The size of the cleared area seems to have not quite doubled, revealing a round hilltop with a fairly steep slope in most directions but a gentler descent trailing off toward the cloud-cloaked glow of the rising sun. Smokereed flowers dot the hillside, smoke rising in wispy trails from their long yellow bells. There's plenty more wyrmweed, a few ice flowers and phoenix's kiss, a scattering of gutberries on the gentle slope, and a bunch of those trees from earlier - plus a few conifers near the edges, where the fog's tendrils coil inward. A sunny golden gleam hints at the possibility of honeydrops growing in the outer reaches.

Meanwhile in the book, it might be useful to know about storage chests and shelves! A page reference from the mention of spice shelves in the page on cooking equipment leads to a page on how to build good storage for items shrunk with Air magic.

In addition to making things smaller and more portable, shrinking also preserves them in the state they were in when shrunk, letting you store things indefinitely; it's important to build your shelves or boxes with a bit of Air in them, though, or they won't be able to correctly support the shrunken items, which will hover in place for a few hours if left alone but then slowly lose buoyancy and fall down, potentially banging themselves up a bit in the process. To make a box or shelf that can maintain that buoyancy indefinitely on any items within, you'll need some wood and a couple of Smokereed petals; channel Nature to form the materials into the shape you want, then Air to finish it off. Optionally you can include metal hinges, if you have metal and the Earth magic to shape it.

Spiffy magic chests and shelves sound awesome. All the shelves are getting upgraded or replaced, and chests are getting put in.

And wonderful, smokereed. Maya heads out onto the hill with Neo to collect some for Neo's wand.

Hailey looks through the book to see if there are any guidelines on transplanting these weird magical crops, any special procedures.

Ruby snuggles Sable and helps think of good places to put chests.

The book is relatively low on gardening advice, though it does mention offhand in the section on Nature focuses that once a mage has Apprenticed in Nature, or a primary Nature mage has apprenticed elsewhere, their fine control when channeling Nature will usually be good enough to successfully work in a garden, "including the delicate operation of transplanting live plants as well as the cruder tasks of planting and tending" - which implies that you can do all those things with Nature magic.

That sounds very useful, but Sable's the only one with functional Nature magic for now, so they'll hold off on that for a bit. 

Sable heads up to the crafting floor and makes Neo an Air wand with the newly-harvested smokereed

The Air wand comes out delicately beautiful, a gust of spiraling strands twining out of the handle and forming an ethereal swirl that converges on a single point at about the same length as any other wand. On close examination, the woodgrain in each strand appears to be laid out in an intricate braid whose loops and turns follow every curve.

Wow, her wand is kind of gorgeous? She accepts it cheerfully, then leads the other Pirates down to the training rooms.

Sure, that's a great idea. If more of the Pirates can cast worth a damn, that'll mean they can do lots of things faster. She'll supervise everyone, and try to teach what she can of the control she was gifted.

Neo's strongest elements after Air seem to be Dark, Water, and Lightning.

Casting at a Learning Stone, with Sable present, gives everyone a much better handle on their channeling. The Learning Stone seamlessly absorbs elemental energy, flaring with the glow of each element in turn - though it can only absorb a single channel at a time. Still, even casting one by one, they improve by leaps and bounds in their first few minutes - they're nowhere near Sable's smooth, finely detailed control, but they can each reliably get their primary element into the Learning Stone without making it catch any flares of undirected strength or sideways zigs of mistargeting, and they're doing pretty well even on their weaker ones.

Their progress slows slightly after that, but if they keep the lesson going for an hour, by the end of it all four of them will be able to feed the Learning Stone their weakest elements reliably without miscasts, and with their primary elements they'll be starting to get a feel for the subtleties of channeling beyond the bare minimum of stably outputting the element.

After the first hour, Sable lets the other Pirates keep practicing and surveys the tower and reviews what's been placeholdered for lack of an ingredient. They don't have honeydrops for the Dragon Wok, nor runewood for the Weaver Bird or Cronebug. They've got infinite paper, books, cloth, stone, and metal, though, so they're probably okay on that for now, and it looked like honeydrops might be at the very edges of the newly-cleared area. They'll need some voidcap to finish off the graduation ritual circle. Alchemical gear is going to need to wait until they have more data collected from the research desk. They need to kill a couple critters to get some midden jellies going, they've got sconces and candelabras and easels and the like...

Ah, yep. They need mana crystals to finish the auditorium, and they still don't have a tanning rack because that takes sinew, and some of the apprentice setups aren't fully documented in the book. Well, that's what the research desk is for.

Does the book have any documentation on how or where to acquire mana crystals?

Mg. Aspen doesn't know how to make them, but has heard they occur naturally deep underground.

Well that's annoying. Unless they figure out how to make them, that's going to take Underhall excursions.

Probably they should add a broom balcony at some point, but that will take a bit of rearranging. Although she does have one idea... Maybe replace a bedroom on a dorm floor?

Eh. Later. She'll try to transplant some honeydrops a bit closer while the girls keep training. And harvest a couple to make a Dragon Wok for the kitchen.

The honeydrops do have hexagonal golden pods, and they smell like strong wildflower honey. Transplanting them is easy work with a bit of Nature.

Okay, actually she should probably make some little gardens. She reviews Neo's designs, then makes little organized garden plots organized radially around the tower, with little seating areas and paths between them. Finally, she transplants some of everything that's currently revealed into the plots.

Gardening is a whole lot easier with magic: pull up a plant with Nature, shrink and transport it with Air, unshrink it at its destination and get it settled with Nature, repeat. Almost meditative, really.

On the other hand, her students are progressing noticeably more slowly without her.

She'll get that dragon wok built, then head up to help her loves with their training some more, then. The quicker they all up to speed, the quicker they can start tag-teaming the Mana Font or hitting the Underhalls.

Oh, speaking of which, she'll look at the (ghostly copy of the) book while she supervises. Are there any signs of problems that can result from expanding the Mana Font's safe zone too far?

No - but it kind of sounds like expanding the safe zone used to be a lot more difficult; Mg. Aspen makes it sound like seeing the bottom of the hill was an occasional treat that got rarer over time. Maybe she's getting more bang for her buck when she does the ritual.

The Dragon Wok is a fearsome installation involving two long serpentine metal dragons coiled around a giant frying bowl, ready to warm it with their fiery breath. It's three feet wide and looks like it could cook for twenty people at a time.