Strawberry's Descent

Fen returned five days later, not with a finished product exactly, but with something close enough that Arista could immediately tell the trip had been worth it, a small vial of pale, faintly shimmering liquid, cork sealed tight, handled with the careful precision of someone who genuinely didn't know yet whether it was stable.

"It doesn't hold mana," Fen said, setting it down on Arista's workbench. "Confirmed that much. But it reacts to it, same as mithril does, near as I can test without an actual controlled magic source running through it continuously."

"Then let's get you a controlled source." Arista was already sketching, three small plots marked out in her notebook, side by side. "Proper baseline test. Three acorns. One gets nothing, just soil, water, sunlight, whatever it'd get naturally. One gets your goo, run through a length of mithril-lined pipe, with an actual Growth mage channeling into the far end. And one gets the mage's magic directly, no pipe, no liquid, just a caster standing right over it, same as the original method." She was already pulling up her tablet, scrolling through the responses to her forum post from earlier that week. 'Should be easy enough. I've still got a whole list of volunteers who answered the nature magic thread.'"

"Control, direct application, and the untested delivery system," Fen said, nodding slowly. "Reasonable. I like a controlled variable."

"I did four hours of research on control groups specifically for this," Arista said, entirely too proud of herself.

Yssa arrived later that same day, having apparently just wrapped up a quest of her own in the Human Kingdom when Arista's message found her, close enough that the trip to the Dwarven Republic barely registered as an inconvenience. One of the volunteers from the original thread, a quiet elf who'd apparently done this kind of casting professionally for a local orchard collective, she looked over the three marked plots with a practiced, appraising eye.

"One thing, before we start," Yssa added, already rolling up her sleeves. "I won't be pushing full output for this. Burning enough mana to compress a decade into a single afternoon isn't something you do carelessly, not for a first test with materials nobody's properly measured yet. I'll hold a slow, sustainable channel instead, steady rather than maximal. Should still show a clear result, just spread across a few days rather than a few hours."

"That actually works better for data collection anyway," Arista said, already sketching a tracking chart. "Instant growth gives me one data point. This gives me a curve."

The results took three days to become obvious, the acorns tracked daily with careful notes on stem height, leaf count, general vigor. The untouched acorn did what untouched acorns did: nothing remarkable, ordinary sprouting at an ordinary pace. The directly-channeled acorn shot up fast, exactly as expected, a young sapling already reaching well past where it had any business being after only three days.

The pipe-fed acorn grew too, visibly faster than the control, unmistakably benefiting from whatever was reaching it through Fen's liquid and the buried mithril-lined tube. But it lagged behind the directly-channeled one, growing at roughly three-quarters the pace.

[Growth Rate — Direct Application: 100% baseline][Growth Rate — Piped Delivery: 75% of baseline][Estimated Loss: Mana Transmission Friction]

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"Twenty-five percent loss," Arista murmured, comparing the two saplings side by side. "Makes sense, honestly, nothing conducts perfectly, not even copper back home. Some of the effect's bleeding off just from traveling the distance, the same way a long wire loses a bit of current to resistance."

Fen frowned at the numbers, clearly bracing for disappointment. "That's a meaningful loss, if you're trying to match direct application at scale."

"I don't need to match it, though. That's the thing." Arista grinned, already seeing past the numbers to the actual shape of the plan. "I don't need one pipe outperforming one mage standing over one tree. I need one mage's effort, split across a hundred trees simultaneously through the pipe network, to beat one mage manually visiting a hundred trees one at a time. Even at seventy-five percent efficiency per tree, the parallel version wins by an enormous margin the second you're not just comparing one-to-one."

Fen considered that, then nodded slowly. "...Fair. You're not optimizing for peak efficiency. You're optimizing for total throughput."

"Exactly. I'll happily take a twenty-five percent tax if it means covering a whole field at once instead of one tree at a time." Arista tapped the pipe-fed sapling's pot affectionately. "This one's doing great, actually. Slower than its show-off sibling over there, sure, but it's not failing. That's all I needed to know."

It was on the fourth day, checking the pipe joints for leaks, that the actual surprise happened.

Arista had asked the Yssa to run a fresh, stronger pulse of magic through the system, testing upper limits, mostly, curious how much the liquid could actually carry before something gave. She crouched by an exposed section of pipe where she'd left a viewing window cut into the casing, watching the liquid inside as the mage began to channel.

The liquid glowed.

Not brightly, not dramatically, a soft, steady green light, tracing visibly along the length of the exposed pipe exactly in sync with the Yssa's channeling, brightening when she pushed harder, dimming when she eased off.

"...Oh." Arista stared at it, delighted. "Oh, that's new. Fen! Fen, come look at this!"

Fen leaned in, watching the glow pulse gently along the tube, and let out a small, surprised laugh of her own. "I didn't design that. That's not an intended property, that's just, apparently what happens when enough mana moves through the compound at once. Some kind of luminescent byproduct of the reaction."

"That's not a byproduct, that's a feature." Arista's mind was already racing several steps ahead, the way it always seemed to whenever a "problem" quietly revealed itself to actually be an opportunity in disguise. "Right now, this whole pipe network's buried. Completely invisible once it's in the ground. Which means if a section clogs, or a joint fails, or the flow just stops somewhere along the line, I've got absolutely no way of knowing where until an entire section of trees starts underperforming weeks later."

"...You want to see the glow."

"I want glass sections. Not the whole pipe, that'd be a nightmare to bury and maintain, but intervals. Every so often along the buried run, a short length sticks up above ground, transparent, so you can just glance at a field and see the actual flow happening in real time." Arista was sketching furiously now, a cross-section of buried piping interrupted at regular intervals by small glass risers, each one glowing faintly green where the liquid ran through. "If a section's dark, something's wrong upstream. If it's glowing steady, everything's flowing fine. You wouldn't even need to dig anything up to diagnose a problem. Just walk the field and look."

Fen stared at the sketch, then at the glowing pipe section still humming faintly beside them, and shook her head slowly, the exact same disbelieving expression Gorthruk and Nettle had both worn at various points over the past several months.

"...You just turned a random side effect into a diagnostic system."

"I turned a random side effect into a diagnostic system," Arista confirmed, grinning. "That's kind of my whole thing at this point."

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