Since Karl still wasn’t finished with the construction of the living area for the witches, the only possibility was to place all of them inside of the castle. There were still four rooms vacant on the second floor. So Roland considered changing the single person rooms into double occupancy rooms. After all, those big beds were actually prepared for visiting nobility, it could easily accommodate two people and still have room to spare.
The Prince waited until the end of the dinner and then finally asked the long awaited question – what were their abilities.
Like a wolf herding sheep, Nightingale brought them one after another into the office. There Roland asked all of them specific questions about their life and abilities etc., all things that were comparable with a job interview. He recorded each of their characteristics, he also tested their abilities while being protected by the effect by a God’s Stone of Retaliation. When the last interview with the witches was finally completed, he took a deep breath and stretched out his tensed body. If he wasn’t afraid that Nightingale might be directly beside him, eavesdropping, he would have liked to start humming ‘Super-Star’.
Although there weren’t any witches with the ability of electricity or shaping material, which could have been used to raise the slow modernization speed, but this batch of witches was still able to bring Roland an ample amount of pleasant surprises.
First and most important of them was the witch called Leaves.
He spread all the records he had collected over the table and took hers back into his hands.
Prior to adulthood, Leaves was still only able to speed up the growth of plants and their fruits. But after her day of adulthood her ability had greatly improved, besides her growth control of plants she could now also manipulate them.
The first ability could be used to improve the quality of fruits and seeds, increase yield, and also increase their herbal effects. Her ability also had possibility of altering a plant’s characteristics and traits.
According to her explanation, if she put her magic into a plant, she was able to grow green leaves on a dead branch. While if she put her magic into weeds she could wrap them around her enemies’ feet and doing so entrap them. But the most remarkable thing was that she was able to integrate herself into a tree.
However, the bigger the plant, the more magic she had to spend to manipulate it. So she preferred using weeds during combat as it showed a faster effect while having a lower cost.
The range at which she was able to cast her power, even through physical materials (such as earth), was around five meters.
There was no doubt that the witch whose ability resembled her name and whose green hair also her appearance, would be a good helper to improve the agriculture. So her importance to Roland was self-evident – industrialization required a large population, and if there was a large number of people it also needed an adequate supply of food to support the population. This was achievable through either self-producing or through trade. If they used the former possibility and the production wasn’t efficient enough, most of their human resources would have to go work in the fields. The second point was very difficult to achieve because of this era’s ability to transport goods.
Now that he was able lay his hands on a Druid, Roland hoped to use only a few farmers to feed a large number of the industrial population, and with this accelerate the process of industrialization in his territory.
Therefore, in the future, he would let her practice improving the quality of wheat and barley seeds so that they would deliver a larger yield. As long as she only improved them by at least a little, it would still greatly help to improve his territory overall and raise the upper limit for the population. In addition, Roland had heard that the Fjords also had some unique types of food. According to Lightning’s description, it sounded like they had both potatoes and corn. If these rumors were true, then introducing those two plants as crops should become one of his highest priorities. After all, wheat itself wasn’t a high-yielding crop.
Roland carefully wrote down the future practice plan, and then put Leave’s data aside, and then he drew the second piece of paper from the table.
The second witch he had interviewed was named Scroll, she was also the oldest witch within the seven survivors, this year she was close to forty years old.