Waking up from the deep slumber I was in, I surprisingly recovered my previous thoughts quickly and got off my bed. Wanting to watch over yesterday's progress, I hurriedly walk toward the backyard field, hoping that the cotton I desperately needed had grown in the night.
Unfortunately, none of the seeds I had planted the day before significantly grew to a point I could harvest something out of them, including the cotton. It seemed like it would take a lot of time to obtain results satisfying my production needs.
Unfazed by the gloom prospect of being unable to move forward due to the lack of new materials, I took my newly crafted hoe and started digging the group, searching for new seeds to plant and accelerating the production a great deal. This task revealed itself to be as tiring as the day before, but strangely more productive as many seeds appeared, brought to the surface by my skillful handling of the tool in my hand.
Before long, more than a half-dozen seeds were eagerly waiting to be planted, some of which I already saw yesterday, and one I hadn't seen before, barley, which seemed similar to wheat in a lot of aspects.
Fortunately, cotton seeds were a part of the set of grains I dug up, and as such, I finally could expand my field a bit, planting where there still was space. The effort I put in developing the garden was put to good use by the number of new plants I was expecting to grow in the future, but it would be challenging to keep sustaining myself on this little plot.
However, watching this little piece of land brimming with life and multiple various herbs and vegetables, I thought that it would be great if my life was solely consisting of being some kind of simple farm, tending to his land, day after day, with the least care in the world about the controlling quest system.
To expand the field further would need to clean a more extensive zone, mostly in my house's backyard, in the village's unruly part. I decided to climb on the wall's peak to get a good view of the surroundings and to be able to take an enlightened decision about what I wanted the topology of the village to look like.
I was astounded by the lack of flat surfaces on the wall's catwalk, probably due to the uneven ground on which it was built, leading to the terrain being unequal and tiresome to walk on.
Despite how poorly constructed it was, the wall allowed me to get a good view of the village backyard and what I would need to chop down, dig, and fill up to get a proper slice of arable land, in which I could grow larger and broadly used cultures rather than simple vegetables.
As such, one could grasp the elevation difference between the front door wall and the back gate one, elevation difference that would need to be filled up to have a pleasant place to live on.
Starting to work on a relatively small portion of the land, I first decided to chop down most of the trees blocking the view and the land and then removed some excess dirt used to fill up some lower grounds.
It also enabled me to finally look at the wall's foundations, where the bricks were simply put into the dirt without proper construction techniques. As such, it would need a really tiresome job to level the walls to a good elevation on all the sections.
However, I would have to let these considerations for another day, as the night slowly came down on me, and I was forced to retreat to my house to not incur the monsters' wrath.
After a good night of sleep, I went back to cleaning the rest of the terrain I couldn't do the day before. Fortunately, not much was left to do, and after chopping the last tree and digging the last piles of dirt left in the corner, I could finally enjoy a clean and leveled up place suitable to plant cultures as soon as the ground would be plowed.
As soon as I could admire my work, I went back to my house, searching for my hoe that I would use to dig up some ground, swiftly transforming the land into an arable plot. One thing I didn't take into account, however, was the fact that I used my tool a lot the previous day to gather seeds and that the previously sharpened hoe was now a dull piece of flint that wouldn't last long.
And as I suspected, as soon as I plowed some dirt patches, my tool shattered in my hands, leaving me no choice but to make another one. Fortunately, between the gravel I harvested earlier and the trees I chopped down to clean the land, I had enough material to make a dozen of these tools efficiently.
Once tilled, the land needed proper irrigation. Using the water I've been storing in the village's old well and the bucket I ardently desired, I finalized these new fields by filling up some holes I purposely left with water.
These efforts were guaranteed to be well-rewarded, and as such, I started harvesting the first batch of vegetables and herbs originating from that field. Albeit a lot of these were vegetables I knew about, some struck me as unknown.
One of these was a peculiar, white-colored plant that dropped snowballs once harvested, which was something unheard of where I came from.
One of the other plants I never heard of before, other than in fiction, was the mandrake roots. It's supposed to be a living plant, able to move freely, but best left rooted in the ground, else you'd be inflicting yourself the pain of hearing its scream.
However, I was naive at that time and paid it no mind, which resulted in disastrous nausea as soon as its scream hit my ears.
The being that emerged from the earth didn't intend to stop here as it relentlessly pursued me in the field, causing me such distress that I had no choice but to aimlessly punch in the ground, in the hope of hitting it, which I, fortunately, ended up doing, knocking the little guy cold, and transforming it in an item.
Cumulating all the products I got by harvesting my field, I thought that it would be nice to have a dedicated chest used to contain these so that it wouldn't encumber the primary storage I had in the house. As such, I crafted another chest to put it near the field, where the food storage will go, as well as plants and seeds I couldn't yet use for anything.
Looking at it, I could see the different kinds of resources I was growing in the backyard, and it reassured me that what I was doing with the farmwork was necessary and that ditching the questing system for a while was worth it, at least for now.
At this moment, I finally realized that expanding my fields was only the first step in creating a sustainable and extensive production of vegetables, fruits, and various herbal goods. In that sense, the second step would naturally be to organize each of the different products I could grow on these fields to adapt the amount of arable land needed for each product type.
I would find out later what the third step would be, but I was significantly happy to have found a goal to spend some energy, which would create a long-lasting return on investments, making my life a lot easier.
I then started to make columns of the same products in this expanded field instead of merely filling up the plowed dirt with each and every seed I could found. This would prove useful, as it would naturally lead to creating more diverse meals instead of endlessly consuming the same food.
As the day was slowly drifting toward its end, I ended up plowing another plot of land to plant more broadly used resources, such as wheat for bread and dough, and cotton for strings and woven wool.
Being more prominent than the two previous plantable areas, its sole purpose was to extensively cultivate one type of resource instead of multiple columns of ones, leaving the firsts fields free for numerous kinds of cultivations.
However, not owning any more seeds of both cotton and wheat, and with the day ending, I decided it was better to head home and sleep for the next day to come, with hopefully many more ideas leading to the path of sedentarization. It's with these thoughts, with my consciousness slowly drifting away, that I gradually embraced the world of dreams.