Homesteading in a fantasy world

Another summer was coming to an end. Today, however, was one of the most beautiful days I’ve had on this planet. The temperature was just perfect, and the breeze was still nice and warm. The sun was high up, but it wasn't burning like it would have been during mid-summer.

Now, I’ve had days like this before, but the added smell of sweet fruits just made it perfect. The trees that I planted were now big enough that some of them began to give fruit in a decent enough quantity. For apples, it was about 5 per tree, but that was enough to fill the whole area with a nice smell.

It was amazing to see the trees continue to grow so well, and I could just imagine the future for us that we were going to have. It will truly be a wonderful place to be, especially during the end of the summer.

"Tim, I know that we agreed that we would use the fruits to make cider, but I think we should also use some of the harvest to make pies and eat a few," I said while picking one of the apples and biting into it.

The juice was so wonderful, and from the corner of my eye, I could see Tim nodding his head while picking a plum and eating it. He had the same wild grin on his face that I was certain I had.

We started to harvest the fruits that were ready, and I had to be thankful that I was actually rich because I could use expanded bags as storage. Otherwise, it would have taken us a few trips and about a dozen filled potato sacks to finish the harvest.

However, in the future as the trees continue to grow, this will not be a few-hour job that we could do with only two people. When we were done, we walked past the pasture where my 2 cows were currently eating grass.

As we made it closer to the center of the homestead, I could hear and see the constant activity that was going on. A lot of the apprentices were preparing for the harvest, but some were working on joint projects or their own pursuits.

I was incredibly glad when one of the apprentices decided to pick up tin smithing. She seemed to enjoy it immensely and, to be honest, she already was better than me. For the practical devices, only a little bit of practice was needed and you would be good enough, but she was extremely good at making things look so good. While I could just make functional things, which I was happy with.

Teaching her and working on my own stuff allowed me to get past the basic rank and gave me a choice of abilities. The choices weren't really that exciting, but I think that I underestimated the choice that I actually made, but I was glad that I did choose it.

Dispersed Strike was an ability that I at first thought would be good for tin smithing because it would help you smooth out the tin and give everything a really nice finish. But what I didn't expect, but I should have, was that it could basically make my sword strikes also blunt attacks, giving me a completely different type of damage if I ever needed it.

While you could classify this as a situational ability, I have truly been enjoying this a lot. That was because of the joint project the apprentices, me, and Tim were working on. While the root cellar was working perfectly, it was obvious that it was too small and didn’t have room for different storage spaces with different requirements.

The one that we were building now was five times larger in floor space but also three times higher. It was a lot of digging, but we had finished that about a month ago and were now working on making the walls from stone.

That's where the dispersed strike had really come in handy. It was a lot easier to get everything in their proper place when you could just hit it really hard and not be afraid of the stone breaking.

We still had plenty of work to do as the whole structure was still completely open to the air, but currently, the project was on hold as we needed to start harvesting. “Attention everyone, tomorrow we will start the harvest of the fields, but today we have some baking to do.”

My voice wasn't loud, but it carried to every apprentice, and basically all of them immediately stopped working and took a few moments to understand my meaning. The smiles I saw also brought a smile to my face. We were going to eat well today.

The harvest had been going quite well, and we had about a week ago finished everything on our land. Now we were working on helping the nation harvest its massive field. The amount of food we were going to get was also the reason that the roads weren't built much this summer.

The capital needed a lot of stone and workforce to expand its storage by a lot. The rest of the workforce was dispersed throughout the many new outposts, or perhaps most of them should be called villages now. We have truly done a lot of building this year.

Everything was progressing nicely, but then I felt one of the message sticks break, and I quickly looked into my bag to see which one had broken. I breathed out a sigh of relief; it was the stick that would be broken if we heard back from the World Council offices about my application for creating my own organization.

Fortunately, the stick was broken from the top half, meaning that it wasn't urgent. I finished helping pack the current cart we were working on and then excused myself.

Back in my office, I read the letter I got. It was good news, especially because it seems that the hearing is a month away, so there is no need to hurry, and it seems they didn't find anything wrong with the paperwork. That was the good news, but thinking about it a little longer, it was weird that the wait was so long.

Most likely, it was because the queen and the support she has in the world council were planning something. That actually brought a smile to my face because I was actually now close to being healed and would be in about a week or so. I have not told anyone this, which probably means that whatever plan they are cooking up will most likely not work.

I went back and continued to harvest, but it was hard to keep the smile off my face. This was going to be fun. I was quite certain that they weren’t going to try something political, but this time, they might try something a little bit more direct.

Thinking about that bodyguard, I remembered that he had reached rank 3 in early summer this year. Oh, please tell me that they want to challenge me to a duel. That would be so perfect. I can’t wait to be able to once again fight and push myself like that. Hopefully, it would be a fight where I could actually kill him; that would devastate the power base the queen had.

The harvest finished a bit over two weeks after I received the letter. The last few days were a bit rainy, but we were able to get everything into storage before things got properly wet. It will take a little while before things truly start to get colder, but I could already see the weather turning towards winter.

The amount of food that we have gotten was stupidly large, and currently, a lot of caravans were probably reaching their destinations to bring winter supplies to all of the outposts, villages, and towns we had in our nation.

I had yet to visit our second-largest town that was on the coast, and I do kind of want to see it, but I will probably not be able to do so before the snows come. From my understanding, the town itself was a lot nicer during the summer than in the winter.

Fortunately, our portal engineer had been hard at work, and just recently, they were able to test an energy portal that they could power themselves. They said that they still have to work some kinks out, but that meant that before the next year, we would actually have energy-based portals that would be a lot more convenient to operate, as energy was a lot more abundant than mana for us.