After I ranked up my digging skill, I moved on to the next one, which was basic quarrying. It was quite easy to join the workforce there, and I was either put to work destroying rock into smaller fragments or cutting out large pieces of stone from the mountainside.

Once again, it took some time, but the constant work helped me quickly improve my skill, as did the tips from other more experienced workers. I was able to rank up my basic quarrying, getting once again three different ability choices.

This time, the choices weren't that good. The first choice was rock understanding, which I could already do. The second one was curved split. This would be useful for both fighting and crafting, but I could already do this by just manipulating energy.

So that only left the last one, rock enhancing. This one had more potential and after I picked it, I tested it out to find it quite useful. It basically just made the basic properties of a rock better. This unfortunately meant more work for me, as I would need to go and enhance the roads that we were building and every other military structure that would benefit from enhanced stone.

With that skill ranked up, I moved on to my basic mining. It was so much easier to mine when you could see everything as if the tunnels were flooded with sunlight. Thanks to me not having to sleep so often, I was able to continue working almost without rest, which helped my skill level up fast. It still took some time and it was getting close to harvesting season, but I was able to rank up the basic mining skill before I needed to return.

This time, the choice was incredibly hard as all three abilities would be useful: earth sense, ore sense, and ore insight. I deliberated this choice for quite a while as every single ability had its uses, but in the end, I picked earth sense as this was the most encompassing and something that I couldn’t do at all currently. After I picked it, I almost passed out from the rush of information. I had truly made the correct decision as earth sense synergized with my interactive map.

So now, slowly, with the connection I had to the land and the nation itself, my interactive map was slowly being updated with everything that was underneath the earth. I needed to suppress the information as much as possible so I could function and would later go through it. It would take quite a while before it was done, so now I said goodbye to all my coworkers and headed back home. I still visited quite often to give my apprentices new challenges, but I was away most of the time.

As I was checking up on everything, I happened to see three eggs lying in a corner, laid by a chicken. When I went to pick them up, I received a notification. "Finally," I said out loud as my basic animal product harvesting finally ranked up. That had taken so long. Checking the abilities offered, I was a bit disappointed. The three abilities were animal tracking, quick skinning, and animal diet.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Nothing really jumped out at me. I didn’t need an extra ability to find out an animal's diet and while quick skinning would be nice, I didn’t have the other abilities that would make this truly useful. That left animal tracking and while I could already do this, it was the best choice out of the three, so I picked that one. I was only disappointed for a few moments as I remembered it was time for harvesting, which brought a wide smile to my face.

This year, the weather hadn't been so perfect and there had been a lot of storms with a lot of lightning. But currently, the weather was pleasant and would be for a week or two. It was time to start the harvest and this time we split into different groups based on what everyone enjoyed the most. My old apprentices joined me and it was nice to once again see George's baby. It was so cute but it was too young to even crawl around yet, but it shouldn’t take too long until that happened.

While the others started to tackle the regular crops, I worked on my evolution project. It seems that at least half reverted back to their previous state and about 1/3 of the remaining half evolved in a completely different way. The rest kept their current evolution or deepened that evolution.

So about 2/3 of the harvest was useless for my evolution project but they could still be used as food. The rest fell into three categories: new and interesting evolutions, same evolutions as previous, or deepening of the desired evolution.

What I was looking for was making plants that were specifically useful at something. One thing that I was focusing on was making them more nutritious so they would give more calories. That way, you could eat less but still get the calories needed to keep going.

Of course, I also tried to boost the vitamin amount but I only had little success with this. The more interesting was to increase the sugar amount and specific proteins that would help make more interesting alcohol.

When I was done and had packed my seeds for the next year, I helped others with the more difficult jobs. Some of my apprentices constantly needed to make food as this was hard work making our bodies extremely hungry.

The atmosphere was lovely and the days rolled by. We had already learned from last harvest so this time everything went even smoother. And when we were finally done with my land, we moved on to Emma and George's land. Harvesting their land took a lot less time, especially with all my current apprentices helping.

Transporting the extra harvest back to the town was a lot easier as the road was almost finished. Currently, the work had stopped as everyone was working on harvesting but within the next week or so after the harvest, the road would be completed and construction of the swamp dungeon road would begin. Most of my apprentices went to help harvest around the town while I went back and started to work on the planted trees.

I went over every one of them, making sure that they were healthy and trimmed off a few unnecessary branches that had grown or mixed the soil so they would have the nutrients they required.

This took quite a while and the harvest was finally over for everyone. Things slowly got back to normal but many started to already prepare for the winter ahead. For me, it was time to start making more bows and finally put the finishing touches on the book I was writing for the goblins.

Weeks went by and I was able to rank up my bow making skill to the advanced rank. There was only one choice that looked promising so I picked that one. Quick craft was an ability that I hadn’t heard about but the name itself promised great things.

When I started to test it out, I realised I had gotten an amazing ability that was on the level of material modification. It gave me insight on how to craft faster but not only that, it also seemed to bend time a bit so I could craft faster than normally possible.

With that, I was able to accelerate my bow making a lot but I also finally finished the crossbow book I wanted to make. Writing was still quite hard for me but not because of the technical side, it was just unfamiliar. My body was dexterous enough that I could perfectly copy any letter, but that didn't mean I didn't accidentally slip into a more familiar language every once in a while. It was finally time to go visit the goblins.