The Hair-Growth Tree
Hair-Growth Fruit.
The name was a little odd, but to Farming World players it belonged to an extremely famous tree. A fruit that, quite literally, made hair grow. It wasn't especially tasty, and it didn't raise any abilities—eat it, and the side effect (?) was simply that hair came in thick. The catch was that, for certain people, that side effect made an excellent medicine.
The fuss had cooled by now, but back in the early days of Farming World, every time the fruit was discovered, word of it spread not only among players but across countless gaming communities, and it got pretty famous. Users who had built their characters around baldness and gone around with shaved heads even posted proof of eating a Hair-Growth Fruit and growing a full, lush head of hair. It was the sort of resource that drew no end of complaints about why it didn't exist in reality—and, as always, the talk would surface for a while and then die back down just as fast, because in the end it was only a story about a game.
Nor was it ever actually used in-game as a cure for baldness, the way people imagined. In Farming World, baldness was no great disease to begin with. In a world where you died if you didn't farm hard enough to keep from starving, and didn't build the strength to hunt monsters, losing a little hair to stress or genetics was never going to matter. Treating a severed arm or a broken leg was far more important, if anything.
Alchemy did include a hair-growth tonic brewed from the Hair-Growth Fruit, but everyone crafted it once out of curiosity and then sent it straight to storage. Too wasteful to throw away, too useless to bother with—that was how the Hair-Growth Fruit was treated.
It was the same for me. My dad and my grandfather both had hair to spare, and since the condition was hereditary, the odds of me going bald were slim. If this had still been Farming World, I might well have cursed the reward out loud. What kind of prize is this garbage?
This was as good as the main reward for pushing out to the Level 2 Biome while I hadn't even finished mapping the Level 0 Biome, and clearing the place by completing an A- rank monster's story quest. But if I could carry it out into reality, that was a different story entirely.
In the real world, a single resource from a dungeon was enough to change which technologies were in fashion. Depending on what appeared, existing resources were driven out and vanished, and it was an everyday thing for companies that had ranked among the world's largest to watch their stock collapse and go bankrupt.
A hair-loss cure, in a world like that?
Ever since dungeons appeared, what countless people losing their hair had hoped for most was exactly a cure for baldness. In Farming World terms it wasn't a hair-loss drug so much as a hair-growth tonic—not treating the baldness, but papering over it by making hair grow. But would the process matter to them? These were people who would live out their days wishing, until the day they died, for natural hair.
"I'm rich."
I'd already proved that money came in if you just farmed hard enough, but there was no comparing those petty earnings to the Hair-Growth orchard I'd landed this time. With this one thing, I could essentially stop mapping, harvest nothing but Hair-Growth Fruit, and never work another day in my life.
Not that I had the slightest intention of doing so.
"Monster territories are quietly a gold mine."
It had been the same back in Farming World. Every monster territory held something like its own local specialty. The game itself had been designed, in no small part, so that monsters occupied wherever the resources were—the lore being that monsters took just as much interest in those resources and guarded them in order to possess them. That sort of setting.
So the Big Rats had the sewers, and with the Goblings there had been the Sunro Mushroom trees. The Corrupted Forest was still being cleared, but it too had its field of Corrupted Recovery Herbs, and this time, for the Black Monkeys, the very place they lived was one enormous Hair-Growth orchard.
Challenge, success, and reward. Clean and simple, that mechanism served up a hit of dopamine no one could climb back out of.
"Hey. Starting from yesterday, gather up every last corpse of the dead monkeys."
"Kiki... Got it, Chief!"
Monkeys were absolutely loyal to their chief. If I had tamed them as a human—as slaves, rather than as their chief—I never would have gotten loyalty on this level. Every monster had to be handled its own way, but now that I was chief, they were slaves in all but name.
Give them an order they truly couldn't accept and they might mutiny, but the nature of a species like this was that, so long as I held the strength, they would throw their lives away on my command over just about anything. Physical one-trick monsters with nothing but rocks for brains, and not a scrap of useless conviction among them. They hauled in their own kind so I could butcher them one by one, and they didn't raise a single protest.
"I'll see the hides get a proper burial. The meat is your food."
"Kiki... Chief. Wise."
"A chief with resolve. Good."
The hides piled up like a mountain. This was genuine A- rank leather. Take it outside, and I could probably stamp out armor on the level of Gray Wolf hide. Auntie Lee Soomi would be thrilled, I bet. This seemed like as good a time as any to try bringing her into Farming Company.
"Let's go. Pick up the hides and follow."
Several hundred monkey hides could have been moved with my storage belt anyway, but I deliberately had the Black Monkeys carry them. I'd killed so many that only about a hundred were left—135 Black Monkeys I could put to use, to be exact. They didn't all need to come along, so I sent about ten of them off to the cottage with the load, then spoke to the ones who remained.
"You've got a pecking order among yourselves, right? If not, sort one out. From now on, whoever ranks second comes to me for orders. The bottom thirty report to the cottage every day by nine in the morning and follow whatever my farm manager says, treating it as an order from me. That place is my farm. Tending it is your duty."
"Kiki."
"Kiki!"
Slave or NPC, the important thing when putting labor to work in Farming World was building the system properly, so that a single command was understood on the spot. Keep it clean and simple, and they wouldn't start judging for themselves and acting on it. Cut away anything vague enough to be read two ways, and orders in the shape of do this, do that were the most effective and the most efficient.
And because they weren't simply programmed, rather than controlling every last one of them myself, it was better to pass authority down in steps to the one at the top and only give orders for what I actually wanted. Slaves or not, that was how you used them for a long time without sowing the seeds of trouble.
"Tomorrow, put this place in order, pick every Hair-Growth Fruit, and bring them to the farm."
"Got it. Kiki!"
The ranks must already have been settled, because the one who answered was Monkey-2, now second in the hierarchy.
"But, Chief."
He asked once more.
"Can we really eat all this meat? Kiki."
Butchering had produced quite a few chunks of meat per monkey. With close to two or three hundred of them, that would come to several hundred chunks.
"You eat all of it. Eat, get your strength back, and work hard enough to cover the dead ones' share too."
"Kiki... Chief... I'm moved."
Monkey meat, same as Gobling, simply didn't look like anything I wanted to eat, so not eating it was all there was to it—and watching the monsters get choked up over that, I figured these bastards really were beasts. Not a shred of feeling about eating their own kind. Then again, maybe that was only natural.
In modern society there was no reason to eat another human, barring some truly sick taste, but Farming World was full of monsters, and in a place where not eating your own meant death, the feeling was closer to: you'd really choose to starve over a reason that petty? So meat I had no use for was, to them, fairly precious food.
"Just set this much aside."
"Got it. Kiki."
Still, just in case, I'd told them to cut a portion off and leave it. Not to eat. Once I installed solar panels and a refrigerator, I'd be able to freeze a fair amount of meat, so I meant to hold onto it and take it out to sell the next time I logged out.
Monster meat had a quietly solid market. High-grade monster meat in particular—there was even research showing the flavor rose in proportion to the creature's stats—and the trend in meat was already shifting from beef, pork, and chicken over toward monsters. The one drawback was that they couldn't be raised for mass production, so a stable supply never quite materialized.
From the seller's side, that was none of my business. If anything, it was a condition that let me charge more.
I wrapped things up in broad strokes and headed straight for the farm. In my hand, for the moment, were five Hair-Growth Fruits picked from the tree.