The Food Crisis (2)
When beasts invade the surface, you take up arms and strike them down.
When famine strikes, however, you end up turning on the very comrades and allies who fought by your side. In this world or any other, there is nothing quite so wretched as an empty belly.
Seen it? Now get lost.
Ever since Rifts ruptured across the landscape, survivors had scattered into the wilderness to carve out fresh fields. Yet there had always been a very good reason those virgin lands had never been farmed in the first place.
Most had tasted the bitter gall of failure after attempting to cultivate crops. The fundamental issue was simple: the soil was stripped clean of nutrients. That left them with only two viable options:
1. Dual-track by tilling barren dirt while throwing hands against randomly spawning beast-plants to harvest their meat.
2. Dump every single stat point into monster hunting and march down the hardcore path of an irredeemably ruined build.
I can just off myself and call it a day~
"Ah, make that three options."
The grim reality hadn't changed one bit. As the famine tightened its grip, people inevitably crossed the line, putting things into their mouths that no rational human should ever swallow.
To keep the disaster from snowballing, I took matters into my own hands. Accessing the gallery marketplace, I set the listing prices to the absolute system floor and flooded the inventory with baseline survival goods. The spearhead of that relief effort was instant ramen, coming out to roughly three hundred won per serving. But when it came to drinking water...
"There's no making concessions on this."
No matter how low I priced bottled mineral water, logistics and system margins imposed a hard ceiling. In that case, the answer was obvious: dump municipal tap water by the metric ton.
In this fantasy world, magic was hardly an obscure esoteric art. Even an apprentice could spark a flame spell to boil tap water before drinking. That single step was more than enough to avert an epidemic and stamp out the immediate water crisis.
Naturally, concepts like microorganisms, waterborne amoebas, or sterile filtration didn't exist in their vocabulary. But through centuries of trial and error, even the most backwater peasants knew that drinking boiled water kept you from writhing in agony on the floor.
"It's just basic hygiene."
I had only dropped a brief warning to boil the water, yet the comment section spiraled into madness.
I had brushed off their remarks as standard internet sarcasm at first, but their attachment was taking a deeply unsettling turn. If this kept up, weren't they going to sprout some bizarre religious cult in my name?
"No way. That's taking it way too far."
Pushing the useless paranoia aside, I tracked down the knight user I had rescued some time back. Lloyd—formerly an elite knight candidate of the Adrian Empire, and presently the commanding sword of the Adrian revolutionary front. He had proven himself trustworthy so far. Walking away from a hard-won title of nobility just to stand with the impoverished commoners was proof enough of his character.
"The kid's heart is in the right place."
Giving a hungry man a fish solves today's crisis; now it was time to teach him how to cast the net.
Every answer they sought was packed right into those bags.
The miracle craft that had shattered Earth's population cap and multiplied humanity's numbers several times over: the industrial Haber-Bosch process. And resting inside those sacks was its greatest legacy—synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.
The lurkers keeping tabs on our exchange ignited into an uproar. Their frenzy made perfect sense. In pre-industrial societies, soil suffered from harsh replenishment cooldowns; unlike modern agricultural fields, you couldn't run continuous harvests season after season without exhausting the earth.
The inevitable question had dropped.
I hadn't wanted to dump the bags without instruction, so I attempted a basic middle school chemistry summary. But the response was immediate blank incomprehension.
"Good grief, you 'everything is magic' lunatics."
They had swerved off into fantasy land yet again. If I truly possessed world-bending sorcery of that caliber, would I really be trapped in a subterranean bunker playing 'defend my chastity' from a rabbit-girl tenant? One slip-up and my survival story would pivot violently into a rated-R romance web novel, making even shutting my eyes at night a tense gamble.
Still, meticulously untangling their delusions sounded like a monumental headache. I decided to shrug and meet them halfway.
"Um."
Fritz Haber's synthesis unlocked the bottleneck holding human population at two billion, ballooning it past eight billion. In the most literal biological sense, I, too, was an eventual byproduct of his research.
Having delivered the unvarnished truth, I promptly exited the thread.
"Now we just have to wait about a month..."
Spreading chemical fertilizer didn't miraculously revive withered soil overnight. Soil biochemistry required time to take hold. While waiting, my schedule was wide open.
"Might as well get some quality forum browsing in."
Collapsing onto my straw-bundle mattress, I spent the rest of the day shitposting and scrolling through the board feeds. Not that this was any departure from my daily routine.
Spell Used: Nitrogen Magic
Casting Time: 1 Month (other activities permitted during duration)
Effect: Transmutes moribund dirt into prime fertile cropland
I have genuinely never seen earth this rich in my entire life.
Standing on it alone makes you feel amazing; fr, you could probably chuck random seeds over your shoulder and they'd grow by themselves.
For the entire month, the marketplace overflowed with rock-bottom essential goods. The vast majority of gallums survived the famine by leaning heavily on the marketplace, and to my pleasant surprise, my own margins were exceedingly handsome.
"You think modern megacorporations peddle discount goods out of the goodness of their hearts?"
Even survivors who had hoarded their Dango with trembling fists bought up the cheap supplies in droves. Rather than shrinking my bottom line, the sheer volume drove my total earnings higher than before.
The brainless ease of application was another major factor. What did traditional medieval fertilizer look like? Night soil and animal manure. And even that foul sludge was chronically scarce. In medieval conditions, walking around with intestinal parasite infections permanently logged on your status window was simply an unavoidable passive trait.
The transformation was most violent among the agricultural workers who comprised the gallery's silent majority. Survivors who had been steeped in skepticism rapidly converted into rabid, fanatic zealots, which inevitably forced everyone else to sit up and take notice. And among the various races watching the soil's miraculous resurrection, one faction reacted with sheer existential hysteria.
The elves—whose sacred World Tree was steadily withering away.
Full-Health Elf has sent you a gift!
[Status: Claimed & Read]
The moment I replied, a desperate barrage of direct messages detonated from the gallery's assistant moderator.
"Fertilizer isn't going to fix that."
Pulling my gaze from the screen, I peered into the shadowed corner of my bunker. There, standing proud and stately against the concrete wall, was a pressurized aerosol can of F-Killer bug spray.
When bugs swarm your room, you blast them with insecticide. Then what do you do when pests assault your crops?
"Pesticides know the answer..."
The solution was already staring me in the face.
Right on cue, swarms of agricultural pests had begun descending across the lush green shoots transplanted into the newly enriched fields.
"Is this the moment?"
The timing couldn't have been more immaculate. Cracking open the moderator shop console, I dove straight into the pesticide and industrial agrochemical catalogs.