MAY 15 Saturday.

The walk back is silent, but I'm fine with a quiet walk, it gives me time to enjoy the day.

When we arrive I stop by my apartment and drop off my saddlebags, Entropy watches me and flies over. "Game?" She's been over for our game nights a few times now and seems to love getting spoiled by Daisy.

I pet her while casting an illusion spell on her, once she's looking like a crow again she hops on me and we leave my apartment. I knock on Daisy's door and when it's opened I see Blaz staring back, "Seems you’re late this time Colt, it's a shame your record is gone now." He greets me in his usual manner and moves out of the way.

I smile at him and wipe my hooves on a welcome mat before letting Entropy fly off to bother Daisy. "I'm surprised you're on time at all, those stairs must be a struggle for you." I jab back while glancing around the room. Daisy is already feeding Entropy something in the kitchen while cooking.

Blaz is on the floor with Maple and they are playing Go Fish of All Things, also to no pony's surprise she is beating him soundly. I walk over and look over the pot Daisy is cooking some soup in while some mushrooms sizzle in a pan. "What are you cooking anyway? Some of those ingredients made no sense. Also hi." I ask Daisy as she feeds Entropy an Orange slice.

She smiles at Entropy but doesn't touch her, Entropy wouldn't let her even if she tried. "Hello to you too. I'm making saffron soup with mushroom sauce and fresh bread." I raise a brow at that, I remember the Saffron because it was by far the most expensive thing we bought, but it still sounds like an odd meal.

She just gives a bittersweet smile at my confused look. "Willow taught it to me, and I haven't had it in ages. Thanks again for helping, even if you really didn't have to." Her tone is a little melancholic but she also has a little happiness in there along with some thankfulness, it makes an odd mix.

I wave her off and wordlessly take over the job of cutting up vegetables. "Daisy, I have many problems, but bits aren't one of them. Honestly, you could have asked for more, still thanks for cooking." I reassure her and dice some carrots as she stirs a pan.

She smiles and nods. "I know, you're kind like that. But I'm not one to ask for help unless I really need it." She chuckles a little. "It also just occurred to me, what do you spend your money on? I liked the new saddlebags but what else do you do with it? I can't remember what you mentioned." She asks curiously.

I pause for a moment but keep cutting a second later. "Not much, I buy magic plants, and... Actually I don't buy much beyond that and normal necessities." I don't mention my gems, but beyond those two things, I don't spend my money on much.

She laughs a little at that. "Why am I not surprised? The only rich one of us has no idea what to do with his money, can't say I sympathize." Her tone has sarcasm and humor as she is just joking with me. "Pass me those carrots please." I finish dicing them and do as asked.

I smile at her sarcasm. "Oh? Would you rather I live within my means? I could buy a nice suit and wear it constantly, I could even get a monocle to look down on all the less fortunate folk." I increasingly use a comically high-class tone as I talk and even turn my muzzle up a bit as Daisy laughs.

"If you do, please tell me, because I will need pictures." Blaz and Maple also seemed to be listening in and Blaz laughed a little at my spot on mimicry while Maple just smiled.

"Agreed, I'll even help by mentioning it constantly and never letting him forget. On the upside with a voice and attitude like that, you'll fit in just fine at a noble party." He adds to the teasing and I just roll my eyes while smiling. "Now get over here and help me beat this master of disguise." A nickname we've given to Maple for her ability to be unreadable in any game we've played.

I finish helping Daisy cut a few things up and then sit down with them on the carpet with a pillow under me and shuffle the deck before passing out cards and starting a new round of Go Fish. "I haven't played this in... Actually I can't really remember the last time," I comment while losing a pair of threes to Blaz on the first turn. "I'm starting to remember why I don't like it." Blaz just smiles and places down all four three gaining a point in the first round. "Of course."

The game moves on as Maple beats us both in what should be a luck-based game. Even with my spatial senses, I can't detect any form of cheating, but this is just ridiculous. I huff and pass her a pair of aces, "I will find out how you do this one day, and then I will cheat along with you." I joke as Daisy sits down with us and Blaz sorts the deck while I drop the Uno deck I brought with me in between us.

Blaz starts to shuffle and deal with the Uno cards. "Ya know Colt? I never did ask but how did you come up with this?" He holds up the deck before placing it in the middle and flipping a card to start the game.

