Farming and training

After the tournament, Lind returned to his peaceful farming life.

Through Lind and Allison's efforts, most of the plantation's ten thousand-plus hectares had been planted with various crops, chiefly third- and fourth-generation Dragon Bananas.

There was no denying how powerful Allison's Grow-Grow Fruit was, especially since bananas already produced enormous quantities of seeds.

With Vitality Durians to replenish her stamina, Allison spent another half month after the tournament producing enough Dragon Banana seeds to plant more than ten thousand hectares.

(I don't really understand the specifics either, but by a rough estimate, ten thousand hectares is about 150,000 mu. At roughly 150 banana plants per mu, the protagonist's plantation would need around thirty million seeds.

One banana plant can produce over a thousand seeds, so Allison would need to accelerate the growth of about thirty thousand banana plants, covering two hundred mu.

Judging by the area Ryokugyu's Woods-Woods Fruit could cover, even if the Grow-Grow Fruit consumed more stamina and the actual seed requirements were higher, a full month, including the half month before the tournament, should have been more than enough.)

To ensure that all the Dragon Bananas planted were fourth generation or earlier, Lind even took Allison back to the deserted island where he had first arrived to gather enough second-generation seeds—the fruit of the first-generation Dragon Bananas.

Fortunately, Lind's mutation ability had turned those banana plants into perennials, allowing them to bear fruit year after year like fruit trees rather than withering after a single harvest.

Combined with Allison's growth-accelerating ability, this made obtaining large quantities of seeds easy.

Otherwise, if they withered after bearing fruit once, even revealing his mutation ability would not have allowed Lind to grow third- and fourth-generation Dragon Bananas on such a massive scale.

Although the Dragon Bananas' descendants had not inherited this trait and remained annual plants, with Allison's ability, that had actually become an advantage.

As long as Lind kept control of the mother plants on the island, he would not have to worry about seeds getting out. After all, without the ability to bear fruit continuously, a few generations of planting would leave their fruit little different from ordinary bananas.

Once Allison had produced enough seeds, Lind stopped squeezing more work out of her, even though she could still have used her ability to speed up the ripening of fruit throughout the plantation.

Lind was not that much of a demon, after all. He could leave the remaining planting and care of the banana plantation to his hired farmers and simply wait for the Dragon Bananas to ripen naturally.

As for the training of the pirates under his command over the next few months, they would have to rely on Sea King meat. A supply of Dragon Bananas would have to wait until the crop ripened in bulk a year later.

Perhaps Allison was particularly selfless. Although Lind had not asked her to keep accelerating their growth, she still produced a batch of third-generation Dragon Bananas for the elite squad members.

This prompted all the officers under Lind's command to thank Allison and lavish attention on her. With her Devil Fruit ability, she could practically be called every squad's provider.

As long as they stayed on Allison's good side and got her to grow enough Dragon Bananas for them, their entire squad's strength would certainly soar.

Over that half month, besides producing seeds, Lind and Allison also made a breakthrough in a technology widely used in his previous life: seed treatment technology.

After all, not every fruit was an annual like the Dragon Banana, whose seeds becoming available to outsiders could be dealt with through natural generational decline.

With perennial fruits like durians, letting just a few second-generation seeds slip out would allow whoever obtained them to accumulate a substantial quantity of third-generation seeds.

That was absolutely unacceptable to Lind at present, so he borrowed an approach used by certain American companies in his previous life and treated the seeds to make them incapable of reproduction.

Unfortunately, that made things harder for Allison. For now, seeds could only be obtained through her ability, since all the plants grown in bulk were incapable of reproducing.

Whenever he thought about this unscrupulous technology, Lind felt he had become exactly the sort of person he had hated most in his previous life.

Especially when Allison looked at him as though he were a demon. He could not tell whether it was because he had come up with such an unscrupulous technique or because of the endless seed-production work that awaited her.

Still, there was no better solution for the time being, so Allison would have to bear the burden for now. With her strength, producing some seeds was not particularly taxing, and she could still handle the current scale of cultivation.

Later, he would definitely have to recruit some scientists to handle the technical treatment of the seeds.

Although the overall level of technology in the pirate world was not as high as in his previous life, there was certainly no shortage of brilliant scientists. A little seed treatment technology would be easy enough for them.

Lind might even have to find ways to stop certain scientists from cracking his technology in the future, though the methods available to him would most likely be physical ones.

He would prevent seeds from getting out by kidnapping those audacious scientists and physically destroying the seeds they produced.

He would eliminate each case as he found it, until no one dared compete with him for business.

As it happened, since he had no scientists under his command, Lind had originally only intended to try his luck and see whether he could sterilize the seeds.

He had never expected Allison to actually pull it off. Lind felt that her Grow-Grow Fruit had to be more complex than its description in the Devil Fruit Encyclopedia suggested.

That was a pleasant little surprise. After all, the stronger her fruit, the greater Allison's future potential, making her more effective at both farming and fighting.

(The original story has a Shove-Shove Fruit, but it requires dancing to promote plant growth. Allison's fruit is a superior version of the Shove-Shove Fruit, with stronger and more comprehensive control over plants.)

Allison was currently handling most of the plantation's affairs, while Lind had devoted most of his energy over the past half month to training the newly selected elite pirates.

Compared with the previous batch of pirates on Hachinosu, who had been the best of the best, Lind's new recruits were generally a notch below them in both strength and talent.

There were also several times as many of them, forcing Lind to devote far more energy to these pirates. He had none of the relaxed ease he had enjoyed while training those ninety-odd people on Hachinosu.

To improve the efficiency of their training, Lind had even incurred a favor owed to Zhang Yang-the restaurant owner he had met during his earlier incognito visit-in exchange for several special recipes that could improve physical fitness.

Fortunately, drawing on those recipes had also raised Lind's cooking skills by a level, allowing him to develop new recipes on his own and giving him a chance to make food that would benefit even him.

Otherwise, Lind would genuinely have questioned whether owing that favor was worth it. Incurring debts of gratitude just to improve his subordinates' training efficiency made him feel like those sucker bosses from his previous life who worked themselves to the bone just to pay their employees.

All he could say was that Lind really was a proper leader and boss. Whatever his treatment of outsiders, he certainly treated his own people very well.

With Lind's full support, the members of the eleven elite squads underwent a tremendous transformation in just half a month.

But Lind's energy was limited, after all, and he could not look after everyone.

Without realizing it, the ordinary pirates who had not joined the elite squads had already fallen far behind the companions they had once trained alongside. It was a sobering sight.