The sun was moving west at the unhurried pace of a sun that had been doing this for several thousand years and saw no reason to rush. Yamiro estimated he had perhaps two hours of daylight remaining, which meant that whatever he was going to do about the fundamental problem of not having a shelter, food, water, or any meaningful understanding of where he was, he needed to start doing it now.
He stood up, brushed the dry soil from his palm, and took inventory.
One broken hoe. Forty bronze coins. The clothes on his back — his work clothes, which meant grey slacks, a white dress shirt with the top button undone, and leather office shoes that were entirely inappropriate for agricultural labor. No phone. No watch. No laptop. No identification documents, which he suspected were not relevant here but whose absence his brain noted anyway out of professional habit.
He turned in a slow circle, taking in the full scope of his new property.
The parcel was approximately the size of four tennis courts arranged in a rough rectangle. On the northern edge, the dead trees stood their vigil. On the southern edge, the land dropped away into a shallow slope that led toward what appeared, at this distance, to be a village — perhaps fifteen minutes' walk, a cluster of rooftops in warm brown and terracotta, smoke rising from two or three chimneys in the still air. To the east, a narrow track of flattened earth suggested something that had once been a path and still remembered its purpose. To the west, unclaimed land stretched toward a line of low hills, empty and unharvested and quietly indifferent.
In the approximate center of the parcel stood the ruins of a structure. Ruins was perhaps generous. It was four walls of stacked stone reaching approximately chest height, open to the sky, with a floor of packed earth and the remains of a wooden roof that had collapsed inward at some point and was now a pile of weathered timber and old thatch inside the walls. There was a door frame but no door. There was a window opening but no window.
Yamiro walked to it and stood in the doorway, looking at the collapsed roof.
[Structure Detected : Former Farmhouse — Condition : Poor]
[Repair Feasibility : Moderate with available materials]
[Taiyo's Note : The previous owner's name was Belan. He owed money to a grain merchant, a blacksmith, and a woman named Gusta whose specific grievance the System prefers not to document. Sleep somewhere else tonight.]
He looked at the pile of collapsed timber. Some of it was genuinely rotten — dark, soft, crumbling at the edges. But some of the heavier beams appeared structurally sound, just displaced. The stone walls themselves seemed stable. Someone had built them with care, once, fitting the stones without mortar in a way that spoke of patience and knowledge he did not have but could respect.
He could sleep inside the walls tonight, under the open sky if necessary. It was not raining. The temperature was cool but not cold. He had survived worse conditions — he had once spent three nights on his office sofa during a fiscal year-end crunch, subsisting on vending machine products and the particular grim determination of someone who has tied his identity too thoroughly to his work performance.
This was better than that. Marginally.
He set the hoe against the doorframe and walked the perimeter of the parcel in a systematic grid, the way he would have walked a new office space — assessing, cataloguing, noting problems and potential in the same flat internal register. The soil was consistent in its exhaustion. Whatever had been grown here had been taken without anything returned, year after year, until the earth had simply stopped cooperating. He crouched at intervals, picking up handfuls of soil and letting it fall through his fingers. Dry. Dense. Faintly grey in color where productive soil should have had the dark warmth of organic content.
But it was not dead. That was what he had felt when he pressed his palm to it earlier — not absence, but dormancy. A held breath. Something waiting.
[Gaia System — Soil Analysis unavailable]
[Unlock requirement : 100 Prosperity Points]
[Current PP : 5 / 100]
He had five points from talking to the ground. He needed ninety-five more to unlock the ability to properly assess what he was working with. He filed this information without frustration. In logistics accounting, you frequently could not see the complete picture until you had gathered sufficient data. You worked with what you had.
What he had was: a broken hoe, forty coins, bad soil, a roofless house, and approximately ninety minutes of daylight.
He went back to the collapsed roof inside the farmhouse walls and began sorting timber.
The work was straightforward and physical and he found, to his mild surprise, that he didn't hate it.
