Tree Improvement

Since my level had gone up, I parted ways with Utena-san and decided to go see Nadja.

For now, the new trees I could plant seemed to be fruit trees.

So we would all enjoy eating some fruit together.

And so, I had Nadja, who had been drilling the dark elves and dwarf recruits, come over.

“Sorry, were you busy?”

“No, not particularly. Refusing Woody’s call was never an option from the start, and besides, from the recruits’ point of view, things are probably easier without me around.”

“Ah, Nadja, you are hard to approach, after all.”

“—Hard to approach!? What do you mean by that!?”

“It means your first impression when someone meets you is bad.”

“I am not asking what the words mean!”

“But isn’t that true? You are a beautiful woman in men’s clothing, and on top of that, Woody-sama’s fiancée. Your attitude is huge, but your chest is small. Ah, ‘hard to approach’ ended up being a double meaning, didn’t it? Hahaha.”

“—I’ll kill you! With my entire body and soul!”

I somehow held back Nadja, who had taken on the expression of a demon, and Aira laughed happily when she saw it.

Nadja was completely serious, so at this rate, it really seemed as though a fight would break out.

“Come on, you two. If you keep fighting any more than this, there will be no fruit!”

“Nadja, were we fighting just now?”

“Nooo? We have been best friends since our previous lives, haven’t we?”

The moment I said that, the two of them smiled brightly and put their arms around each other’s shoulders.

There was a vein bulging on Nadja’s forehead, but pointing that out would have been tactless.

“In that case, I’ll plant the new trees for now.”

Since this place was close to the lord’s residence, even if people saw them, they probably would not be taken away, so I activated Tree Planting.

The two newly added trees were plum and mandarin orange.

I knew about mandarin oranges.

The name “orange,” which is what they are called when mandarin oranges are classified more finely, might be more famous.

They were oval fruits harvested in certain regions of the kingdom.

Apparently, their size and sweetness changed quite a bit depending on the region, but the ones that came to the Conrad domain where I had lived were all extremely sour.

The usual way to use them was probably to squeeze out the juice, mix it with a large amount of sugar, and drink it as juice.

As for plums… I knew absolutely nothing about them.

For now, I decided to plant both.

“This is… it has a scent I have not smelled very often before. Sniff, sniff.”

The moment I planted the plum tree, a distinctive fragrance drifted from it.

It was a slightly sweet scent.

Did that mean I could expect good things from the fruit too?

“But being able to harvest mandarin oranges is a big deal. I had wanted citrus fruits soon.”

“Indeed. If they are sweet, they can be shipped as they are, and even if they are sour, they can be used as seasoning. They will most likely be the former, but… with your crossbreeding, Woody-sama, you should be able to make sour ones right away too.”

“Ah, about that, actually…”

I told the two of them that I had obtained a new skill called Tree Improvement.

Since both of them had gone through all sorts of hardships together with me, they were happy with the same feeling I had.

“That’s amazing, Woody! Now we can say goodbye to that hell of taste-testing!”

“I did not dislike that time either, but… congratulations, Woody-sama. With this, you have taken another step closer to the finest fruit.”

At present, I had been relying entirely on the crossbreeding skill to improve fruit.

That method was faster, and above all, there were no people who could improve varieties by pollinating them one by one or matching stock plants.

The crossbreeding skill was certainly useful.

But using it also consumed smile points, and it was troublesome because I had to take notes so I would not forget each combination.

For example, it was a lot of work when I made the House Tree the other day.

It was when I temporarily built lodging for adventurers at Magros Volcano at Fem-san’s request.

Fem-san was the type who was extremely particular about small details, so she firmly divided the residential area into several sections, then gave detailed specifications for each area, such as how tall each house should be, how large each house should be, and what kind of furniture should be inside.

To respond to that, I had to desperately stare at the documents where I had compiled the data on the House Trees I had made so far.

Some of them were made by further crossbreeding trees that had already been crossbred, so choosing the House Trees was far more exhausting than the planting work itself.

Now that the types of trees had already increased so much, I could not remember one by one what would result from combining which trees.

That was why fine-tuning through crossbreeding was one of the tiring jobs.

But things would be different starting today.

Starting today, this Tree Improvement should free me from note-taking hell… right?

“Tree Improvement.”

