Homesteading in a fantasy world

For the next week, I fell into quite a lovely schedule. During the next week, I taught a class on basic energy control. Since there were quite a few interested whom I deemed good enough, I also decided that after the basic energy control class, I would do an intermediary energy control class.

Everyone was so excited when I started this new class, but as I explained what they would need to learn, their expressions changed from excited to worried, as they needed to learn quite a lot and by the end of this class would need to gain the energy storage stat.

I had been quite curious for a while why energy storage could be unlocked by an action, but since then, I have come to learn that there are a few other stats that you can unlock by doing certain things.

For example, the constitution stat can be unlocked by causing constant damage to yourself and then rapidly healing it by drinking potions or being healed by a healer. It was an incredibly painful and expensive way to gain a stat unlock, and usually, you would get the stat from a class if you needed it anyways.

Now, probably a lot of the ways to unlock different stats have been kept hidden by the groups who discovered them, but I wasn’t going to keep the way I discovered a secret. One of the ways I’ve heard to unlock the luck stat, and this is something quite well known, although no one I’ve spoken to has been able to pull it off.

Even though I give it a go ever so often, and I even tried cheating it, it unfortunately didn’t work if you cheat. You need to leave it completely up to chance. You just simply have to take a coin and then flip it. It doesn't matter which side it lands on. To get the luck stat unlocked, all you have to do is flip it another 49 times and have it land on the same side.

Now, David actually did the math and told me that doing something like this should be impossible, but since there is actual documentation that someone managed to do it, even David couldn’t argue that if you were one of the few people to pull it off, you would get the luck stat unlocked.

I have gotten up to seven without cheating, but most likely, if an event has an absolute near-zero possibility of happening and you manage to make it happen, you will probably unlock the luck stat. This, of course, didn't stop people from trying, but now I at least knew that reaching that far would probably never happen for me.

After that, I always went into my office to do some paperwork, but fortunately, I really didn’t have that much to do. Soon, I could go into the acquisition warehouse where I looked over new unique materials that had been found, classified them, and wrote down the properties I could detect.

After that, it was time to get back home and chop down some more wood. When I had enough of it, I used my ability so the lumber would be ready faster. Then, I started to dig out the foundation for the bow workshop.

On a rainy Tuesday, when I was in my office finishing some paperwork, I heard a knock on the door. "Come in," I said, and one of the secretaries walked in with quite a thick bundle of papers. "The peace treaty terms arrived from the queen. Before everyone signs, we are having everyone read them over."

She was about to continue, but I held up my hand to stop her. "Why is that bundle of papers so big? The peace treaty should only cover one-fourth, if not less, of a standard paper. And if it includes the payment plan, I can understand if it’s one, maybe two pages, but why are you holding something that looks like a book?"

She tried to open her mouth multiple times, but eventually said, "This is the paperwork they sent over for us to sign. From what David told me, it mostly just ensures that both sides uphold the same agreement. He also wanted some clarifications from you about what exactly is supposed to be in this agreement." When she finished, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath in and out. I indicated for her to give me the agreement, and I quickly skimmed only a few pages before I stopped.

"It seems she continues to want to play games. Could you please turn around for a moment?" She looked at me, confused, but did what I asked. I opened up one of the drawers attached to my table, pulled out a few papers, then placed the peace treaty at the bottom and the papers back on top. I closed the drawer.

"Tell David to write back to the queen and remind her that the peace agreement and the exact wording of it are already in effect. There's no need to sign any other agreement. Also, we should let her know that she owes us 2 million gold coins, and if she doesn't pay within 90 days since the start of the agreement, we will contact the World Council." She left after that.

That bitch of a queen. She wanted the peace agreement to go both ways, but I was quite deliberate with my words during the hearing. They can’t declare war on us or take any hostile actions, but we could whenever we wanted to. She tried to make the peace agreement both ways so we also couldn't declare war for the next 20 years on her or any of her allies. But I wasn’t going to take the bait.

With this agreement, we should be able to get quite a few other nations as allies simply because if they are our allies, she can't attack them as well. I so want to see her face, but more importantly, I would like to see the rage her bodyguard will experience when this plan of theirs doesn’t work. Hopefully, he kills some important figures; that would be so funny.

It actually made me feel a bit better, and when I looked out of the window, I saw that the sky was also clearing. Perhaps this will actually be a nice day. That wasn't actually the case because the secretary soon returned as an emergency meeting was called where I needed to explain everything once again.

It seems that from the last time, no one actually understood what this meant for us. But by the end of the meeting, I was actually terrified by all the ideas that everyone else came up with on how they could abuse this peace treaty. It almost made me feel bad for the queen, almost.

As I was looking at the finished foundations, I was a bit conflicted. Tim was working hard every day, yet if I were to start building, I would probably finish well before him. Perhaps I should take a break and visit my other apprentices.

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. So, for the next two weeks, the second half of the day, I spent going to my different apprentices' future homes, just talking to them, seeing how they were doing, and helping out a little bit.

Everyone was progressing well, and I was glad that everyone had hired competent help. I had hoped that my birthday would go unnoticed once again, but that didn't happen. So, I actually had to celebrate my 15th birthday.

I couldn’t believe that I had already been here for three years; it seems time has gone a little bit slower than it did during the last years I was on Earth but still fast. The celebrations weren’t anything fancy, and thanks to that, I could tolerate it, which was probably why everyone kept it small.

I left everyone else to celebrate while I returned home to find that Tim had started the sauna. He invited my old apprentices, as well as Val and his family, to have dinner as well. I liked that a little bit more than the celebration in the town hall.

It was nice to just spend some time talking about nothing and just joking around. The water was especially refreshing, but I was the only one who could enjoy it. However, I could see that Arthur had leveled up quite a lot, and I was quite certain that next year he wouldn't worry about how cold the water was.