Star Fruit
The fruit wasn't hanging there in a blaze of color. Nothing of the sort.
Which was probably only natural. This was a dimension that had been left to neglect, and if an orchard that lived only in a fairy's memory — memories of the Previous Master stretching across millennia — had carried on, unchanged, into the present, that would have been the strange thing.
I liked it better this way. Nothing inside had been kept in order. Over the long crawl of years the remains of fallen fruit lay strewn in a mess across the ground, and most of the trees had rotted until simply staying upright was more than many of them could manage. Only a handful, by the excellence of their kind, were still bearing fruit.
"They really put their heart into this."
From the placement of the trees on out, the whole of it had been made so perfectly that all I had to do was plant fruit-tree seeds and be done. Starting with the high walls. Those, by themselves, settled everything.
The greatest threat when you're raising fruit trees is monsters. Even a field worked right outside the front door takes losses day and night from creatures that come for the crops — that's simply how it is — and this orchard sat nearly a kilometer off. I wouldn't be planting fruit trees for myself. I'd be planting them as a gift for the monsters.
You can nurse a fruit tree along with all your might for a hundred days, and it's still easier to think of it like this: if I pick the fruit before the monsters eat it the moment it ripens, I eat; if I don't, it's taken from me. Nor was this the kind of problem you could partly solve by clearing the nearby sewers and wiping out the rats. The wider the biome, the wider the map, the more kinds of monsters live there, and unless you scour every stretch of land and wall the whole of it in, keeping every inch of the interior under control is no simple matter.
They had solved it. Solved it so completely that I — a man who had never learned a construction skill, and had no intention of learning one yet — wouldn't have to give it a single thought.
"I could farm in here just like this."
It was that good. Walls of this solidity meant that the monsters of the Level 0 Biome, at least, wouldn't be able to go after the fruit beyond them unless rage or instinct sent the whole pack charging at once.
I found myself seeing Ruru in a new light.
"You've been hiding some special ability, haven't you? Why else would you—"
"I'll have you know I'm an ancient fairy in my own right!"
"Hmm. And that's all it takes, is it."
If she'd done nothing but navigate for me while I cut the weeds blocking my view, I might have felt like handing her a snack or two. Building an orchard for a fairy on this scale, though? I had my doubts. Maybe I simply hadn't grown fond of her yet. Or maybe the Previous Master had built the place because she wanted one, and the part about doing it for Ruru had been tossed in offhand to cheer her up.
Either way, the orchard was an orchard. Counting only the fruit trees still alive, there were some twenty of them all the same, and deeper in sat a storehouse for the fruit, twice the size of my cottage.
There was no fruit inside, of course. There were seeds.
"Thank you. Thank you."
The Previous Master was dead, but her spirit had remained behind as seed. Some fifteen fruit-tree seeds, and fifty Recovery Herb seeds. Beyond those, seeds that looked useful enough in their own right — dozens of each kind — had been sorted and laid out in a corner of the storehouse.
"Do you have any idea what this is worth."
Sell the Recovery Herbs alone and I'd be a rich man. Try to buy this many seeds with Farm, and what I had on hand now wouldn't come close.
I secured the seeds first and drew an axe. Rotten fruit trees, to start — every last one of them. They were wood too. Resources.
"If you've got nothing to do, clean the ground a little. The Previous Master didn't build this so you could keep it this filthy, did she?"
"Yes, Master..."
Perhaps she was turning over old memories of the Previous Master. Either way, Ruru flew about on her small body and set to cleaning the floor with everything she had. It hardly showed. I figured I'd have to take a broom to the place myself at some point, but that wasn't what mattered just now.
I'd been cutting trees for a while when I noticed the day was sinking. If I meant to head back, it had to be now. I decided to stay the night instead.
Shut the door, and unless something came flying in out of the sky, there was no way a monster could get at me. The storehouse was roomier than the cottage besides, and the Previous Master must have slept here now and then — a small bed sat in one corner.
No bathroom was a shame, but I wasn't the fussy sort who hauled every comfort along while playing Farming World. The work ran on late into the night. It felt like four straight days of mindless labor, and I was a little worn in the head, but ten years of experience doesn't just up and leave you.
And there's that saying, isn't there. No amount of decorating and cleaning on your own house ever really feels like work. If this had been Farming World and I were breaking ground on a fresh map, I might have knocked off around here and gone to rest. I already had my main map. Was there any need to push this hard? It gets dull. Take it easy.
