Cleaning the Yard
An icebox is no refrigerator.
At best it's a somewhat oversized cooler bag, and only if you pack ice packs inside does it hold on to even a trace of a chill. If I could run electricity out here, I'd have a real fridge brought in at once — but putting power into a base means farming resources on the order of A-rank. Out in the real world, electricity is one of those resources there is far too much of. In Farming World, it's precious high-tier tech. So the Big Rat meat had to be eaten, and eaten fast.
Tssss—
A broad iron lid, the kind you grill meat on, would have been the more romantic choice. I'd packed in a hurry with whatever was already at the house, though, and bringing the mood along hadn't been easy. Even so, a frying pan is nothing to scoff at.
The sound and the smell of meat searing, riding a cool wind, made it feel as if I'd come out camping. Plenty of people in Farming World love exactly this sort of thing. It's a game set against nature, so you never have to go hunting for some far-off wilderness in the real world just to camp — and if anything, it feels more like nature than nature does. Every biome even has its own idea of the wild, so you can camp somewhere different every single time.
I had never much enjoyed that kind of romance. I'm a rational man before I'm a sentimental one, and the dopamine of achievement has always struck harder than whatever romance healing is supposed to offer. And yet, grilling the meat, I felt it. I was something of a sentimental person myself.
"So it really was just because it was a game."
What was the point of savoring romance in a game? Think of this as reality, though, and it had a charm of its own — a private experience that only I got to have. If you wanted the feeling out in the real world, plenty of people turned empty dungeons into campgrounds. Doing it inside a dimension that was mine alone would be something else entirely.
"Mmm."
Big Rat meat is rat meat. The flavor sits closer to chicken than to pork, but there's a fair amount of flesh on it, so skip the frying and grill it and it eats well in the manner of pork belly. I laid a couple of slices on a leaf of lettuce, added a dab of ssamjang and some garlic, set a finely cut piece of chili on top, and put the whole thing in my mouth at once.
"Kh."
The beer had gone a little lukewarm, but I cracked a can and drank it down, and if there was a heaven, this was it.
"Nom nom."
Beside me, Ruru picked up a piece of meat and set to work on it with her tiny mouth, earnest as anything.
"Any good?"
"Yes! Nom nom nom."
She was eating like a beggar starved for days. I had to wonder whether this was really a fairy.
"Fairies eat meat too?"
"Vegetables are our staple, but for the sake of nutrition, we have no choice but to eat meat as well."
"Doesn't look like it to me."
For someone making that claim, she hadn't laid a finger on the lettuce and was shoveling down nothing but meat. Well, there was Big Rat to spare, and with a body that small, how much could she possibly pack away? I didn't bother stopping her. What she didn't eat would only be thrown out, and I'd be seeing a lot of Ruru from here on. Keeping her well fed couldn't hurt.
The meal done, dessert was cup ramen, of course. I'd bundled food into a suitcase and hauled it all the way here in a rush for exactly this — how was I supposed to just let it pass? I boiled water in a pot and poured it over the noodles. Three minutes, one mouthful, and the spicy broth kicked my temperature, dropped by the chilly evening wind, right back up.
"That's the stuff."
Bibim-myeon, those spicy mixed noodles, eaten with that pork-belly feeling, would have been good too. Unfortunately there hadn't been any at the house. Ruru patted her stomach as she flew about, saw what I was eating, and quietly drifted over to my side.
"Want a bite?"
I lifted a single strand on my chopsticks and held it out. Ruru took it in her hands and slurped the noodle down.
"Hack. Hack. It's spicy."
Well. She wasn't as useful as I'd thought she'd be, but having her chatter away beside me wasn't worse than having no one at all.
The long, long night of day two passed.
I throw away ten years of myself.
A new map.
A new beginning.
To manage that, I had to find a beginner's heart.
Pa-bap ba-ba-bap-pa-ba-bap— pap-pap-bap ba-ra-bap-bap-bap, bap, bap-ba-ra-ba~
The best alarm for hauling a tired body upright is, as ever, this one.
Part of me wanted to be moving from before dawn, but sleep less than six hours and you spend the other eighteen and then some living under a debuff. Short of something serious, six hours or more is the better play. I got up, stretched lightly, splashed water on my face, pulled out the watering can, filled it, and headed for the yard.
◈ Made to hold water and sprinkle it.
◈ Capacity: 5L
The can's grade was low, so I felt every bit of the water's weight in my hands. My Strength was high enough that it didn't feel truly heavy, but a watering can is one of those tools you upgrade before anything else whenever you play with farming at the center. The difference in performance is not something you can ignore.