I give him a cheeky smile. "Boredom. Now draw two." I start the game by returning the favor he dealt me before and deflecting his question. He smiles and places another draw two passing it to Maple, she has to draw four cards at the start but looks unconcerned. "Five bits on Blaz drawing more than twenty cards first." Instead of betting on Maple winning or losing, I bet on who will be inconvenienced first.

"Deal!" Daisy takes the bet without hesitation and Blaz gives me a challenging look.

"Then I'm betting on Daisy, now play your cards!" He gets an excited look as we continue the game. It goes poorly for me and I end up owing Blaz five bits when four draw-two's and a draw-four cards are all staked on me and my cards balloon to twenty-three.

I pay him and several rounds later I stare across the table with narrowed eyes as both Maple and Daisy have only one card left. "I don't even care about winning anymore, get her." I encourage Daisy as Blaz changes the color to green, and Maple is forced to draw a card. "YES!" All three of us shout as Daisy plays her last card and actually wins us a game.

Maple just smiles and looks pleased, despite being so good she never looks mad when losing a game. Daisy jumps up and practically bounces over to grab some chalk and moves over to a small chalkboard she has on the wall. "Another win for the group against the reigning champ." She mimics an announcer and updates the score.

On one side is Daisy, Blaz, and me with a total of sixty-three victories. On the other is Maple alone with one hundred and ninety-six. Maple keeps her smile, "You're all almost there, just one hundred and thirty-three to go. Good luck." She says with a slight chuckle.

I just smile. "It could be six points five to four hundred and eleven? So it's not too bad." I joke back, well it's not a complete joke. That is my current score with Celestia, we still play chess and I've still yet to win that much.

Blaz chuckles. "No half points Colt, half points never count." He insists as we prepare for yet another game.

I shrug. "It wasn't my choice," I answer back cryptically as he deals more cards.

He widens his smile. "Oh? Well, I wonder who that could be? It seems Daisy isn't the only one with a special friend." I know he's just teasing me, but his talking about Celestia that way threatens to make me blush.

I give him my best deadpan look and force any impure thoughts down as my mind tries to run wild yet again. "No, I don't. Now give me my cards." I demand while trying to rapidly change the subject, none of them seem to believe a word I said but all thankfully drop it.

Maple takes the opportunity to speak up. "Speaking of dates, Daisy. You ready to reveal your secrets?" She doesn't demand it, but even I can tell that she's curious, as we all are.

Daisy gives Maple an unimpressed look but sighs after a moment. "Fine, I'll have you know he's a rather nice stallion I met a few weeks back. But that's all you get for now." I nod and just accept that, but Blaz picks right back up.

"Welp, I owe Mist ten bits." He says disappointedly, if I remember correctly Cool Mist is a mare that works in book translation, Daisy gives him a slightly incredulous look. "What? You're telling me you wouldn't bet on my dates with Shade?" He drags me in and I can't have that.

"Wow! Not my kind of bet... Actually it is, are you dating somepony." I defend myself only to mess with him a moment later, despite our words we're just messing with each other, and to prove that point Daisy just chuckles at me and Blaz.

"Ya, I suppose you're right you old duster. Now draw four and hope we get a reverse card, I want to get another win over the champ." She takes it all lightly and jokes right back while adding four cards to Blaz's already full set. I smile as we descend into our game again, I love these mad ponies.

In the end, we all eat a hearty meal and I'm able to take home a large amount of leftover soup and bread for myself. I place the borrowed pot on my countertop and leave it be for now, I have a few things I really want to test even though it's already dark outside, only just though the sun only set half an hour ago.

I could experiment with the gold dust more, but I want to test something else and I think I can do both at once, the other thing I want to experiment with is the Copper Lily. Specifically, I want to try and selectively breed them to have much smaller flowers than they do now.

Right now the cost of growing a single flower is very high, it's basically my limit actually, so I can only grow one before having to rest. As far as I can tell the main consumer of magic is the process of gathering and transporting metal for the flower, so if the flower is much smaller than it currently is it should cut down on the cost a lot.

As for why I want to do that? Well, the Copper Lily can filter copper out of soil and water, so why can't it filter other metals as well? But to make it do anything like that I need to selectively breed it on a large scale, and with the cost right now that's not very practical.

