Chapter 349: Gregarious Nature

Pandora’s gaze sharpened slightly.

Her finger lightly brushed over the black spot, the motion exceedingly slow, as though she were caressing the petal itself.

She recalled what she had seen in Amanda’s Arcane Garden.

That slender, fragile beauty—so delicate it seemed almost not of this world—and that single stroke of deep, concentrated black.

She had no doubt. This was exactly what she was looking for.

“Excellent. You’ve done very well.”

Pandora’s voice was calm but assured.

This was not merely the laboratory’s first success. It was her first successful cultivation of the Cloud Crested Currant since arriving in this Fragment World.

Even if the blooming had lasted only an instant, it was worth celebrating.

The young man’s eyes lit up at her words.

“Boss, it’s the least we could do!”

“Past this wilting zone, further inside—that’s the batch currently under cultivation.”

“This batch is performing far better!”

He gestured deeper into the facility. Now that he had the big boss’s approval, his voice had regained its vigor, and his steps grew noticeably lighter.

As they crossed the vast stretch of withered plants, the scene before them shifted abruptly.

Pushing open a heavy glass door, they were met with a rush of warm, humid air.

This atmosphere was different from before—carrying the raw vitality of soil and the crisp fragrance of leaves. It was the scent of life itself.

The space was an enormous greenhouse.

Above them arched a curved ceiling. Dozens of incandescent tubes hung from iron racks, radiating a steady, warm light. Fine mist drifted through the air, every droplet tinged pale gold by the illumination.

And upon the ground—

There lay a stretch of lush, verdant lawn.

No. Not a lawn.

It was thousands of slender seedlings, densely crowded together, spreading like a thin blanket of tender green velvet.

Their stems were fine as strands of hair, faintly translucent with the gloss of sap under the light.

The leaves, no larger than fingernails, stretched outward and curled slightly upward, straining toward the light source above with vigorous vitality.

The young man gazed at it all, pride unmistakable in his voice.

“In this batch, over twenty-five percent of the seeds have successfully germinated.”

“And of those, at least ten percent have survived beyond three days!”

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“Boss, look—”

He crouched down and, with the utmost care, used his fingers to brush aside the base of a seedling, revealing the moist soil beneath.

The motion was exceedingly gentle, as though he were handling a piece of fragile porcelain.

“The root systems have already begun penetrating the nutrient substrate.”

“At the current growth rate, in another week or so, the strongest among them might enter…”

He paused briefly.

He glanced at Pandora with uncertainty, as if weighing his words. That particular term—he didn’t quite dare to say it aloud.

After all, the last “blooming” had lasted only a fleeting moment.

Pandora did not respond.

She simply stood there, quietly observing that expanse of emerald seedlings.

The crimson moonlight spilling through the window interwove with the warm lamps, casting a faint blood-red sheen over the seedlings.

Red and green, light and shadow—they converged upon that field of delicate life.

In that moment, Pandora’s pale features seemed to soften in the interplay of light.

Her thoughts drifted back, to three months ago…

By the end of her first month in this world, her cultivation results could only be described as dismal.

Back then, she had neither this laboratory nor this equipment and personnel.

Even the most ideal samples could only survive for three days at most.

Three days.

The delicate seedlings would wither without the slightest warning.

No matter how she adjusted the lighting, changed the temperature, or altered the nutrient formula, the result was always the same.

As if three days was the absolute limit these seedlings could struggle to endure in this world.

And now, surviving three days was merely a starting point.

Over twenty-five percent germination rate. Over ten percent three-day survival rate.

This leap forward—beyond the efforts of the laboratory staff—owed, of course, much to Pandora’s own contributions.

Three months. Nearly a thousand experiments. Hundreds of variables arranged and recombined.

Every batch of seeds that sprouted and died—she personally reviewed the records and analyzed them.

From the pH of the growing medium to the color temperature of the light, from the frequency of watering to the humidity of the air, every detail had been repeatedly scrutinized.

But diligence alone would have been far from sufficient to achieve such results.

More critical was that she had changed her approach.

Amanda’s cultivation manual, useful as it was, had its limits.

The manual recorded Amanda’s own complete process for cultivating Cloud Crested Currants. From seed pretreatment to seedling transplantation to the maintenance of mature plants—every step was exhaustive and precise.

Yet, under the differing rules of different worlds, those precise steps could also become shackles.

As the manual itself had noted:

The seeds she had given Pandora might require diametrically opposite cultivation conditions in different worlds.

The lighting conditions that promoted growth in Amanda’s Arcane Garden could prove lethal in this world.

Every “should” in the manual might well be a “should not” in a new world.

For that very reason, from that point onward, Pandora had ceased clinging rigidly to the manual’s details.

She extracted the core logic reflected in Amanda’s cultivation guide—the understanding and principles regarding the essential nature of the Cloud Crested Currant, hidden beneath the specific steps.

Then, combining that with the mode of thought used in wizardly research, she engaged in continuous trial and error through practice.

Hypothesize. Verify. Overturn. Hypothesize again.

And as it turned out, this willingness to explore freely yielded far greater results.

One of the first key factors Pandora identified was, precisely—gregarious cultivation.

Initially, she had followed standard botany research methodology, cultivating seeds in individual containers under strictly controlled environmental conditions.

One pot, one seed, one set of precisely controlled variables.

This approach certainly allowed one to distinguish the effects of different conditions with precision and pinpoint the optimal variables.

It was the foundational method recommended by any botany textbook.

But Cloud Crested Currants, as a plant, inherently benefited from group cultivation.

When thousands of seeds were densely planted in the same large cultivation tank, a subtle symbiotic relationship emerged between them.

Fragile lives, supporting one another.

When one seedling began to wilt, its neighbors seemed able—through some imperceptible connection—to lend it sustaining support.

And when one seedling thrived, those around it correspondingly grew more robust.

Thus, their fragile vitality became steadied.

However, what truly surprised Pandora was the second discovery.

It was not some special cultivation condition, some optimal solution she had yet to find.

Quite the opposite—it was time.