I stared at it, just long enough to analyse it.
Then I struck, stabbing down with my spear.
Maybe I could have saved the chicken and aimed my spear a little better, but I didn’t. Adrenaline was coursing through my veins, and quite frankly, I wanted the experience too much to screw it up. So, the spear went through them both.
The fox squirmed for a few seconds, tugging at my spear until I slammed him into the wall, at which point it went still. I gave him another stab to make sure he was dead and not playing possum and then closed the lid and went around opening the front the way I would if I were collecting eggs.
The moment the front entrance opened, the chickens made a run for it, throwing feathers and loud fearful clucks in every direction. I ignored them. The fox carcass held my attention. Nervous excitement and no small amount of trepidation swelled inside my stomach as I reached out and touched the small orb floating above it.
Well done, you have killed a Spiked Fox. Would you like to loot it for experience and loot?
Yes/No?
I selected No and touched my hand to the fox’s corpse instead. The loot orb wasn’t how farmers gained experience. A prompt appeared.
Well done, you have successfully defended your farm against a Spiked Fox.
An electric shiver ran through my fingers and I held out my right hand the way I would when I received experience from a crop. A small, pea-sized green crystal coalesced on my palm.
You have earned 2 farmer experience. Would you like to absorb it?
Yes/No?
I selected No again.
“It worked,” I said with a grin. “It really worked.”
I held the little green crystal out to Salem, grinning ear to ear. I’d done it. I had gotten experience from killing a monster. Well, technically, it was from defending my farm, but the result was the same. My plan worked. I’m embarrassed to say I started dancing.
“Don’t get too far ahead of yourself,” Salem said. “This was a simple spiked fox, a farm predator, if you will. We still have no idea if this method will work on a larger, more dangerous monster. If it only works on foxes then it isn’t a success.”
My rhythmically-challenged jerking motions stopped as I turned to glare at the cat. “What are you talking about?” I growled. “Of course it’s a success.”
Salem rolled his eyes. “You killed six chickens to get it here and then lost another, one, two…ten chickens before you could kill it. That is sixteen chickens to kill a fox. At five coppers a chicken that’s 80 coppers—or 1 silver noble and 30 coppers—as pure expense. Now, with that much money, you could have purchased three experience, at base, which by itself sounds like a poor investment, but you add in six days of your time and the cost of the farm, it turns into a terrible one. Once you’ve added those costs, even if you were successfully able to bring in a fox every six days, without the additional loss of chickens, and this was a small farm with only four fields rather than the fifty-five you are being taxed upon, this whole situation would still be a financially poorer investment than actually farming.”
“If you were trying to kill my enthusiasm, you succeeded.”
“I was. And of course I did. I succeed at all my endeavours. Now that I have curbed your stupidity, I believe tomorrow we should go after something bigger. There is a small pack of wolves that I’ve been tracking. If you collect these chicken carcasses tomorrow we will leave them a feast they cannot ignore.”
I looked at the mess inside the chicken coop, and then back at the house and my waiting bed, but it only took a half-second glance in the direction of the field for my energy to skyrocket. No matter how annoying this was, it was still better than farming.
The sound of a wagon rolling down the road towards my house pulled me from my breakfast the following morning. I left my plate on the table and made my way to the backdoor, checked that the lever attached to the trapdoor outside the back entrance was firmly in place, and then quickly stepped on and off the trapdoor I’d built into the veranda, to see who was here.
My haste wasn’t because I didn’t trust my work. It was because I really didn’t trust my work. I usually used the windows to enter and exit my house. However, that looked weird, and I didn’t want to be known as the village weirdo, on top of being the village pervert, so I had to put up with the creaking sound that occurred as I stepped on the trapdoor and heart attack that followed as I stepped off having survived the experience.
Nervous sweat spread across my body as my heart rate finally slowed. Rimble, Blackwood’s tax collector, drove his wagon down my dirt road towards me, unaware of my near-death experience. The grumpy old goat sat on his seat scowling at the world around him, angry as the day he was born, or so Gretel said. I’d never seen the old man smile and didn’t expect it to happen today.
