Caldoon stared out of the window in the office at the bleary morning. After last night's shower, the sky finally started to clear up, momentarily cracking to reveal peaking rays of light from the heavens above. He had his feet kicked up against the windowsill as he sat back in his rotating chair.

  “Another fine day…" he muttered to himself. “The icon is completed, people are stumbling over themselves to join the guild, and Tranquil Waters is finally starting to develop its own economy. Pretty soon, I can cut imports and start making new deals with other guilds. We’ll finally be a self-reliant country.”

  The merchants' guild, artists' guild, culinarians' guild, the list goes on. If the island gained prominence, then so many would be willing to set up outposts here, bringing their skills and raising the island’s status even further.

  “HAHAHA!” Caldoon laughed, giddy at imagining the possibilities. “AT THIS POINT, NOTHING COULD GO WRONG!”

  The door to his office was shoved open, and Caldoon didn’t need to look to see that it was Triton who had entered.

  Me and my big mouth…

  “I’m sorry for bothering you, sir, but I’ve come to give you an update on Dragon’s Lance.” The old man said. “I’ve been talking to some of the village elders. Apparently, their team has been making many rounds around the island investigating those dragon rumors. According to the elders, they’ve been harassing people into giving them information. There are already many complaining about their presence.”

  Yeah, I figured this would happen.

  Right now, he had a precarious deal with Dragon’s Lance. Basically, they were allowed to have an outpost on the island and dock their ships for so long as they paid. However, the outpost was not responsible for what happened on the island, only what happened outside of it. Dragon’s Lance doesn't target tyrants out of the kindness of their hearts. They did it to negotiate for control over land and territory. Turns out, people tend to hand over power in exchange for protection, and stoking the people’s fear of tyrants creates the perfect excuse for that.

  The reason Caldoon mentioned a dragon during the party was to see what their intentions were. Unfortunately, all he knew was that their guild was obsessed with killing them, hence the name “Dragon’s Lance." The reason for it was a guild secret that not even Triton knew, despite his previous service.

  They won’t find anything; I’ve made sure of it. In fact, I’m already planning on getting rid of their presence on the island, but Triton doesn’t need to know that.

  “I’ll be sure to reprimand them later. Incidentally, have you talked to anyone from Kelp Grove village lately?” Caldoon asked.

  “Well,” Triton turned his head in thought. “Recently I heard that an old man from the grove has come to the town to obtain the fisherman class, alongside a large group of otters, but besides that, nothing.”

  “I see…” Caldoon mulled.

  Caldoon continued to stare out at the world beyond his window, wondering what his next move should be.

  …

  “I really appreciate you visiting the guild with me today, though I’m not exactly sure how much help you can be.” Leah said.

  “It’s fine, Mom," Lukey replied. "Besides, we should all try to harbor a good relationship if our guilds will be working together in the future. At the very least I should introduce myself and see if you guys need anything.”

  If anyone had work for fishermen, it would be Thousand Acre. While they mainly concerned themselves with plants above ground, if Lukey remembered correctly, they had previously made a request of Ocean’s Bounty to investigate a kelp forest. That request ended up being taken by someone else, but it couldn’t hurt to see if they needed a follow-up.

  There was also a serious need for allies for Ocean’s Bounty. No guild was entirely self-reliant; each one had specific needs that had to be passed off to other experts. One example of this was auxiliary staff, like Roman. There were also people who made weapons and materials, something Lukey already had experience with. Ocean’s Bounty wasn’t self-reliant, and neither was Thousand Acre. They just needed a reason to cooperate with Ocean’s Bounty, which was exactly what Lukey wanted to find out.

  Lukey walked alongside his mother along the path that led northwest of Tranquil Waters, past the Tranquil Gardens, and through the lush jungle toward the botanist's outpost. They weren’t the only ones either, as there were many young children walking alongside them, each one heading towards the school building, which was adjacent to the botanist’s guild.

  “Ah, this brings back memories. Remember when I used to drop you off at the school before heading to the main building to do research?” Leah reminisced.

  “Ugh, don’t remind me.” Lukey groaned. “The instructor was always hardest on me, since I was the son of a prodigy, as if he somehow expected that I was going to follow the same path as you.”

  "Aw, c'mon, he just had high hopes for you," Leah consoled. “Now look at how far you've come, making waves on our little island. I’m sure that deep down he’s proud of who you’ve become.”

  “Yeah, right,” Lukey dismissed. “The only thing deep down inside Instructor Hard-ass is just rotten wood.”

  The second Lukey finished that statement, the ground began to heave, with roots tearing through the earth to create a large crack.

  “I HEARD THAT, YOU BRAT!” Shouted a voice echoing out like a hollow oak.

