Reaching for the Stars

Twenty-Seven

I ended up getting a clipping of an aquatic plant, which Carina had helped me get, she spent a great deal of time talking about the proper ways to take care of the herbs, which I was greatly interested in. We toured almost all of the greenhouse, with her being in the Advanced Herbalism class I was allowed to go places in the greenhouse I would normally not be allowed in, it was in one of these restricted sections, that I found an abandoned room with a single tree inside it, it wasn't even really a tree but a wilted sapling, bare of any leaves, it looked close to dying. Which made it all the stranger, because every other plant here was thriving under many herbalists' attentive care.

As soon as I saw it the strange energy I could see coming off it, I had known that as I grew stronger in cultivation, my body would experience changes, but I had never heard of an ability to see auras, at least not in the result of cultivation, but auras didn't fit with what I was seeing, it was as if I could see the spiritual energy in the plants, people had it too but it was more faint and restrained, likely because they practiced cultivation which harnessed and absorbed that energy.

Plants on the other hand while able to thrive in the presence of spiritual energy only absorbed it slowly by being in contact with it, they didn't actively seek it out, not like animals and humans could. Resulting in rarer herbs, that were harder to find and were usually strong in their properties, having a better absorption rate of spiritual energy than common herbs, which in turn made them so much better than common herbs. At least that is what I could think of after discovering this new ability of mine for only a day. She had laughed at me when I said I wanted to take a clipping from that wilted tree, the look she gave me was almost clearer than the words she said. "Given free reign of the entire greenhouse, allowed to take two clippings off any plant of your choice, and you choose a slightly uncommon aquatic plant and this practically dead tree? I'm not even sure what it is, if only for the fact that it is still alive, and we still have an adequate amount of free space, we probably would have gotten rid of it ages ago.

No one can tell me what type of tree this is, though it has supposedly been here since the founding of this academy, supposedly they call it the Queen tree, not because it is a certain species but there is a legend that the sister queens Inara and Ashara gave this sapling to the academy." She so casually dismissed legend as mere rumor, instead of there even being a possibility of it being true.

The so-called legend that she dismissed so easily, made me even more eager to get a clipping of this tree. Though it was strange, while normal trees wouldn't be affected by a branch breaking, but this tree seemed to wilt even more the moment Carina took a small branch cutting. I could already see the aura of energy around the branch fading so I quickly directed some spiritual energy towards it until the aura became steady again, strangely enough the branch seemed almost healthier than the tree now.

That night since I wanted to go shopping for herbs on the rest days, and in order to plant the cuttings inside the spatial world, I chose to not sleep and instead entered the spatial world. Fluorite came to find me right away as usual, upon noticing the plant cuttings in my hands she perks up. "Ah, mistress have you brought more plants for the greenhouse?" I nod and she eagerly follows me to the greenhouse, it was strange to see it, being almost three quarters the size of the academy's greenhouse, my collection of herbs was immense.

Many of which the academy didn't even have. The greenhouse was separated by conditions in which the plants thrived, if they thrived in the cold or heat, there were different places for them, just as if they thrived in constant light or preferred darkness, with subsequent spaces in between each space for plants that preferred a mix of two specific conditions, like partial light and partial darkness. "We don't have a pool for this do we, Fluorite?" She glances at the aquatic plant sitting in a small jar filled with water, slowly she shakes her head.