The video games Leo had played in the city suggested that farming was a matter of rhythmic button presses. You swung the tool, a square of earth turned dark, and you moved on. The process was linear and frictionless.
The reality of Forget-Me-Not Valley was that friction was the only thing that existed.
By noon on the second day, Leo had not cleared a field. He had barely cleared a closet's worth of space. The "3x3 grid"—the standard unit of planting—was not a simple geometry. It was a war of attrition against the geology of the valley.
Leo swung the iron hoe. The blade bit into the clay, traveled two inches, and stopped dead against a submerged rock. The shockwave traveled up the handle, bypassing his gloves and detonating in his shoulders.
He dropped the tool and looked at his hands. The blisters he had acquired at 8:00 AM had burst by 9:00 AM. Now, at 12:00 PM, the raw dermis was weeping clear fluid mixed with grit.
"Inefficient," a voice boomed from the road.
Leo looked up, squinting against the sun. Standing at the gate was a woman who looked less like a human and more like a mountain that had decided to wear an apron. It was Vesta.
She did not lean on the fence; the fence seemed to lean on her. Her arms were thick with functional muscle—not the sculpted aesthetics of a gym goer, but the dense, corded strength of someone who wrestled livestock for a living.
"You're swinging from the elbows," Vesta critiqued, walking onto the property without asking. She didn't look at Leo; she looked at the pathetic scratch marks he had made in the dirt. "You're trying to muscle the earth. You can't beat the earth, kid. It weighs more than you."
Vesta reached down and picked up a clod of the grey, dry soil. She crushed it in her hand. It didn't crumble; it shattered into sharp pebbles.
"Dead," she diagnosed. "No worms. No moisture. This isn't soil; it's a corpse."
"I'm tilling it to aerate it," Leo defended, his voice thin with dehydration.
"You're making dust," Vesta corrected. "If you plant seeds in this now, they'll suffocate. You need biomass. You need fertilizer. And you don't have the money for either."
She threw the dirt down. It hit the ground with the sound of a stone hitting a stone.
"My farm is across the river," she said, pointing a thumb over her shoulder. "We ship five tons of high-grade vegetables a season. We don't use magic. We use sweat and logic. If you want to survive the month, come over. Marlin will show you how to hold a hoe without tearing your rotator cuff. If you don't..." She looked at his bleeding hands. "Well, the city bus runs on Tuesdays."
She turned and left. It wasn't an insult; it was an audit. Leo had been found insolvent.
The sun began to dip behind the western cliffs, casting the valley in a bruised purple twilight. Leo should have stopped. His body had exhausted its glycogen stores hours ago. He was now running on cortisol and stubbornness.
He picked up the hoe again.
One more row, he thought. If I can just finish one 3x3 grid, I can plant the turnips tomorrow.
He swung. The iron struck a buried root.
Thunk.
He swung again.
Thunk.
The repetition became a mantra. The pain in his hands dulled into a distant, throbbing background noise. The world narrowed down to the patch of grey dirt in front of him.
And then, the physics of the valley stuttered.
As Leo stared at the ground, the soil seemed to ripple. It wasn't a visual distortion from the heat; it was a shift in focus. He wasn't looking at the dirt anymore; he was looking into it.
For a split second, the grey clay became transparent to his mind. He saw the microscopic fractures in the hardpan. He saw where the water table was hiding, three feet down, terrified of the surface.
And he saw the face.
It wasn't a cute elf in a hat. It was a coalescence of brown light and soil particles, forming a small, wrinkled face that looked like a potato left in the dark too long. It was trapped under a heavy stone in the corner of the field.
"Pressure," the voice whispered.
Leo froze. The voice hadn't come from the air; it had vibrated up through the soles of his boots.
"Too much pressure," the voice groaned. "Can't breathe."
Leo dropped the hoe. He fell to his knees, ignoring the agony in his joints. He dug his fingers into the dirt around the heavy stone.
He wasn't thinking about "finding a collectible." He was acting on a sudden, violent intuition that the earth was choking.
He pulled. The stone didn't move. He dug deeper, his fingernails tearing against the abrasive clay. He found the leverage point—the fulcrum.
"Move," Leo gritted out.
He heaved. His back screamed. The stone shifted, rolled, and flopped onto its side.
The space underneath was dark and damp. And sitting there, blinking in the twilight, was a creature. It was small, dressed in brown rags that looked like woven roots. It didn't look magical; it looked biological. It looked like a fungus that had learned to walk.
The creature took a deep, rattling breath, expanding its chest.
"Finally," it croaked. "Oxygen."
Leo sat back on his heels, his head swimming. "What are you?"
The creature stood up and dusted itself off. As it did, the soil around its feet changed color. The grey turned to a rich, dark brown. The cracks sealed up. A radius of life expanded from the creature, turning a single square foot of dead clay into fertile loam.
"I am the decomposition," the creature said, adjusting its hat. "I am the gap between the soil particles. You can call me Guts."
It looked at Leo with eyes that were black and ancient.
"You have terrible form with that hoe," Guts said. "But you have good ears. You heard the dirt screaming."
Leo laughed. It was a dry, hysterical sound. Then, his vision tilted sideways, and the ground rose up to meet him. He passed out, face-down in the only square foot of fertile soil in the entire valley.
High above, in the second-story window of the Mansion, the Witch Princess lowered her telescope.
She picked up her chalk and walked to the blackboard. Under "Variable A," she erased the question mark.
"Subject demonstrates rudimentary perception," she said to her teddy bear. "He found a Brown Sprite without a detection spell. Interesting."
She smiled, sharp and dangerous.
"Let's see how he handles the weeds."