What Is This?

After that, I suddenly became busy all at once.

I basically made sure to report whenever new fruit trees became plantable, but this time, it was an important matter on a slightly different level from before.

Since it would also affect the production volume of future specialty products, I had Maton and the other civil officials think about it, while I went around planting trees in various places.

After trying various things, I found that when planted normally, every item was evenly allocated 4 points each, and using Tree Improvement seemed to let me intentionally create a bias there.

When I asked Simurg-san, she said that trees inside a Sanctuary received the Sanctuary’s protection, so they were apparently less likely to contract diseases and the like.

So for resistance, I decided to allocate only the bare minimum of 1 point, then distribute the rest among the other items, starting with sourness and sweetness, and plant trees to test various things.

The results were quite interesting.

First was sweetness and sourness.

By boiling down fruit made with sweetness set to 10, we successfully managed to create concentrated juice and fruit syrup.

It still required time and manpower to boil it down, so the production volume was not that high yet, but I intended to gather people and increase production soon.

Once syrup production settled down, I was thinking that we might even be able to refine sugar from there.

Incidentally, both products had already been wholesaled to Ran-san for the amount we had managed to make for now, and she was spreading them as Wenti specialties.

Next was sourness.

This, too, went exactly as expected.

When I planted a mandarin orange tree with sourness set to 10, it produced mandarin oranges so sour that even lemons were no match for them.

Since they looked completely like mandarin oranges, the sense of wrongness was incredible.

Incidentally, the other fruit trees also became incredibly sour when their sourness was set to 10.

When we carefully strained their squeezed juice… we got a sour liquid that retained just a little of the fruit’s flavor.

I discussed it together with Maton and Ran-san, and since calling this fruit liquid “fruit liquid” did not sound good, we decided to name it Fruit Squeeze and, for the time being, circulate it within Wenti territory in order to make it a Wenti specialty.

I was happy that rock salt could now be harvested stably, but Wenti’s cooking basically did not have much variation in flavor.

It was either sweet by using fruit, or salty by using salt.

For the most part, there had only been those two.

But this new Fruit Squeeze opened up new possibilities.

Food was richness, and in rich domains, one could almost always say that unique local cuisine would develop.

By becoming able to produce fruits that probably did not exist in nature, such as sour mangoes, sour loquats, and sour peaches, our domain, which could now mass-produce unique sour seasonings unlike anywhere else, had likely gained the foundation to develop its own distinct food culture.

By changing the other parameters, possibilities beyond sour seasonings had also expanded in various ways.

For example, Growth Speed (Tree).

This affected not only the pure growth speed of the tree, but also its original tree height.

If Growth Speed (Tree) was set to 1 to make a miniature-sized tree, it became possible to place trees indoors like ornamental plants. Incidentally, by setting Growth Speed (Fruit) to 0, it was also possible to prevent fruit from forming, so there seemed to be room to commercialize trees purely for decoration.

Conversely, when the growth speed was set to the maximum of 10, it became ridiculously large like the palm trees I had seen in the south before, and it began growing rapidly day by day.

When trees grew too much, harvesting and pruning could no longer be done properly, so I learned that raising this too high was not a good idea.

However, from the perspective of using them as timber, they might be quite useful, so I provided several of them to Utena-san and the others in charge of forest management.

If cuttings could be taken and trees that grew at explosive speed became available, perhaps the forest resource depletion problem that had recently been causing a stir in the kingdom could be dealt with too.

Next was Growth Speed (Fruit).

When this was raised to the maximum of 10, an accelerated-cultivation fruit tree that bore one fruit every five minutes was born.

If considered purely from the perspective of food production, I thought it was wonderful.

However, this Growth Speed (Fruit) actually had a fatal weakness.

That was… the more the parameter was raised, the worse the fruit’s flavor became.

Up to around a value of 5, it could still be eaten without issue, but at 7, it became no different from fruit from elsewhere, and once it exceeded 8, it became something that could only be described as “something that merely moistened the mouth.”

I also learned that resistance had interesting properties.

I had assumed this referred only to resistance against disease and the like, but apparently it had a broader meaning.

As the value was raised, all kinds of resistances improved, from heat resistance and cold resistance to physical resistance and magic resistance.

And what happened when resistance was raised to 10…

“I-It endured my strike!?”

Amazingly, even after taking a strike from Nadja, it only bit halfway in and withstood it without splitting.

Judging that this was definitely usable, Nadja and I decided together to use this high-resistance timber for Sandstorm’s armaments.

Light, hard, and difficult to break.

Since they had been using light armor until now, it apparently became a little harder to move, but its defensive power was guaranteed.

We did not intend to fight anyone, but Sandstorm’s combat strength ended up being strengthened even further.

Ah, come to think of it, Nadja had told me to take this opportunity to reorganize Sandstorm properly as the Adastria domain army.

I would have to do that later when I found the right timing.

Incidentally, this high resistance was not only useful for dangerous things.

There were trees where increasing heat resistance and cold resistance would be appreciated, right?

Yes, House Trees.

House Trees made using Tree Improvement became far more livable and less susceptible to outside influences.

It would be impossible to change all the House Trees that already existed, but when making new houses from now on, we would probably build this improved version of the House Tree.

…Well, in that way, for better or worse, this Tree Improvement ended up bringing all sorts of changes.

Thinking about the future, we ended up in a situation where various parts of Wenti had to be changed.

While going back and forth between Tree Village and Guinea Village planting improved trees, I ended up spending my days devoting myself to product development as well.

“Mm… Who could that be?”

Exhausted from being swamped with daily work, I opened the door and looked outside.

Standing there was Divine Wolf Fem-san, whom I had not met in a while.

A trickle of cold sweat ran down my spine.

“The preparations for turning our place into a Sanctuary seem likely to be ready soon. If you would not mind, would you come and take a look once?”

…Oh no, I had completely forgotten!

In order to hear about the progress of the third village being built in Magros Dungeon, I hurried toward Magros Volcano while listening to Fem-san’s story.

“I am sure you will be surprised when you arrive.”

Fem-san puffed out her chest and said so confidently.

So I headed toward Magros Volcano with my heart swelling with anticipation.

And there, I…

“W-What is this!?”

At the liveliness far beyond anything I had imagined, my eyes could not help darting about in shock.