Homesteading in a fantasy world

It was actually quite refreshing to feel like a human again, as I was sleeping now every night, and that seemed to be helping me recover a bit faster. Every few days, a healer also comes and helps with their magic, but having such a powerful body as mine comes with negative aspects as well, especially when it actually gets hurt.

I still can't believe that they actually managed to damage my bones, but I guess it makes sense because rank two people could fight against dragons, so it makes sense that they could hurt my bones.

With the apprentice here, we were slowly getting the equipment ready for the harvest. This year, there were also some fruits to get and nuts from the trees that I planted. The best yield was 18 cherries, and what a wonderful taste they had.

There was also a pleasant surprise. Normally, if you plant apple seeds or any other tree seeds, you won't actually get the same type of apple with the same taste; it's completely random and usually not so tasty.

Now, however, I could dive into the seed and see what characteristics the seed had, and when compared with the tree the seeds came from, I could get a pretty good indication of what the fruit will taste like.

It’s, of course, a rough guess, as I would actually need to grow the seeds to understand the structure I can see with my ability and the different markers to understand what they exactly mean. This meant that I had to do tree planting next spring.

One of the seeds that I got from the goblins was an interesting bush-type plant that produced slightly glowing berries. It took me quite a while to look through my plant books that I purchased a little while back to find out that they were an ingredient for a mana restoration potion.

It wasn't the best potion, but it certainly wasn't the worst, and growing the other ingredients would not be too hard. I opened my notebook so I could make an entry to bring this up in a future meeting.

There were quite a lot of books on every surface in my bedroom and the living room. Seems like I need to make a bookshelf. It was a quick few hours of work, but it was still quite lovely. After the harvest, I should also continue to teach energy control and manipulation.

There was also the demon spell book I needed to continue to help decipher. So many things to do. It was quite fun to make the bookshelf because I was just one of many on the homestead doing things, and it was quite nice to feel people doing normal things around me.

The harvest didn’t start on a certain day. For example, vegetables were harvested throughout the later half of the summer, especially cucumbers and tomatoes, which continued to produce fruits over time.

Also, some of the root vegetables were already taken out of the ground, so we could already cook with them. These fresh ingredients were quite lovely. Yet, when I felt the plants were ready, we started with the potatoes.

The work was incredibly fast, almost too fast, and I would have made everyone take more breaks if it was just our land that we were harvesting. Next were root vegetables, and then it was time for the grains.

With my broken body, everyone else was able to keep up with me. But that was only because I was still collecting evolved seeds, although I was just collecting them and not thoroughly investigating them, as I could do that later.

The reason why we were in such a hurry was because the weather wasn’t going to be nice for long, and this year the raining season was going to be quite awful. Even though we were rushing, it was still a nice time as we were still constantly talking to each other, even if there was an undercurrent of sadness from all the lost soldiers.

Currently, a lot of people were working on retrieving as many of our fallen as possible so they could be brought back and properly buried.

I was not looking forward to those ceremonies because every soldier who died was the fault of me not being strong enough. I knew that wasn’t a completely correct statement, but it would still be incredibly hard to tell the grieving family members or friends about the death of their loved one.

Francis had also finally made it back here, which meant that we could load up quite big carts for him to bring back to the capital. Everything that had even a little bit of purpose was saved from the harvest and transported to the appropriate location before we moved on to Emma’s and George’s lands and started to harvest what they had planted.

Emma had quite a lot of plants that weren’t for food but for fabric. Making clothes to resist the winter was also quite important. George had basically what I had, although I found it quite interesting that he had even more potatoes planted than me.

When that was done, we continued to move forward towards the capital, but there were still two pieces of land owned by my former apprentices on the way. It was there where I finally leveled up my farming to the expert rank.

Like always there was a choice of three abilities: Targeted Soil, Fast Crop Growth and Sustainable Ecosystem. Fast Crop Growth was out as I didn't like that, which left Targeted Soil and Sustainable Ecosystem.

I have lived in this world for quite a while now, and I have read and listened to a lot of information about skills and what abilities you could get, but I hadn’t heard about these two. It was honestly disgusting how many variations and simply the amount of abilities this system had.

Apparently, there were entire libraries full of information about different abilities and even skills and classes, but it seems no matter how much they tried to plan and find out everything, this system always seemed to be surprising us all.

Both of those abilities kind of sounded like they did the same thing, but I guess Targeted Soil was a lot more direct but also had larger limitations. Now, this was just a guess, but I expect if you target soil with this ability, other things would not find living there nice.

This could be quite good for combating weeds, but the name just sounded off to me. I don't know why, but it was giving me the same vibes as Fast Crop Growth. So, I picked Sustainable Ecosystem.

As we continued to harvest, I started to test out my new ability. I found it less of an ability that could change things, but more of an ability that could inform you, though it did have some capability to change things.

The information I got was actually brilliant, and it seemed to even connect with my map ability. It was incredibly surprising when it suggested to introduce a bug that was living in one of the forested areas in our nation to the grain field, as it apparently liked to eat one of the more annoying parasites that damaged grain stocks. What a wonderful ability to add to my repertoire.

Finally, the letter with my verdict arrived, but since it wasn’t accompanied by rank three guards, it meant it was a positive one. The letter itself was incredibly long and filled with diplomatic jargon, but the important thing was that I was cleared of charges and even got 300,000 gold coins in compensation.

Whoever the queen had supporting her had quite the connections, as it was quite hard to find who actually accused me in the letter, but I had gotten quite good at reading this language. I really needed to do something about that queen, and I wondered why she was so threatened by me.

Well, Mirhit should have some free time now; he should start gathering information about the nations to the south, and hopefully, he has the reach to start spying on the Queen's nation.

Hopefully, she won't actually be a competent ruler, and we could perhaps spark a few rebellions so she would finally understand that she should focus on her own country. After that, I got back to work, and I was quite pleased that working seemed to actually help me recover faster.