The Previous Master's Legacy
Cultivation in the Rift Dimension
Plant one crop, and two or three harvests come back. Even the grade of what you pull out of the ground runs high. I'd sown D- rank Recovery Herb seeds and gotten D+ rank plants out of them — whether that meant some one-step rank boost was in effect, I couldn't say for certain, but the state of the field was outstanding either way.
"The Rift Dimension is a primordial dimension, where the energy of life itself is born. Of course everything that grows here is overflowing with it."
So Ruru claimed. Three Recovery Herbs had given me five berries and ten leaves. I planted yesterday's herbs in the emptied rows at once, watered them, and pushed the garden out farther along the side. I didn't have seeds on hand yet, but the moment I did, I wanted them in the ground — so I decided to work the entire front yard into plots ahead of time.
"Yeah. About like this."
Blanket the yard in nothing but beds and you can't walk anywhere, so I laid out modest squares with paths cut through the middle, a checkerboard. That was the basic farm layout from Farming World: easy to move through, no doubling back, and set right in front of the house so that if monsters ever came crashing in I could keep them off the crops. Later, when the sprinklers went in, a single unit would cover as many beds as possible. All of it by design.
"Haa."
If I had to name the Secret Farming Map's single greatest flaw, it was that time here ran one-to-one with reality. In Farming World you could crank the time scale however you liked and squeeze a little extra out of the clock. Here, nothing of the sort. Grinding wasn't any kinder just because you sped the clock up, so one-to-one was probably the right call — but sleep, and every stretch where you only needed the hours to pass, those had been worth skipping. Seven straight days of nothing but farming, staring at crops while they grew, was no small thing to sit through. Pioneering the surroundings at least made the time move. Sooner or later I'd have to build something at the base that could kill hours, too. By then the logout cooldown ought to have shrunk enough that I could just spend the wait back in reality.
The sun beat down warm for spring. I smeared the sweat off my face, drained a half-liter bottle in one go, and walked straight out of the house.
"Ruru. Let's go."
"Eep! Coming, Master!"
She'd been rolling around indoors, but today she trailed after me with unusual enthusiasm. The path I'd cut yesterday had been opened wide enough for three people abreast, with future transport already in mind, so it felt open, and the stretch that had eaten nearly half a day took less than ten minutes to its end. About a kilometer. The village sat roughly two kilometers off, which meant that if I pushed today I might even reach it by night, late start and all — the garden had held me up longer than yesterday. Sleep in the village, and it would work out somehow.
"Master. I think there's an orchard near here that the Previous Master used to tend."
"Huh?"
"About a kilometer east of here."
"How do you know?"
She'd said she knew the major points of interest in the Level 0 Biome, so remembering the Previous Master wouldn't have been strange. Maybe the memories simply surfaced once you got close enough to a place. I was turning that over when she answered, unexpectedly simply.
"Um. I flew over and looked."
"..."
Right. She was a fairy. I'd assumed she just sat on my shoulder and wandered off on her own now and then, and here she'd been doing something actually useful.
"You're secretly pretty useful, huh?"
Flight was an absurdly practical ability over a field of weeds grown past two meters. I wasn't hacking a road through them because I was scared of the damn things. Every last one was a resource. Basic materials fed all the way into the endgame tech tree, and if you didn't stockpile them while you could, you'd be stuck later making a nuisance run back to some low-level biome just to farm what you should already have had.
"Hehe. I am useful, right?"
"..."
Little brat was working this hard because she wanted ramen. From where I stood, it wasn't a bad kind of effort.
"Lead the way. Orchard first."
The village could wait. The only reason I was cutting a road toward it at all was to find out whether the seed merchant would sell Recovery Herb seeds — that was priority one. For that, the orchard was far more promising, and I wouldn't have to spend a single Farm. If there were seeds stored away, or even fruit hanging on the trees, that was a jackpot. No. Even bare trees in the ground would do.
"Please."
There was more heat in the road toward the orchard than there had ever been in the road toward the village. There was no helping that.