  The voice was followed by a figure rising up from the crack, pushed up by roots that ran beneath the ground. The figure rose to nearly twice Lukey’s height, with long, pale limbs that stretched down to the ground. It was a man, and an elderly one at that, with a mossy beard and short leafy hair that crowned his balding head. Above his sunken eyes were two branches, jutting out of his forehead like a pair of antlers. He wore a long robe, woven from peat and moss, and alongside it, a very displeased look on his face.

  [Simon Heartgrove (Elite Botanist) Lv. 358]

  Indeed, Instructor Heartgrove was a Leshy, a Floran species, and the one responsible for managing the entire Thousand Acre outpost. The leshy were all male-species, widely known as the caretakers and rulers of the Eternal Forest on Vetus. Despite no official title, each one considered themselves equal to royalty, the lords of the woods.

  As for why the instructor was on the island? Well… like all leshy, Heartgrove had an addiction to gambling. At one point he apparently owned his own little territory, but after a streak of losses it was all swallowed up by other leshy. After effectively being rendered homeless, Thousand Acre had decided to reassign him overseas, to this outpost.

  “Instructor hard-a…. I mean Instructor Heartgrove. What a pleasant surprise.” Lukey nervously stuttered.

  “You little bastard! You were about to say "hard-ass," weren’t you! I swear you and your mother are like day and night.” Heartgrove said, then turned to Leah, his expression growing softer upon seeing her. “Ms. Leah, always a pleasure. Tell me, is there a reason you’ve brought your son with you today?”

  “Well,” Leah waved a hand toward Lukey. “He asked me if we needed any help at the guild, so I brought him along. I was hoping to use this opportunity as a chance to show him what we do here. You don’t mind, do you?”

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  Worried that Heartgrove may actually tell him to leave, Lukey kept active [Aura of Serenity]. He did this in hopes that the old geezer might actually let down his guard and soften up, and judging by his demeanor, it gradually seemed to work.

  “No, not necessarily,” Heartgrove muttered. As he did, he crouched down in a squatting pose to maintain eye level. Beneath him, the opening in the ground was slowly being sewn back together, courtesy of the roots that were under his control. “Just be careful; we work with some delicate plants here, and I don’t want anything destroyed. In fact, I have some time before lessons start, so I’ll come along and watch.”

  “OK!” Leah cheerfully said. With that, the three of them walked together down the jungle path. As they did, the branches overhead seemed to shift ever so slightly, straightening themselves out and arcing in a fashion that was far more presentable to the eye. Lukey could only assume that it was Heartgrove’s control over the wood element that was the cause. Eventually they stepped into a clearing, and Lukey once again saw the entirety of the Thousand Acre outpost.

  To their immediate front was a large, elongated building, a hall of verdant splendor complete with a wooden stairway and organic columns. In the back was another large building, a greenhouse with walls of reflective, see-through leaves, and framed with branches. To the left was a small field for crops, and to the right a small park, fenced in with various floral bushes. Finally, to the far right was the school, a hall that could accommodate a great number of children and a place Lukey was glad he no longer had to attend.

  At the center of the part stood the botanist’s sovereign icon, Havana. The icon depicted a beautiful woman with braided hair wearing a long gown, holding a basket of flowers and herbs in her right arm. It was said that long ago, she traveled the world in search of rare plants to collect and cultivate, seeking a cure to a deadly illness that was plaguing her home.

  “Shall we?” Heartgrove spoke, striding over to open the door for him and his mother. They both stepped inside and we immediately met with a front desk similar to that of Ocean’s Bounty, with two hallways veering off to either side of the building. Managing the desk was a mousy-looking girl, a scholar by the look of her, who was quietly reading a book. The trio ignored her for now and made their way down the right hallway.

  “Now Lukey, you should know this already, but can you tell me what we do as botanists?” Heartgrove asked.

  To be honest, he had forgotten all of that the day he stopped attending school, but he wouldn’t dare say that to Heartgrove’s face.

  “Find rare flowers and customize gardens for rich people?” He speculated.

  Heartgrove grumbled, but his mother was quick to interject.

  “While that’s certainly part of it, it’s far from the extent of what we do.” She quickly explained. “On a basic level, we search for and cultivate plants with rare or useful qualities. Those plants are then sold to other guilds for them to use as materials. The farmers, alchemists, weavers, culinarians… they all rely on the plants only we can cultivate. The reason we are able to do so is because of our arts, which help us to not only find and harvest plants but empower and grow them as well.”

  “Medicinal properties, taste, size, color, and even output can be modified, assuming you know what you’re doing.” Heartgrove interjected. “This island specifically provides three widely sought-after materials: mahogany wood, brilliantly colored flora, and rare fruits. The wood can be used to make ornate furniture, the flowers can be pressed into dyes, and we are currently working with the culinarian in town to find uses for the fruit. We haven’t found anything particularly rare, but the materials here are plentiful enough that it justified building an outpost.”