With my heart swelling with anticipation, I activated the new skill.

A list of trees appeared.

Looking closely, I noticed that only the World Tree was missing.

In other words, this skill could improve trees other than the World Tree.

In that case, I decided to select the mandarin orange tree I had just obtained.

When I touched the words “Mandarin Orange Tree,” the panel of light suddenly spread wide to the side with a rush.

“Whoa!?”

““Are you all right, Woody-sama!?””

I gave a light smile to the two of them, who were worried about me, and told them I was fine before looking at the panel of light again.

There, several items were lined up.

“So these are the items I can improve…”

I had expected that tastes such as sweetness and sourness could be changed, but apparently, size and growth speed could be changed too.

It would certainly be a problem if they grew too big, after all.

Ah, I see. Maybe the World Tree cannot be selected because it cannot be adjusted in various ways like this.

“How should I proceed with this… hm?”

Looking closely, there was something like a small cursor next to each item.

When I tried pressing the upward arrow next to sweetness, the sweetness value changed to 1 with a bright ping.

I see. So this was how it worked.

For now, since I remembered mandarin oranges as extremely sour fruit, I decided to allocate points to sweetness.

Then, when I raised sweetness to 10, the upward arrow turned gray, and I could not allocate any more points to it.

The same was true for the other items.

It seemed that the maximum value that could be raised for one item was 10, and there would be no problem as long as these five items were kept within a total of 20.

I hesitated a little, but I decided to make the first tree like this.

When I pressed the confirm button below, it moved straight to the familiar selection of the place to plant.

When I selected the planting spot, light flashed, and the next moment, a tree was born in the place I had specified.

“This is… it is quite small.”

“It is not quite miniature-sized, but… perhaps it is about the size of a freshly planted World Tree?”

The mandarin orange tree Nadja and Aira were looking down at certainly had about the difference between an adult and a child compared to the mandarin orange tree planted a little farther away.

Was this… the result of lowering Growth (Tree)?

If so, perhaps trees that were not improved originally had a slightly higher value for this.

“Yes, please.”

I would not be able to remember it if it was memorized in such an ordinary way, but apparently the Tree Planting skill would make up for that part.

My memory was not all that good, so I was truly grateful.

Huh, but if that was the case… would it not have been better if it had remembered the fine combinations when I made House Trees too?

In response to my inner question, the skill said nothing and simply remained silent.

The more I used this Tree Planting skill, the less I understood what it meant.

There were times when it responded to me as though it were human, and there were times when it stubbornly stayed silent no matter what was said to it.

There were times when it lent me its power, and there were times when it did nothing in response to things I wanted it to do.

This was probably because remembering the fine details through repeated combinations was my domain, while counting trees through the skill’s Tree Improvement fell under the skill’s scope.

Maybe because it was a skill, it was not very flexible… Well, that did not matter right now.

As a test, I swapped the values of sweetness and tree height by one point each and planted several patterns of trees.

Then, when the tree height reached 4, it became the same size as the mandarin orange tree on the other side.

That led to one hypothesis.

Could it be that this Tree Improvement… was a power that converted a tree’s original potential into numbers and allowed me to redistribute them?

Maybe when planting was done without doing anything, a tree with all values set to 4 was planted.

As a test, I set all the values of the mandarin orange tree to 4 and planted it next to the mandarin orange tree I had planted first.

Then, an identical tree of exactly the same size appeared.

When I checked my smile points, they had decreased by about 20.

I see. Using this skill cost 20 per tree… In that case, I could probably produce them without worrying too much.

Recently, I had gained quite a lot of leeway with smile points too.

It was a huge difference from the beginning.

As I waited while looking back on memories from those early days when I had desperately tried to make Aira smile, Mandarin Orange Tree (1), which I had improved, turned orange and bore sufficiently large fruit faster than the first tree I had planted.

This one had Growth (Fruit) set to 5.

Feeling even more confident in my prediction, I decided to pluck one fruit.

“All right, then let’s try eating it right away.”

“I will cut it.”

Using a fruit knife she had pulled out from somewhere, Aira neatly peeled the mandarin orange.

The peel was thin, and the inside was packed full of flesh.

Compared to the mandarin oranges I had eaten before, the flesh had a deeper orange color.

“““Thank you for the food… nom.”””

