This is the current story stuck in my head. Thanks brain, I wasn't done with the last one. It fits in well with the Fantasy Farmstead series, though it is not a modern fantasy. Had the desire to explore the rural areas of Anoria this time. It's concurrent with 'The Harbinger of Wrath' and 'Demon in Lianzhen' and is the same world as 'Modern Benton Cove'. This is also an experimentation with a story fully written in first person.

I almost missed the entryway. The path from the road to the courtyard, assuming it had a courtyard, was so overgrown that it was indistinguishable from the surrounding forest. A small stone pillar set next to one side of the gateway was covered with moss and stained with time. With two simple letters it stated that the gateway and the land that lay beyond belonged to Han. Well I guess I wouldn't need to buy a new marker. Clean it up, yes. The gateway itself was in particularly poor shape. One of the two pillars stood straight and tall, the other leaned dangerously into the forest, likely held in place by the rotting and sagging beam that made up the top spar. The lower spar was broken. Half of it hanging limply from the straight pillar. The other half likely lost among the detritus of the forest floor. The whole thing looked ready to fall over.

"Thing will probably fall on me someday."

I found the house. Or what I assumed was the house. Honestly if I hadn't known ahead of time that there was supposed to be a house, I don't think I would have recognized the lopsided mound of debris that looked mostly like a moss and brush covered hill. The root cellar was mostly intact. The door was rotted, but still somewhat functional. The roots of bushes and trees that shouldn't have been on the roof poked through the ceiling and wound down the walls. Worse case scenario I guess I could sleep in here, but the roof was probably going to need replacing. The rice paddies were… well, they were forests with an equally forested berm around them. I didn't really know the ins and outs of rice cultivation yet, but trees in the brems probably didn't do good things for water retention. Another mound hinted at a shed or chicken coop or something, but the pile didn't tell me much.

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I stood in the center of what might have been the courtyard and rubbed my neck. This kind of sucked. Realistically I had expected to start with nothing albeit a bit closer to civilization. This place was not only on the edge of Mizuyamachi, it was on the edge of the empire as a whole. Sitting on the line that made up the end of the world, if I had been looking at a map, the mountains in the distance would have "here be dragons" written along their peaks. For all its negatives though, it was practically free. Yes I needed to build a house and clear the land with less starting money than I was hoping, but this opportunity was setting me at least five years ahead of schedule. Disappointing that the land was this overgrown and the house was basically gone, but if I could clear and rebuild this year, I could seriously consider finding a wife and starting a family. This was good. This would work. That or I'll starve. I need an axe. And a saw. I needed a lot of things.