“What,” Bortag started.
“How?” Soren asked.
“Uh,” I responded.
The two men, flanked by their pet lubargs, stood and stared at my farm fortress.
I really should have expected someone to show up in my territory sooner or later. In fact, I should have invited both these men here already, in order to prepare them and control the narrative better. Instead, I got distracted working on new formulas for the skillfruit growth potion, and when Soren had some questions for me, he and Bortag, bolstered with confidence by their ‘bargs, decided to come north using the very road I had made and see where I had carved out my home.
Nonetheless, I was caught by surprise.
“So, um, welcome to the farm,” I said, breaking the silence.
Two pairs of eyes bore into me.
“This is awesome,” Bortag said.
“Wh–ugh. That aside, how is this even possible?” Soren said, stumbling over Bortag’s comment.
I sighed. “Well. I’m a bit of a stone mage, I guess.”
“A bit, he says,” Bortag snorted.
“Capable merchant, advanced tamer, and… expert stonemage? You’re sixteen! Are you some kind of… secret prince or something?”
I frowned. “No. I just learned magic at a young age, and… practiced a bit.”
“A bit,” Bortag repeated, laughing.
“Anyway,” I said, glaring at my friend before looking back at Soren. “It’s not as impressive as it seems. The mountain is right there, so I barely had to move the stone, and I’ve been at it since I first arrived, before I even came to the village,” I said, glossing over the fact that I finished most of the construction back at the start of winter, and hinting at having been at it for longer. I waved my hands. “Any mage could do this with enough resources. The walls aren’t even that tall.”
Soren shook his head, eyes closed, and rubbed his forehead.
“Well, give us the tour,” Bortag said.
So I did. I showed them where the tarands were, the enclosures for the various breeding pairs of beasts I had taken in, and the quadhorn barn.
“You collect milk?” Soren asked.
“Yeah,” I said, thinking about how to explain it. “Not enough to starve their young, just the excess. Milk has a lot of nutrients that are good for us, the same way that babies grow well on milk.”
“And you… drink it?”
“That’s disgusting,” Bortag added.
“Is that… the secret to your powers?” Soren whispered, perfectly serious.
“Ugh, it’s not… no. It’s not the secret to my powers, and yes, I can see how you might think it’s a bit… icky, but you don’t drink it just like that. You cook it, first, and then you can process it into something better, but… it’s a work in progress.”
The men looked at me skeptically. I really need to find some citrus.
Sadly, my milk experiments had dried up with the mothers for the season, and I would not be back at it until they gave birth again in the fall, and my focus in the short term was on purple potions, but I made a mental note to ask Bilgus next time I saw him about fruit from the south.
I showed them what I could, and kept the more extreme stuff a secret. The magical enchanted freezer, the bulk grain in my storage facilities, the quartz water cistern and magic pumps, the working toilet and septic tank, the stash of gemstones I had created and had been slowly selling in Gurt, the secret tunnel through the mountain, and my other bigger secrets would remain secret for a while longer. As much as I would love to share the various things I had done with these men, they were already overwhelmed, and in some ways sharing all my secrets would actually strain their trust beyond what was reasonable instead of reinforcing it. It was easier to build trust with actions, and I had, thankfully, done that over the past year.
When I saw them off, I promised Soren that I would do some stone work for the village if he needed it, and confessed that I had already been improving the road west to Gurt, to which Bortag muttered an “aha!” as if finally understanding something he had been mulling over. I welcomed them to come back, and even told Soren he could bring Rena around to see the animals.
It was overdue, honestly. There was enough to do on the farm even without my extra projects, nevermind also working the Tamers Guild and running convoys to and from Gurt, that I was going to need to hire help soon.
After growing in confidence through her taming, Rena was starting to come out of her shell, and she was approaching an age where she would need an apprenticeship. I was a bit young to take an apprentice—both in terms of my actual age and perceived age—but she had already been asking me about apprenticing with the Guild, and she had grown quickly as a tamer. I was not sure how her dad would feel about her helping on the farm, especially with the distance from the village, but the world was shrinking with the use of tarands for transportation.
