Gladesbale Grove [druid, litrpg, town building, slice of life, cozy]

Distractions from important projects was a grand tradition in Gladesbale Grove. Rud justified his newest project by claiming he could increase his Animal Communication skill while working on a new plot of land for his tea farm. And why exactly would he need the help of an overly energetic spirit wolf? Digging, of course. Lots and lots of digging.

"What's the idea? What we doing?" Sarya asked, running in circles while she held a branch in her mouth.

Rud grabbed it for the thirty-third time and tossed it. The wolf ran after it right away, snatching it up and growling as she shook it.

"The plan is simple, my dear wolf," Rud said, grabbing the stick. Sarya wouldn't let go, so they played a game of tug-o-war. "We're moving the tea farm away from the tree so we can expand it out. We have two options. First is that we put the farm into the ground. Easy enough if we can find a wide-open place. Next option? A raised garden bed, which requires me to weave some trees together to create the perfect growing environment."

"The second one sounds hard."

"Very hard. Especially since we'll need to move dirt from the forest floor and bring it to the platform."

"Digging?" Sarya asked. "I love digging!"

Either option was a large undertaking. But if he created a large planter box for his tea, he could flex his Rank 1 Construction Magic skill. Perhaps he could even put his Grove Reinforcement upgrade on display, pushing his newest structure to its limits.

"Right. Giant planter box," Rud said with a nod. "We're locked into the plan, so don't back out now. The first step is to find a place to put this thing. Good news is, we can get kinda wild this time around. I mean real wild."

"Let's get wild," Sarya said with a growl.

"Your energy is infectious," Rud said, pressing both palms into either side of the wolf's face. He squished it and her tongue lolled out. "Here we go. Time for sky tea."

"Rud's Sky Tea!" Sarya shouted. "Business name right there."

The concept was simple. Rud had some great experience creating structures that didn't rely on ground-contact. His bathhouse only touched the ground in spots, and he was a master at creating bridges that spanned vast distances. This would be a treehouse-style platform with raised edges. The tricky part would be to enable it to endure the crushing weight of so much dirt. That's where his newest upgrade came into play.

Sarya wouldn't be much use if she couldn't move the dirt…

"I wonder if Taz is busy… Could you go find a cart?" Rud asked. "You know… The same way Mint finds all my random crap."

"The abandoned village?" Sarya asked, tilting her head to the side. "Yeah. I think I saw some beast-drawn carts over there."

"Go fetch one for me," Rud said. "Gonna turn you into a little pack mule."

"I'm on it!"

Rud rubbed his hands together as he stepped through a nearby bush. He had a few ideas for where to place the new tea farm. With no need to clear the land, he could pick any section of the forest. His current plan was to put it east of the bathhouse. There were enough trees close together that he could use them as the supports for the farm. But first, he needed a man who just loved to dig.

"Busy?" Rud asked, poking his head into the smithy.

Taz turned, raising a bushy brow. "That's the voice you use when you need something."

"Yeah. Maybe. Wanna dig?"

"What are we digging?" Taz asked, coming closer as though that was enough to entice him.

"Dirt. I'm gonna do some silly stuff," Rud said.

Taz glanced back to the forge, his eyes lingering for only a moment. "Okay, I'm in."

"Excellent," Rud said, rubbing his hands together. "This is gonna be awesome. We'll have an entire farm raised off the ground. Treehouse farm time!"

"As if living above ground wasn't bad enough," Taz said with a shiver. "Now you're talking about living in the trees? How far does it go, Rud?"

"To the moon! Moons, I guess. Come on, grab a shovel and let's go."

By the time the pair approached the work site, Sarya had returned with a wooden cart. Somehow, she had attached the yoke over her shoulders and was currently doing circles.

"Sarya will pull the wagon up a ramp after you've filled it with dirt," Rud explained.

"Okay. What ramp?" Taz asked.

"The ramp I'm about to build," Rud said, scoffing as he touched his Shape Plant spell. It felt more powerful now, as though his new ascension to Rank 1 in the associated skill had empowered him.

Weaving the various trees together to create the ramp almost seemed effortless. The air filled with a green haze as it filled with mana, tendrils forming from the nearby plants joining as one to form the ramp. Rud guided it, snaking it up and to the right at a right angle.

"Ah, that ramp," Taz said. "Sorry, didn't know you could just do that so quickly. How about fixing the angle, though. Unless you want to kill poor Sarya."

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Right," Rud said, fixing his stance as he reworked the angle on the ramp. Now that Taz had mentioned it, the poor wolf would've had a hard time lugging a cart filled with dirt up at such a steep angle. He ensured there was a platform where they could dump the dirt.

This was where the Grove Reinforcement upgrade would shine. Rud infused the support sections of the ramp with his mana. The wood hardened before his eyes, shimmering for a moment before becoming more dense. There was a bit of sway to the ramp before the druid had hardened it, but now it was solid. It didn't move an inch as he stomped along its length. No matter how much he moved, the ramp did not budge.

"Out of the way!" Taz shouted from the base of the ramp. The wolf rushed past him, reaching the top of the ramp in moments and jumping up to dump our load. Then she was back down on the forest floor, awaiting another load from the dwarf.

Rud didn't have any time to waste. He had forced both Taz and Sarya to get to work, and he had to admit he wasn't even ready. He rushed to the top of the ramp and began weaving parts of nearby trees into a solid platform. The plan was to have a recessed area deep enough to contain enough dirt to make the tea plants happy. That would likely be at least a foot of dirt spread over the entire area, but even before he could get a few branches from nearby trees to move over to the soon-to-be platform, the wolf came to deliver another load.

"Good gravy! You guys are fast!" Rud shouted, going into panic mode.

