Godslayer Lysette: Chapter 211

Chapter 211: The Couple's Training

Lysette stood upon the eastern plain shortly after sunrise along Jules and Katie, her two captives turned protegees.  With the start of the new year and both of their Sparks sufficiently healed, she decided it was an ideal time to commence the start of the two’s intensive training.

“Brrr!”  Jules shivered.  “It– It’s so-o-o cold!  How are you not freezing?”

“Mirae is a master of Ice techniques,” Lysette answered.  “They’ve ensured quite thoroughly that only the most extreme of cold can possibly faze me.  In any case, I will be working the both of you quite thoroughly, so I’m sure you will appreciate the cold by the time we’re done this afternoon.”

Katie nodded.  “So, what exactly do we have to do?”

Lysette placed a kernel of maize into each of the Terean soldiers’ hands.  “What I’m going to teach you is not difficult, but it’s equally not straightforward.  We are going to use the technique I have granted both of you to grow this kernel into a full-grown stalk.”

“So how do we do that?  You said it wasn’t straightforward.”  Katie stared at Lysette with incredulity.

“First, I want you to concentrate on the tiny bit of life that lies dormant within the kernel.  Once you can feel that bit of lifeforce, you’re going to want to slowly coax it out of its dormancy with your Essence.  And it needs to be slow— if you do so too quickly, the growth will be unbalanced.”

“Neither of us has that much Essence remaining after you drained us,” Katie said.

“I gave you more than enough.  And it doesn’t require that much.  Pure Essence is a far more effective fertilizer than anything else I know of.”

“‘Not much’ coming from you doesn’t really carry a lot of meaning,” Jules said.

“In any case, I want you to focus on identifying that lifeforce.”

The two began doing so, closing their eyes and focusing on the kernels in each of their hands.  A bit of ambient Essence danced around them, with neither making a sound as their concentration intensified.  A chill wind blew, but Lysette raised a small canopy of grasses around the couple to provide them a bit of warmth and ensure their concentration remained unbroken.

Ten minutes passed, then twenty, and finally, after thirty-three minutes, Jules opened her eyes and smiled.  “I think I can feel it.”

Lysette nodded.  “Now that you’ve gotten that far, you’re going to want to connect your will with that of the kernel and, more or less, ask it to wake up.  And it’s going to need some energy to do so, just like whenever you’re creating a new artifact for yourself.  The key difference is that instead of forcing your will onto an inanimate object, you’re just going to guide the will inherent in the seed.”

“I still have trouble imagining that this kernel of maize is alive,” Katie said.

“And that’s why you’re having difficulties.  It is alive, no less so than you or I are.”

“I–  I don’t know how my stomach feels, knowing that everything I eat is alive.”

“That’s the nature of the food chain.  Plants harvest energy from sunlight, and we eat plants, as well as animals who eat plants, in order to sustain ourselves.  There is nothing inherently wrong with that.  Though it is important to respect the life of what we consume and avoid being unnecessarily cruel or wasteful.”

Lysette and her demonic impulses understood the irony of her words.  But the key difference was that, unlike humans, who needed to eat to survive, Lysette did not need the Sparks of other humans to sustain herself.  And then her focus shifted back to her far less guilty pleasure, those heavenly custards she missed so much.

“I see.  Well, I will get back to it and keep working while you and Jules work on the next step.”

Katie closed her eyes again and concentrated once more, while Jules and Lysette went off a few dozen paces to focus on growing the seedlings into young sprouts.

“Before you demonstrate, I have a question.  You said there would be problems if I gave the plants too much Essence.  What exactly do you mean by that?”

Lysette demonstrated, imparting about ten times the required amount of Essence into the kernel.  It moved around on Lysette’s outstretched palm, dancing about before erupting into the air.  Roots shot out in dozens of directions toward the ground as the stalk grew numerous branches, eventually towering a hundred feet into the air before the growth halted.

“Is that a bad thing?  Seems like a good way to get a lot of food quickly.”

“It’s not.  Look closely.  There’s not a single ear on the entire stalk!  And I don’t think your subordinates would be pleased eating corn stems rather than cornbread.”

“So, what went wrong?”

“Think about how many processes go on inside your own body.  You’re breathing, moving blood around your body, digesting food and absorbing nutrients, coordinating your muscles to stay standing and talk to me, not to mention processing what I’m saying, looking around your surroundings, trying to keep yourself warm internally, and even more processes that even I’m forgetting about.”

As Lysette finished her speech, the giant cornstalk snapped, tumbling over toward the Terean couple before Lysette teleported over, caught the branch, and teleported it off into a field a few hundred yards further east.

“Apologies for that,” Lysette said upon returning to the couple.  That’s another issue with trying to grow plants too large.  They will collapse under their own weight, because they aren’t adapted to grow as large as various trees do.  They lack the thick, woody barks and other structures that allow them to support such a large height and weight.”

Jules only nodded.

“And that’s another reason why it’s important that you connect with and nurture the will of the plant rather than try to dominate and force it to grow haphazardly.  The plants instinctively know what they each need to do to grow properly, just like our bodies know how to keep us healthy, even if we consciously don’t know half of what our bodies are doing on that front.”