"So. Are there actually trees?"
"The Previous Master loved fruit so, so much! I'm a fairy, so fruit is what I live on. She adored me, and she said the orchard was for me..."
Her voice dipped, just a little. However long it had been, some affection for the Previous Master was still in there. And if Ruru really did live on fruit, then yes — an orchard of fruit trees, planted for her, made a certain kind of sense.
"Fruit's your staple, is it? All I've seen you inhale is meat, snacks, and ramen."
"...Fruit is my favorite!"
"And didn't you say your old master died pretty fast? Where'd she get that many fruit trees?"
"She still made it as far as the Level 2 Biome..."
"Oh, did she? Shame."
A thought snagged. Maybe the little thing knew the major points of the Level 1 Biome too, and was simply keeping her mouth shut. Raise her past whatever seal the system had on her, and the information might come loose. Or maybe it was like now — get within a certain distance, and the old memories surfaced on their own. Either way, I stopped digging.
"So what was it like back then. The orchard."
"Enormous. Huge. She put so much work into keeping the monsters out."
"Think I can let myself hope a little?"
In truth, I didn't hope for much. Fruit trees weren't easy to come by in a low-level biome. Cut weeds and timber long enough and the rare reward seeds would, on occasion, drop a fruit-tree seed — but the odds were low, and the kind of tree changed from biome to biome. Anything that actually tasted good, anything expensive, meant a high-level biome. Now and then the village seed merchant turned up with one or two fruit-tree seeds from who knew where, except the price was the sort of rip-off that made you want to swear out loud. Short of the late game, when Farm was coming out of your ears, an orchard was genuinely miserable to build. Which meant an orchard left by someone who'd died around the Level 2 Biome was very likely full of fruit you could have found in the real world. What I wanted was an orchard of fruit that existed only in Farming World.
Still. A well-kept orchard site was a well-kept orchard site. Eat the fruit, cook with it, sell it — it all turned into Farm — and once I got my hands on the seeds I actually wanted, I could use the grounds as they stood instead of carving an orchard out of nothing. Not bad.
So I gave up on the village for the day and cut a path as far as the orchard, and there it was: a wall that announced itself as the entrance from a long way off, standing higher than the weeds and making sure you knew it.
"Whoa. What?"
Even from a distance the wall looked a good three meters tall, and it wasn't tangled in useless weeds. Flowering vines of every color wound prettily over it, and the stretch of wall running off to the side covered more ground than I'd expected.
"How serious was the investment in this orchard, exactly?"
Ruru hadn't been lying. The wall wasn't plain stone. The bricks were cut from materials you could only get in the Level 2 Biome — things that ought to have been D-rank at minimum, mixed in together. Cement alone demanded a brutal grind out there, and shaping bricks that clean meant a heavy investment on the construction side. The scale of it wasn't a day or two of work, either. If the outer wall alone looked like this, the inside had to be worse.
"What, were you and the Previous Master a couple?"
"No! The Previous Master was a woman!"
"Women can love each other, you know."
All that labor, for a fairy whose entire contribution was chattering at your elbow. Maybe I was pricing it too hard by my own Farming World common sense. But by that standard, a Previous Master who had sunk an SSS+ Rank ability into magic — and died in the Level 2 Biome — putting this kind of orchard in the ground was an investment bordering on waste. She'd held out decently, for someone who'd chosen magic. Then again, maybe it was wastes exactly like this, stacking one on another, that had finally pinned her against a wall and killed her. Saying she'd died over a single orchard was a stretch, though. If she'd become master of the Rift Dimension under conditions anything like mine, she wouldn't have been enough of a moron to miss something that obvious.
Whatever the truth was, I was grateful.
I set my hands to the entrance in that wall of more than three meters and pushed. The door, shut for an age, swung open with a long, grating creak.
"Whoa..."
A run of ground that had to be two hundred meters stretched out ahead of me, and on either side, three rows deep, the trees stood waiting.