“Ah,” I said. “There’s one more thing I should show you. This is called a saddle…”
* * *
“Eeeeee!” Rena squealed, jumping up and down with joy. Soren glared at me, but it was a mild glare, tempered by the fact that Rena was so happy.
It was her tenth birthday, and she was getting her own saddled tarand as a present. For me, it was a practical gift, because they actually did not cost me much, and since she was going to be apprenticing with the Guild, she needed to be able to get back and forth between the branch and the farm quickly and safely.
Developing the improved saddle was a work in progress, but it was not too difficult to fashion something usable with wood, leather, and furs as the main ingredients. The first one made was the one for my mystic tarand, and it was a lot rougher than Rena’s. Lidel, one of the village’s leatherworkers, had been a big help, since I did not have a leatherworking skill, and was interested in making more. Once I gained another level, I planned to pick up the skill off her, and then spend some time dialing in the relevant skills and methods so I could pass on what I learned to her.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
I suspected that, in time, there would be a lot of saddle orders, and a lot of potential to profit.
We got the stirrups fitted to her leg length, and Rena was slowly riding in circles, figuring out the best way to hold her weight and move with the tarand. Riding was a lot easier with a tamer bond with your mount, given the advanced level of control of the beast. The tarand would never throw her, so she only risked falling if she tossed herself or overreached. She was forbidden from going faster than a trot until she had spent weeks in the saddle.
Soren sidled up next to me as we watched his daughter learn the ropes on her own. He looked a bit sad, but then took a deep breath and patted me on the back.
“Treat her well,” he said solemnly.
“As… an apprentice?” I asked. He looked at me seriously, and I blinked. “Please tell me that you mean as an apprentice.”
He sighed, and looked at me meaningfully.
“Soren. She’s ten,” I said, horrified.
His brows furrowed, and he looked back at his daughter. “You… aren’t grooming her to marry?”
“Oh my goodness no!”
“Oh thank goodness,” he exhaled. “She talks about you non-stop at home, and the tarand is so valuable, so I thought…”
I shook my head, turned, and walked away. Perhaps… this apprenticeship was a bad idea.
Fortunately, there was enough incredibly hard work on the farm that she would be worked to exhaustion until she hated me. Sure, she thought the farm was magical when she visited over the summer, but after mucking the barns, milking the quadhorns, and hauling the feed to the animals, she would change her tune.
Difficult or not, Rena was the best option for farm help. A lot of the work required rapidly switching bonds between animals, and the young girl had thrown herself at the task of improving as a tamer. She had gained two levels since the spring, reaching Level 7, and clearly her skill points had practically all gone into taming because she had advanced the skill, and became the first Freehold villager to rank up in the Guild, earning her bronze badge.
I looked back and saw Soren whispering with his wife, who had a frustrated expression on her face, like the news that I was not grooming her daughter to marry was bad news. She rubbed her belly, which was growing with their next child. She looked over at me and I quickly turned away. I let out a long, exasperated sigh.
“Humans are so difficult,” I murmured, and Treepo grunted and headbutted my ankle. “I know, I know, hush.” My mood had actually improved dramatically over the summer, spending time with the villagers and building something impressive out in Freehold.
The inn was coming along great, and at my recommendation we had plans to add a water tower to it. It would take magic to pump it full from a ground well, but I had explained how once the water was held high, and with a still-quite-simple pipe system, the inn could have on-demand water inside because of gravity. Down the line, I could incorporate enchantments, so that any villager with sufficient MP could contribute by pumping water. Encouraging the village with smaller enchantments should help them naturally grow their magic pools as they level, so that they could use larger enchantments, even without formal magical training, but if all else failed and I could no longer do the work myself, I had the potential to incorporate a magical circuit with a deepwater pearl acting as a magical battery. I knew, abstractly, there was a way to do it with a windmill and pumps, but I did not know off-hand how and it would take a lot of engineering trial and error. Why not just use magic?
We were also building a small storage building and built our own simple crane for loading and unloading crates, so that I could streamline bulk grain shipments to the village from Gurt without needing to use my inventory in secret. We would send a larger group of wagons into Gurt that fall and bring back twice as much grain as the previous year, at minimum, plus whatever I needed for the farm. We had plans to put in a stable there, between the inn and the Guild, which would also make use of the water tower and grain storage for the tarands or whatever other mounts came and went.
