The S+ Rank Farmer

Farm Management was exactly what it sounded like: a system for running a farm efficiently. There was nothing especially fancy about it. It simply let you see at a glance how the farm ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠was getting along, and it helped you work the slaves and NPCs under your management with a little more efficiency.

The Map and the Domain already offered functions that were more or less the same, so the best way to think of it was as a tidier screen for looking at all of that at once. The real heart of Farm Management was that you could grant abilities to NPCs. Back in Farming World, I had used Farming Points to teach NPCs abilities, or to raise the rank of the ones they already had, and that was about as far as the system went.

This farm, in the end, was never going to be something I could run by myself. The core of a farm-management game is brutal at the start. You bust your ass until you're sick of it—hard, miserable, the kind of grind that makes you wonder if you seriously booted up a game just to do manual labor, until the burnout lands hard enough to make you rethink your life. Then, somewhere along the way, that stubbornness starts bearing fruit, and the fun shifts to automating one thing after another.

You build sprinklers and buy back the hours you used to sink into watering every day. You hire NPCs and hand off the seeding and the cultivation. You send slaves down into the mine so you stop living there for days every time you need ore. Cut things away like that, automate them, and time opens up. With that time you break into higher-level biomes, hunt stronger monsters, and grow your abilities as a hunter. Push further still, and you upgrade the NPCs themselves, until the crops start making money too.

So Farm Management was a fairly important system.

I had no intention of spending Farming Points on it. Not yet. At a glance they look like they pour in from subquests—ten here, twenty there, five somewhere else—but decide you want to get strong in a hurry, buy a handful of skills, and Farming Points are gone again. That was the other thing about them. More than anything, the moment I had any slack I needed to raise Login & Logout as well, if I wanted the acceleration that would actually grow the farm. There was no such thing as a surplus of Farming Points.

Even so, a life-skill selection right handed out as a quest reward was something I could pass along through Farm Management. I could have learned it myself. But a life skill tied to running the farm, rather than to combat, would for now only pile more work onto my plate.

If this had still been the me from when I was playing the game, I never would have made this choice. Stubborn as it might have been, I would have kept driving Kim Sujeong and the slaves the way you drive NPCs, taken the S+ Rank life skill for myself, and poured my time into wherever my own ability was needed, living a little busier for it. Every one of them was my character. I would have thought that my growth was what mattered. This was reality now, not a game, and if anything that was even more the way it ought to be. And yet, strangely enough, my judgment had already tipped toward giving Kim Sujeong the S+ Rank life skill I had just obtained.

I didn't really agonize ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠over it. The choice—that this was right, and that it was efficient—had already been made. I figured it came down to trust.

Family. Conduct worth believing in. Passion. My way with people is dogshit, and I have no eye for character, but I at least know the look in someone's eyes when they have real fire in them. The look Kim Sujeong got when she farmed. The look when she cooked. The way she threw herself into living and seemed satisfied inside a routine that, on paper, shouldn't have been any fun at all. I knew that at the end of all of it, once she went back to reality, what she felt was happiness over the money she was earning. Whatever the motive, the effort itself was genuine, and that made it something I could trust. That was why I was giving her an S+ Rank life skill that could put real wings on the role she already played.

"From now on, you're a farmer."

"Huh?"

"Uh?"

I laid a hand on Kim Sujeong's head as if I were granting absolution, and used the S+ Rank life-skill selection right. She shot to her feet, startled by the message floating in front of her eyes.

"What is this?"

"What do you think it is."

"Whoa. An S+ Rank Farming ability. This just showed up on my status window? Did you do this, oppa? That's insane!"

"We're about at the point where we need a real farming ability anyway."

Until now, all we had done was the simple, repetitive kind of farming. Water. Harvest. Repeat. In Farming World, you don't even call that farming. You say you're tending a kitchen garden. Not that there's some incredible secret art to it, either. Crops grow on their own so long as you water them on time, and if you start lecturing about the finer points, the farmers who actually break their backs in the fields would have a fit just watching. Still, once you have the skill, start using fertilizer, and push the farming rank up through breeding and refinement and all the rest, it starts working a lot like alchemy. The door opens onto crops that are more varied, and worth a great deal more. That was another reason I had given the ability to Kim Sujeong instead of keeping it for myself.