“Kinda like an army, or a nation, don’t you think?  The generals might not know all the minutiae of how food and supplies are delivered to each detachment, and they certainly aren’t directly issuing orders to every private on the battlefield.  But they give the general orders to their subordinates, and those orders cascade down to whomever needs to hear them.”

“I think that’s a pretty good analogy.  So why don’t you try?  Let the kernel know you’d like it to wake up, and then when it lets you know it needs some energy, give it just a bit to start.  You can always give it more when it asks, but you saw what happens if you give it too much, too fast.”

“Alright.”  Jules closed her eyes and again pulsed the ambient Essence all around her as she formed a tiny strand bonding her hand to the seed.  For a few moments, the Cultivator and the kernel were perfectly still save for the subtle vibrations of the Essence strand connecting them.  After about ten minutes though, the maize seedling bounced around before growing a small root that branched into three some seconds later.

Jules barely restrained a fist pump as she turned to Lysette with glee unhidden upon her face.  “It worked!”

“It did.  But now you need to maintain it and continue to guide it so it can grow.”

Lysette pointed to the seedling that had jumped out of Jules’s palm and dug its way into the soil.  It danced around as it took root, wiggling in the wind as though to say ‘feed me’.  And with a nod of approval from Lysette, Jules dropped to a knee and continued to nurture the maize stalk with her Essence.

It grew slowly at first— an inch or so a minute, but once it had grown to a foot tall, its growth rate doubled, and then doubled again as Jules poured more of herself into the plant.  Once it had reached five feet tall, its height leveled off, and new organs began to develop along the plant’s top and stalk instead.  The winter air filled with pollen dust, and after a couple of minutes of stasis, the buds rapidly grew into fully-grown ears of maize with beautiful silken layers at each ear’s tip.

“It worked!”  This time, Jules was unable to restrain her joyous celebration, grinning and pumping her fist twice in succession.

“That it did!  Well done!”  Lysette smiled and cloaked Jules in a robe of nearby grasses to shield her from the oncoming boreal gusts as they made their way back to where Katie was standing.

“Hey, Katie,” Jules said.  “I managed to get it to work!”  She held out three ears of corn as proof.  “What about you?”

Katie sighed and panted.  “No good.  I keep doing as Lyse says, but I just can’t seem to forge that connection with the kernel.  I think it doesn’t like me very much.  Must have been when I said I didn’t believe it was alive.”

Lysette turned her focus inward as the two lovers consoled one another, searching through her Cultivation realm for the couple’s shrubs.  She furrowed her brow as she realized the problem— a small wound had remained in Katie’s Spark, and it was causing complications with the tissue grafted onto it.

“Katie,” Lysette said.  “Stop what you’re doing for just a few minutes.  I just noticed a problem.”

“A problem?”

“I’ll explain after I fix it.”

Lysette did exactly as promised, diving into her Cultivation realm once more and focusing again on Katie’s Spark.  There appeared to be some deep tissue bruising that Lysette had overlooked during her repairs fifteen days ago, deep enough not to have been noticed until inflamed by her use of Cultivation techniques.  The treatment was thankfully straightforward.  Some Essence injected into the wound as a healing salve, some suturing of the pinprick wound just the same as before, and a trace more of solidified Essence used as bandaging to help support the stalk.  And finally, a day or two more for the repairs to take effect.

“Alright, apologies for that,” Lysette said.  “It seems there was a little damage to your Spark that I didn’t notice two weeks ago.  So, while I’m grateful that you’re eager to help out, I will have to ask you to hold off on this for a couple more days until the treatment fully takes hold.”

“May I stay out here with Jules while she’s helping you grow the plants for everyone?  Even if I can’t help just yet, learning more about this ability by watching will certainly make it easier for me to learn it when my Spark is healthy again.”

“I have no objections,” Lysette said, handing Katie a cloak of foliage which matched her partner’s.

“One question, though,” Jules asked.  “Why are you able to grow plants so much faster than I can?  Doesn’t that defy every principle of what you’ve taught me?”

“As I mentioned before, the processes of life are exceedingly complicated.  Even regeneration and antivenin techniques work by accelerating the body’s natural ability to repair itself.  But I have a far greater understanding of all the processes that go into plant growth and development than you do.  Their tissue makeup, their life cycle from germination to growth, flowering, fruiting, and ultimate decline and decay.

That, and a lot more practice with the technique.  I understand how plants grow at a deep enough level that I can work toward causing them to grow in useful, but unintended ways as well.  When and if you get to that level, following my rules won’t be necessary.  But until then, you will use these techniques as I’ve taught.”

“Um,” Katie said.  “Are those safe to eat?”

“Again, these techniques are novel and untested, so I cannot promise with absolute certainty that there are zero risks whatsoever.  I also don’t want to rely on food grown with my techniques over the long run either.  But not doing so will risk everyone here running out of food before winter’s end, so I’m choosing the possibility for unforeseen long-term risks over the certainty of short-term ones should we not use my abilities.”

“I understand,” Katie said.

“And thank you for giving us this opportunity,” Jules said.  “We won’t forget your generosity.”

Chapter 210: https://www.patreon.com/posts/112440650

Table of Contents: https://www.patreon.com/posts/101896170

Chapter 212: https://www.patreon.com/posts/112440675