On top of that the gold dust's newly discovered ability could help massively speed things up. I grab my saddlebags along with my mortar and pestle, the copper ore and metal I have, and after that I have Entropy take me to Gaia's Eden before letting her get some sleep in my shadow.

I grab another sack of old mail and a bag of Copper Lily seeds along with my wooden shovel before walking over to my pavilion. I checked on the Copper Lily I still have, the original plant I grew in the stump is still there and I'm thinking of keeping it as a memento for now.

It needs a little life magic to keep itself healthy so I give it some and move on to my plan. I grow a new barrel out of the White Oak floor, it's two feet tall and one foot wide. Once it's done I detach it by decomposing a little wood before taking the barrel across Gaia's Eden while lugging my things with me.

The Water Tree has been slowly filling up its small pond over time and now it's full of water as a small stream moves the excess water into the river nearby. It's crystal clear and I can see right to the bottom of it, the tree itself seems to be happy enough and hasn't needed my help.

I repeated the process I did a few weeks ago and emptied the sack of mail into the barrel to make some fresh soil from it. Once it's ready I use my field to dip the barrel into the water and fill it up. It's heavy but my field is still able to lift it as I make my way to the Gold Oak.

I place the barrel next to the medium sapphire and barrel used to collect gold dust. I take a moment to turn off the dust collection shield, I don't want it messing with my work by accident, once it's off I check the dust barrel and it has several ounces inside.

Both barrels are in the radiuses of the Gold Oak's effects and this is where my plan unfolds. I need to grow a lot of Copper Lily's so I want to stack as many life magic effects as possible, the Gold Oak's increased life magic density, the gold dust, and myself.

All combined this should speed things up massively, or that's my hope at least I'll need to test it first. For now, I need to test if the gold dust can even work on the Copper Lily, so I start grinding down copper ore and metal. It takes a while and I'm once again reminded I need to improve this process later, but when I'm done I add the dust to the water and use my wooden shovel to mix it up.

I add a seed and start to measure out two ounces of gold dust, I'm not perfectly accurate but I get close enough for my needs and add the measured dust to the water before mixing again. But unlike last time the dust activates before I can do it myself, the life magic density from the Gold Oak is high enough to activate the gold dust on its own it seems.

I feel with my life magic as the seed I dropped inside starts to sprout and grow, I don't give it more life magic to grow and just control the Copper Lily's growth. I have it only grow two stems, a single lily pad and one flower, both reach the surface of the water and unfurl a minute later.

The gold dust's effect ran out a moment later, I couldn't time it but it felt like roughly two minutes, I checked the time before adding the same amount of gold dust again. This time I watch as the flower blooms and starts to accumulate copper, it's slower than when I do it but considering I'm not using my own magic it's amazing to have it go this quickly.

I have to keep the plant from growing in other ways as I repeat this process, in the end, I get three more uses out of the barrel, around ten ounces in total, but the Copper Lily is still not fully grown. The gold dust lasted roughly two minutes each time and it took around a quarter of my magic to finish its growth. I use that as a measuring point it takes roughly thirteen and a half ounces to produce the equivalent of my magical energy capacity.

I'm working with rough numbers and I'll need to test a lot more, but that means a little less than a pound of gold dust can grow a Copper Lily completely. But the Gold Oak doesn't produce that much gold dust, it made ten ounces in around the same amount of hours so a full day would give me just over a pound, but that amount will most definitely change by a lot.

I also have to factor in the Gold Oak's effects on life magic density, if I tried this somewhere else I'd need even more gold dust. I'll definitely need to measure and test all this more but for now, it means I can grow a Copper Lily for free every day, which should speed things up to a degree.

For now, though, I just make myself some tea to replenish my magic and pick the Copper Lily before growing a single seed pod off of the plant and decomposing the plant into soil. I take the new copper flower and take notes on its size with my illusionary notebook in my bracelet before grinding it right back into dust to be reused in the same process and planting a new seed from the bag I brought with me.

I'll need to grow several flowers from a single generation and compare the flowers of each to see which is the smallest while collecting seeds from each plant before destroying it to grow the next one. Then I recycle the all materials used and pick the smallest one to make a new starting bag of seeds and restart the whole process from the start.

In between breaks of regaining my magic, I work on my spells as the night goes on.

Author's Note

Thanks for reading. :D
Current year is 994

I'm taking tomorrow off, you all know the drill, see you Thursday.

Also, 3.000 words. Hmmmm, good.