With spring transitioning into summer, I was ready to start planting. I had bought some seeds in Gurt for my own food crops, but the main thing I needed to succeed at growing was skillfruit trees.

To get me the skills I needed, I ate one of my last eleven skillfruit, chasing the sour taste with sweet syrup. I wanted to experiment with blending the two, but not until I had fruit to spare. With the additional skill point, I worked my personal garden planting cherry tomato seeds until I got the horticulture skill, then consumed the final ten fruits to advance the skill.

The horticulture skill and prospects of cherry tomatoes made me think about my parents in this world, and I hoped they were doing well. The sad truth was that I did not feel all that much emotional tie to them. Horg and Sharma were the people who brought this body into this world, and they were decent parents and people, but I had a lot of guilt about stealing their real son from them due to the fact that this body was born with my consciousness, and that had interfered with my ability to bond with them in a meaningful way.

Shaking off the melancholy, I hoped that the new skill would help me grow the fruit trees. None of the pits I had planted in pots had sprouted, despite different substrates, watering schedules, and heat.

Frankly, that was not a surprise, as I more or less knew they would not grow without a dungeon. I had hoped that I could grow them in a mundane fashion, as I could not rely on finding dungeons regularly, but even if I could, I realized it could be possible that the fruits would not have their true effects without the red magic of the dungeon cores.

As such, I cordoned off an area to the west of the farm, away from my beasts, and with trepidation, I pulled the chipped rank D core out of my inventory, and planted it in the ground.

I spent the following days checking on the area obsessively, monitoring any and all progress. Eventually, a small, dark mound formed, and the local flora died back. Over a number of days the dark mound fully emerged as a cave mouth.

The initial entrance was very small, too small for me to comfortably enter. I could crawl in, but the thought of making myself that vulnerable, even if the strongest corrupted creatures within were only rank D, made me shudder.

So, I waited, and I watched. I saw some small forest beasts get captured by the cave’s effect and drawn inside, where I knew some would be altered and all would need to be put down. More plant life died around the entrance. I did not want the cave to fester, so once it had grown enough that I could comfortably walk into it, I did.

Most of the captured creatures were only rank F or rank E, and between purifying them with 6-point magic and using my sword, I swiftly worked through the caverns until I reached the boss room. I had expected maybe an evolved and corrupted lubarg, but the boss was a corrupted razoraven, a rank F bird made rank E through evolution.

It was easily killed, and I collected the core, a bit surprised to find it reduced in size. I appraised it and discovered that it had turned into a rank E core.

With the core removed, I left the cave, and watched it disappear back into the ground, and quickly started planting skillfruit pits. The first sprouted within an hour, but the second was slower, and the third failed to sprout at all.

The growth stalled out, all the red magic of the dungeon core absorbed by the juvenile plants. I cursed myself for not just planting a single pit and getting a smaller yield instead of overreaching.

I could try to plant the core again, I thought, but I think that might just kill the trees, the same way it kills other plant life. I knew the magic did not kill the seed bank in the soil, since I had seen the area around completed caves come back to life, and that was how the first skillfruit tree I had found had grown, some long-forgotten skillfruit pit claiming the energy from the cave.

So how does that work? It both needs the red magic, but dies by the red magic. The pit only grows when the red magic was dissipating, which meant…

A lightbulb went off in my head, and I pulled out the peculiar mixture of crushed red crystal that I had added to the blue crystal potion. It was the same purple as the rings around the gas giant in the sky.

Red crystal, in concentrations, caused the dungeons to form, but that was so overwhelming that it suppressed other magic. My illusions were weak or failed within the dungeons, and the corruption responded poorly to purification magic, but the corrupted beasts were generally quite magic-resistant otherwise. Purification is extremely MP-intensive, perhaps enough to temporarily wipe red magic, but weaker blue magic has difficulty overwhelming the red magic’s corruption…

Once the dungeon core was removed, perhaps the residual red magic could no longer suppress blue magic. In that case, the two would fall into balance, at least for a while, and if balance was what the skillfruit needed, then maybe this potion could help.

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With tentative excitement, I poured the purple fluid around the base of the biggest skillfruit tree.

Part of me expected the tree to explode into growth immediately. After all, the trees grew very fast when exposed to the residual magic, at least in my experience, and this purple potion seemed to be the path forward. I thought back to the rank B dungeon I had cleared north of Roko, and recalled that while the initial sprout was relatively quick, it did take at least a day for the tree to grow in full, so I decided to come back the next day instead of watching the tree grow.

The next day, the tree was noticeably bigger, but not magically fully grown. I frowned at that, then laughed at myself for being upset that a fruit tree failed to grow to maturity in a single day. I’ve gotten a bit used to magic, haven’t I.

