The journey to Blackwood Vale took three days by hardened wagon, then half a day on foot down a treacherous mountain path. The two royal guards tasked with delivering him spoke only in grunts, their eyes wary of the deepening shadows in the twisted pines. The air grew colder, thinner, and carried a sour tang of decay.
"There's your kingdom, dirt-scratcher," the senior guard finally said, his voice a gravelly rasp. He pointed a gauntleted finger into the valley below.
Jarine looked down. The Vale was a wound in the world. A vast, bowl-shaped depression choked with gray mist, its slopes sheer and jagged. What passed for vegetation was a skeletal forest of black, thorny trees and patches of sickly purple scrub. A river, the color of lead, cut a sluggish path through the center. The "manor" was a solitary, crumbling watchtower perched on a rocky outcrop, half its roof collapsed inward.
"Tithe's due at the end of the season," the other guard said, tossing a rough burlap sack at Jarine's feet. It clanked dully. "Tools. And the ledger. Don't die before you pay. It creates paperwork."
Without another word, they turned and began the climb back up the path, their relief to be leaving palpable.
Silence descended. It was not peaceful. It was a dense, hungry silence, broken only by the moan of the wind through stone and the distant, echoing cry of something that did not sound like a bird.
Jarine, the boy Jaren, felt a terror so profound it threatened to liquefy his bones. This was where you were sent to die. This was the punchline to the joke that was his life.
But the old man Jarine breathed in the foul air and knelt. He ignored the tower for now. He scooped a handful of the valley's soil. It was not soil. It was a gritty, gray shale, devoid of moisture or smell, littered with sharp, flinty fragments. He rubbed it between his fingers. Acidic. Compacted. Zero organic matter. Biologically inert.
"Barren," he whispered. But his mind was already working. Barren was a condition, not a fate. Conditions could be changed.
He shouldered the sack and made for the tower. The interior was worse: a single round room littered with rubble, animal droppings, and the ashes of a fire decades cold. The sack contained a rusted iron hoe with a splintered handle, a cheap tin pot, a flint and steel, and a thick ledger book with "Blackwood Vale – Tithe Registry" stamped on the cover. The expected tithes were listed: 20 bushels of grain, 10 bushels of root vegetables, 5 bolts of linen or equivalent value in monster cores. The amounts were absurd for one man, on any land. On this land, they were fantastical cruelty.
He sat on a fallen stone, the cold seeping through his thin tunic. This was the test. Not of fighting, but of existing. He closed his eyes and willed the System interface to appear.
The Shop bloomed in his vision, a serene oasis of possibility. He had 100 Credits. He navigated past the dazzling, expensive wonders and focused on the Fundamentals category.
His choices were careful, deliberate. He was not planting a crop; he was building an ecosystem.
· Stonebreaker Turnip Seeds (Tier 1) – 8 Credits/packet: "Roots secrete enzymes to fracture bedrock and neutralize acidic soils. Moderate growth speed."
· Aeorian Till-Beetle Colony (Tier 0) – 15 Credits/colony (4 beetles): "Burrowing insects that aerate compacted soil. Frass is a potent, rapid-acting fertilizer."
· Sentinel Thornroot Sapling (Tier 1) – 25 Credits: "Semi-sentient defensive flora. Immobile. Launches hardened thorns at perceived threats within a 15-meter radius. Requires initial mana bond."
· Dew-Collector Moss (Tier 0) – 5 Credits/square yard: "Passively harvests atmospheric moisture. Provides minimal insulation and discourages fungal rot on stone."
He did the math. He bought two packets of turnip seeds (16 Cr), one colony of beetles (15 Cr), one Sentinel Thornroot (25 Cr), and four square yards of moss for the tower's interior walls (20 Cr). Total: 76 Credits. He saved the remaining 24.
The work began. He chose a small, relatively flat area just south of the tower, where a thin lip of rock offered some windbreak. He cleared the poisonous scrub with his bare hands, the thorns drawing blood. He used the broken hoe to scratch feeble lines in the unyielding ground.
He planted the turnip seeds with a planter's reverence, whispering to them of water and sun they could not yet sense. He released the Aeorian Till-Beetles. They were beautiful, fist-sized creatures with carapaces like oil-slick rainbows and powerful, shovel-like forelimbs. They clicked and chirped, antennae twitching, before immediately burrowing into the gray shale with astonishing vigor, turning it over, creating tunnels.
Finally, he planted the Sentinel Thornroot at the northern edge of his tiny plot, the direction from which trouble seemed most likely to come. It looked like a knobby, dormant tuber. He placed his hands on it, reaching for the new, green pool of mana within him—the energy of his Farmer class. He pushed the mana into the root, along with a simple, clear concept: This is home. Defend it.
The root shivered. A single, dark-green shoot, tipped with a needle-like thorn, pushed out of the earth and stood upright, quivering slightly. The bond was formed. He could feel a faint, vigilant presence at the edge of his awareness.
He spread the Dew-Collector Moss on the interior walls of the tower's lower floor. By nightfall, the stone was already slick with condensation, and the air inside lost its bone-dry bite.
Exhausted, he built a small fire in the hearth with dead scrub. The flames cast dancing shadows on the moss-glowing walls. He ate a tasteless journey-biscuit from his discarded travel pack.
Outside, in the vast, hungry dark, something howled. The sound was answered from three different points in the valley.
Jarine looked at his feeble fire, then through the empty doorway at his tiny, prepared plot. It was nothing. A scratch on the face of a giant.
But it was a start. He had defined a point. Here. Mine.
The old man smiled in the dark. The first seed was always the hardest. The rest was just patience.