The drive back out to the farm was a lot more pleasant than the drive into town. I wasn’t worrying about the wheels falling off or the pull of the steering wheel sending me careening off the shoulder of the road. Compared to how the car had been when I took it into the mechanics that morning, Carl had worked a miracle. It felt like a completely different vehicle.

It was a bit difficult to get my head around the fact that there was a monster core in the center of the engine, and six tiny little water monster cores which were causing the reaction that made my truck go. And along with that, heat resistant slime jelly kept the whole thing cool. Technology based on monster parts was something that I was going to have to get my head around.

When I got back to the farm, I was surprised to see a trio of slimes waiting right in the middle of the driveway. They were strange looking things, half translucent pudding, half quivering jelly, with bizarre floating eyeballs in the middle that swiveled towards me as I brought the car in front of them. If I just drove over them, they’d probably gum up the wheels and the axles of the truck, so I brought the truck to a stop and stepped out.

This got the slimes very excited, and they started quivering as they moved in my direction. At first, I thought they were just going to move towards me like snails, but those twitchy motions that they made quickly turned into full on hops and jumps as they squished and squelched towards me.

I drew my sword as I approached them, but I wanted to get a bit of an idea of their attack patterns. If these things were like slimes that were in any of the video games and tabletop games from my world, they were probably corrosive and could melt flesh from bones. I didn’t want to risk dying on my very first day in this new life.

These slimes were around the size of a small dog, like a Pomeranian or Chihuahua, and they were cute in their own grotesque floaty-eyeball kind of way. They often took a second or so to charge up before bouncing towards me when they meant to attack, so it was pretty easy to telegraph their attack patterns.

I waited for the first slime to launch itself at me before stepping to the side and slashing through with my sword. The sun gleamed off the blade, and I understood why my grandpa gave it the name Sunstrike. The blade passed through the mucosal membrane keeping the slimes insides in. From the moment the integrity was compromised, the jelly inside gushed out like a burst water balloon. There was a tiny little bit of gelatinous goop in the middle of the slime’s corpse, and a window from my farmer’s insight appeared when I hovered my hand over it.

Slime Gel

Elemental affinity: None

Small slimes don’t have a core. Instead, they have a clump of gel. Once a slime reaches a certain size this gel clump may harden into a core, but not always. This gel can be used in cooking, alchemy, medicine, and many other things.

I quickly grabbed the slime gel as the other two slimes lurched towards me in similar jumping and lunging attacks. They were not really much of a threat, but I imagined that if you were ambushed by a pack of twenty of these things and they managed to overwhelm you, that could be a problem. I saw a pair of eyes floating inside each of those slimes, but I couldn’t see anything that resembled a brain. They were probably pretty dumb, which certainly worked for me.

The little glob of slime gel that I had picked up had already solidified into a squishy yet dry lump. It didn’t have a smooth appearance, with lumps poking out here and there, but at least the slime gel in this form wasn’t trying to eat me. I slipped it into my pocket as I side-stepped the incoming slimes.

I killed the last two slimes and took their gels as well. This time though I watched the process of the gel solidifying in my hand. It was like almost all the liquid that surrounded the gel clump at the center of these slimes evaporated when it hit the air. Maybe the mucosal membrane that held the slimes together also protected their volatile liquid insides from evaporating under the harsh heat of the sun. I tried to see if I could grab a couple of the slime eyeballs as well, but they were some of the first things to start breaking down.

I can’t explain why I had the sudden urge to lick the slime gel, but I did. I guess it’s that same compulsion that people had way back when I was in my 30s to start putting laundry pods in their mouths. I was relatively sure that the slime gel wasn't going to be corrosive or dangerous, because I’d held three of them now without any problems. Plus, if the slime gel could be used in medicine it had to be safe.

The moment my tongue touched the outside of the slime gel my eyes widened in shock. It was absolutely delicious! It was sweet, yet had a tart element to it. I wondered where sweeteners came from in this world, because in the world I came from it mostly came from high fructose corn syrup, or refined sugar cane. Did the properties of the slime gel make it a prime candidate for confectionery and other sweet things?

I’d have to have a look through Grandpa Joe’s kitchen to see if there were any recipe books. The bodies of the three slain slimes were already pretty much gone by the time I got back into the pickup truck and headed back to the farmhouse. I reversed the truck into the barn, and I threw the protective black covering over it again.

Once inside, I put the groceries away while I boiled the kettle. I made myself a nice cup of coffee with my brand new coffee press, sweetening it with only a single teaspoon of raw sugar, then adding a dash of full cream milk. It was nowhere near as good as the coffee I’d had at Morning Ritual, but it would have to do.

I still had a couple of hours before sunset, and I really wanted to get both the cucumbers and the onions planted. I had a couple more hours between now and sunset and I really wanted to get both the cucumbers and the onions planted. I consulted Grandpa Joe’s handwritten notebook on both of those crops just to make sure I understood their optimal planting conditions, and then I headed out to start preparing a few more vegetable plots.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

I used the scythe to clear the fields, collecting more fiber and plant matter as I went. Then I used the rake to prepare the soil, and the hoe to prepare the planting rows. Onions didn’t need a whole lot of space in which to grow, so I could plant them closer together then I could plant the cucumber seeds. The cucumber seeds in this world would flourish into large leafy vines which took up quite a lot of room.

If I planted them too close together, the vines and root systems would entangle and they would compete with each other for sunlight and food. Grandpa’s notes said that this would provide a sub-optimal harvest, and the cucumbers that did grow would be small and would sell for less.

