Ruby was walking between the few rows she started on. At first, she only had things from home to work on, vegetables, fruit and the like she managed to gather from the many kitchens on the Voyager.

  The vegetables were quite easy to manage, she already had a few that would be flowering soon, the fruits though, It was hard to get most of them to grow.

  Most of the seeds in those wouldn't really grow into something that would produce the fruits they came from. Some of that was either because they were engineered that way, or simply because it wasn't possible after all the years of hybridisation and selective breeding that they went through.

  Fortunately, her two spells helped a lot in that. Nurture and Plant Manipulation were skills that worked wonders in bringing misbehaving seeds to fruition. That combination, no matter how miraculous it was, couldn't do the impossible though. A few of the fruit seeds simply didn't want to listen to her at all.

  It was a bit annoying, but she didn't let it affect her, mainly because she knew that at later tiers those two skills would most likely be able to do what she wanted of them. Especially Plant Manipulation, that skill gave her the feeling that it could eventually achieve the impossible. Manipulating the dormant potentials of the seeds so they would grow didn't seem impossible.

  There was another reason to be sure she could bring them back to life again, it was mainly how fast she was levelling up. She was already at level 6, just a few days after hitting level 2. She might not have had a concrete reason for why she was growing that fast, faster than even some of the people who had been in fights, but she had a hypothesis.

  As a Bloom-Mancer from a different world with access to plants unknown to everyone else but her and her fellow otherworlders, and coming in contact with plants that were unknown to her before she made it to this new world, she was in quite a special situation. She guessed that she was getting a multiplier for all that.

  The system must have been taking all of it into account and her experience, as the others were calling it, was growing rather fast compared to the others, aside from Sam that is.

  She might as well be the only one in the whole Voyager that would grow faster by doing what her Class asked of her rather than hunting. She was glad for that too, she wasn't looking forward to going on one of those boats to hunt the creatures around that area.

  Moving her attention to the newer addition to her little garden, a couple of rows filled with little sprouting plants, the ones she asked to be brought from the black market, she couldn't help but smile a bit, things were going to be quite interesting.

  As she was lost in her thoughts and considering what she could work on next, she heard footsteps coming from behind her.

  "Hey, honey," a voice that she would never mistake sounded, "How are you doing?"

  "I'm good, just looking over the new little darlings," she answered her husband as she eyed the plastic bag he was holding, "That aside, what are you doing here? Did something happen?"

  "Nothing like that." He waved her concern away. "The others are still out there, the first group seems to be doing well. I even heard that Sam hit tier 2."

  "Really?" She smiled. "I will have to congratulate him when I see him next time."

  "I didn't only come here for that though," Raymond said as he handed her the plastic bag in his hand, "Here, I had asked Ricky to see if he could bring me a piece of the weird weeds down there, I know that you were quite interested in them."

  Opening the bag, Ruby saw a rectangular piece of... something. It was deep green in colour and clearly had a sticky fluid covering it.

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  "Be careful," Raymond reminded when he saw her try to touch it, "It's really sticky, I made the mistake of touching it directly and I regretted it so much. Fortunately, the thing about metal being the way to deal with them was true, I managed to pull it off me with a bit of help from a kitchen knife."

  As he finished speaking, he handed her two other smaller plastic bags to put on her hands. Moving her fingers like pincers, she smiled with her husband before she focused again on the task at hand.

  As she cut the plastic bag to let the weed piece unfold perfectly, she gave it a deeper look. The piece Raymond brought her was around 50 cm tall, 20 cm wide and 5 cm or so thick. Ruby raised an eyebrow at the thing on the ground, just that small piece was enough for her to imagine how long those things were down there and how scary being caught by one of them would be.

  Aiming to know more about the piece of weeds she had, she activated Plant Manipulation.

  "Huh..." a voice left her mouth.

  "What is it?" her husband asked.

  "I can't control it," she answered slowly, "My skill doesn't even register it..."

  ***

  "Robert," Diana turned to her husband, a serious expression on her face, "Are you sure that this is alright?"

  "How many times do I have to say this?" Robert smiled wearily at his wife, "I've already spoken to the others about this, they know what's coming and approved it. Besides, I've set all the speakers to their lowest volume level."

  "That's still loud though." She sighed. She hoped nothing bad was going to come of this small experiment as her husband called it.

  "Come on!" Robert said energetically, "Chop chop! We don't have all day!"

  Glaring at her husband, Diana took a deep breath as she activated the speakers,

  "Testing testing," she said, hearing her voice being broadcasted all around, "Is this a low enough volume?"

  "Marcus here." The walkie-talkie in Robert's hand came to life, "It's at an acceptable level, proceed please. Over."

  Ignoring her husband's expression, which seemed to be saying, see, told you so, she took a deep breath as she started singing, keeping her voice low.

  It all started when Mary wondered if Diana's skills could be used over the speakers, which was a good question, and had Diana wonder why she didn't come up with it herself. All her skills had to do with her voice one way or another, whether that worked over the speakers or not was very important for them, it would open up many new approaches and ways to use her powers.

  She mentioned that to her husband offhandedly at one point or another and he of course went and brought that up with Dan and the others.

  She knew that it was important that they understand their skills and the best ways to use them, but she just didn't want to try it in their current location. It wasn't isolated enough and there could be some ships just a few nautical miles away from them, she didn't want to risk people hearing them over an experiment.

  The skill she was using at the moment was called Soul Resonance, which was a skill that magnified what she was feeling as she sang and sent it to those she meant to buff and were within the range of her voice. She could either raise their morale, calm them down, or raise their courage, it all had to do with what song she was singing and what she felt at that moment too.

  "Marcus here," the walkie-talkie sounded after her song went on for a minute or so, "Seems that it worked. Over."

  "Understood, and thanks for the help again. Over," after his reply, Robert turned to her with his signature smile as he said, "See, it wasn't that hard, was it?"

  She just rolled her eyes at him as she stopped singing.