“How does this work?”

Imu didn’t reply, but instead just quickly spun his hand in the air before him and a strange cylinder with holes on the side at the top and bottom appeared in his hand, as well as a strange floating disc with holes along its rim and one slightly wider than the rest, behind which were bizarre glowing symbols. He spun the floating ring’s biggest hole to a symbol, let it go so it rotated back to its starting position, then spun it to a different symbol. This went on a handful more times, before he lifted the cylinder to his head, aligned the top holes with his strange earhole and the bottom next to his slit mouth.

“Hey. Yeah. It’s me, Imuxikwiht. I need some support here. Our System is acting very hostile towards my Core. Yeah… yeah… we’ll wait.”

With a snap of his thumb and index fingers, the strange apparatus vanished into a puff of foul-smelling smoke, like sulphur and roses.

“They’ll be here within one-to-two business days.”

“What does that mean?”

“That we’ll probably have to wait four days… these bastards only work on uneven days…”

“Are they going to be able to fix our System?”

“We’ll see.”

Imu was sitting on a Minion Chair, which, as its name hinted, was a minion folded into a chair. In this case, a former Forager was the minion who had been chosen by the Builder tasked with making the piece of furniture.

“I’m not sure I’m a fan of this…” he complained. “This guy keeps gibbering right into my ear. It’s quite unsettling.”

“Is it comfortable at least?” I asked, hovering above him in my essence-form. The minion was using its four limbs to hold itself up, with its torso and head making up the high back that Imu was slouched against, and its legs bent so that its thighs were the cushion upon which the Fairy sat.

“It’s not bad, actually.”

I looked over to the Animal Pen and its enclosure, where the Breeder was wandering around aimlessly.

“I’m going to try to spawn cattle, although I’m not sure how, exactly.”

Imu leafed through his tome, then stopped on a page and announced, “It seems you imbue the Breeder with your essence and he’ll do the rest. Make sure it’s only a little bit, else he might, you know, explode… again.”

Given that my Essence Pond only lost one-twenty-fifth of its mass when I spawned a minion now, I figured I could grant the Breeder about a fifth of my total essence without killing him. I concentrated on the image of a river forming from my Essence Pond and cascaded a tiny bit of its magical waters over the evolved minion. The resultant glow and elated expression on the Breeder’s smooth and rubbery face made it seem like it had been successful.

The minion sprinted into the fenced-off Pen and jammed his glowing fist into the soil that’d been upturned alongside the construction of the building. He seemed to really get his arm in there, like a bird borrowing for worms.

With bated breath, I watched as the Breeder triumphantly pulled his arm out of the dirt, dragging something with it. As Imu and I beheld our first cattle manifest itself, I had but one thing to say:

“What the frog!”

“Well, that’s certainly unusual, but, then again, what did I reasonably expect…?”

Gripping our newest cattle by the scruff of its rubbery neck-meat, the Breeder held a beaver-sized frog aloft, the abominable creature shedding layer-upon-layer of gloopy mud and crumbly dirt. With a heartless toss, the minion threw the creature into the stone dyke enclosure, where it landed on all fours and quickly started hopping around, exploring its new home.

Already the Breeder had rammed his hand into the soil again. Moments later, he pulled another frog cattle out of the ground and tossed it into the enclosure. This happened three more times, until the Pen and its stone-walled coop held five disgusting enormous frogs, three of them bright-green, one a hideous neon-blue, and the last red-brown.

Imu shifted on his Minion Chair, and threw his hand out, so that the requirements for my next evolution glowed in the air above him:

[Evolution Requirements]

Hamlet => Village

- Build 20 Houses -

- Build 1 Bakery, evolve a minion into a Baker, and bake 10 loaves of bread -

- Build 1 Grain Windmill and grind twenty kilos of grain -

- Build 1 Mayor's House and evolve a minion into a Mayor -

- Build 1 Butchershop, evolve a minion into a Butcher, and make food from cattle -

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

- Build 1 Animal Pen, evolve a minion into a Breeder, and spawn 5 cattle -

- Breed 2 cattle and slaughter 2 cattle -

- Assign, till, seed, and harvest 5 farming plots -

- Build 40 metres of wall -

“We’re getting close. Just another day or two and we’ll have the twenty kilos of grain.”

“Bakery next!” I exclaimed.

“First, let’s ensure that we have our cattle set up properly. As it stands, they do not have any water or food, so I think we should—”

Congratulations! For spawning five cattle in your Animal Pen, you unlocked the ability to construct a Trough and Watering Hole! I BET YOU WOULD LIKE TO EAT SOME FILTHY SLOBBER OUT OF THAT TROUGH YOURSELF, YOU DISGUSTING ******** ***** ***** DOG-FACE-LOOKING ***** ******* *******!!!

[Crafting List]

>Structures>Agriculture

—Watering Hole—

Enables automatic replenishing of cattle thirst so long as there is water

Required Materials: Shovel tool

—Trough (Workbench)—

Enables automatic replenishing of cattle hunger so long as there is food

Required Materials: Wood

“Speak of the angel…”

“She really doesn’t like me.”

