Chapter 1
Chapter 1
The tavern Golden Pond was a place frequently visited by adventurers. Unlike an ordinary tavern, scattered not only with empty mugs but also with torn map fragments and request sheets across the tables, it clearly showed how busy this place was.
“Where the hell did that bastard Rex go?”
Amid the noise, an adventurer gripping a beer mug muttered under his breath.
“Tch, I just wanted to see his face for once…”
Leaving behind thoughts of his missed friend, the adventurer sat back down.
He had come here on the off chance, since Rex used to drink here often, but it seemed he had gone off on a request. In the end, he wasn’t here either.
Without some kind of arrangement, it really was hard to even meet face-to-face these days.
“Rex?”
Just as he was taking a gulp of beer in disappointment, a man sitting across from him murmured the name of his friend.
Sensing that the man might know Rex, the adventurer cautiously spoke.
“Yeah, that’s right. Do you know where he is?”
The man shrugged at the question.
But it wasn’t a gesture of ignorance or denial about Rex.
“Give up.”
“What?”
“He’s probably dead. He kept going on about the Green Dungeon a few days ago.”
The man snorted indifferently, as if Rex’s death were something obvious.
The shocking words made the adventurer’s emotions flare. His eyes reddened as he grabbed the man by the shoulders and shook him.
“What are you talking about? Rex is an A-rank adventurer! And what? You’re saying he died in some dungeon no one’s even heard of!?”
The adventurer shouted in anger, but the man only shrugged as if it were nothing.
For a while, the two stared at each other in silence. The man spoke first. He brushed off the adventurer’s grip and took a swig of beer.
“Looks like you don’t know anything.”
He drank so hastily that he reached not only for his own mug, but for the other mugs on the table as well.
His face gradually flushed red. Whether from intoxication or drowsiness, his gaze drooped.
“Half a year ago, three S-rank adventurers challenged the Green Dungeon. There’s still no news of them.”
“…What?”
“And that’s not all. Plenty of others went in too. Not a single one came back.”
The man’s earlier mocking tone had disappeared. Now he spoke as if explaining things, almost persuading the adventurer.
“So what do you think? Of course they’re all dead.”
“…”
“If you’re thinking of going to the Green Dungeon looking for Rex, don’t. I’m serious.”
At the man’s bitter words, the adventurer could no longer say anything.
Even the once noisy tavern felt strangely quiet.
As if people like him weren’t anything new, no one paid him any attention.
‘Rex…’
The Green Dungeon… just what kind of place was it?
What kind of place could swallow even Rex, who had surpassed human limits—one that even S-ranks couldn’t return from?
‘…’
The adventurer silently drank his beer.
It tasted sweet.
The lid of a coffin slowly slid open.
The creaking sound of wood had become familiar now. It was before sunrise, when the dampness of the night still lingered.
‘Did they grow a bit today?’
Rising from the coffin, I headed toward the field. It had been half a month since I planted the potatoes, and I wondered if they had grown a little.
‘Hmm, did someone come by?’
On the way to the field, the Nepenthes clustered along the roadside had swollen bellies.
Their pouch-like skins were stretched tight, and something heavy seemed to have sunk inside. It looked like someone had wandered into the field during the night.
When I approached and opened the mouth of one of the sacs, sure enough, inside was a stark white skeleton drenched in digestive fluid.
“Sigh…”
The bones were disordered, the joints melted and limp.
Probably human.
Judging by the shape of the skull and the teeth, and the fact that only humans used metal identification tags like this.
I pulled out the tag engraved with the name Rex from inside the Nepenthes and casually stuffed it into the eye socket of the skull. That made 120. The number of tags I had collected over the past year.
“Here we go again.”
Letting out a sigh, I walked toward the outer wall. As expected, there were scratches and cracks scattered across it. Honestly, was it normal to be checking things like this in the middle of farming?
A little distance from the wall, a shattered wooden warning sign lay forlornly on the ground. What kind of manners did people have, breaking a sign meant to keep them out and trespassing anyway?
It wasn’t even funny.