In retrospect, the potion had only used a tiny little chip of the rank D core, so maybe it just needed more red magic energy. I decided to go home to mix up some more purple potion, but I got distracted by the needs of the farm and did not make it back to the tree until the next day.

To my surprise, the tree did seem to have grown over the following night and day. Rather than give it another batch of potion, I gave the second, smaller sprout the potion. I took some crude measurements to make sure I was not imagining things, and left the trees to grow another day.

On the third day, I confirmed that both saplings were still growing, including the one that had got the first shot of purple potion. What was more, they seemed to be growing at approximately the same rate. It was a rate of growth that was still more advanced than a mundane tree, but a fraction of the intensity of the huge flush of growth after clearing a dungeon that had infused the land for a long time.

My hypothesis was that the blend of red and blue magic in the potion was either wrong for the skillfruit’s growth or, possibly, more stable, and thus more consistent, than the random mix that happened after a dungeon was cleared.

At that point, growing these trees out in the wild was no longer necessary. I had options that seemed safe for the farm. I would continue to monitor these two trees' growth and when it stalled, I would fertilize it with more purple potion until I got a yield, but it would be easier to experiment closer to home.

* * *

While I experimented with growing skillfruit trees, I chipped away at the rank E core, and while I did have a rank B core as well, I wanted more material to work with. I followed up on my hunch that the spot Bortag had mentioned to the south east was a possible dungeon, with a mixed sense of apprehension. On one hand, a stronger dungeon would have a larger core to work with, but would be a bigger risk, and a strong dungeon that had captured one or more shuggopotami would be extremely dangerous.

When I finally did find the dungeon, I was able to use 3-point magic to determine that it was a rank C dungeon, which was probaby the best I could ask for. It was still somewhat risky, but much less so than the rank B one I had cleared, while offering me that much more red crystal to experiment with than a weaker rank D dungeon.

Even still, the dungeon set my nerves afire and I was constantly on edge inside. Out of a dungeon, I could walk up to a rank C beast while invisible, commanding the local environment, and even one-shot it. Unless I risked being eaten in full, like the draconewt and the darkwurm, I could handle myself out in the world. The dungeon changed things, took away control, interfered with magic. If not for purification, allowing me to sacrifice a huge amount of MP to destabilize it back, the risk of dungeons would outweigh any possible reward. I gained battle experience, of course, but the beast bodies were lost, the aggression was over the top, and the only treasure was the core itself.

This dungeon had been here for a while, and I fought a number of corrupted lubargs, mursin, and multitudes of other local beasts. The one benefit of the dungeon was it took away the beasts’ intelligence, so the lubargs lost their pack advantage, and most battles were only one or two beasts at a time. I decided not to push myself too hard, and when my MP ran out, I headed home. I would tackle the dungeon day by day with full MP, save my potions, and eventually weaken it to the point where I could clear the boss room and claim the core.

The early summer days passed while I made headway into the dungeon, went hunting with Bortag, experimented on skillfruit trees on the farm, tended my garden, and manned the Tamers Guild in Freehold. I discussed building an inn in the expanded section of the village with Soren, and bought small beasts from Rena, and chatted about the other cute beasts I had seen with Hella, who then surprised us all when she announced she wanted to head west on a journey and bring back some of the beasts I had sketched and claim some of the bounties.

While the village saw her off and was saddened by the loss, we did not need to worry about a reduction in hunting yield. As promised, the addition of lubargs to hunting parties made the mursin hunts far more productive, now that the puppies had grown enough to have a bit of heft to them. Where in the past a hunter would only be able to shoot a single mursin and lose the rest of its group, tamed ‘bargs let hunters drive and chase mursin and easily take down multiple in the same hunt. The extra meat made the villagers happy and soon we had enough excess to merit a trip to Gurt to sell.

The quick trip to Gurt turned out to be more profitable than I had imagined, as the two additional pairs of tarands and their wagons that I brought with me sold almost immediately. The previous merchant who had bought one made a trip to Roko and back in record time, and she had been raving about the comfort and speed of the journey. When we sold out, people tried to pressure me into selling the last wagon and pair of tarands, but I insisted I needed them for the journey back to Freehold and could not part with them.

When I informed people that I had more tarands and wagons back in Freehold, several people requested riding back to the village with us in the wagon. Since we were selling meat but not buying much aside from a few luxury items and some early-summer produce, we had plenty of room to bring people back with us.

The travelers’ presence convinced Soren that an inn could be a good idea, as he had to host them overnight in his home while I retrieved the tarands from my farm. After they left, the village started felling trees on either side of the road, opening up the space and dragging them back to the village to process for construction.

Everything was going really well, the village was prospering, and I was deep into several projects and experiments. I assumed that was why I was taken a bit by surprise when some villagers showed up on the farm’s doorstep unannounced.