Strawberry's Descent

The Human Kingdom, Arista discovered fairly quickly, had a guild for absolutely everything. A knitting guild. A chef's guild. A guild, apparently, dedicated exclusively to the proper appreciation and cataloguing of regional cheeses, which she made a mental note to investigate purely out of morbid curiosity later. The Alchemy Guild itself sat in a squat, sprawling building that smelled like a dozen competing experiments happening simultaneously, shelves lined floor to ceiling with bottles in every conceivable color.

The guildmaster who eventually agreed to talk to her, a harried, ink-stained woman named Fen, sleeves rolled up past her elbows, listened to Arista's pitch with polite, professional patience right up until the actual mechanics came up.

"You want to know if mana potions are literally bottled mana," Fen repeated slowly.

"That's the question, yeah."

Fen actually laughed, not unkindly. "No. Not even slightly. Mana potions are reagent solutions, chemical compounds that force a caster's own internal mana pool to regenerate faster than it naturally would. The liquid itself contains no magic whatsoever. It's closer to a stimulant than a battery. You're not drinking magic. You're drinking something that yells at your own body to make more of its own."

Arista's face fell in real time, watching an entire branch of her plan collapse under its own weight.

"...Oh. So there's no such thing as actual liquid mana. Just liquid that tricks your own supply into refilling."

"Correct. If you wanted stored, portable magic, you'd be looking at enchanted objects, something with a rune matrix holding a charge, like a battery, not potions. Potions have never held magic themselves. That's a common misconception, honestly, half our apprentices assume the same thing on their first day."

Arista sat with the disappointment for a moment, mentally scrapping the sprinkler system as originally conceived, running back through everything she actually knew instead of what she'd hoped was true.

Then, slowly, something else clicked into place: an old thought, resurfacing from a different conversation entirely, weeks earlier, in a dwarven forge.

Mithril doesn't hold a charge on its own. But it channels it about as well as anything known.

"Okay, different question, then." She sat up straighter. "Copper conducts electricity, back where I'm from, doesn't generate it, doesn't store it, just lets it flow through cleanly instead of resisting it. You've got mithril here that apparently does something similar with mana, doesn't hold a charge, just conducts it efficiently." She leaned forward. "Can you make a liquid version of that? Not something that contains mana. Something that doesn't hold any magic of its own at all, but reacts to it, lets it flow through, cleanly, the way mithril does, except in liquid form instead of solid metal."

Fen went quiet, turning the question over with visibly more interest than she'd shown for the previous, now-discredited premise.

"...A conductive medium. Not a storage medium."

"Exactly. I don't need the liquid to be magic. I just need it to carry magic somewhere else, let a caster channel their spell into one end of a pipe network, and have the effect come out the other end, spread across a field, without needing the caster physically present at every single point along the way."

Fen picked up an empty vial from her workbench, tapping it thoughtfully against one ink-stained finger. "That's... actually a much more reasonable ask than bottling raw magic. We already work with reagents that react to specific magical signatures, that's half of alchemy, honestly, compounds that shift color or state in the presence of fire magic, or ice, or whatever else. Building something that reacts to mana flow specifically, channeling it rather than just responding to it—"

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"Is that a yes?"

"That's a 'I need to actually test it before I promise you anything,'" Fen said, but she was already reaching for a fresh notebook of her own, the particular spark of genuine professional interest overtaking her earlier polite skepticism entirely. "But it's a considerably more interesting problem than 'bottle some mana,' which, frankly, half the adventurers who wander in here ask for, and it's never once been possible."

Arista grinned, feeling the whole project shift back onto solid ground. "Welcome to the team, then. Fair warning, it comes with dwarves, elves, a demon negotiation, and eventually, probably, a very large field full of trees growing faster than they should."

Fen studied her for a long moment, then let out a short, surprised laugh, already clearing space on her workbench.

"...You're the one who dug the tunnel, aren't you. Strawberry."

"Guilty."

"I should have known this would eventually end up on my doorstep too."

"Give me a few days," Fen said, already shooing Arista toward the door with the brisk efficiency of someone who'd clearly done this exact maneuver on curious apprentices before. "I work better without an audience."

"I could help, though. I'm actually pretty good at—"

"I work especially poorly with people hovering over my shoulder asking questions every four minutes." Fen said it without malice, just flat, practiced certainty. "You dug your tunnel alone, mostly, didn't you? Let me have my workbench the same way."

Arista opened her mouth to argue, found she didn't actually have a good counter for that logic, and closed it again with visible reluctance. "...Fine. Fair. A few days."

"A few days," Fen confirmed, already turning back to her vials before Arista had fully made it out the door.

She made it back to Ashfall Reaches by evening, notebook already half-rewritten with the collapsed sprinkler concept crossed out and replaced with something considerably more interesting. She found Gorthruk exactly where she expected him, hunched over his own forge, going over ore samples with the same patient scrutiny he gave everything.

"Scrap the sprinkler idea," she announced, dropping onto her usual crate without preamble.

Gorthruk didn't even look up. "I assumed as much, given the report on mana potions."

"Right, yeah, dead end, mana potions don't actually hold magic, just a whole reagent thing, I'll spare you the disappointment I went through." She waved a hand, already moving past it. "But here's the actual plan, if Fen's conductive-liquid idea pans out the way I think it will: forget spraying anything across the surface at all. We build pipelines underground instead: proper channels, buried beneath the growing fields, and plant the seeds directly on top of them."

Gorthruk finally looked up, setting down the ore sample in his hand. "Underground."

"Underground. If the liquid's actually conducting magic instead of just holding it, distance shouldn't matter much more than it would through a wire, right? So instead of some exposed sprinkler system that needs maintenance, weathering, probably freezes solid in winter, you just bury the whole delivery network below the roots. Trees grow straight down into a constant, steady flow of Growth magic seeping up from beneath them, same way they'd naturally pull water and nutrients from soil anyway."

"...That's considerably more elegant than a sprinkler," Gorthruk admitted slowly, turning the idea over with real consideration now. "No exposed pipework to damage. No spray pattern to calibrate against wind or terrain. Just... roots doing what roots already do, except pulling something extra up alongside the water."

"Exactly. The trees don't even need to know anything's different. They just grow into what's already there, the same way they'd grow into any other soil condition." Arista grinned, already sketching a rough cross-section: buried pipe network, root systems threading down toward it, seeds planted in careful rows directly above each junction point. "It's basically irrigation, except instead of moving water to where roots can reach it, we're moving magic to where roots can reach it, and letting nature do the actual absorption work for free."

Gorthruk studied the sketch for a long, quiet moment, then shook his head slowly, not in disagreement, but in the specific, familiar way he'd started reserving for whenever one of her ideas landed somewhere unexpectedly sound.

"You do understand that if this works, we're not just solving a fuel shortage anymore. We're describing a method for accelerating an entire forest's growth indefinitely, buried and self-sustaining, with minimal ongoing labor."

"...Huh." Arista sat back, letting that fully land for the first time. "Yeah. I guess we kind of are."

"That's not a small thing, Strawberry."

"No," she agreed, grinning slowly. "No, it really isn't."

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