【Warning】
This area is private property. We are not responsible for unauthorized entry.
‘Are people really that desperate?’
What could possibly be so valuable in a simple farm like this that people kept coming?
After roughly repairing the sign with magic and placing it back, I glanced at the Nepenthes lining the outer edges of the path to the field.
As if embarrassed by their bloated bellies, they were slowly spitting out bones. Honestly, I provided fertilizer every time—why did they keep eating things like this?
As the one who had to prepare the fertilizer, it wasn’t particularly pleasant.
…
“Dissolve the bones too. You need to take in calcium.”
At my offhand remark, the Nepenthes drooped their stems slightly.
Well, they were plant-type monsters, so it wasn’t strange that they could understand speech.
The problem was that even when they understood, they didn’t follow through.
‘What can you do.’
With a sigh, I entered the field. If they rotted their leaves by eating strange things, that was their responsibility.
Better not to worry about it and just check on today’s potatoes.
The field was still in place. The furrows were neatly arranged just as I had left them yesterday, and the soil was dark with the moisture of the night’s dew.
Each step sank just enough—not too soft, not too hard. At least on the surface, it looked like a well-maintained field.
‘This time, it’s this, huh.’
Not even a sigh came out.
The potatoes I had planted had turned into mandragoras.
Not just the potatoes. The sweet potatoes planted beside them had also grown into mandragoras, making it impossible to tell which had been which without the boundary.
“Waaaaaaaah!!!”
The cries of the mandragoras seeped up from beneath the soil.
I had no idea what the problem was.
‘This isn’t easy.’
It had already been a year since I revived as an undead and started farming. Yet similar things kept happening.
The Nepenthes colony along the field’s edge had originally been a patch where I planted tulips. At first, I thought it was coincidence. The second time, I suspected soil quality. By the third, I even changed the seeds.
But the result was always the same.
‘Still, at least this time it’s mandragoras.’
Mandragoras were classified not as monsters, but as medicinal herbs. So in a way, this was progress.
Then what exactly had caused this “positive development” in my potatoes and sweet potatoes?
“Let’s see…”
From between my ribs, I pulled out my farming journal.
[ Igrifa’s Farming Journal VII ]
Before planting the potatoes and sweet potatoes half a month ago, I had tried altering the soil composition using a green dragon.
Was it because I had ground up a green dragon’s corpse and mixed it into the soil?
This was far more advanced than when I used a leviathan ten months ago to stabilize the soil quality.
‘Back then, the potatoes grew fins.’
I had just released them into a nearby river. I wonder if they were living well.
As expected, compared to a sea-dwelling leviathan, a land-adapted green dragon seemed more effective.
I drew a small circle next to the part labeled “green dragon” in the journal.
“What should I try next…”
Ideally, I wanted to continue experimenting with other crops using soil enriched with green dragons, but I had hunted too many recently.
The green dragons in this area had long since been wiped out.
Until I found a new habitat, I would need to use something else.
“How did Father do it…”
Potatoes grew as potatoes. Corn grew as corn. Whatever he planted grew exactly as it should. Unlike me, he had never raised crops with limbs.
Take peppers, for example. They were plump and firm with elasticity, in stark contrast to Father’s thin limbs.
I was clearly following the exact same process I remembered, so why were the results different?
‘…’
Peppers?
“Red dragons and peppers…”
Using the reconnaissance-type magic “Clairvoyance,” I searched for red dragon habitats in the surrounding area.
With the chant of the spell, my vision expanded. The field and the Nepenthes faded, replaced by layered landscapes overlapping like translucent veils.
The first thing I saw was a forest. The canopy was irregularly burned, its green withered into a dry yellow.
‘One for now.’
In an area where rocks bore black scorch marks, I spotted seven red dragons.
Dragons usually lived solitary or in small groups, so seven was a good start.
‘Here too… hmm, quite a few here as well.’
In total, within a 400 km radius, there were eight red dragon habitats.
Not bad. Compared to green dragons, that was twice as many. This should be enough to prepare the soil for my next pepper crop using red dragons.