Expanding the Cabin
Making the cabin bigger started, at the most basic level, with wood. It didn't matter whether that wood was a basic resource or high-grade timber. Better materials simply made for a sturdier house, and if you had a preference, you could always choose the wood to suit it. The original cabin had been thrown together from the trees crowding the yard out front anyway, so there was no need to go hunting for anything else. The lumber stacked in the storehouse would do just fine.
The real problem was planks—wood that had been processed. Construction doesn't take raw logs. It takes boards cut and shaped from them. Those could be made at the Item Workbench, and I'd already put a stock of them together whenever I had a spare moment.
"First, expand the house."
The first thing I did was tear down the existing cabin walls. The base itself had roughly doubled in size, and I meant to scale the cabin to match. Until the base grew so vast that a bigger house would only look pointless, bigger was simply better. Set against that cramped little box where two people could barely lie down and there was nowhere left to put a thing, doubling the floor space already made the place feel unmistakably more open.
The boxes stayed outside by the door alongside the workbench, and this time I raised a second floor. The base had gone from 10P to 20P, which made it possible. I set a staircase against the inner wall for the way up and built two rooms overhead. If we needed anything more later, I could always revise it in build mode, so I didn't bother filling the place with anything grand.
The second floor was living space. One room was mine. The other was Kim Sujeong's. Ruru could keep doing as she always had—sleep in my room, or in Sujeong's bed, whichever she felt like.
I would have liked to fit a bathroom into the spare space upstairs, but unfortunately a bathroom isn't something you can make from basic resources. The room itself is easy enough. What goes inside it is the problem: a sink, a shower, a toilet. The crafting recipes for those are a little troublesome to get hold of, and buying them would be simpler—except there are no village NPCs. So I didn't build one at all. If it was a nuisance, we could just use the bathroom on the first floor.
In about half the remaining open space, I marked off another room and built it out. This one was storage. Haul the plastic bins up from the first floor, stuff all the clutter into them, and things ought to look a good deal cleaner. Once I'd done that, the first floor—which had been packed tight—opened up considerably. Now it held only the bathroom, the kitchen, and an empty living room.
In the kitchen I built a table for four and set out four wooden chairs. The simple construction was finished in no time. Truthfully, the heart of building is nothing more than expanding the house and dividing up the space. Everything else is fine interior work.
"Whoa? What the—the house got bigger."
"Waaaaah! Master!"
Kim Sujeong and Ruru, who'd stepped outside for a bit, met the change with fierce cheers. All I'd done was make the house bigger.
"This is insanely huge! Wait. Is this my room? I'm losing my mind."
Some people gasp and light up over nothing much at all. It left me feeling strangely off-balance. Is this what being acknowledged feels like? I wasn't entirely pleased that the one doing the acknowledging happened to be my little sister, Kim Sujeong, of all people.
No matter how painstakingly I'd decorated and built, pouring everything I had into a mansion like the one from my Farming World 1, it meant nothing if I was the only one there to look at it and enjoy it. In the end, someone has to see it, be satisfied by it, and praise it before those ten years of mine are truly, fully recognized. Back then, of course, I hadn't needed any of that. I'd played purely for my own satisfaction, and I hadn't regretted it. Even so, someone had taken a liking to my world and gifted this place to me. And here, they were delighted by something that wasn't even a hundred-thousandth of the effort I'd put in over there.
Is this what a sense of achievement feels like? The weight of being head of the household... yeah, that might be laying it on a little thick.
"A fireplace in here would be so romantic. A tree, a bit of Christmas atmosphere—that'd be nice too. Or we could go Japanese, lay down some tatami, and drink tea."
Our family isn't exactly poor. Dad's business hadn't always gone well, but we'd always had enough to get by, and living in an apartment, buying whatever we needed had never been out of reach. Kim Sujeong, raised in a house like that, was finding happiness in all sorts of trivial little things inside a shabby cabin. Talent, just as I'd thought.
"Oppa. Mind if I take a crack at the interior later?"
"Do whatever you want."
