Authors note: Comments and advice are welcome
One of the guards armed with a spear escorted Dwyn out and continued herding him.
“Before you can start working off your damages, you must get the gardener class, and there’s only one woman in the village that has it, and can teach you. Her name is Paeral.” After giving Dwyn a brief meaningful glance he continued “If you think that escaping from the village is a good idea, remember that what you’ve done so far were pranks. An escaped convict gets a bounty put on his head.”
The guard escorted a silent and sulking Dwyn to one of the mud houses on the very edge of the forest. This house was particularly small and had an unusual garden. It was also the only garden in the village, as wood elves usually prefer nature as it is. The guard knocked on the door and left without a word.
“Yes? Who are you?” Paeral asked as she opened the door. The smell of fresh earth, and flowers followed her out.
‘Oh great. She’s ancient. Why does my luck suck with boring old people.’
“Hi, umm, my name is Dwyn and I’m here to get the gardening class from you” He meekly said.
“Oh you.” Paeral said with either tiredness or disappointment in her expression. It was hard to tell due to all the wrinkles.
She turned around and walked indoors and waved him in. Inside the cottage, and without any nosy guards around, her attitude quickly turned bitter and hostile.
“Now listen here you little shit” Autor’s note: I just had to use this. HAD TO
‘whoa, what?’ Dwyn was too surprised by the sudden change for any coherent thoughts.
“I’ve heard all sorts of wonderful things about you.” She said with a sinister wrinkly old smile “If you try any of them here, they will be considered a capital offence. You get one chance to learn the class before I stop cooperating, and you have to pass the same tests that anyone who actually wants the class would.”
‘aaargh’ Dwyn rolled his eyes
“FINE, I’ll take the damned tests and get this over with quickly. That way maybe we can get out of each others’ hair faster.”
“Why that sounds wonderful my horrible young apprentice, but that was also my idea. I was trying to warn you of the difficulty of these tests for those that have no patience or prior knowledge.” And then she added as an afterthought “Only because I have to of course.”
“Got it. Now let’s get started. The sooner this is over the better.” ‘This one will need some sort of special revenge’
“Stop making grimaces, you’re plenty ugly as you are. I’ve already told you not to rush. The first of your tests will be growing one of each of the seeds from that brown cabinet. Upper drawer”
“There’s like hundreds of these. Are you seriously telling me …”
“One from each cup special child. You’re obviously a grade above stupid” Paeral muttered the last one, but in a way to make sure Dwyn heard her.
Dwyn was getting exasperated dealing with her, and her constant stream of insults. “So, take one of each, stick ‘em in the dirt and water them until I can leave your rotten old ass.”
“That’s just the first test I’m afraid. Once you’re done I suppose you should come find me again. Take a bunch of each of them. I don’t want to see you too often, special though you are”
“So, there’s thirty of them. Should I pluck whatever grows, and bring it back?”
“No. Leave them there. You will need them for your next test, now please leave already. I am old after all and get tired easily.”
Dwyn placed the seeds in his inventory and left reminding himself about the consequences for failing the class test. He did not want to deal with any more problems from Royal Road, so he resolved to postpone his revenge on her.
‘I can be patient. You’ll see. Maybe I should leave them a memento of some sort when I’m about to leave? I must remember to shift the blame on someone else this time.’
When he noticed he was on the fenced edge of the village and alone, he decided to plant one of each seed there. He made sure to water them from his beginner’s canteen and had to go refill it twice at the creek. Once done he logged off.
‘I should see how to get this quickly done. Someone probably posted info about it online. Let’s do a quick search’
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DDorrie says:
Gardeners have thests? OMG, like who would even bother LOL.
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The first result had him clenching his fists and wanting to hurt someone, but he persevered.
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Gladys37 says:
I have some expertise gardening, so I took the chance to explore the level of detail and diversity that this game which boasts so much on it has. I was pleasantly surprised that you could find most real plants as well as those obviously unnatural ones. There is some tediousness to the fact that you must prove yourself to some virtual person before you can fully explore it, however this method is far faster than doing it on your own, which appears to take…
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
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At that point he skimmed the rest and found nothing useful.
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Flo_Evie says:
This has some uses for me because I’m an alchemist, but gardeners are really rare, and almost always NPC’s and they give me some stupid quest or another for them that I can’t do because I can’t fight. I’m an alchemist for Christ sake.
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…
The list went on and on, and some 15 minutes after he had a fully blown headache, he found that to grow the seeds he would need different soils, amounts of space, time, water and sunlight. Some even needed mana and special liquids, but those were too high leveled for him. Also the number of tests was anywhere between one and five. All of the tests were about maintaining and growing plants.
After image searching (because he could not identify his seeds), he recognized some and read about what to do with them.
When he once again returned in game, he found 28 out of thirty of his plants hadn’t made it through the night. And one looked sickly. The one that seemed to thrive was a purplish short thorn bush. It was shorter than his ankle, and all of the original grass that was there the day before had died around it.
‘Is this one territorial? Let’s take a snapshot for later reverse image searching.’
Done with that he went around the village planting the 10 seeds that he could read about on the internet. Next to each of them he planted one of each of the others, at varying distances. Three of the seeds he had were parasitic mushrooms that grew on other plants. Knowing nothing else about them he placed them on some trees, each other, and bushes.
The original 10 grew without problem in the next few days. He even identified another 5 seeds on the internet. He got lucky with six others, and the purple thorn bush was called loneshrub because it poisoned nearby ground, and therefore other plants. It was also useful in making weak poisons. Another plant dawnbloom was great at healing curses and other afflictions. Most of the others were useless.
Once Dwyn reached the point where he still had 8 plants to go, he was starting to get impatient. None of them would grow where the others would, and Dwyn was stuck in the village and running out of places to test them. He worried that he would fail the test and that he was set up with an impossible task.
While refilling his flask his thoughts started to wander. ‘Shit need to water them again. I have less and less time to do anything other than watering them since there are only 8 left. Where can I put them…..Is it the amount of water? ... Or mayb…’
As he was thinking he finally took a good look in front of himself.
“The creek” He shouted “Maybe they’re…” Dwyn stopped talking and put one of each of the seeds in the creek and watered the others. In the end all but one grew underwater, or on the creek’s edge.
Dwyn struggled with the last one for another three days before he got so angry he threw the rest of them out in frustration. “THIS IS :)$%#(/%”#$);”*!`<#. These are obviously broken”
As he stood there panting after his outbreak only one unwelcome thought kept returning to him. ‘If I don’t find them and finish this $#!& test I’ll have to deal with that Paeral again’ So with great reluctance he set out to find the thrown seeds. Searching for them in the tall grass was challenging for Dwyn. It took him another three screaming episodes to finally find only five seeds.
For another two days he tried to find a suitable spot, and when he futilely used the last of the seeds, his only choice remained to go back to Paeral and get some more. As soon as he started walking there was a ~Ding~.
You have successfully completed the first test. Return to Paeral.
‘What? But what happened to the last one?’
Thinking that maybe it was among those he threw away, he made his way to that place and saw a vine like plant growing out of several cracks in stone wall that made a small cliff.
‘So this one grows in stone’ he thought, and once again headed to Paeral's hut.