I heard Salem splutter for a moment. “This is unacceptable. You will wake up and retrieve the wizard this instance. That creature is a menace.”
I yawned, already falling back to sleep. “You said it wasn’t dangerous. Why is it now a menace?”
“It petted me,” Salem said with a small growl.
Chapter Eight
A GHOST OF FARM LIFE
“I cannot believe you went back to sleep,” Salem said. “Where are your priorities?”
“Look, I’m not going to get up a couple of hours early just because some ghost petted you,” I said as I stepped out of my room into the hallway.
The floorboards creaked as I closed the door behind me. Having no windowpanes, only shutters, caused draughts, and the bedroom doors would slam with the slightest breeze. Right now, I had a ghost problem and a draughty slamming door was just a jump scare waiting to happen.
Salem growled and then swore. “After everything I have done for you. This is how you repay me.”
“Oh, please.”
I crept to the end of the hallway, poked my head around the corner, and peered into the kitchen. A fire was burning in the iron stove. The table had been set for one, with a plate of steaming French toast, and a large tankard of ale next to it.
The ghost was a translucent white apparition. It had the appearance of a plump older woman, not ugly but not overly attractive either. She looked like your typical farmer’s wife standing there at the counter, elbow deep in a real bucket of hot water, washing dishes. She wore a long dress, had her hair tied up in a bun, and except for the whole being a ghost, things seemed quite normal. She was even humming to herself while smiling.
I stepped back. “She made breakfast.”
“Yes.”
“Why?” I didn’t bother hiding my confusion. Salem and I were past that.
Salem sighed. “I would leave you ignorant out of spite, but I need you to remove this creature. Ghosts come about from violent deaths. They are a corruption of the deceased’s magic that has caused an imprint on the world around them. They have no thoughts or feelings of their own, only memories which they are formed from. Those memories can be good or bad. This one seems to fit into the good memories category.”
I frowned while wiping the sleep from my eyes. “How can you tell?”
“It’s not crying or reliving its death.”
I nodded. That made sense. “Okay, so she’s making breakfast because she had a good memory of making breakfast.”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t seem so bad. She’s even doing the dishes. Why do I need to get rid of her?”
“Because it petted me,” Salem said angrily.
I ignored his reply as my stomach grumbled. “What happens if I eat the food? Do I die or get possessed?”
“No. The food is food. Its actions are a memory, an echo of the past. It will behave as close to its original memory as possible, incorporating those around it into them.”
“Cool,” I said, stepping out of the hall and into the kitchen.
I headed for the table, walking carefully, as I eyed the French toast. I’d never learned how to cook. I either ate out or had things like TV dinners or ramen. The only meal I could cook on my own was an omelette, which is why I made the four-mile walk to the inn every couple of afternoons for a hot dinner. The only items I had in the pantry were ale, dried fruit, dried meat like salami, and the stale bread I’d bought a couple of days back. There were also the eggs from the chickens I’d purchased when I moved in, but those had come in sporadically. Hopefully, now that the farm was active, they would lay their eggs in the coop. So with that in mind, I was more than happy to sit down to someone else’s cooking, even if that someone else was a ghost.
About three steps into the kitchen, the ghost turned to me and smiled. “Good morning, dear. Breakfast is on the table.” She had a pleasant, motherly tone that made me think of Mrs. Claus rather than any ghost from any horror movie I could remember.
I turned and looked at Salem, hiding at the edge of the hallway.
“It has probably put you in the place of its dead husband,” he explained.
“What do I do?”
“Leave and contact the wizard.”
I turned back to the ghost and smiled. “Good morning…ah, honey.” I went and sat down at the table. As I picked up the utensils, the ghost walked over and gave me a peck on the cheek. The cold hand on my shoulder and colder touch on my cheek threw me for a second, but before I could do anything more than flinch the ghost faded from the world. The only sign left over from its presence was a chill that ran through me.
After a few seconds of discomfort and a little fear-induced adrenaline, my stomach rumbled. I dug in. As the first bite of buttery egg goodness met my tongue, I smiled. The ghost could cook.
A minute passed. Salem walked over and leapt onto the table, glaring at me. “You are not keeping it.”
“I wasn’t even considering it?”
“You have no control over it, and the fact that it appeared immediately after you activated the farm means it has a consistent routine.”
I stopped eating, French toast halfway to my mouth. “Wait, are you saying that she will cook breakfast every morning?”
“Among other things. We would have to study its behaviours to learn its eccentricities, but you are going to get the wizard and remove it.”
I looked at the plate in front of me and then over to the dishes that had been cleaned. “Now, let’s not be hasty. Why don’t we give her a chance?”
“I will not be petted like a common animal. You will get the wizard.”
“If you don’t want to be petted, stay out of her way. And how did she pet you anyway? You are insanely fast.”
“It crept up on me while I was sleeping by the fire.”
“Don’t sleep by the fire then.”
Salem glared for a second. “I hate you.” Then he leapt off the table and walked away.