He had not done significant physical labor since university, when he had briefly worked summer construction to pay for textbooks. The muscle memory was gone but the methodology remained — assess the material, identify what is salvageable, move efficiently, don't try to do everything at once. He separated the rotten wood into a pile on the south side of the house and stacked the sound beams against the north wall. His dress shirt was damp across the shoulders within twenty minutes. His office shoes were developing an opinion about packed earth that he chose not to engage with.
[Prosperity Points : +2]
[Reason : Physical labor performed on registered land.]
[Taiyo's Note : You're going to need different shoes.]
Seven points total. He kept working.
By the time the light had shifted from gold to amber, he had cleared the interior floor of debris, identified three beams that could realistically form the skeleton of a temporary roof structure if he could find something to lay across them, and discovered, in the far corner of the farmhouse under a collapsed section of thatch, a clay pot with a cracked lid and three hand tools inside it — a small trowel, a dibber for making planting holes, and a rusted but potentially functional sickle.
He set them beside the hoe and looked at his small collection of implements.
[Items Found : Basic Trowel, Planting Dibber, Iron Sickle (Rusted)]
[These belonged to Belan. He won't be coming back for them.]
[Taiyo's Note : He really won't. It's a long story. Don't ask Gusta.]
He examined the sickle. The rust was surface level on the blade — he could see the dark line of still-sound metal beneath it. Takeru Yamada, he thought, could probably do something interesting with this. Then he remembered that Takeru was a person he had not yet met, in a world he had arrived in three hours ago, and filed the thought for later.
The village was still visible at the bottom of the slope, the chimney smoke thicker now in the cooling evening air. He would need to go there — for water if nothing else, and for information. He did not know the name of the village, the name of the nearest city, the political structure of this region, the currency exchange rate for bronze coins, the current season, or what was typically grown in soil of this type.
He knew how to find out. You talked to people and you listened more than you spoke and you did not let on how much you didn't know until you had a clearer picture of what information was safe to reveal.
He had been doing this in business meetings for eight years. It translated.
He put the tools in the clay pot, left it inside the farmhouse walls, and walked south toward the village with the hoe over his shoulder because carrying it felt more purposeful than leaving it behind.
The village was called Miredo.
He learned this from the wooden sign at the northern entrance, hand-carved and weathered to the point where two letters were guesswork, and confirmed by the first person he encountered — a woman of perhaps sixty, broad-shouldered and unhurried, carrying a basket of something leafy and purple toward a house on the left side of the main track.
She looked at him the way people in small communities look at strangers — complete, rapid, professional assessment, conclusions reached before he had finished saying good evening.
"You're the one who bought Belan's land," she said. It was not a question.
"Yes. Yamiro Kageyama." He inclined his head slightly.
She studied him. His city clothes. His impractical shoes. The hoe over his shoulder that clearly hadn't been used in years. "You're not a farmer."
"I'm learning."
Something in her expression shifted — not warmth exactly, but a recalibration. She had been expecting denial or performance. Plain acknowledgment was apparently less common. "Doris," she said. "My husband owns the mill at the east end. You'll need us eventually." She glanced at the hoe. "Sooner than you think."
"Do you know where I can find water on the parcel? Or near it?"
"There's a spring on the hill behind your western boundary. Belan used it before he started cutting corners on everything else." She set her basket down and pointed. "Follow the tree line west from your north edge. Twenty minutes. Bring a vessel."
"I don't have a vessel."
She looked at him with the expression of someone adding a data point to an already substantial file. Then she reached into the basket and produced a clay jug, plain and functional and slightly chipped at the lip. "Return it when you have your own."
He took it. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Belan's land dying is bad for everyone's soil in the valley. If you actually fix it, you'll have done me a favor." She picked up her basket. "The general store closes at sundown. If you move quickly you can still get basic supplies."
She walked away without further ceremony. He appreciated this.
The general store was run by a man named Porto who had the energy of someone who had been moderately irritated for so long that it had become his natural resting state and he had made a kind of peace with it. He was perhaps forty-five, with a grey beard and quick eyes that performed the same rapid assessment Doris had done, arriving at similar conclusions.
Yamiro laid six bronze coins on the counter and said, "What does this buy?"
