While the process of sucking all the life away from the forest was slow, it"s steady and constant character put a lot of pressure on me to hurry up and harvest all possible herbs and ores from it.
I didn"t see anything wrong in splurging most of my free energy points of the tower for the sake of those two small words, with one aimed at being a paradise that I could one day show to Eve, while the other one being my private medicinal garden.
Not daring to wait for even a second, as soon as I confirmed the purchase and placed both subdimensions in the first and third floor of the tower respectively, I rushed towards the frontline between life and death.
Hopping over the imaginary line that separated the devastated land and the lush forest, I pretended not to see countless trees constantly falling down and turning to the dust, only to give way for the next line just like brave cannon fodder in some medievalistic battle.
The only difference was, the trees had no way to raise their flag and escape.
Right off the bat, I pictured the entire area in my head, separating it into a wide, reversed pyramid, made of squares that could be covered with my energy vision at its best. I didn"t want to miss even a single spot, but I had to give up on scavenging the lands that would be run down by the tendrils of my parasitic core before I could even reach them.
Starting from the most central piece, I scanned my surroundings, only to curse inwardly. No matter how it looked right now, the closer I was to the edge of the devastation, the deeper the part of the original forest I was in.
Unable to change the reality and pressed for time, I moved up a bit and to the left. Quick scan, and I once again relocated to the left, following the pattern that I chose. It took me three left-sided moves to finally move forward a bit, with my direction changing to the right.
Scanning the areas while keeping the tabs of the places I already visited was quite taxing, almost making me miss the spot where I was supposed to move back to cover the other side of the second row of the pyramid.
For some reason that I couldn"t fathom, despite most of the beasts that Invaded me back at the tower being at the level close or even higher than the beast I faced off against in the arena city - excluding the worthless cannon fodder obviously - their amount of the herbs I was finding was minimal.
I could only hope that this private garden of mine would have effect great enough to not only recover those mostly mediocre weeds and bring their quality up a notch, otherwise this endeavour would be nothing more than a wasted effort!
Continuing my process through the night, when the first light of the morning sun cast itself on the planet once again, I was horrified when I realised that despite covering most of the forest with my scans, the speed at which it was giving way to the devastation was actually faster than I calculated it before!
No matter whether it was the case of the core growing stronger and thus more efficient or some other variable that I didn"t think off, but if I didn"t hurry up, about a third of the remaining areas that I have yet to scan would be gone before I could take care of them!
The flow of time was also one of the reasons why I continued to curse at my lack of storage ring. Holding the herbs by hand, prevented me from picking up the beast and kidnapping them for the sake of starting a pasture in my small world, not to speak about dragging freshly cut trees to provide some building material for it!
When only about a kilometre remained between the frontline of the devastation and the beach in the widest point of the island, I dropped the idea of collecting any more herbs, dashed back to the tower to place them haphazardly in the garden that looked like just an empty plot of land with a tower erected right in the middle of it, and ran back to the forest.
For now, I had to decide whether the fresh meat would be more important than a lodging inside my primary small world. Thinking about how the topmost level of my tower was already fitted with loads of furniture that turned it into a lovely and comfortable bedroom, I decided I would profit more by kidnapping some beasts rather than trying to replant d.a.m.ned trees!
That"s where lady luck, or rather, lady the inevitability came into play.
If I wanted to create an entire heard of the beasts, not only I had to find some of the more docile specimens, but also make sure both males and females from various bloodlines would be present.
What would be the point of giving them another option at life, even if in the role of livestock, if I couldn"t breed them?
With the ever-shrinking line of forest and the innate fear that the beast had about the devastation, they were all amazed in the narrow corridor of the remaining green lands, making my job far easier than I actually expected.
The only problem appeared when I actually tried to bring those beasts back to the tower, while they were resisting with all their power to even step on the dusty desert that once was their home!
It took me quite a while of struggling against the stubborn beasts to practically carry or drag them through the vast expanse of the empty plot of devastated land, before throwing them into my small world.
Surprisingly enough, just by bringing simple beasts - even with their strength being on par of middle-grade spirit cultivator - made the whole s.p.a.ce of the subdimension expand a bit!
But that was also the last thing I did before going out of my way to kill all the remaining beasts and throw their corpses on the land of devastation before proceeding to do some more killing.
I didn"t do it for the measly exp rewards that was barely enough to raise five levels for me, but I was simply worried about what would happen if the smell of the death of so many beasts would attract some more powerful foodies from under the pristine expanses of water!
One could never bee to cautious!
I finally managed to finish all my tasks connected to the island barely ten minutes before the last bits of the big vegetation crumbled under the a.s.saults of the underground tendrils of mana steeming from my parasitic core.
While there was still a bit of the ground on the beach for it to cover in order to claim that it took the entire island into its possession, this task was more or less finished.