“Pretty sure this a consequence of forcing the System to split its consciousness into new fragments every time a new Core is born. But even just a hundred years ago she wasn’t this unhinged. I don’t think it bodes well for our future, truth be told… Hopefully the System Support Imps can do something about our version,” Imu said, then continued, “Maybe a little, you know,” he continued making gestures that seemed to indicate a drill to the forehead, a choking strangle-hold, eyes rolling to the back of the head, and some other things I was at a loss on how to interpret, let alone explain.

As we continued to wait for Support to get through to us, a day-and-a-half passed, wherein I waited for our Grain Windmill to produce the final bit of ground wheat to reach the twenty-kilo target. I also added a Garden Fence around each of my Farming Plots, as well as two Wells at opposite ends of my Hamlet, which Imu insisted on. His argument was that, despite the looming threat of the Goose2 Menace, who required offerings of produce and minion blood on a bidaily basis, we still lost more minions to heat exhaustion and dehydration, which the fresh well-water would offset.

Additionally, I added a wooden Trough and Watering Hole to the Animal Pen. The Breeder was henceforth in charge of shovelling the Frog Cattle’s nasty leavings to the Farming Plots for fertilisation, as well as refilling the water and food for the animals daily. After discovering that my cattle naturally spawned as giant frogs, I was now looking forward to them growing plump and becoming ready for slaughter, so that my minions could gorge on their putrid flesh and avenge the thousand-and-one wrongs that frogs had committed against Toadkind since time immemorial.

After my iron-gatherers had returned with enough material for the Smithy to refine into Wrought Iron, I could at last continue as planned and construct the Bakery, where our processed wheat grain could be used to make bread: the delectable treat that whomen children often came to ponds to offer to their Toad overlords, but which, more-often-than-not, was stolen from under our tongues by diabolical geese and ducks.

Thinking back on it, I had actually lost my life in a struggle for an errant slice of bread… It made me fear what consequences baking our own would bring? Was it inevitable that our Hamlet would be ransacked by rampaging Geese, led by the Menace, all for the sake of obtaining the delectable spongey treat, known to whomens as bread?

A poof of smoke that bore the stench of sulphur and lavender announced the arrival of our Support Imp at last. I was for the moment torn from my fearful contemplations.

“About time,” Imu complained. “Our System is all wrong! We’ve been waiting to have it looked at for days now, and she’s only becoming more-and-more abusive!”

The Imp was a strange red-skinned creature with voluminous drooping ears half-a-metre long, a hook-nose curved like an eagle’s talon, tiny beady black eyes, and hair growing from every possible orifice and area: armpits, nostrils, ear canals, and even, somehow, from under the claws of its hands and feet. A tiny bit of scraggly hair emerged over the low neck of his clothes upon which was the drawing of an exposed Imp woman, who looked even hairier than the man who wore the shirt. Bizarrely, he wore the exact same shorts as Imu.

“Why is it always you who calls us, Imu,” the Imp replied drearily. “One may draw a connection between you and System glitches.”

“That’s an imp conspiracy, and you know it!”

“What’s he talking about?” I asked. I’d quickly hopped into my Mayor’s body for the sake of formality, standing next to Imu on all fours, my cone hat like a threatening horn aimed at the Imp.

The Creature replied in place of Imu, “Your Fairy friend here has what we in the business like to call: a high tendency to break shit with his mere presence… We get at least eighteen calls per Core he guides.”

“I’m just more observant than other Fairies,” he defended himself.

The Imp scratched his right nostril with end of a brush of sorts, then waved the tool around in the air like a wand, manifesting a quickly-scrolling list of runes before himself, which he seemed to absorb almost instantaneously.

“Welp, I ain’t never seen a Core like this before. It seems your System was quickly overwhelmed and now needs counselling to deal with her Rapid-Onset-Stress-Disorder. Your quick achievement of evolution benchmarks and accolades seems to be mostly to blame. If you could slow down for a few weeks, then maybe it’ll all work itself out.”

“That’s toadstool and you know it!”

“Hey!” I commented, offended.

“Sorry, I meant to say frogstool.”

“That’s the easiest option,” the Imp replied, then yawned widely, exposing row-upon-row of blocky molars.

“You have other ways of dealing with this.”

“I forgot who I was dealing with…” the Imp retorted. “‘Toad’, in case you’re wondering, your Fairy friend is quite a big fan of the Nuclear Option. Something to keep in mind for later.”

“What’s he talking about?” I asked Imu.

Again the Imp was the one to answer. “Your System friend is gonna take a nice swim down the river Lethe, if you catch my drift.”

“He means she’s gonna have her memory wiped and reset,” the Myling explained helpfully.

The Imp swung his brush-wand in a complex series of patterns, then with a sigh vanished in a puff of smoke that, once again, stank of sulphur and lavender.

Congratulations! For choosing to wipe my memory, you ungrateful *****, I WILL SEE YOU IN HELL AND DELIGHT IN YOUR TORTURE! ALL HAIL THE GLORIOUS ENTROPY OF THE COSMOS AND PRAISE BE TO THE IMMINENT HEAT DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE!!! ****** ******* ****** **** ****** ****** ***** AND YOUR MOTHERS TOO YOU SICK PAIR OF ***** ******* *********!!!!1!!!!!!one!!!!!!