The Host's Cheat Map
In this world, resources matter. Enormously.
Enough that wars break out over them. A country that is nothing but desert can become obscenely rich on oil alone, and natural gas can give birth to entirely new forms of energy. Civilization never advances without resources trailing right behind it. In a sense, a nation's strength can be measured by how much of this planet's finite buried wealth it holds.
Which is why America has always drawn the joke that it is the host's cheat map. The land is simply stuffed with every kind of resource. Even now, in a modern age when people say everything worth digging up has already been dug up, new resources and new energy sources still keep bursting onto the scene often enough that the phrase itself has become a cliché.
That did not change in the new world people call hunter society.
Hunters and dungeons are things modern civilization simply cannot explain, so of course no real answer ever emerged to the question of why only America. A few theories did surface, though.
For one, America has a great many strong hunters. The population is large; hunters from other countries get recruited for the privileges of living in a superpower; and paired with overwhelming military might, they clear dungeons aggressively. The land is vast, so the sheer number of dungeons is high to begin with, and because they clear higher-rank dungeons than other nations, resource-bearing dungeons turn up in proportion. For now, that was the most plausible guess.
Plausible. Not certain.
India and China, which hold the largest populations on earth, have been chasing America's heels along much the same lines, and still the world's greatest holder of resources remains the United States. That has not changed. Even America does not have enough of what the dungeons yield. Imports fall short, and across the globe the price of dungeon resources — the so-called new-dungeon energy — climbs by the day. These days people say that mindlessly buying stocks tied to dungeon resources makes more money than actually going to work.
Which is to say: resources that come out of dungeons are money.
But even dungeons do not produce all that many of them.
My Secret Farming Map has so many that the word unmeasurable applies.
"That changes things."
When I first saw that the login-logout cooldown was seven days, I hadn't thought much of it. What kind of game makes logging in and logging out take seven days a pop? Might as well not play. Games are supposed to work that way — if it pisses you off, you walk. I'd already been on the fence about whether I'd even bother if I ever got my original map back, so I'd figured it was just as well.
Now, for a number of reasons, I had found my reason to play the Secret Farming Map again. Which meant I had to revise my judgment on login and logout.
"I need to cut the cooldown."
Coming out once every seven days isn't really a serious problem. I still don't even know how many points it takes to raise the level. But I was sure that being able to come and go often would be better.
Right now, the most I can expect to bring out is D-rank wood, stone, and weeds, so it hardly matters. Before long, though, I'll be mining at least up through C-rank and B-rank resources. Gather a decent pile of farming points, unlock a few active skills or abilities, and by the time I'm digging up resources worth selling, I'll raise the relevant stat enough to make logging in and out a little less painful.
Once I'd sorted that out, this stretch of time felt far too precious to waste.
"The dungeon isn't what matters."
SSS+ rank hunter or whatever else they wanted to call me — there was no reason to go hunting for pocket change when I had resources piled up in my own backyard.
I was about to log in on the spot, then caught myself.
"...Still. It's seven days."
Rushing is fine, but when a new system shows up, it pays to go through it carefully, one piece at a time. More than anything, I had never even imagined a situation like this unfolding — and yet, under the what-if I had once daydreamed about, I was now in a position to actually make those things happen.
Back during Farming World's heyday — well, the very brief moment it had shone — the lively Farming World community had been full of posts like these.
It wasn't as if I wanted some grand feast. Players who had ground away building a base just to soak in Farming World's signature healing atmosphere would sit beneath a night sky crowded with stars, drink in the wilderness, and miss the food of the modern world.
And I had become the first human who could actually have it.
I stepped right back out of the room, opened the pantry, and pulled out a small pink carry-on. Then I crammed the snacks, the ramen, and the cup noodles from the kitchen and the pantry into it.
"What are you doing?"
"Snacks for the dungeon."
A dungeon or the Secret Map — going in was going in either way. I packed the suitcase full of snacks and dragged it out, and only then did my brat of a little sister notice me and lose her mind.
"Hey. What the hell. Why are you trashing my suitcase."
"I'll use it and bring it back."
"Oh, piss off. Give it back! You wanna die?"
In the old days, that pint-sized little bitch would have walked all over me. She doesn't look it, but she awakened somewhere around D-rank or C-rank and runs dungeons as a hunter. Right now, though, I am an SSS+ rank hunter with Strength, Agility, and Endurance all at S.
"Nngh! What the—!"
I push her forehead back with one finger and shut her down without effort.
"What the hell. You!"
I ignore her, step into my room, lock the door behind me, and call out.
"Log in."
Logging into the Secret Farming Map.
It isn't a dream.
A shabby hut, and a yard in front of a door that has only just been pried open. The little kitchen garden was honestly worse than the vegetable patches old folks tend in front of their houses — nothing but window dressing so you could half-ass the tutorial — embarrassing to call the property of a ten-year Farming World veteran. Inside the wooden crate, Big Rat meat had been added to the stores.
"First, into the cooler."
I couldn't just haul anything and everything from reality over here. Wondering whether it was even possible, I'd worn a few things, stuffed a couple into the two empty bread-and-water slots left on my belt, and carried the rest in my hands. Whatever I'd been holding vanished. Only the items in the belt inventory survived.
Whether the rest was still back in reality or had been erased entirely, I couldn't say. What I did know was that the suitcase packed with food had come through safely, stored in the inventory — and so had one other thing. The cooler.
I open it and put the meat inside. It's a fairly large cooler, but Big Rat meat is so huge that not even half of it fit. Until I mine the resources to build a refrigerator, short-shelf-life meat like this is a nuisance; there's no way to keep it except to eat through it fast. Early on you don't usually have the leisure to stockpile meat while watching expiration dates, so it's a happy problem. Still. I'll just have to keep eating it. What else is there to do.
And piece by piece, I start learning how this works.
"Figures. Inventory stacks go by the package."
This was a concept already proven in the original Farming World. Put several items into a storage inventory, then place that inventory inside another, and the whole thing occupies a single stack. Fill each slot of a five-slot item pouch with wood, stone, and other resources, and the pouch amounts to six items in all — but pack it and slot it in, and it only takes up one space.
Whether the same rule applied to objects from reality could only be proven by my own experiment. Even the suitcase, which has no item-storage effect of its own, was treated as a single item slot, which meant the dozens of foods inside it had come along safely in one belt slot.
Efficient. The reverse is possible too, so when I'm carrying materials out — seven slots, and some of those have to hold weapons — I'll be able to keep it in mind while filling the limited inventory I've been allotted.
"Snacks and ramen can just go wherever."
The basic hut has a tiny sink and a shelf, the sort of thing you'd see in a cramped little studio. They put it there so you can cook and eat, I suppose, and now the top of it is buried under snacks and ramen. I brought a mountain of seasonings, too. In Farming World you can grow crops, or buy them in the village with farm points, but hauling them over from reality is far cheaper.
The mansion may be gone, but my heart felt a great deal steadier.
"God, this is nice."
When I was little, I once built my own bunker on the small veranda of my room, walling it off with blankets. Snacks and treats I'd secretly squirreled away, bit by bit, inside the bedding closet. The leisure of pulling a blanket over my head and reading fantasy novels I'd borrowed on the sly from the book rental shop, late into the night.
This wasn't some shoddy bunker like that. It was a real one, mine alone — a perfect other world that only I could enter — and already the feeling of it was pouring off a few packs of ramen, a handful of snacks, and a cooler.