In the garden, Demi’s plants were doing well. She hadn’t had the opportunity to use Earth Blessing on them since Aelfric’s arrival, but they still seemed to be growing faster than normal. She supposed that wasn’t entirely surprising, considering they were watered from a goddess’s holy spring and growing right next to where a goddess regularly slept.
If Aelfric thought anything about the unusual quality and vivacity of her plants, he did not comment on it. He just watched her closely, the way he always did.
By the third week after his arrival, he was essentially healed, but he made no move to be on his way. It seemed almost as if he was waiting for something, tense, and on guard. He did seem to be going about his days in a relatively normal fashion, but she couldn’t help but feel he was always on edge, as if waiting for the sky to fall down upon them. Demi didn’t mind the fact that he seemed reluctant to leave. She liked having him around. He was good company and had already taught her many things. She liked him.
(And he was the most handsome man she had ever seen in her entire life. It was difficult to pass on that.)
It was a warm day with a light breeze when Demi set about building a worm house.
She had already built a compost box on the same day she had planted her first seeds, and there were surely already happy worms and other small creatures living in that box. But she knew how beneficial vermiculture could be to a garden. At her family’s estate, there had been multiple tiered worm boxes to help process the waste that the house produced into valuable fertilizer.
Now that her life had settled into something like a regular rhythm, she felt that she had time to add some wriggly little worm friends to her farm.
Surprisingly, there wasn’t specifically a worm house among any of the blueprints she had for crafting. There were several different kinds of composting boxes, but none that looked like the worm houses she was accustomed to.
That was all right, she thought. She had already learned that she could construct just about anything so long as she could visualize it—and considering that Aelfric was with her most of the time, it wasn’t as if she could gleefully deploy the power of system menu crafting without a lot of uncomfortable explanations.
So she decided to approach Aelfric with her plans for the worm house, to see if it could be completed through the use of Fluid Alchemy.
Once she had explained how it worked, and described the materials and dimensions, he had thought about it, then nodded.
“At scale, that design might be useful for handling waste in municipalities,” he had said.
Demi had laughed. “I don’t know,” she had said. “Worms can’t eat all the different waste we produce, only some of it. Besides, that would take an awful lot of worms.”
“A large-scale device wouldn’t use worms,” he had corrected, looking up from where he was making notes, then nodding in the direction of Dollop, who was idling nearby, waiting for an opportunity to be helpful. “Mild-tempered domesticated slimes would probably be the most effective consumers for a town.”
“Pii pi pi!” Dollop agreed.
Aelfric tapped the table where he was working.
“I’m sure beavers could design a mechanical system that would be functional, so it could be used even without a town mage,” he said. “The capital city of Prystir already keeps a specific type of waste-eating slime in the underground sewage system, but they’re essentially wild and roam freely without any oversight or direction. Not all towns have underground sewage either. It depends on the size of the settlement and relative population density.”
Oh right, Demi thought to herself. This world does have all kinds of creatures I’m not familiar with. It’s easy to forget that, even with Dollop around to remind me. It would be interesting to design a public works project that involved slimes.
“In that case, it might even be possible to create a proper sewage treatment facility,” she said thoughtfully. “In addition to a normal organic garbage processing plant.”
Dollop always works so hard to be helpful, she thought to herself. I’m sure there are other slimes who would be willing to work with people, especially if they’re treated well. I’ll have to talk to Foreman Oakroot and Grandmeister Fairfox about it.
Before the day was out, she and Aelfric had drafted a design for a four-tier worm house, with a reservoir at the bottom that had a spigot to drain out the nutrient-rich “worm tea” that the worms would produce in the course of breaking down the waste put into the box.
The other layers of the box all had holes in the bottom of them to allow drainage and ventilation. The layer directly above the fluid reservoir also had a fine mesh screen to catch any worm friends that might tumble through from a higher layer. This layer was meant to catch the “worm castings,” the digested worm poop that made excellent fertilizer, and was the final product of the vermiculture process.
The top three layers of the box were where the actual worms went about their worm lives and did their worm work. Demi collected a good mix of dried leaves, powdery weathered wood chips, and even some of the slightly failed paper from her earlier synthesis attempts. Mixed with a little good soil, it was perfect bedding for her new friends.
She had already set aside the scraps that she planned to feed them to start off, so now it was just a matter of collecting some worms.