I'm the kind of person who fixates on the finished product. The mansion I'd cultivated and built already lived in my head, and I figured everything in between would only get torn down and rebuilt anyway. So honestly, I'd made the rooms for efficiency and left the decorating alone. I didn't even have the recipes. All I'd put in were the things we actually needed: a table and some chairs. For Kim Sujeong, it wasn't like that. The drive, the passion—looking at her was like looking at my old self. I'd let her have a go. This was going to be a long process and a longer journey anyway, and rather than a bare house measured only by efficiency, there was nothing wrong with finding my own satisfaction in the passion someone else had built into the place.
The farm at night, seen through the second-floor window, felt like something else entirely. This had to be what Ruru meant by the view from the roof. Beyond the glass stretched a wide field of weeds, and past that, unknown lands that might or might not be waiting. Resources lay open in every direction, and the cabin sitting at their center was, at the very least, the center of this world. I threw the big window open, set out a small round tea table and a single chair, and it made for a fine teatime.
"These are tea leaves I grew yesterday. Try some, Oppa."
"Haa. The mood's nice and all, but why does the person I'm stuck sharing it with have to be Kim Sujeong..."
"...The mood's nice, so let's not wreck it, 'kay? I don't love being alone with the boss like this either."
Farming World veterans have no sentiment in them. Lay a spread of resources out and ask what they're looking at, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred they'll just rattle off the garbage and, wedged in among it, the names of the few things actually worth anything. Which is why those same veterans—these days, right around the oil stage—completely lose it whenever some newbie, once in a blue moon, shows up in the community.
Just watching how those newbies play is enough to drag back the innocence of my own first days in Farming World. To my worn-out eyes, those seeds were worthless. Zero efficiency. Water them, grow them, and all you'd get was wasted time, so I either converted the seeds themselves into farm points or threw them away. Those were the only two options. But they raised them by hand, put them to uses that meant next to nothing, and glowed with a pure kind of joy that—when you think about it—had to have been one of the very things the veterans themselves had hoped for and played toward when they first started the game. I'd been no different. Looking at Kim Sujeong, I could feel it.
"This tea. They say drinking it calms the mind and body. Let's take this and sell it too."
"If it can be sold, we take it."
Of course, we weren't being purely sentimental. Sujeong and I share the same blood, so a calculating streak runs through both of us. Even so, I kept spotting reasons it might actually be fine to leave the farm work to her, and that was the surprising part. The thought that she might genuinely be good at it. And every now and then, the things she said to me were genuinely useful for growing the farm.
"Oh, and Oppa. This house can keep getting bigger, right?"
"Yeah."
"Then next time we come, how about we just buy solar panels? We could make enough electricity with those to run one house right away, couldn't we? You said producing power here on our own would take quite a while."
"Huh. Yeah."
The greatest advantage of moving freely between Earth and the Rift Dimension was precisely this: I could carry the resources overflowing here back to Earth, and I could bring resources from Earth into the Rift Dimension. I knew Farming World's resources inside and out, but my knowledge of the real world fell short, and this was something I simply hadn't thought of. Lacking any real scientific grasp of how to produce electricity, I'd only been thinking of gathering grade-appropriate materials in Farming World and crafting it through the system.
"Good thinking."
Electricity is an essential resource, whether here or there. Even just being able to run a refrigerator would massively widen what we could eat, let us drink something cold, and make it far easier to watch movies and dramas on the tablet we'd brought along.
"I'll head in first, then. Ruru! Let's watch a drama together."
"Ooh! I'd love to!"
"Have you ever watched one?"
"No."
"Judging by the way you eat ramen, you'll definitely like it. Come on."
Kim Sujeong and Ruru had grown close in a hurry, close enough now to share a room. Charging off the heap of power banks they'd hauled in and savoring, late at night, the rewards of a hard day's work—it was a pretty amusing sight.
"Our oppa's got a rotten personality, doesn't he, Ruru?"
"Ah... yes... but I think Master is strong because he's like that."
"No, no. A foul temper's got nothing to do with it. He just has a foul temper."
"Hehe... it's okay. Even so, he seems warm on the inside."
"Hmm... yeah. Once in a while, he is."
"..."
Draining what was left of my tea, I tossed a single line at the door on my way to my room.
"I can hear every word, you brats."
"Kyaaaah!"
"Ack! Pretend you're asleep. Pretend!"
Well... in its own way, it did feel like a pretty harmonious little move-in.