There was quietly a lot to keep track of, and combining things ate up time. I had a few recipes stored in my head, but honestly I had never been all that interested in the farming side. I refined a handful of valuable crops, sold them, and called it done. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠I had never felt like digging into every little thing, and I didn't particularly want to start poking at it now. As the biomes climbed, I could bring back the improved varieties I knew and teach her those. For the moment, it was better to let Kim Sujeong figure it out herself.

"Oh. Huh? Oppa, my status window just went weird."

Kim Sujeong, who had been reading over the ability in wide-eyed wonder, kicked up a fuss. The moment she finished speaking, a system message appeared before my eyes.

She had been coming and going for a while, and the time she had actually lived in the rift dimension added up to quite a bit. Only now was this place acknowledging her as one of its own. Maybe someone had to be given an ability—or I had to spend Farming stat points and do something for them—before they could be registered as a member. Whatever the condition was, it counted as good news. A Farming Window meant she could now earn experience through farming, raise her level, and climb the ranks on her own. Hunters already did something like that, of course. There was bound to be something here that set it apart from a hunter's status window. For instance.

"Farm? What's a Farm, oppa?"

"The currency of this place. If you've got Farms now, you should be fine selling whatever you take into the village."

Split the work, and the workload drops by half.

"Whoa. This is insane. There's a ridiculous number of skills I can learn. Wow. I'm really going to need these when I farm. But I'm short on these Farming stat points."

"You get them when you level up. Or by clearing quests."

As I explained, the advantages of having a Farming Window started showing themselves one by one.

"Ah! Quests! Ooh. Ability subquests? Two of them just popped up. Is there a main quest too? Whoa, what even is this reward."

Hunters have them as well, but the growth system here is so much bigger, with so many more rewards of so many more kinds, that you could fairly call it the engine behind my own growth. She was S+ Rank for now. If she kept at it—SS− Rank. SS Rank. Even SS+ Rank. I didn't know whether Kim Sujeong could reach SSS Rank, but if we kept running the farm together, maybe I would get to watch her grow alongside me.

"Oppa. You can give me Farming stat points too, right?"

"..."

Of course, that warm, heartening, happily-ever-after process, and the ending that came with it, probably wasn't going to come easy. Reality was those big, sparkling eyes, locked onto my Farming Points.

"Want me to just snatch it back?"

"Can't you buy me just one? Seriously, just one. This one's actually really good to have."

"Earn it yourself."

"...My birthday's coming up soon..."

"..."

"It won't work, will it? Okay. Thanks anyway, oppa."

She put on a pitiful face, and the moment it failed to land at all she dropped it, brightened, and went running for the fields. A vixen, through and through. If I had points to spare I would have liked to invest them in the farming too, but I didn't, which was why all I had been able to give her was the S+ life skill. Nothing to be done about ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it.

"Master. I have a feeling that this time, you'll really put this dimension in order. Hehe."

Ruru had been watching from beside me. I nodded.

"I spent ten years in Farming World. The least I can do is this much."

Could I keep performing at this difficulty all the way through? Honestly, I didn't know. But at least in this dimension, I felt as if I could keep going the way I was now.

"Ah!"

A thought struck me out of nowhere, and I asked Ruru.

"This main quest reward. I can't be the only one who got one, right? What did your Previous Master receive for her second SSS+ Rank ability?"

Not that this was insecurity, or comparison, or anything on that level. I had left that stage behind a long time ago. Comparing myself to a Previous Master who had up and died in a Level 2 Biome was absurd from the start, and conquering the Black Monkeys' territory had already proved as much. I was just genuinely curious. Take SSS+ Rank Holy Magic alone. However late-game an ability like that might be, magic at SSS+ Rank should still have let her skip the corrupted ogre and restore the village by some other means.

"Um..."

Ruru hesitated over something, then answered carefully.

"...She chose... alchemy."

"Hm. So she picked alchemy. Alchemy's decent even as an S+ Rank life skill. Good for earning Farms, too. So the SSS+ Rank one was?"

I thought I had misheard.

"The Previous Master never obtained an S+ Rank... She chose alchemy for her SSS+ Rank..."

Now I was curious. The real Previous Master of this dimension. What kind of person had Ruru's old master been? From the scraps of news alone, she sounded like nothing but a romantic—a mage with exactly one trick.