Skill Shopping

In a way, it had been a gamble.

If I'd been streaming this as a Farming World streamer, chat would have lost its mind. Judged on the result alone, I looked like an idiot—complacently dumping more than fifty seeds into the garden, every variety lumped in together, never cleaning the sewer, never so much as putting up a fence, then sleeping like a baby while the plot all but begged to be robbed.

Not exactly wrong. I'd chosen it, and I'd made the situation myself. Doing it any other way wouldn't have changed a thing.

Farming World had been out for ten years. Plenty of people who actually cared about the genre had played it, trading research and hard-won experience across the community and pooling what they knew to chart the most efficient route. That kind of exchange was about as basic as interaction got in a game like this. The early grind in particular—the parts that looped until your soul checked out—had already been solved down to the last second and the last scrap of material, so nothing went to waste.

Options still existed, of course. Line them up and none of them differed enough to matter, so the verdict could just as easily have been play however you like. But the stretch of farming from the opening all the way through the sewer cleanup was, for Farming World players, a gamble that demanded a truly perfect answer. It was inevitable.

You had to farm to finish the tutorial. No way around it. Skip the tutorial and it still didn't matter—farming was the spine of the game, so if you wanted to earn any Farm, you had to grow it on the side anyway.

A route where you shut up and went exploring from the very start definitely existed. That was a stunt for fossils like me, players who already knew every monster pattern and were sure they wouldn't take a single hit. Charge in with no armor, die, and it was game over. Then you got to reset the server.

So there were a few choices. At the crafting bench you turned wood into a basic fence, ringed the garden with it, and hung bells at the entrance and here and there along the line—bells that chimed if anything brushed them, left there to serve as an alarm. That was the standard. Set it up that way, and if a Big Rat climbed the fence or smashed through and struck a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠bell, the sound would carry. You'd hear it, get up, and cut the damage as best you could. For an early player, that was about as optimal as play got.

The problem was the bell. I didn't have what it took to make even one small one. I had some of the materials, technically, but I'd also need a furnace, and I didn't have that perfectly ordinary real-world thing called string, which made a line to hang the bell from ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a pain to produce. I could probably weave something out of twigs. The real problem was elsewhere. Could I actually wake up when it rang?

Waking in the middle of sleep carried a nasty penalty. Only fifty percent of the time you'd already slept was counted, so dodging the penalty meant sleeping even longer to make up the difference. Worse, driving the rats off once didn't mean they wouldn't come back. The community had posts from people unlucky enough to get their gardens raided three times in a single night. Optimal play was just another word for stopgap.

You could always set rat traps and be done with it, but anyone who had advanced that far and still hadn't bothered to clean the sewer was a pervert, and perverts were excluded from the debate. And yes—part of me had been careless. That was fair. With ten years of seasoning behind me, building a fence cost time, and putting one up only meant tearing it down again once I expanded the yard. More work on my hands. I skipped it. I'd walked in with the mindset that a little damage was fine. Then it actually happened, and it pissed me off. That kind of feeling.

So I'd gambled. I'd played the way I always played, inside the situation I was in, and my luck had been bad. I'd taken losses—bigger ones than I'd expected. Crops I could live without, sure, but crops that were good to have. I needed somewhere to put this anger.

"Son of a— those rat bastards are dead. I'm selling the hides and the meat."

Honestly, that was the real reason. Push came to shove, I could hunt the little bastards down and beat the losses back out of them. Chat would have swarmed me with Wouldn't the best play be keeping the crops and wiping out the rats? But I wasn't streaming, and in this dimension the only ones watching any of it were me and Ruru.

"Mmm... I don't remember exactly, but I think it was about three kilometers to the southwest."

"That far, and they still dragged themselves all the way here to trash the place?"

"This area must be the rats' territory."

Three kilometers was no short walk. Even moving fast, it was more than thirty minutes. What possessed the Big Rats to leave their own home and come all this way just to raise hell? If Ruru was right and their territory reached this far, then a cottage sitting inside it—and me showing up in that cottage—might have been irritating enough to bring them. Either way, I was heading out today to kill rats, and I meant to cover the ground a little quicker. Cutting a proper path could wait until I had time to spare.

So before I set out, I opened the Farming Point Shop.

"Time to buy a movement skill."

The Farming Points I had on hand came to ten—what I'd gotten from leveling up, plus the tutorial payout. They were a currency in Farming World, the kind you used to raise all sorts of levels. If Farm was the money you spent like cash, Farming Points were what you ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠spent to raise stats, buy abilities, or level those abilities up. They had so many uses that one of the biggest mistakes newbies made was dumping them wherever the hell they felt like. That was the charm of the genre, wasn't it. Pour your points wherever you wanted and grow however you wanted—that damned freedom.

Once you had seasoning like mine, investing roughly was fine. Growth had its essentials, and if you hit the numbers that mattered, veterans barely felt the difficulty. I kept reaching for the word veteran, though, and it left a bad taste—too close to speaking of the dead, and Ruru's previous master was exactly that. Pick Magic at SSS+ Rank the way he had, then refuse to pinch your points one by one just to crawl through the early game, sink them into building instead and throw up an orchard, and sooner or later you hit a wall. Was it really this hard?

That was also why I'd been sitting on a whole ten Farming Points without spending them. I meant to use them only where I needed them, and only when I needed them. This seemed to be that moment.

"The map's too damn big."

Farming World players didn't warn you to pick a reasonably sized map for nothing. Even on a PC, an oversized map burned time just getting from place to place, and travel bloated your playtime. Virtual reality was worse. Later you could lay rails, build something to ride, or get around on monsters—the fun of a civilization coming into its own—but the early game was hell itself. I remembered my last map, an SS+ Rank one, stupidly enormous. Early on, more than half the time I spent opening it up was just walking. Which was probably why, vanilla players like me aside, quite ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a few people installed a mod from the start that let them slap together a ride, however shabby, as fast as possible.

Either way, in a dimension that boasted SSS+ Rank scale, I needed a movement skill or a mount if I didn't want to waste my hours on foot. That was why I'd opened the Farming Point Shop. If a relevant skill was in there, I'd buy it. If not, I'd pick up an active tied to swordsmanship and put it to work while I hunted.

"Hm."

Among the shop's many categories, I opened the Skills tab. The abilities I held were split into subcategories—Melee Weapons (SSS+ Rank), Farming (F-rank), and Butchering (F-rank)—and pressing a tab unfurled the skills I could learn beneath it, spread out like a skill tree.

The active skills were all grayed out. Only the passive I'd already learned burned in bold, lit and active. There were a great many skills, and every last one of them was SSS+ Rank. Just looking at them was a pleasure. For now, the ones I could actually buy were the two at the very front: Two-Fold Strike and Leap Slash. The names looked brain-dead simple, like some dogshit F-rank skill, but the SSS+ Rank tagged beside them bought a whole lot of trust.

"It's not the name that matters. It's the rank."

And the description didn't look like dogshit, either.

It was exactly the movement skill I needed.