Day 318

My apprentices are quickly improving. Askos was able to take a couple steps without losing concentration and Junior is able to do more and more complex magic. Based on how quickly they are already improving Askos should be able to walk around by tomorrow while Junior should be able to cast spells just as well as she was able to before within three days. I’ll be honest, this is kinda boring for me so I’m glad they are improving so quickly.

Testing on my current project went well. The only real issue came up when describing where you wanted to go verbally, but that was easy enough to fix by telling people to teleport to landmarks and other places with proper names. I should be done adding everything into all of my trees before dawn, modifying my trees is a lot easier than building something new entirely.

One small group of people have decided to practice using these teleporters as much as possible. Some of them teleporting so much that they double over and vomit from teleportation sickness, something normally impossible with how short of a distance they are moving. I’m looking forward to seeing what becomes of them.

My Paladins, the ones who have my plants integrated into them, are also training with teleportation, but not in the same way. They are trying to do so independently of my trees, so that they can teleport beyond the bounds of my forest.

Speaking of my paladins, Par decided to assess their combat abilities and found them to be lacking. No surprise for a group of ex-farmers who had only been training for a bit less than two weeks. With his guidance, I set up what should be a much more effective training plan for them.

I’m not entirely sure how to train them, aside from constantly pushing them to improve, because everything that I want them to know how to do is something I am able to do intuitively. With Askos and Junior healing is something I made an active effort to study, even when I had no talent for it, so it is something I can teach. While plant manipulation is something that has always come easily for me. There is quite a bit I can explain, but in order for any of that to be useful they would need to already have quite a bit of skill in plant manipulation, more than they currently have. Other than pushing them to improve until they figure out how to there isn’t really anything I can do until they reach that point.

Though once they do manage to get good enough that I am comfortable integrating my plants into them then they will share a much deeper mental bond with each other, making it much easier for them to learn from each other's work. Once they all get to that point they should improve very rapidly, or at least that is the idea.

I was talking with Par today when the subject of the war came up, or more specifically how he can’t spare the soldiers to subjugate and integrate cities that aren’t on our shared border with the angelic council. Especially cities in the opposite direction of said border, many of which I am getting close to with my forest. No one is really expecting it to be a problem, or if they are they aren’t saying anything about it, but still, something about having cities in my forest that are not part of our empire doesn’t sit right with me.

And so I tried to think of something to do about that. The only thing that came to mind that didn’t involve murdering a bunch of people was to make them worship me. So I asked the people in charge of that whole group to focus their efforts on those cities, make them want to join our empire. It could work, or it could fail spectacularly.

Other than that I spent my downtime sitting alone and thinking. This whole war is kinda weird honestly, the angelic council was way too hostile towards us from the start. Like I get that they wanted some kind of ‘other’ that they could threaten people with in order to keep their people happy, that much I had explained to me, and we make a pretty obvious target for that. The vast majority of our population isn’t very high up on the evolutionary tree, Par was a goblin less than two years ago and he is the emperor. At first glance we should be a pushover, especially when you consider the fact that their founders and their important people are almost all true immortals. And we are the only other group bigger than a city-state that I know of, ignoring the scholars who are mostly untouchable. But we can’t exactly serve the purpose of being the ‘other’ if they crush us, and based on what they have been throwing into this war that is exactly what they are trying to do. It makes sense for them to hate us and for them to make their people content by saying ‘at least we aren’t those guys’, and it even makes sense for them to go to war with us while putting in a token effort. Maybe they are trying to take control of everything on the continent?

And now that I think about it, if they wanted to crush us why didn’t they have some of their true immortals come fight us? They sent in quite a few of what must have been their best soldiers and all that they really managed to achieve is making us angry. I’m not exactly the brightest when it comes to politics and military stuff, but either there is something I’m missing or they aren’t very good at this either. That is entirely possible, they did form an empire on sheer virtue of their own personal strength instead of military might or anything like that. Maybe they just don’t understand military tactics? Well, whatever. That is a bit beyond my sphere of influence, I’ll leave that stuff up to Par.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.