"Flower, I heard you're building a new structure? Where is it?"
The voice belonged to Flower's father, Lord Gabriel Sainsbury. He'd arrived at Linden Pine Valley that morning, claiming to check on his children, deliver fresh vegetables, grain, and preserved meat to the workers, and bring last year's dried fruit—slightly shriveled, but still a rare spring treat.
Dahlia rolled her eyes—she saw through his excuse immediately. Within minutes of arriving, Lord Gabriel kept circling back to the new building project. Even Flower, exhausted from days of glassmaking, pretended not to notice, slumping in a wooden chair and making small talk about the valley's weather.
He shifted uncomfortably, eyeing Leon's padded reclining chair in the corner. "Yeah, Leon's building a 'greenhouse.' We'll grow mushrooms in it now, and vegetables when winter comes."
"Sit up straight," Lord Gabriel said, frowning at his son's slouch. "What kind of posture is that? Where's your knightly discipline? Even as a mage apprentice, you should hold yourself with dignity. You're falling behind Leon—and he's just a baker's son."
Dahlia snickered from the table, where she'd been doodling messy runes on a scrap of parchment. Lord Gabriel turned to her, his voice sharp. "Don't laugh at him. Slouching over the table is no better—you look like a scruffy farmhand, not a noble lady. Doesn't your teacher enforce proper etiquette?"
Dahlia pouted, pushing her hair out of her face. "Dad, we're tired. We've been melting glass for days."
Flower nodded, yawning widely. "And from now on, we have to hold our Mage Hands in the furnace fire every day. Teacher says it'll make our tentacles stronger."
Im had started having Flower and Dahlia help Leon make glass weeks earlier, but he'd noticed a stark difference between Leon's Mage Hand and the siblings'. Leon's tentacles were far more durable—even stronger than Im's own, though Im had more raw mana to offset fire damage. After studying the difference, Im realized the furnace's mana-rich flames were "tempering" Leon's tentacles, purging impurities and making them tougher. Now he required all his apprentices to spend at least half an hour a day holding their Mage Hands in the furnace fire.
The training drained their mana quickly, leaving them feeling hollow and exhausted. Flower had spent the morning napping, and Dahlia's doodles were uneven and smudged.
Lord Gabriel didn't seem sympathetic. "I trained until I collapsed during my knight days. This is nothing compared to that. Now show me this greenhouse."
Flower dragged himself out of the chair and led his father down the hill to the construction site, just beside the herb garden. The workers had cleared a small patch of forest, and the wooden frame of the greenhouse was already complete—rough-hewn oak beams forming a rectangular structure, with one-meter square sections marked out for glass panels.
A third of the frame was already filled with glass, which glinted in the sunlight, casting bright reflections across the grass. To Leon, it was a crude, basic structure—nothing like the skyscrapers with glass facades or massive glass-roofed exhibition halls he'd seen in his old world. "It's functional, at least," he'd muttered to himself that morning, adjusting a loose glass panel.
But to Lord Gabriel, it was breathtaking. "You're building a house out of glass?" he asked, his eyes wide. "That's more luxurious than the royal palace in the capital."
He didn't know that glass was more common in the Coastal Merchant Federation on the eastern coast, where temples used colored glass for their domes, creating brilliant rainbows when sunlight hit them. In the Aurestian Empire, though, glass was a luxury item—only nobles could afford small glass windows, and mirrors were rare, expensive treasures.
Lord Gabriel stared at the greenhouse, his mind racing. He wanted to strip the glass panels off and sell them as raw material, or turn them into mirrors for a huge profit. But he knew better than to anger Im—mages had powerful allies in the Mage Guild, and attacking a mage's home was a death sentence for a lord. "Why aren't you making more mirrors?" he asked, trying to keep his voice casual. "With all this glass, you could make a fortune."
"Teacher says flooding the market would make mirrors worthless," Flower said. "And we need to focus on our magic training. Making mirrors all the time won't help us become better mages."
He didn't mention the unspoken rule among mages: spending too much time on low-level, non-magical crafts like glassmaking would get them mocked by other mages. This wasn't Leon's old world, where people would do anything for money—mage status was about honor and magical power, not wealth.
Flower pointed to the glass panels. "These aren't regular glass, either. Leon treated them to make them stronger—tempered glass, he calls it. It's way harder to break than normal glass."
He explained the process: after annealing the glass, they cut it to size, then heated it in the furnace until it almost melted, then cooled it quickly with forced air. The rapid cooling created a stress layer on the glass surface, making it much stronger. Leon had tried dozens of times to get the temperature and cooling speed right, and the new magic furnace from Eunice had made the process much easier.
