"Good.

What else did we want to cover on the way? I don't get people from completely different worlds showing up every day, normally the worst it gets is a runaway from the Marches who's never learned anything outside their farm."

"I suppose we can talk about what I need to know if I'm staying once we know that's what's happening. How would I cultivate more of the plants I have, what do they need?"

"The vervain is not too difficult as long as it gets the right amount of water - you want to keep the soil only very slightly damp, it's better to err on the dry side because that will just make the leaves yellow a bit and you can pull it back.

Essentially, rot and fungus - and any pests - will be strengthened by eating the stuff, so it needs to not be in a condition where it might start rotting. For the first few I'd advise individual pots, it won't survive a frost and it doesn't like extremely hot direct sun, but it's generally pretty good at showing distress well before it's too late to save it.

The other one you've got is bladeroot - you can tell them apart because vervain has fat hairy leaves, bladeroot has thin pointy ones - and that is a cold weather plant, keep it in the shade. It's fussier than vervain, if you can't plant it in a corpse glade it will need bonemeal dug into the soil."

"...a... corpse glade...?"

"Oh, right, I know everyone deals with their dead in a different way. Navarr designate certain areas as corpse glades, because we don't always have the luxury of time to hang around and have a complicated funeral, so anyone is welcome to take a body there. If you run across an area just off the road with a bunch of decorations hanging from the trees, best not get too close. The ones around here tend to be much more pleasant than elsewhere, Miaren doesn't have a shortage of Spring Vates or tend to have a lot of people die at once, so it's possible for us to get round and Turn the Circle on them - that's a ritual that turns a body into harmless mulch of some description, usually leaves or mushrooms."

"Oh, okay, if they're getting routinely turned into leaves or mushrooms that's fine."

"I can't vouch for every corpse glade in the Empire, but Miaren is usually civilised enough to get it done. It's a little more difficult when the mana on hand could be used to save a life instead."

"Keeping dead bodies around is a good way to get some people killed. Germ theory style."

"Yes, hence the warnings in the trees and so on. Not being able to run away because the healer is out of mana is also regularly fatal."

"Yeah, I get that, it's - a lot of disease control things are the kind of thing where doing a little of it barely helps, but doing it perfectly every time helps such an enormous amount that the thing you do to get really good results is just to cultivate a horror of letting it slide even once, even when it's obvious that it's not going to be useful."

"I think we probably need to address the Varushkans throwing them in the lake to appease their ancient horrors before we need to worry about corpse glades."

"In the lake! What ancient horrors are these?"

"The lake in question is quite a way from here.

The Varushkans in particular seem to have especial trouble with various... idiosyncratic threats. Some of them are explicable with magic, usually Winter magic, which has a range of unpleasant side effects while also being the most capable magic when it comes to simply not dying. Others just seem to arise from the land in some way. All of them are bound by things like proximity, their word, hospitality; recently someone broke a deal with the one that lives in the enormous lake called the Semmerlak, and it's been demanding all kinds of nonsense and sinking boats; and one of those things is to execute criminals by drowning them in the Semmerlak, which fortunately the Synod declined to endorse, but that doesn't stop people taking matters into their own hands here and there."

"What was the deal they made in the first place?"

"I don't actually know the details, this was pretty recent, I just still keep up with the Synod dispatches.

But yes, corpse glades, not the worst hygiene violation, rarely cause anything some roseweald or bladeroot can't fix.

Mostly we only have problems with disease when the Druj cook up something particularly nasty and then idiots insist on breaking quarantine and bringing it to Anvil, or when someone deliberately curses a territory, or sometimes in the League cities because they are not sufficiently careful about what goes in the river, insist everyone pays for everything including medical treatment, and have a lot of people in the same place.

I suppose the places with actually remote villages, like the Marches and Varushka, sometimes have trouble finding a physick or someone with Purify."

"I'm not sure if this world has more problems than mine or just such unfamiliar ones that it feels that way."

"I have no idea how many problems your world has, but the Empire never seems to have a shortage of them, no."

"Ours are on a downward trend?"

"In theory, the Way of Virtue is ensuing us more Virtuous souls reborn every generation. In practice, I'm not sure that is actually having a downwards effect on the number of individual temporal problems, although the Empire has won some great victories and some of the greatest problems in the world are showing some progress, such as ending slavery, that's going better than at any previous time we know of.

So, probably downwards in magnitude, not necessarily so much in number."

"Ending slavery's good... nobody still alive on my planet remembers when it was a thing there. Maybe we're mostly just farther ahead."

"It does sound like it. Possibly you avoided having your first attempt at civilisation eaten by hungry plants."

"Yeah, there are carnivorous plants but they eat... bugs mostly."

"We have those too, they're quite useful for the normal sized insects."

"I'm not sure ours are even aggressive enough to be useful, they don't eat much!"

"I imagine you've rather tamed your natural world, compared to ours."