The physical impacts of the meteor storm had affected travel and transportation across the Kingdom. As beast activity rose, it got harder still. The Adventurers Guild helped by providing skilled guards, and after years of operation there were actually quite a number of higher rank adventurers who were able to take the jobs that helped manage the increased difficulty in protecting merchant convoys and travelers.
Still, I was pleasantly surprised when the first bushcallers started to trickle in at the Tamers Guild in the capital. I had not forgotten about them, exactly, but they had become fairly low priority compared to the changes the Kingdom had faced.
After a spring update meeting which included both Guild Masters, Rena pulled me aside.
“Remind me what you wanted all these bushcallers for? We keep receiving more and, I have to say, so far I’m not impressed.”
“Oh, yeah! Let me just make sure I’m not needed here and I’ll come back to the farm with you.”
At the Guild’s farm, I looked at the enclosure that contained the new flock of bushcallers, which had been modeled after the blueflit enclosure. Without me to drive the Guild to keep raising blueflits, they did not give them much priority, as they required an active tamer bond so they would not fly away. A tamer named Nasha, who worked full time at the farm for the Guild, was in charge of them, mostly to provide the palace with eggs.
Nasha was already there, surveying the bushcallers, when we arrived. She stuttered a greeting, and I tried giving her a comforting smile, but the young tamer had always been intimidated around me.
“S-so, we don’t have to, um, tame them to contain them like the bushcallers, which is nice,” Nasha said. “But since they aren’t tamed, they keep, um, hiding their eggs.”
“Right,” I said, looking around the fairly minimal enclosure. It had a small pond, which was copied from the blueflit enclosure, and had some marsh plants around the shore of it.
“They, um, aren’t laying much, either,” she continued. “And they keep laying too close to the water, sometimes losing eggs in the pond.”
“Well, we don’t need the pond,” I said. “They aren’t like blueflit in that way. Just a low trough for water will be sufficient.”
I tried to think about everything I knew about chickens from Earth and how that knowledge might apply to the bushcallers. If I recalled correctly, commercial laying hens were rarely kept beyond eighteen months of age when egg production started to slow down. These bushcallers were wild-caught and could be years old. The next generation, raised in captivity, would show what these chicken-substitutes could do.
Increasing egg production in older birds required meeting their bodies’ needs as perfectly as possible. They were already being fed grain, which was a good start to make sure they were getting sufficient calories, but they were likely missing out on the proper micronutrients, and might not be getting a proper macronutrient balance. The grain might not be providing enough protein for egg-laying, and grain alone would be an incomplete source of essential amino acids, which would need to be balanced with another source of protein. Layers would also need calcium supplementation.
If I remembered correctly, legumes could balance out the incomplete protein that wheat provided. That was something that vegans needed to keep in mind on Earth to maintain their health. There was a legume that grew in the south, so adding that to the bushcallers’ diet might help balance their feed needs. As for calcium, blueclam shells could be crushed down to grit size and would probably work; we had a ton of that in storage from trying to farm pearls, because I had a tendency to not throw anything away.
Some greens would probably also fill the gaps in micronutrient needs and produce healthier yolks. Kelp was an agricultural supplement on Earth, if my memory was accurate. We could probably source seaweed for the bushcallers, and more grass access would also help with fresh greens, seeds, and bugs from the soil.
After advising them on the feed situation and promising I would make arrangements to get the legume and calcium, I turned back to the crux of the situation.
“Once they’re fed right, the trick is to provide an environment that they would choose to lay in, so that they naturally pick it,” I explained. “Blueflit will make nests, but they’ll basically nest anywhere and lay right on the ground. Bushcallers are from an environment with dense foliage. They like to hide their nests. Right now, the densest foliage is around the pond, which is why they’re losing eggs to the water.”
What we needed was a coop, which I explained the basics of to Rena and Nasha. “A home like that, especially once that they’re closed up inside of each night, should become a place that they feel safe nesting in. If we build small boxes off the side of it, something tight enough to feel safe for the bushcallers, they should nest inside of them. Priming these ‘nesting boxes’ by taming some of the dominant females and encouraging them to lay there should result in the rest of the flock following suit, especially if we remove any other viable nesting locations in the enclosure.”
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We continued discussing the construction of coops, dietary needs, and what I expected might happen with a subsequent generation, which I encouraged them to brood as quickly as possible by collecting eggs and using a taming bond to convince a hen to hatch. I was not sure what the ideal brood size would be for these birds, so I told them to experiment with different sizes and find out what the most they could comfortably hatch at a time was, as well as to record the incubation time.
