Another year has passed and the days continued to move forward in the small town of Guanzu. Besides school, the gungho gym and his responsibilities in his dad's cooperative as an apprentice mechanic, Jung Hee also spends a lot of his time helping his mother take care of a small garden in their backyard.

He didn't mind since the activity helped in the growth of his gardening, farming, and herbology skills.

His mother introduced him to gardening when he was younger by allowing him to help carry stuff and dig a few holes. However, the backyard garden has become his personal domain. His mom is still gardening, but she usually just does it in front of the house, mostly because her son's gardening method is starting to confuse her.

Jung was not satisfied with the minerals in the soil in their backyard. As he grew in skill in gardening and farming, he just knew things like that. Jung didn't think much about how he learns it or where the system grabbed the knowledge from, but it is now in his mind as sure as the sunset. It is just there now, and as much as he is curious about where he get the knowledge, it sure didn't stop him from applying it to his life.

First, Jung has to dig a trench almost 12 feet deep near the edge of the forest. It became the dumping ground of most of their biological waste, but was completely controlled by Jung. He even cut and ground vegetable and fruit parts, as well as the dead parts of the plants in his garden. He even went deep inside the forest in his spare time, simply to bring back topsoil in certain parts of the area. Add animal manure and the occasional carcass of dead small animals from his pet. Then, using a rake and a shovel, he laboriously mixed the stuff, sometimes for days. To his surprise, he learned the skill "Alchemy" because of it.

But more importantly, the mixture works. It took Jung a few days, but the smelly heap started sprouting small mushrooms and other algae and moss. Jung continued to mix it all, sometimes by hand with the help of an old gloves. After a few more days, the result was black, mineral-rich topsoil.

At first, he only has enough for a few pots, but several months later, his effort produces enough compost to cover several drums or a truckload of soil. It wasn't quick, and Jung suffered a few setbacks, but he continued to persist, and as he continued to do the mixing for months and even years, he finally had enough topsoil to cover his own backyard. It was visibly different from the other dirt, and for some reason, Jung could not help but be proud of it. Through the years, Jung also experimented with other forms of alchemical materials that he added or removed from the mixture as he saw fit, like the chemicals from the school lab, animal blood, industrial waste in the co-op, or even animal food rich in nitrogen he got from a client of his when he was repairing furniture back in town.

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Then his mom started raising an eyebrow when, one night, Jung hee joined her while she was sewing a patch in her husband's favorite pants. Jung Hee's mom did not understand when her son started smiling while sewing. What she didn't know is that he just noticed a remarkable improvement in his "tailoring" skill by adding 6 skill points to increase the skill to 3 levels.

His mother refrained from questioning him about his weird smile, but she didn't have any problem asking him why he was making a bedsheet from his old clothes. Jung turned to her and said, “Huh? Oh, the bed sheets!” Her son just smiled at her again with that dorky smile of his and said, "it's for gardening, mom."

To her astonishment, when Jung Hee finished his sewing project, he used it to cover a portion of the soil in which he planted the tomatoes. She studied the garden for a moment and realized that it was to protect the plants from insects, or maybe even animals.

She thought it was absurd until two weeks later when the tomatoes were visibly growing at an astonishing rate without any problems. But Jung hee wasn't finished yet. He began playing with spiders; she had no idea how he accumulated so many in such a short period of time, but she could not help but wonder when Jung Hee began distributing them to the base of the plants he was growing.

"How in the world do you know that those specific spiders will eat the specific insects that are eating your plants? And how do you know that those spiders will not eat your plants?"

Jung hee started opening his mouth to answer, but stopped. Then he looked at his still-growing tomatoes, and then back to his mom's face. "I... I - I just know, mom," he said simply.

Two more weeks later, Jung Hee's mother could not help feeling a mixture of pride and annoyance when Jung hee proudly presented her tomatoes the size of her head. They sold them in town for a hefty profit, and Jung immediately continued his weird way of gardening.

She stopped asking about gardening things from her son when Jung started doing more and more elaborate things in the garden. Jung began doing complex grafting techniques, building elaborate hanging support structures, and customized chemical insect repellants made from different kinds of plants. Then he proceeded with landscaping, crop rotation, and other things.

Intellectually, she understood what Jung was doing, but how the technical details worked was beyond her. So when his son explained things like that, she would just smile and pat him on the head.

"That's great, son."

Almost six years of this made their house feel like the story in Hansel and Gretel. But instead of a home built of candy, their house is made up of vegetables.

Their house is covered in green vines of leafy produce, from the sturdy roof to the walls. There is vegetable fruit everywhere, from eggplants to various types of gourd, pods, tubers, and covered beans. Jung Hee knew exactly which plants were ready for harvest and which were not. He planned and set it up so that the family could harvest something on time every week.

His mother wasn't even surprised anymore when Jung started expanding and convinced her husband to use his compost. He only covered a small portion of the co-op’s field at the moment, but Hyusil, her husband, already mentioned that there is an increase in maize production by almost 30 percent because of Jung Hee's effort. The head commissar had awarded his cooperative as the number one producer in their local region twice in a row now and five times in the last seven years.

In time, she and all the local farmers in the village would simply let Jung do anything he wanted in the field and just shake their heads at the eccentric young boy.

She is proud of her son, but she is also worried because Jung is starting to get a reputation for being a weirdo. A helpful weirdo sure, but a weirdo nonetheless.