“Don’t forget we’re going to bait the forest before dusk,” I shouted as he retreated.
My smile returned as I finished eating. I threw my plate into the hot water, washed and dried it, and then took the dirty water outside and tossed it. Meals took so much longer without indoor plumbing, stoves, and dishwashers that I was looking forward to the time she would save me.
I knew Salem hated to be petted, and yes, this was quite literally the only thing he had ever asked me to do besides help hide him from a murderous demon, but it was hot food. He was asking too much.
My smile and cheerful mood faded as I made my way to the barn to collect my tools. There were a few different ways you could farm. But for a basic crop like squash, it took a twelve-day rotation. That meant you planted out an entire field at once and went through each stage, doing slightly different jobs each day.
Day one was hoeing the soil and planting. Days two through five were a variation on watering and weeding. Day six was a rest day where you didn’t have to do anything, but only if you had done your job correctly the other five days. Days seven through nine, you did more watering and weeding. Day ten, you harvested the crop and pulled out the plants. Day eleven, you turned everything which wasn’t produce back into the soil, and day twelve was another rest day. Then you rinsed and repeated.
Let me tell you, the six-day week took me a while to get used to, mainly because they used the same number of days in each month as back home for their calendar. The fact that everything more or less shut down on that sixth day was also a surprise. Apparently, that wasn’t the same in the cities, but out here in the sticks, everyone took the day off. It kind of sucked that there were no public holidays or festivals, except for the solar festival, and that only occurred once or twice a decade and no one knew when it would happen.
Even though I was now used to the six-day week, I still occasionally made the mistake of thinking of a week as seven days. And I’d confused numerous people by incorrectly referencing a week, turning up a day later than they expected.<
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I collected my tools and seed and headed for the field. The field interface blinked into existence the moment I stepped onto it, indicating where I was when I finished the day before.
It was incredibly helpful.
The spot where I called it a night was highlighted by a blue overlay, showing that the area hadn’t been done. The blue contrasted with the green area I’d already completed, showing I was about a third of the way through. I got to work, turning over the soil and planting seeds. None of the squash would start growing until after the next sixth day, even if it was all planted; the farm's magical growth was tied to their calendar. There was no way around it.
My method was less than ideal. There were literally dozens of techniques I could use to improve the quality of my final product, but all of them took extra attention and time. The purpose of my farm wasn’t to grow crops, only to meet the minimum requirements for a functional farm, so I continued to work haphazardly.
My stamina bottomed out long before I was finished and I headed inside to eat. I was thankful that bottoming out your stamina didn’t leave you incapacitated. However, it did leave you with a feeling of bone-weary exhaustion, the likes of which I’d only experienced that one month I’d had a personal trainer and attempted weight training. You could still function without stamina, but only at like 60%, and it was hard.
The frustrating thing was stamina didn’t replenish on its own, and it dropped slowly over the day. You had to eat or sleep to gain it back. It was the only way. There weren’t any potions that could do it. However, different foods gave different amounts of stamina over different lengths of time, so as long as you chose your meals carefully, it wasn’t too problematic. But if you didn’t pay attention to the details, you would get fat from eating high-calorie foods with low stamina gains which I think had happened to the previous owner of my body.
With my measly 100 points, that didn’t affect me, though. My stamina was so low almost any food would get me back to full, but Salem had told me about adventurers with ridiculous amounts of stamina who could only eat expensive, specially-prepared meals. So, I ate a couple of handfuls of dried fruit, refilling my stamina, and went back to work.
Salem came and found me a few hours before dusk as I was finishing off planting. I didn’t bother questioning how he could arrive precisely when I was ready to go. Though he hadn’t told me anything himself, I’d managed to learn a little about familiars over the past eight months.
To begin with, they were rare and every wizard wanted one. Familiars were a living reservoir of power, entirely devoted to their master and actually stronger than them. The bond a familiar had with their wizard meant that their attributes increased whenever their master’s did, but they also leveled independently.
His master had apparently been level 99 which made the damn cat a wrecking ball, even in his weakened state. He was far more capable than I could ever hope to be as a farmer, and the only reason I’d survived my time in The Wild Woods, or felt safe enough to attempt luring monsters to my farm.
“The day grows short,” Salem said curtly.
“I’ll hurry.”
I picked up my tools and seed bag and wearily made my way to the barn. The tools went away, stuffed into a corner, and the machete came out.
I grabbed a handful of feed and made my way to the chickens pecking at the ground around the coop. A large stone sat above its entrance, resting upon a sliding door that could drop and cover the entrance if the wedge holding it up was pulled out. It was there to lock them away if something showed up or lock something inside if it got in.
The chickens clucked happily as I approached. They seemed much better behaved now that the farm was active. For the past couple of weeks, they’d been hiding most of their eggs leaving me to find them in all sorts of weird places. Now that the farm was active, they all laid them inside the coop.