Porto looked at the coins. "Depends what you need."
"Prioritized: something to eat tonight, seeds for fast-growing crops, rope."
Porto leaned back slightly. "Fast-growing crops. That's Belan's land?"
"Yes."
"Nothing's grown on that land in three years."
"I'm aware."
Porto studied him for another moment, then began moving. He had the efficiency of a man who had been doing this for decades and had stopped wasting motion. He produced a heel of dark bread, a wedge of hard cheese, two dried strips of something that might have been meat, a paper envelope that he shook to demonstrate its seed content, and a coil of rough-spun rope. He laid them on the counter beside the coins and did mental arithmetic that Yamiro could see moving behind his eyes.
"Five coins. I'm giving you the rope at cost because I've had Belan's creditors in here twice this month and I'd like that situation to be finished."
Yamiro counted out five coins. "What's in the seed envelope?"
"Radish. Fast, hardy, doesn't ask much of the soil. If your land can grow anything, it'll grow those." Porto paused. "If it can't grow those, it can't grow anything."
[Seeds Acquired : Common Radish Seed x1 envelope (approximately 40 seeds)]
[Growth cycle : 25-30 days under normal conditions]
[Gaia System Note : Under your care, conditions may vary.]
He put the supplies in his shirt, tucked the rope through his belt, and nodded to Porto. "Is there a well in the village, or do people use the hill spring?"
"Well in the square. Public use."
He filled Doris's clay jug at the well on his way back north, drank half of it standing at the well's edge because he realized he had been thirsty for several hours and had not registered it, and refilled it before walking back up the slope to the parcel.
The stars over Kagamikai were wrong in the best possible way.
He had not expected to notice them. He was not, by nature, a person who looked up — his professional life had trained his gaze toward screens and documents and the middle distance of concentration. But sitting with his back against the farmhouse's north wall, eating bread and cheese in the dark with his knees pulled up and the clay jug within reach, the sky above the open roofless walls was simply there, and it was extraordinary.
The constellations were not Japanese. They were not anything he recognized. But they were dense and bright in a way that city skies never were, the Milky Way a genuine visible band across the darkness, and among the familiar random scatter of stars there were three that shone in colors — one distinctly amber, one a cool blue, one faintly green — that stars in his previous world had not been inclined toward.
[Night Sky Note : The amber star is called Taiyo's Eye by local astronomers.]
[It has been there for six thousand years.]
[It is watching you eat that cheese.]
He looked up at the amber star for a moment. "The cheese is adequate," he said, to no one in particular.
[Prosperity Points : +1]
[Reason : Taiyo is laughing. This counts as 'Nourishing the Spirit of the Land's Creator.']
[Taiyo's Note : I'm not laughing. I'm observing. There's a difference. (I'm laughing.)]
Eight points total.
He finished the meal, drank more water, and used the rope and three of the sound beams to rig a rough cover over the corner of the farmhouse where the walls were highest and most intact — enough to sleep beneath something if the dew came heavy before morning. He laid the remaining thatch that wasn't rotten in a rough mat on the floor for insulation.
He lay down on it, still in his grey slacks and his impractical shoes, with his jacket folded under his head, and looked up at the stars through the gap his rigged cover didn't quite reach.
He was thirty-one years old. He had died at his desk. He was sleeping on dead thatch in a roofless stone house on cursed farmland in a world a lonely god had built from memory, with eight prosperity points and forty radish seeds and a jug of water and a broken hoe.
It was, he realized, the first night in four years that he had not thought about work.
Is this really necessary? he thought, from habit.
Then, because no one was going to answer and the amber star was still watching and the night was genuinely quiet in a way that nights in Osaka never were, he closed his eyes.
He was asleep in four minutes.
The soil beneath him, dormant and listening, registered the warmth of the sleeping body above it the way old things register the return of something familiar — slowly, and with a patience that had no need to announce itself.
[Prosperity Points : +3]
[Reason : First night slept on registered land.]
[Total PP : 11 / 100]
[The land is remembering what it felt like to be cared for.]