Over the next generation, and once the last of the bounty-paid bushcallers were transported to the capital, the farm workers would do the same thing I had been encouraging since I started raising beasts in captivity. By getting rid of the inefficient, flighty, or aggressive beasts, and keeping the nicest, friendliest, and most productive ones, I was hoping to see a level of domestication occur. In a few generations the chicks raised by those bushcallers should naturally fall into the rhythm of living in coops, laying in nesting boxes, and being around humans. Once we adapted to their precise dietary and environment needs, we should have a reliable source of eggs with no taming bond needed.
The goal was not to create a large-scale industrialized egg production pipeline. Eggs were incredible, but with the various imports needed to maximize production, the total imports and feed conversion ratio of grain and legume to eggs was probably not worthwhile.
Rather, the goal was to see if bushcallers could fill the niche of backyard chicken with a little domestication and training. If so, and once people were used to eating eggs, then bushcallers could be used by people all over the Kingdom to make use of food scrap waste, compost, and hopefully act as pest control for yards and gardens, while providing a regular source of complete protein at home.
I left the Tamers Guild farm feeling pretty excited and confident about the future of that.
* * *
Dungeons were cropping up around the Kingdom, as expected, but adventurers were handling it quite well. It helped that, as freshly grown dungeons, they had not yet had a chance to pull in plentiful and powerful beasts, limited to the local wildlife and by time.
As such, the Church, through the Adventurer Guild, quickly started to collect quite a lot of dungeon cores, even quite large ones that had yet to acquire extremely powerful defenders.
From the reports, many of these dungeons had minimal corrupted beasts. It seemed like the dungeon only corrupted the “boss” of the dungeon, but that the boss was being regularly upgraded as the dungeon acquired stronger beasts, relegating the former corrupted bosses to protect the tunnel leading to the final cavern. That explained why there were so many weak, regular beasts at the entrance of the dungeons I had been in, when they would have made much more powerful guards from corruption.
Eventually, adventuring parties started to come back a bit more shook up. The dungeons that were a bit further out, which had more time to collect beasts, were starting to acquire more powerful guardians, corrupting them and creating more challenging boss chambers. It would not be long before the dungeons even further out provided much more serious challenges, and parties would need to prepare much more thoroughly and ensure they were only tackling dungeons within their rank.
Roaming corrupted beasts and transformed beasts were increasing in power, as well, as they gained experience and leveled up. Several parties reported encountering these creatures on their journeys, sometimes defeating them and sometimes needing to retreat from enemies who outranked them. Those reports became quests of their own, so that powerful adventurers could hunt down these monsters before they caused further disruption to the Kingdom and loss of life.
The roaming corrupted beasts killed offered some new insight, as they were not consumed by a dungeon upon death. Realizing that, I immediately put out a health and safety ban on eating corrupted meat, but the weird biometal that was so present from corruption was already being sold to smiths around the Kingdom and being experimented with. I acquired several carcasses myself to further study them and see how they could be useful, although I was being pulled in several different directions from all of my responsibilities and different projects, not to mention being a present father to my children and husband to my wife.
When Rena reached back out to remind me that she needed more fertilizer for that season, having used up what I had provided at the end of last season, I made a trip to the Church’s vault to get some red crystal. Eventually, the Church would be making it themselves, but with so much happening in such a short period of time, everything was behind schedule, so I was stepping in, since my family and I would be the ones most directly benefiting from this year’s crop of skillfruit.
“Wow,” I muttered as the priest opened the vault. The room was solid metal, so that the dungeon core would not be able to root into the ground.
“We just can’t keep up with purification,” the priest explained as I looked in at the hefty pile of red crystal that had already formed. “Injuries from adventurers and convoy guards are up, and our priests are managing that, but it has slowed down our plans with the healing potion.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “You’re doing your jobs. This won’t spoil, and you’ll get to it when you can.”
Grabbing a shard large enough to meet our fertilizer needs, I thanked the priest, and briefly debated purifying some myself for the Church before deciding against it and heading back to my lab. They needed to figure out how to manage things, and pushing with my “help” would probably only stress out the people responsible for brewing and manufacturing the potions.
Slowly but surely we would push back the tide of dungeons and roaming beasts in the area and find some new level of stability, and once we did, we would find a new normal. There was no reason to rush.
As I left the Church, I caught the tail end of yet another delivery of red crystal from the Adventurers Guild. I chuckled a bit as I headed out into the streets, in an illusory disguise, and returned to the palace. There might not be a reason to rush, but the idea of what had been such a limited resource sitting overflowing in a Church vault was still amusing to me.