Lord Gabriel toured the construction site, lingering by the glass panels long after Flower had finished explaining. He left reluctantly, telling the workers not to talk about what they'd seen. But Flower knew the secret wouldn't stay hidden for long. Within weeks, rumors would spread that a "crystal palace" had been built in the valley, and people would make up wild stories about the mage who lived there—maybe a dragon in human form, or a powerful wizard who ate villagers.
Luckily, Lord Gabriel didn't have to worry about raiders. Common folk feared the lord's authority, and anyone bold enough to ignore it would know a mage lived in the valley. Mages were dangerous targets—raiding a mage's home usually ended with the raiders dead, and any lord who helped would face the Mage Guild's wrath.
With enough workers, the greenhouse was finished in two weeks, before spring had fully arrived. It was a rectangular structure, about 110 square meters, with a rough wooden frame that looked bulky and unrefined. But in the sunlight, the glass panels glowed, making it look magical to everyone but Leon.
Beneath the floor, the workers had installed stone fire channels for heating on cold nights. Im had wanted to add a small heating rune array, but he didn't have enough mana to power it regularly. "One day, when we're stronger mages, we could cast a climate control array over the entire valley," he'd said, staring at the greenhouse. "But for now, fire channels will have to do."
True powerful mages could cast large-scale rune arrays that changed the climate of an entire region, or even create small pocket dimensions for growing magical plants. But that was advanced magic, only possible for white-robed mages and above. Im was still a gray-robed mage, and Leon, Dahlia, and Flower were just apprentices.
Once the greenhouse was done, Leon started preparing mushroom growing medium. He mixed sawdust, wheat bran, straw, and cow manure, then soaked the mixture with water and piled it up in the greenhouse to compost. When the pile got hot from fermentation, he turned it over to let it decompose evenly.
After the compost was ready, he added quicklime, which reacted with water to create slaked lime, killing bacteria and adding calcium that mushrooms needed. Finally, he wrapped the medium in dried grass into small cylindrical bundles—he didn't have plastic bags like in his old world, so he had to make do with what he had. He steamed the bundles to sterilize them, and the mushroom medium was ready.
The next day, Leon took Flower and Dahlia into the forest to collect mushroom spores. "Do you really think we can grow mushrooms from this?" Dahlia asked, wiping sweat from her forehead. She was tired from walking, and her legs ached.
"Of course I do," Leon said, grinning. "I invented the fountain pen, made glass mirrors, and even figured out how to make tofu. You should trust my inventions."
He was more confident than he felt—mushroom growing depended on so many factors: temperature, humidity, spore viability, and contamination from other fungi. But he knew if he got it right once, it would be easy to replicate.
Flower sighed, kicking a small rock as they walked. "I don't doubt you can grow mushrooms. But what's the point? Will growing mushrooms help me become a full mage? I'm almost an adult—my older brother was already a knight squire at my age, and he's on track to become a full knight soon. I'm still just an apprentice."
His voice was quiet, full of frustration. As a lord's son, Flower had three options: inherit the title (which his older brother would do), become a knight (which his second brother was training for), or become a mage. He'd chosen mage because he didn't have his brothers' knightly talent, but now he worried he'd made the wrong choice.
Mages rarely got noble titles—kingdoms were wary of giving land to powerful mages, who could easily rebel. And while mages had status, Flower wanted to make his father proud, and he feared he'd never measure up to his brothers.
Leon put a hand on Flower's shoulder. "Teacher says you're doing great. You mastered basic meditation faster than most apprentices, and you're good at rune carving. Becoming a full mage takes time, but you've got what it takes. And I'm here to help—remember, I explained the mana circulation theory better than Teacher did, right?"
Im had told all the apprentices that becoming a full mage was possible for anyone who studied hard and built up their mana pool. The hard part was advancing beyond that—older mages often struggled because their minds were set in their ways, and they'd missed the best age for learning complex magic.
Dahlia nodded, smiling at her brother. "Yeah, Leon's explanations make everything easier. You'll be a full mage in no time."
Leon struck a silly pose, puffing out his chest and making gorilla noises. "With me as your teacher, you'll be the greatest mage in the empire!"
Flower laughed, pushing Leon playfully. "Alright, alright. I'll try to be more confident."
Sunlight filtered through the tree leaves, dappling the forest floor with bright spots. For a moment, all three apprentices forgot their worries, just enjoying the quiet of the forest and the promise of new adventures.