Shaaaa—
I soaked the little garden plot until it was properly damp. A day had been enough for the Recovery Herbs to send up the barest green stems, and a satisfied smile came to me on its own. Pretty things. Come and settle nice and thick in my wallet.
I hadn't planted all that many seeds, so a liter or so was enough to leave the plot moist through. I tucked the watering can back into my belt. The farm was still small, so for now drawing water from the cottage washroom would do. Scale it up, and I'd need to dig a well or open a waterway.
"Later."
Maybe because I'd already cleared the Big Rats out once, there was no sign they'd come through, even with no real precautions in place. Until I dealt with the sewers, though, crop damage was something I'd have to swallow unless I stood over the plants all night. I'd at least planted the Recovery Herbs toward the inside. All I could do was hope the damage would spare them.
"Hey. Ruru! Let's go!"
"Yes, Master!"
I drew the wooden sword, packed a little food into the small backpack I'd stowed in the suitcase, and called Ruru over to set our heading. I'd taken her for the sort of manager who only handed out scraps of miscellaneous information, but as it turned out she could come along on expeditions too. There was no reason to leave her behind.
"You can't fight, can you?"
"Um... if Master were to invest in me..."
"Enough. Just guide me, and do it right."
A navigator is a navigator. The journey to find the Level 0 Biome Village — yard cleaning thrown in — was finally underway.
I was a little tense. Over nothing, really. On any other map I would have shut my mouth and charged, carving a path as I went. This was an SSS+ rank map, though, and both the basic resources and the monsters sat at a high grade, so even I found myself being careful.
A path made by cutting down weeds. Nothing worth calling an incident actually happened. Dangerous monsters were never going to be packed in around a cottage to begin with. At most, a Big Rat popping out now and then, or a tick, or a bird — pseudo-monsters you could barely even call monsters. That was all. Most of them were F- to E-rank, and next to a normal map they were certainly a sturdier crop, but an SSS+ rank in melee weapons didn't let me down either.
"Wow, Master. You're amazing. Your swordsmanship..."
"What was the Previous Master good at?"
It carried the sticky feel of a clingy boyfriend who wouldn't move on, and I hadn't wanted to ask. Even so, if I was going to keep opening this map, I was better off squeezing Ruru — the one with actual experience — for every scrap of information she had. I asked it lightly. She slipped into recollection for a moment, then prattled out everything she knew.
"The Previous Master... was a mage."
"Hm."
"Her talent was extraordinary, but..."
"She died before any of that, huh."
"...Yes."
"Dumbass. How do you get through the early game with magic."
Was that how the chance had come to me? I was cursing a Previous Master I'd never met, but I flinched all the same, remembering the moment I'd wavered between summons and the sword. If I'd taken SSS+ rank summons, could I be carving a path this boldly right now? Not impossible — but I might have been out here suffering like a dog, dragging shit-tier summons into life-or-death fights with Big Rats, clawing and scraping until those freeloaders finally learned to pull their own weight.
Some people say there's no romance in swinging a mere sword. No? To me, it is romance itself.
On light feet I slipped the charge of a Big Rat bigger than I was and drove the wooden sword into its eye. The blade sank deep, and the huge body thrashed. I didn't let it throw me. I set my weight, held my center, and carried the cut straight through the neck.
Winning a fight like this without using a single skill was thrill and feeling, both at once. It wasn't simply that I handled a sword well. This passive — the one that makes you a master of combat itself so long as a melee weapon is in your hand — and how broken it is, I'd only felt a handful of times. Every time I did, it satisfied.
"Rululu~"
"Yes?"
"Not you."
At my leisure I butchered the Big Rat, cut the weeds, and broke the rock. I felled trees and opened the path slowly. Progress was so poor that even around lunch, a look back still showed the cottage as a faint shape in the distance. I hadn't come far. That was fine.
"A real gold mine. Fuck. Why am I only getting a map like this now?"
Basic resources don't make money. In Farming World, there isn't a moron alive who plans to earn off basic resources in the first place. Basic resources are, literally, basic resources. Weeds. Wood. Stone. The foundation under every craft there is. Being D-rank doesn't make them worth money. They do pick up a little extra value, and sell them by the heap and you'd see a return, in farm currency or even real cash, but the efficiency isn't there.
The rare items that come off them at a low rate are different. The seeds you get from cutting wood or weeds, I'd already covered, back with the Recovery Herbs. Mine rock, and there's a very small chance of ore of the matching grade. Usually, even when it shows, it shows like dust, barely the size of a fingernail. Farming ore by mining rock is, frankly, absurd.
"Whoa... why is this dropping so well?"
I'd spent nearly half the day cleaning the yard, and somewhere in that time iron ore had piled up in the backpack until I could feel the weight.
And then.
More lustrous than iron.
A glittering gray gem fell.