  The trio walked down the hall until they reached one door of the many they had already passed.

  “If you want to help, perhaps you should look at this.” Heartgrove said, then opened the door to reveal four people in the room, huddling around what looked like a tide pool constructed of stone. Inside the tide pool were several large pieces of kelp, each one empowered using the arts of the people around the pool. The long green kelp looked to be sparkling, and [Insight] revealed why.

  “Kelp?” Lukey questioned. “You want to grow kelp?”

  “Precisely, but this isn’t what we need help with,” Heartgrove said. "It's this.”

  He then went over to a small crate tucked away in the corner, opening it up to reveal a long string of dead kelp. It was brown and dried out, but that wasn’t the surprising part. Once again, [Insight] shined light on the situation.

  Lukey’s breath was stolen at the sight of the word "draconic."

  “I don’t think I need to explain, but something like this, assuming we can cultivate it, is worth its weight in gold, possibly platinum.” Heartgrove explained.

  “I remember this…” Leah said. “We found this kelp washed up on the shore of a beach one day. Since then, we’ve searched the entire island, but since underwater exploration isn’t our strength, we had to give up. I remember posting a mission at Ocean’s Bounty to search for where it came from, but…”

  “…it got taken down. Unfortunately, we never got an explanation for why that happened." Heartgrove interrupted.

  Interesting… “Dragon’s Kelp”? I bet Kiran would love to work with this stuff. He could probably turn it into a soup or something else that could easily be carried around in a bottle. With healing properties like this, you could probably cure most poisons.

  “So, let me get this straight.” Lukey summarized. “You want me to look for this Dragon Kelp, right? I assume that it grows somewhere in a kelp forest?”

  “Right,” Heartgrove confirmed. “More specifically, we believe it grows in the kelp forest on the northwestern side of the island, near a village called Kelp Grove. A couple months ago, we sent some strong people from the guild there to dive for some of that kelp. Do you know what we found?”

  Lukey shook his head.

  “A LABYRINTH!” Heartgrove exclaimed. “There’s a labyrinth in the kelp grove! I didn’t even know labyrinths could form underwater until I came to this island, but they seem to pop up like weeds here.” The leshy shook his head, then his tirade came to an abrupt stop. “Anyway, that’s what we need you to do: go to the labyrinth and search for that kelp. We can’t do it because none of us can breathe underwater to search for it.”

  At this point, Lukey was even more giddy. A labyrinth? That was as good a chance to continue leveling as he could get! This mission seemed pretty easy too. Just search for some special kelp. Fighting monsters wasn’t part of it, so he could take his time and even come back another time. Best of all, he was getting paid for it too!

  “Alright, I’ll do it!” Lukey exclaimed. “Give me a few days to prepare, and I’ll head out in search of that kelp.”

  “Well,” Heartgrove chuckled, “glad to see the prodigal slacker has some motivation.”

  “That’s great!” his mother cheered. “Though shouldn’t you talk to the people at your guild first? If anything happens, you should at least let them know.”

  “Don’t worry, I will,” Lukey dismissed. Then they all began heading out of the building. “Maybe with that kelp, you’ll be able to impress those big shots from the main guild.”

  “So, you’ve heard, huh?” Heartgrove grumbled. “Yes, maybe we will, but there’s only a slight chance of that. Most of the people at the main guild only see this place as an isolated outpost. The only thing they currently see of worth here is your mother.”

  “Yeah, it’s unfortunate,” Leah sighed. “They keep asking me to design gardens for wealthy merchants and royalty, and I always end up being sent halfway around the world to do a job for months before I can come back home. Meanwhile, the people from the main guild keep asking me to move closer to them, and I keep having to tell them no. I love this island, and I really don’t want to move away from home.”

  Lukey just stood there, listening to his mother humbly bragging about how much work she did. [Princess of Venus] wasn’t a title she earned on a whim; she got it by making literal jungles of flowers bloom, in all types and varieties. Even the Thousand Acre guild leaders respected her skills, and they were roughly at the same level as Caldoon.

  “Hey…” Lukey spoke up. “Don’t you ever find it overwhelming, being told that you’re a prodigy all the time? I mean, if they think you’re that special, then they must have pretty high expectations of you. How do you bear with it all?”

  Leah looked at Lukey with confusion before giving him a look of consolation.

  “Honey, they can say I’m a prodigy, a genius, a princess, or whatever. They can call me whatever they want, but I’m not doing it for them; I’m doing it for me. In the end, I just ignore what everybody says and do my best. You can’t be at your best when you're constantly plagued by fear of what others might think.”

  “Indeed,” Heartgrove sagely nodded. “Like a gambler with a terrible hand, you must never let the fear show on your face. Instead, stride forward with confidence. A calm mind drives away fear and gives light to opportunity.”

  A calm mind drives away fear… Easier said than done…