But this was my house. My dwelling. My dimension.
The moment I thought of each one of them as money, it stopped being hard at all. Tending my own shop, digging the money out of the yard in front of my own house — who in the world would call that hard?
Once the cleanup was finished, only the trees still in fruit remained, standing sparse. A little bare for an orchard, and not much of a sight, but tidy enough in its way. Rotten leaves, stray twigs, the remains of fruit — I raked them up with a rake from the storehouse and hauled the lot outside.
One of the nicer things about Farming World, if you ask me, is that illegal dumping is very much allowed. Throw trash inside the radius where you actually have to live and you'll only end up cleaning it yourself, of course. Natural refuse like this, though, tossed roughly outside, gets washed off by the rain sooner or later, and the rotten fruit gets eaten by monsters besides. In the end it turns to fertilizer, too.
"They really did spend a fortune."
The fruit trees that had survived were all of exactly one kind. Star Fruit — a fruit found only in dungeons, giving off a blue light. The seed of a tree that grows in tropical biomes. Biomes come up at random, so she might have found it in a Level 2 Biome, or she might have bought it, but buying one ordinarily means paying out an enormous amount of Farm. The seeds are genuinely hard to come by in a tropical biome, and the tree itself isn't something you see easily even if you comb one from end to end.
Eaten plain, it's sweet and good, with a stamina-recovery effect and a regeneration effect besides, which is why Star Fruit trees are one of the things you plaster an orchard with once you reach the late game. Turn the fruit into jam, or into wine, and the taste alone is enough to command expensive Farm. And there were nearly twenty of the things standing here.
At that point I started to wonder what the other trees had been, before they rotted through.
"She really must have cherished you."
"Hehe..."
Or maybe she'd simply wanted an orchard and used Ruru as the excuse. Whether it had been some lucky chance, or she'd fallen for Star Fruit, papered the place in Star Fruit trees, and then died — either way, it was a considerable piece of luck for me.
Recovery Herbs. And Star Fruit.
Even back in reality, Star Fruit isn't a widely known fruit. Among people with a taste for fruit, it trades for several hundred dollars apiece — more, in fact, than something like Recovery Herb, good as that one's effects and potency are. It couldn't be otherwise. The tree appears only rarely, and only in tropical biomes, so cutting one down and planting it somewhere tropical on Earth doesn't make it bear, and the fruit itself doesn't come easily either. If anything, it's far harder to get hold of than Recovery Herb. Even so, the price had only failed to shoot through the ceiling because a fruit vanishes the moment you eat it.
Paying several hundred dollars for a single piece of fruit was past anything my common sense could accept, but I picked every Star Fruit that had gone to the trouble of ripening.
"Head out this time and I'll make a proper killing."
What time I had left looked just about perfect for planting the Recovery Herb seeds, raising them, and then getting out.
"Here. You have one too."
"Thank you!"
A reward for results has to be solid. If Ruru hadn't told me about the orchard, I might have busted my ass all day again, only just now dragging myself into the village to burn Farm while the NPCs took me for a sucker. I didn't even know what state the village would be in, and whether NPCs existed here at all was an open question.
Farming World was a game, so that much was fine. This place was a dimensional rift — a rift dimension — and I had to wonder whether a dimension with no master would have NPCs in it to begin with. Veering off toward the orchard, then, had been the right call. Rewarding Ruru, who'd earned the credit entirely, was only natural, and for someone whose staple food was fruit, Star Fruit was sure to be something of a delicacy.
Maybe because no one had harvested them in so long, each tree yielded about five Star Fruits on average, and close to a hundred blue, glittering fruits piled up in the basket. I'd been about to toss her one when a sudden curiosity made me pull a few of the snacks she liked from my pack and hold them out.
"You pick. What'll it be?"
Star Fruit against the spicy snacks Ruru loved. Spicy potato chips on one side, a snack shaped like tteokbokki — those rice cakes simmered in chili sauce — on the other, versus sweet, crisp Star Fruit. Honestly, a contest that wasn't worth contesting. Setting a snack you could buy for two or three dollars on the same line as a fruit you could only get inside a dungeon was an insult of no small size.
But Ruru stole a careful look at my face, then quietly chose the snack.
"Both... I can't have both, Master?"
The way I saw it, the bit about fruit being her staple food was definitely bullshit.