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Village life was going as usual. It turned out that although everyone specialized with a specific plant, the main diet was still sweet potatoes. It wasn’t like there wasn't any other food available, more like sweet potatoes were the most affordable. There was no cash or checks used here, but a currency of purple crystals that looked like Amethyst. These crystals were the “money” here, and they were called coins.
Grandpa Jin sold ten anesthetic fruits for about five coins, and that could get us forty pounds of sweet potatoes, versus only one loaf of bread. Bread and rice were super expensive!
Finally figured out the real reason why sweet potatoes were so popular in our diet. The demons in the Land of Ruins were mostly pleasants who farmed. Of course, everyone did not have that kind of extra “cash” for any luxury foods, like bread and rice.
Grandpa Jin was not feeling great today, so I volunteered to go exchange the anesthetic fruits for some coins because we were running out of sweet potatoes. I swore if I kept on eating potatoes, one day my whole being would turn to a gigantic potato!
I didn’t dare, though, to use Grandpa Jin’s anesthetic fruits for some nice bread. Those were the last ten dry fruits that he had in the bag. He worked so hard on taking care of the fruit plants in the summer, and they did not produce that much fruit at all. Grandpa Jin had to use his magic arts to speed up the process. No wonder this was the Land of Ruins! It was not like we could just stick some sweet potato seeds in the soil, and they would grow merrily. Nothing grew easily on this land.
Now it was winter time, which made things even worse, even sweet potatoes were in shortage. There was only so much food you could store to survive the harsh winter. If it was before I would never imagine myself surviving winter through a bunch of sweet potatoes, but somehow willpower and endurance worked out, at least for the demons, not sure how long a human can last with such a mono-diet.
Well, having some potatoes was better than starving to death.
I picked up my speed because I did not want to be the last one to watch the sweet potatoes run out in front of my eyes. We still needed to wait at least two months for spring to come, by then, there would be more food available.
The sky and land merged together and it was difficult to tell them apart. The snowflakes fell softly onto my furry hat, and one of them even sat right on my eyelashes. The air was cold but refreshing at the same time. There was a light herby scent of burning wood in the air and the rising of gray smoke in another two miles, and that was direction toward the market.
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If it wasn’t for the thick layers of clothing, I would definitely turn to an icicle within five seconds; unsure of the type of fabric though, it felt a bit like some kind of animal skin and was super effective against the cold.
Probably a buffalo’s skin?
That was my initial thought, but then considering the last time the old couple ate buffalo was at least 50 years ago. Buffaloes were extremely rare here. If that was not made with buffalo skin, then what kind of animals could that be?
It was impossible to find any wild animals here. The land was so infertile that no organisms could survive, even if there was one, would be soon hunted down by the villagers. I had not seen any other creatures except for demons or occasionally a tiny bird silently gliding through the sky. There was not even a chicken here! Of course, assuming that there were wild chickens in the Aniesian Continent which was not plausible.
I was actually tempted to stick out my tongue and get a taste of a snowflake, but gave up on this idea because a frozen tongue was probably not the most comfortable feeling to have.
As a gust of wind soared across land, I shivered up to my spine and hugged the bag of fruits tighter toward my chest. The snow was slowly getting worse, and finally turned into a pretty bad blizzard. It was so windy that it almost blew me away. My face was probably super red due to the harsh cold wind, that it felt like a million needles on the skin. It would be nice to have a sled and a group of cute huskies dragged me across this white land. That would have been so much better, but all I had were my two feet stabbing through the thick snow.
The Land of Ruins was really a tough place to survive, so barren and lacking resources. Survival was probably the only thing in mind, and no wonder the commoners here never got their first pair of wings. They did not have time to cultivate the holy pearls, just thinking how to survive day by day, probably taking enough time and left no spare time for cultivation.
That was just my thought, and by no means did I actually know the real reason.
Passing by a row of evergreen trees, I marched on despite the low visibility. Good thing I went with Grandpa Jin to the market a couple times, so at least I knew the direction. In my old life, I had no sense of direction. Ever since arriving on the Aniesian Continent, I was regularly getting trained on survival skills, and direction was one of them.
“Aiyaaa----------!”
Something in the snow tripped me, I stumbled and fell hard in the snow. My whole face was covered in snowflakes, and slowly melted into water beads. I frowned and tried to wipe my face with the back of my hand. As I tried to reach the burlap bag, suddenly realized that my left foot could not even budge an inch.
It felt as if…………..
THERE WAS A FREAKING HAND GRABBING ON MY ANKLE!