I spent some time more actively shoring up the road, now that Soren and Bortag—and by extension, much of the village—had learned I could also use magic. While the scale of what I can do was kept quiet, the fact that I could do some magic was not that unusual. It was out of place in Freehold, but the villagers already knew I was from elsewhere, and learning magic was uncommon but not outright absurd. The story I told was that I had traded with a mage for a copy of a grimoire and some basic education, and had practiced it during my merchant apprenticeship on the side. It was enough to suspend any disbelief about being able to push some water up a tower or make some small bricks for the road, especially since I had beasts who could help with some of the manual labor hauling stacks of pavers around rather than floating them all myself.
Hmm, maybe I could build an actual water pump and make use of beasts to pump the water instead of a windmill… that was more on-brand for the Guild, after all.
* * *
The rest of the season flew by, a flurry of construction, training, and projects coming to realization. I finished clearing the rank C dungeon, defeating a corrupted, evolved version of a rank D beast called a rogdine, which occupied the forest’s bear niche and was rather large and scary corrupted in the dungeon. The battle was pretty hectic and intense, as boss battles in dungeons often are, but it ultimately was not that interesting. Purification, quick engagements and some stabbing, retreating and tossing hematite-tipped rock spears, and pacing myself allowed me to chip away at the lumbering brute. I was fresh for the battle since I had taken my time clearing the dungeon, and it was slow to replenish itself as the local beasts had learned to stay away from the location.
I harvested the core, then planted two skillfruit pits and returned a couple of days later to harvest those. I had continued fertilizing the other wild-growing skillfruit trees from where I had planted the rank D core, and harvested those as well. As for my home-grown orchard and my experiments with purple potion, I had dialed in the right proportions such that I only needed to feed the trees once every handful of days. The better mixed the potions were, the more balanced the magical energy, which helped the tree grow less chaotically. Rather than gorging on energy and growing to maturation in mere days, these slower-growing trees took the full season.
There was not a huge difference, except that the slower growth process resulted in significantly better-tasting fruit, full of more natural sugars that balanced out the absurdly sour acidity.
Rena had, unsurprisingly, been curious about the fruits when she saw the trees, and I let her eat some, interested to see if she could benefit from them. It would take a while to observe her and see whether they would have an effect or not. I was able to make use of them through directly interfacing with my skill growth and assigning SP. The layperson was not able to do that, and as far as I could tell, required earning a hundred experience points by a specific skill in order to assign a skill point naturally to said skill. I could not see Rena’s skill menu, only her skills in general and whether or not they were advancing as usual, so it would take some time and study as she ate enough skillfruit to make a difference to see.
Meanwhile, with a proper avenue to farm skillfruits, I finally fully broke my own skill balance, and started eating them whenever I felt like it to start growing my skills beyond my level. First I suffered through the sour ones, saving a few to experiment with for cheese—which sadly turned out to be another failure, once the quadhorns gave birth and we were getting milk again—and then I settled into a pattern of eating one of the nice-tasting ones after dinner for dessert to end off most of my days. With the glut of skill points, I gained and advanced the leatherworking skill as planned, double-advanced 5-point magic, and was working on advancing my new 8-point magic to play with over the calmer winter season.
I taught Rena what little I knew about milking quadhorns, and she started riding her tarand up to the farm first thing in the morning to do all the milking, feeding, and mucking chores before returning to the Guild branch to work the desk in the afternoon. I went into Freehold to work the Guild in the morning while she was doing the chores, then got up to my own work in the afternoon when we traded off, aside from the days I stuck around to teach her when new challenges arose. She always had a small entourage of beasts accompanying her as bodyguards for the trip, and had tamed a razoraven and transformed it into a silvered razoraven which she used to seek me out like a messenger pigeon of Earth in case something came up that needed my attention, either on the farm or at the Guild.
Before I knew it, it was time for another year of making the big procession to Gurt, before settling in for another winter.