The three of us put the mandarin orange into our mouths together.

Then… the moment I bit through the membrane of the mandarin orange, the flesh inside burst, and fresh juice spread through my mouth.

“S-Sweet! It is so sweet my teeth feel a little squeaky!”

It was delicious… but it went beyond delicious, and worry won out a little.

That was how violently sweet it was.

Among the fruits I had eaten so far, mango had been the thickest and sweetest, but this mandarin orange surpassed even that.

So by adjusting things with Tree Improvement, I could make fruit this sweet…

Since its sourness was set to 2, it could be eaten normally and tasted good, but without even a little acidity, it might be so cloyingly sweet that one slice would be enough.

“What is this mandarin orange…? Oranges can be harvested even in the count’s domain, but this is far beyond comparison…”

“It is delicious, Woody-sama. If this were made into juice, we could make something unbelievably sweet.”

Both Nadja and Aira ate the mandarin orange in surprise.

Aira had a major sweet tooth, so she ate it eagerly, but Nadja, who was not especially good with sweet things, ate at a slower pace than usual.

Indeed, at this level, the sweetness would divide people’s tastes.

But making this into juice… huh.

“If it is this sweet… perhaps we might be able to make that.”

“What is ‘that,’ Woody?”

“That is—”

“Concentrated juice and syrup… right, Woody-sama?”

“Y-Yeah, that’s right.”

“I was asking Woody just now!”

Wenti’s fruit was sweet, but fresh fruit spoiled quickly.

Of course, recently, dried fruit had also been improved enough to be called plenty delicious, but having people eat something made with fresh fruit was still easier to understand.

In order to convey this deliciousness to distant places, we had been testing whether there was anything we could do with juice as well.

One of those attempts was concentrated juice.

To put it simply, this was juice that had been boiled down from squeezed juice to make it thicker than normal.

For example, suppose juice with twice the concentration could be sold for twice the original price.

When transporting it, concentrated juice would only weigh half as much, so twice as much could be carried.

In other words, profit would simply double.

Of course, this was a simplified explanation, so in reality, it would not be that easy.

In any case, the bottleneck when traveling between the desert and each domain was still the difficulty of transportation.

Concentrated juice was one of the prototypes we had been making to see if we could lower that difficulty.

However, so far, we had not been able to make concentrated juice well.

Strictly speaking, we could make somewhat thick juice, but no matter how much we boiled it down, it only became slightly thicker juice that did not need to be diluted with water on purpose.

But if we made juice with this selectively improved fruit whose sweetness had been increased—if we boiled it down, we might be able to properly increase its concentration.

And then there was the other one, syrup.

The basic idea behind this was the same as the fruit tea we were already making.

If we used fruit with high potential, products made by adding something to fruit might be reproducible using only fruit.

Starting from that idea, we had been trying through trial and error to see whether we could make fruit syrup by only boiling down fruit, without using sugar.

However, just like with concentrated juice, the attempt to make syrup had also stalled because there was not enough sweetness.

If we could make fruit with a higher sugar content, we might be able to restart the two currently stalled projects.

While putting a mandarin orange with restrained acidity and completely unrestrained, violent sweetness into my mouth, my eyes shone.

“This… is an amazing power!”

Compared to the skills I had obtained so far, this Tree Improvement was a plain power.

In terms of convenience, it could not beat teleportation or Tree Arrangement, and it did not directly increase my combat ability either.

But this skill would at least display tremendous effectiveness in developing Wenti.

After all, since ancient times, humans had been creatures unable to resist sweetness.

“Oh, it looks like this one is ready too.”

While I was thinking about all sorts of things, it seemed the normally planted mandarin orange tree had also borne fruit.

After drinking detox water and resetting my mouth once, I took a bite.

“Yes, this one is definitely delicious. It is first-class fruit.”

“After eating that earlier one, the sweetness feels lacking…”

“Both are delicious, but if they are to be used for sweets or as an acidic seasoning, a little more sourness might be better. But… you can adjust that area too, can’t you?”

“Yeah! With this, it might be best to have each place submit requests, then adjust the fruit’s flavor into the form everyone wants! Things are going to get busy from now on!”

This new power of Tree Improvement did not betray my expectations.

Seeing a bright future ahead of me, I could not help making a triumphant fist pump.