I prepared the plots in line with the instructions in Grandpa's notebook, using my farmer’s insight overlay to make sure that they were planted optimally. Once the seeds were planted, I watered them and headed inside. I’d picked up enough groceries to take care of myself for the next few days, and tonight I planned on having a simple, yet tasty meal of sirloin steak cooked medium-rare, gravy, and roasted potatoes.

I quartered some potatoes, leaving the skin on, and then season them with oil, garlic, salt, and pepper. I placed them in the oven at roasting temperature, and I left a single piece of steak on the counter to settle at room temperature. That was the secret to cooking thick steak well. Letting it rest equalized the temperature, ensuring a more even cook.

While I waited for the potatoes to roast, I decided to give the cornerstone of the fantasy genre in this world a go. The Insight of the Gods was quite different then what I expected it to be. It was epic fantasy in the truest fashion, but the central MacGuffin – which basically means the central object, device or event the entire plot turns around – was not an object like a ring that was once wielded by the Dark Lord.

No, the MacGuffin was a system.

It was an insight, gifted to the main character in a blessing from a dying god. The story definitely conformed to the chosen one trope, and I could see all the hallmarks of your basic Hero’s Journey kind of story here, including a wise old wizard that acted like a mentor to the plucky farm boy. The insight system was actually quite true to life, based on what I had seen of the farmer’s insight system here. But in this novel, it was called a hero system, and the chosen one was a young farm boy who was rewarded for doing good deeds and acting just like a hero should.

Insights in this world were real. The only experience I’d had with them so far was the farmer's insight that my Grandpa supposedly passed on to me upon his death. But I had no idea how he first obtained that insight, or whether others in this world had access to similar systems. The farmer’s insight was not an all-encompassing system like the one in The Insight of the Gods. It extended only so far as what I needed to know for being a farmer. I suddenly wondered whether Quinn had access to a coffee maker’s insight, or whether Carl had access to a mechanic insight system. Was it this commonplace in this world?

If these insight systems were the gifts from gods, then maybe normal folk didn’t have access to them at all. Maybe I was a freak, or rather my Grandpa had been a freak before me and decided to induct me into his multi-generational freakitude. Maybe I would need to go back to the bookstore and talk to the old lady who ran it. I still didn't know what her name was, but I had a feeling I would need to go back. Oftentimes fantasy novels were written with a grain of truth at the center.

What if Ronald Falkhurst, the author of The Insight of the Gods, had access to his very own insight system, and decided to use that as the basis for a series of novels? It wouldn’t be the first time an author has used their own personal experience to channel into a work of fiction, but the way that this was written made me think that maybe Ronald did have some extra insight.

I became lost in the book for about half an hour as the sun dipped over the horizon, and when I got up to turn the potatoes, I fired the cast iron pan up to the perfect steak grilling temperature. The stove top appeared to be an electric one, but I wondered just how that electricity was generated.

If this world didn't use fossil fuels, then was there some monster core fired power plant out there? I didn’t really need to worry about that at that moment, so I put it out of my mind. I poured a little oil in the pan and gently put the steak onto the sizzling pan.

It certainly looked like beef, smelled like beef, and after it was done and I was sitting down at the dinner table with my roast potatoes and fresh gravy, it certainly tasted like beef as well.

It was some of the most tender and mouth watering steak I ever had in my entire life. I hadn’t needed to tenderize it or season it with salt or pepper, the flavor was gorgeous even just on its own. Even the potatoes had a crispy outside with a smooth creamy roasted inside that just flooded my mouth with memories of home cooked roast meals with my family.

My grandma back in my other life, before she passed away, always had us come over for Sunday roast dinner. She was the reason I left the skin on my roast potatoes, because she insisted that if you skinned them, you lost a lot of the good nutrients, and a lot of the interesting texture and flavor. And she had been right.

The family I had back in my old life were pretty standard for my time. My real grandfather died when I was very young, so I have almost no memories of him at all. But we spent a lot of time at my grandma's place, especially after my mother and father broke up. My father was a deadbeat who chose not to be in my life, and my mother worked a full time job just to keep a roof over our heads. She needed a lot of help from grandma, and I basically lived at my grandma's house after school while my mom was finishing her day of work. We were your basic broken family, but we did our best.

I never managed to reconnect to my own father before I saw his obituary in the newspaper. He was the kind of guy who pushed everyone away, even those people who loved him despite his faults. He didn't even have a funeral because no one wanted to put one on for him.

I guess my experience of having an absent father made me reluctant to really pursue having a family of my own in my past life. What if I did the same thing to my kids that he did to me? What kind of father would that make me? So, I guess subconsciously I just decided to not be a father at all. That was one of my life’s biggest regrets, and one that I planned on changing this time around.

This town was full of beautiful women just around my age. I had no doubt that Quinn was flirting with me this morning over my coffee order, but she could have just been being nice. People who worked in customer service were literally paid to be nice to people. Then there was Allie Walker, Carl's daughter, with her beautiful music. She had made it abundantly clear she wasn't ready for any kind of relationship in her life. Even Courtney at the bank had been cute in a hard-nosed bank administrator kind of way.

Maybe Carl was right though. Maybe looking for love right now was not the right choice. Not until I had everything sorted out with my farm and my own new life. Still, as I sat there eating my delicious home cooked dinner, I didn't like the thought of eating at this table alone each night. I'd spent the last twenty years of my life being alone, having no company but my own, and I didn't want to do it for another second.

After dinner I had a shower to wash the stink of the day off, then got the bed ready. The mattress was still lumpy, but the new pillows and blanket made a world of difference. It was barely nine o'clock before my eyes started to droop. I climbed into bed, and I was asleep before I knew it.