I tossed the crushed maize on the ground and they all came running. Not wanting to play favourites, I grabbed the first one that came close by the neck, turned it upside down and grabbed its feet before carrying it around the other side of the farmhouse to where I had put a chopping block for this purpose.
“Sorry about this,” I said as I placed the fighting chicken on the block. The machete went up, and then the unlucky bird went to chicken heaven.
I began plucking feathers as the body thrashed. I wasn’t planning to eat it, so I didn’t do it nearly as cleanly as Gretel would have demanded, though I probably should have for the butcher skill experience. Once the job was done, I took the machete and quickly chopped the bird into chunks, throwing the pieces into a wooden bucket.
With my bait ready, I collected a spear and we headed to the forest. At the edge of the tree line, Salem took off scouting the area ahead, making sure we didn’t inadvertently walk into a monster and trigger a combat situation that would be pointless.
Today’s plan was simple. I would walk a mile into the woods and create a trail of blood and chicken chunks that led back to the farm. Hopefully, something would come across the trail and follow it back.
It was the simplest of our plans. There might have been better ways of doing it, but this entire endeavour was an experiment. Starting simple was the whole point. If this didn’t work then we could try something a little more complicated. I didn’t want to start with something complicated, only to find out six months from now that a simpler, cheaper approach would have been sufficient.
To be honest, I wasn’t holding out much hope that this would succeed, but it was a start.
Three and a half weeks. Three and a half weeks of nothing. Well, not nothing. Twenty-one chickens made their way to chicken heaven.
I finished my last bite of sausage, patted my stomach appreciatively, and glanced over at Salem. The ghost had long since pecked me on the cheek and vanished, which was the only reason that Salem was in the kitchen, lying on the stones by the stove, enjoying the warmth.
“Let’s change it up today,” I said.
Salem, head resting on his front legs, opened an eye to look at me. “Change what up?”
“The luring tactics.”
Salem snorted. “I honestly thought it would take you another week to see the idiocy of our current venture. How did you want to proceed?”
“Well, you keep saying the monsters follow the trail to the edge of the forest but don’t go any farther. I’m thinking we should start targeting specific monsters. You can scout where their hunting grounds are, and then we bait them towards the edge of the forest from there, instead of just letting a random one come across the trail. If we get their attention, we keep baiting the same path, drawing them back repeatedly. Hopefully, after a few days, they will get brave enough to leave the woods and come to the farm.”
“You don’t want to try using the live bait?”
I cringed. “I’d rather not be so obvious as to stake out a line of live chickens to my farm just yet. It’s kind of a hard thing to hide, even if I don’t have neighbours.”
“And you have to get up shortly after dawn to release them.”
“And that.”
Salem yawned, stretched out his legs, and then climbed to his feet. “I still think live chickens are the best option, but we can try it your way. Anything specific you wanted me to target?”
“Let’s start small,” I said, picking up my plate and carrying it over to the waiting bucket of hot water.
Salem nodded, yawned one more time, and then walked out of the room. I heard him jump, the backdoor handle click, and then a few seconds later, the door slammed shut.
God, I hoped this worked.
Chapter Nine
A LITTLE SUCCESS AND A TOUCH OF HOME
“You are going to die, fox!” The words tore from my throat as I tugged the rope attached to the wedge keeping the chicken coop’s entrance open. The small door slid down the guide rails, dropping shut, weighed down by a large, fifty-pound stone. The chickens trapped inside went ballistic.
Excitement flooding me, I d
ropped the rope, picked up my spear, and then removed the lantern's hood. The light threw off the shadows blanketing the room, and I opened the shutter further, illuminating the ground between the glassless window and the chicken coop.
Salem casually pushed the other shutter open with his paw and then leapt onto the ground, kicking up dust. “That was a terrible battle cry.”
“I had to yell something,” I said as I climbed through the gap that passed for a window in my farmhouse.
“You didn’t…it’s a mindless beast. Yelling at it is counterproductive.”
“You’re counterproductive.”
Salem sauntered ahead of me, moving around the side of the coop to where I’d left the stepladder. “That is a lie. I’ve been nothing but productive. I found you this fox, and in just six days, helped you lure it to your farm with tasty treats so you could do away with it.”
I swallowed, a small shiver running through me. “Could you maybe not describe it like that? I feel kind of dirty now.”
“No. It is an accurate description of our endeavour.”
I scowled as I followed him to the side of the coop and began climbing the stepladder. The chicken coop wasn’t just a chicken coop, just like the barn wasn’t just a barn. They were both traps. But since I didn’t want to accidentally kill my chickens by dropping them in a pit and impaling them on spikes, this trap was rather limited in what it could do.
I put the lantern on the hook, which had been placed there for this exact purpose, and then removed the pins that kept the corner of the roof from blowing open. With a little hesitation, I raised my spear and carefully lifted the corner of the roof. The orange light showed the carnage within. Feathered blood lay everywhere. Half of the twenty or so chickens I kept were already dead and the little bastard was shaking its next victim.
Oh Great! I was Reincarnated as a Farmer Page 10