No matter how fast Rud thought he could weave plants together, he couldn't be nearly as fast as the wolf and the dwarf. But with his newly upgraded skill, he created the width of the platform using nearby trees to support his creation and hardening them with his new upgrade. Each section he used that new upgrade on felt sturdy, and even when the massive wolf came thundering up the ramp, it didn't move at all. Perhaps this would work after all.

With a width of about 50 feet, the above-ground farm would be positively massive. When Rud had enough of the planting bed constructed, the wolf began dumping her load directly in there, and it fell to the druid himself to move the existing piles of dirt. Thanks to his low strength attribute, this was difficult, putting him further behind the devilish pair. Only when Taz came up to help him out did he breathe a sigh of relief.

"You gotta keep up," Taz said, clapping a hand on his back. "Work more like a dwarf instead of a scrawny human."

Sweat poured down Rud's face as he shoveled dirt, evening it out in sections. When the dirt was placed to his satisfaction, he got back to work on the platform, desperate to stay ahead of Sarya. Her tongue lolled to the side as she dumped the cart, listening for the last clod of dirt to fall free before taking off like a bolt.

When Rud first asked Taz to help him, he had expected the dwarf to decline the offer. Instead, what resulted was three solid days of working on the platform. Both the dwarf and the wolf were relentless. They gave him no rest and forced him to work on his elevated farm from dawn until dusk. But the result was satisfying.

The mid-afternoon of the third day, Rud had completed the platform itself. It was a 50 by 100 foot monster of an elevated farm that even had an integrated root watering system in the bed. The wolf was pulling one of the last loads of dirt up—a fact that had become complicated. Drawing dirt from the same spot would create large divots, so they had taken dirt from here and there to keep it even throughout the grove. The result of all their efforts was a sprawling farm and a fantastic view.

"You need to put some safety rails on this thing," Taz said, peering over the edge of the platform. His face went white as he withdrew from the edge. His hands clenched into fists.

"What's that? A 40-foot drop?" Rud asked, flashing a smile. "That's nothing."

"You're lucky I'm even up here," Taz said, blustering. "And you're only saying that because you can turn into a flying squirrel. If I fall, I'm dead."

Rud took a moment to stop teasing his friends. "Seriously, guys, thanks," he said. "I wouldn't have been able to get this done without you, and you two made an unexpectedly awesome team."

"I only have one request for my services," Taz said. "I need you to name some tea after me. One of my choosing, preferably."

Rud couldn't help but laugh. Most people would have requested money or items for this service, but the only thing Taz wanted was to have some tea named after him. "I could do that," the druid said, clapping a dirty hand on the dwarf's back. "With all this extra space, I'll have plenty of different varieties of tea, and everything that gets planted here will be infused with even more of the grove's power."

"Even more powerful tea?" Taz said, sighing with satisfaction. "Guess this venture might actually be worth it!"

Rud would file this under his 'mega-projects', like the road. They were things that took a ton of his time and effort, but the rewards were absurd. Unfortunately, he had neglected his Animal Communication skill during the construction. It had simply taken too much of his focus to keep up with the whirlwind that was Taz and Sarya. He had absolutely no plans to get the transplant process going.

The group dispersed, going back to whatever it was they were doing before the project. Rud found his way to the grove's center, letting out a heavy breath as he fell to a seated position against Ban. Her warmth spread through his back. The flowers on her boughs twinkled and he smiled to himself. The druid shifted into his squirrel form, sprinting up the Sacred Tree and finding his way to her boughs.

Before him sprawled the grove. It was an endless field of green. Each tree blended together to create a sea, waving as the wind blew.

"Quite a view, isn't it?" Ban asked.

"It really is," Rud said. "You can't even see the spots where I built stuff."

"No, you cannot. Because you've learned to live with nature. None of your structures exist outside the grove. They're part of it."

That was a fantastic way of thinking about it. All the buildings he created were made from living trees. They still went on living, absorbing energy from the sun and drawing nutrients from the ground. Each tree was connected with Ban, living in symbiosis. It was a tree-hugger's paradise.

"Any luck with the lab?" Rud asked.

"I found the labyrinth's core," Ban said, the sound of a sly smile entering her voice. "It shouldn't take me long to crack it."

"That's scary," Rud said with a nervous chuckle. "You have the potential to get real strong, don't you?"

"You should see Bent's grove," Ban said. "An army could assault that place and fail. Even our grove could withstand a decent attack."

"Right? They couldn't even find the center! Not without getting lost or going bonkers… Guess our grove is pretty scary already!"

"Not if you're on the inside," Ban said reassuringly. "I'm happy with your current project. It feels like a creative use of your powers."

"Right? I'm very happy with it. I made it so I could expand it if I needed more area. And of course, it will never hurt the forest floor. Well, except for the lack of sunshine."

"A few shrubs here and there won't hurt."

Rud enjoyed his time in the tree's branches. He could see nothing of the forest below, but watching the way the wind blew the leaves was enchanting. After working so hard on the new farm, he knew he deserved a few moments to take a breath. The plants still needed to be planted, and new strains of the tea plants had to be discovered. But that singular moment of rest was revitalizing.

Ban's progress had stalled in the past few days. She had become obsessed with figuring out the labyrinth, but she was free to do what she wanted. It wasn't as though she had stopped processing energy, either. The Sacred Tree was hard at work, splitting her attention between too many things and he couldn't blame her for not rushing through ranks.

Rud climbed to the underside of one branch, looking at the world of the grove in an upside-down manner. "Well, if you'll excuse me… I need to go bother some forest creatures."

"Don't neglect your Grove Custodian class," Ban said, laughing.

"Ah, right. If you'll excuse me, I need to go bother some mortals and some animals. At the same time, if I'm lucky."