but none of them even thought about giving up.

They believed that as long as they had my approval, anything was possible. They believed in me too much for their own good, and thought about me as infallible…

So I had no right to fall.

I closed my eyes, entering the state of meditation. In the background, I heard Amby shushing my girls so their chatter won’t distract me—now they were talking telepathically instead.

Minutes passed—I wasn’t sure how long. My mind was working on overdrive, reaching the depths of its creativity…

Until an idea hit me.

I opened my eyes. When I saw that the Council Chamber was still full of people, I let out a breath of relief.

The last time I went meditating in the middle of a Council gathering, I opened my eyes in the middle of the night, when everybody had long gone to sleep! Even Amby was asleep on the table, because she didn’t want to just leave me sitting there alone…

But now all the Advisers looked at me with curiosity and expectation.

“I had an idea,” I said.

“We knew you would!” Worriesgone chirped. “Tell us, Father!”

“It’s advanced gardening. Something like bonsai. This will be a much more effective way of dam-building than putting pots into rivers.”

After this confusing introduction, I stood up from the table and walked up to one of the chamber’s walls.

Not too long ago, I arranged to install a blackboard there. We had chalk sticks by now that were moderately convenient to write with, and the blackboard made from dyed, polished wood was a decent way to demonstrate pictures to the entire room at once.

Now I used it to sketch a tree sapling. Then a larger tree… but bent.

With these illustrations, I explained to my girls the concept of making plants grow the way you wanted to. All it took was an application of force over a prolonged period of time.

The ice-hole trees grew so fast that force only needed to be applied for short periods. This would make shaping them this way much easier.

I didn’t want to make tiny ice-hole trees, though.

“Our gardeners could bend trees at the edges of the rivers to make them grow into and over the water. This will stem the flow of it at least partially, making the rest of the dam easier to build. With some earth pots, new trees can be grown right on top of the old ones that will freeze into the surface of the rivers.”

***

The plan I came up with was immediately put into execution.

The gardeners had plenty of seeds to work with. On the same day, they received the instructions through telepathic connection and began bending trees.

And it was even more effective than I hoped!

With enough fire spit at the trees by fire-breathers from a distance, the ice-hole trees could grow incredibly fast. Even more, they kept growing even after their lower parts froze into the water already.

This allowed bent trees to grow horizontally for dozens of meters before they couldn’t do it anymore. Some were longer than a hundred meters!

The tallest ice-hole trees reached a height of approximately three hundred meters, which was taller than a human. And as a rule of thumb, the freezing range of an ice-hole tree equalled half of its height.

This meant that a bent tree froze the river for dozens of meters to the bottom, and grew even farther using the water’s warmth.

The smaller streams could be blocked almost fully with just one or two trees!

Wider rivers were blocked partially, but this made planting further trees much easier.

Of course, water that was blocked by the ice dams spilt to the sides of the rivers, but there it was stopped by the planted walls of the ice-hole trees!

Like I predicted, they froze the water before it could even touch them, creating tall ice walls. Every day, more snow melted and more water poured on us, but the worst of it was always stopped by the ice.

The rivers in the Bee Empire still flooded, but these floods were minor. No people were harmed by them, and a couple of human villages that were built too close to the water could be quickly rebuilt later (or somewhere else).

The ice wall and the dams were ready not only faster than we planned for—they were ready before the worst floods began. We had some time to spare to strengthen them even further!

Which was great. Because twenty-five days after we started building walls and dams, a hot spell hit the region.

It was already warm, but now the weather grew HOT.

The snow melted like it had never melted before, and the scouts posted in the mountains to watch brought reports that made Bloodhero frown when she read them.

“Walls of water pour from the overflowing lakes, they say. They can actually see the ground in many places where the snow had melted, and this snow is now pouring into countless streams. They are flowing for kilometres but never end and never seep into the ground. Within two days, they will reach the Bee Empire for sure. The existing rivers are overflowing more, too.”

Bloodhero put the report on the table and raised her chin.

“But, also, Father! This is the moment we’ve been preparing for, and we are ready. Let the water come!”