He grunted as he brought his wagon to a stop beside me. He had five days of patchy beard growth and wrinkles deep enough to hold a hand of poker. “I’m here to pick up the king’s portion.” His tone had that gritty, dry, angry old man quality that told you he blamed everyone except himself for his problems.
“The barn is in front of you. Go right ahead,” I said, not wanting to talk to the old man more than I had to.
“I’ve been informed I’m to collect your entire measly crop as taxes.”
“That’s right. I don’t eat squash.”
My second harvest had come in a few days ago, which meant I had 80 units worth of squash sitting in my barn. A unit was how they measured food here. It basically equated to enough calories for a single meal and differed from produce to produce.
“Plant something else then. It’s not worth my time coming out here just for 80 poorly-grown units of squash.”
Rimble flicked his reins, and the wagon moved forward, going around the turning bay in front of the barn to stop side on before the open door. There was a flash of light and the squash I’d stored in the barn appeared on the back of his wagon. Rimble gave his reins another flick, moved forward to finish the turn, and continued on his way back to the village.
I shook my head. My farm didn’t have indoor plumbing, but it had teleportation. It made absolutely no sense.
Salem sauntered around the corner, carrying a live mouse in his jaw. He saw me staring down the road and turned and looked at the retreating wagon before continuing on his way, smug as anything.
I went back to breakfast, going through the window rather than tempting the trapdoors a second time. When my meal was finished and the dishes were done, I went outside and checked the chicken coop. I’d cleaned up the dead birds as well as I could in the middle of the night, but there was still a lot of blood left behind.
I started by opening up the front and pulling out the bloodstained hay. Once that was done, I got a brush and more than a dozen buckets of water and washed inside. I had no idea if this was actually something I had to do, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt, and it eased my guilt over the massacre I’d let happen to gain experience.
Even after I cleaned the coop and replaced the old straw with new straw, the chickens weren’t happy, clucking nervously when anything came too close. That wasn’t exactly a surprise. I figured it would take a few days for their nerves to settle. If they didn’t, well…it wasn’t like they were going to live that long anyway.
With everything clean, I checked the coop to make sure all the latches and the quick-release door were working. They were.
Checking the coop made me realise I should probably check out my other traps. I hadn’t done anything to them since I’d finished installing them and I was already afraid of the two trapdoors at the house, so regular maintenance was something I should probably start doing.
It was quite possibly a really good idea.
The longer I considered it, the more pressing the issue became. I mean, last night I successfully attracted a monster. Sure, it had been a fox, but Salem wanted to go after wolves next. And not one wolf either, but a pack. I didn’t want a malfunction to occur when they turne
d up.
Suddenly, my day of farming was off the table. I had maintenance I needed to do.
I decided to start with the two trapdoors at the house. The trapdoors were eight-foot squares with hinges on one side. The other side was held up with a trigger-like mechanism that had a rope attached to a lever which I could pull from inside the house to drop the trapdoor.
I got the oil can from the barn and then went inside and pulled each lever, opening the trapdoors. Both traps worked flawlessly, dropping the floor and exposing a ten-foot-deep pit lined with sharpened wood spikes.
The house’s trapdoors had each taken me about a day and a half’s worth of digging to create. They would do their job fine, but weren’t designed for anything larger than a man. I put oil on the hinges and trigger mechanism and reset the trapdoors before checking on the big one in the barn.
The barn trapdoor was fifteen feet across and dropped into a spike pit twenty feet deep. I’d dug down far enough that I’d needed to reinforce the walls with wooden planks to keep going. The depth was so the massive trapdoor didn’t take out any of the four-foot spears at the bottom when it opened.
It and the falling spike rack that hung above it with a thousand pounds of stone on top were my troll killers. I’d taken the Darkwood’s history seriously. If a troll or ogre ever showed up to eat me, my only chance of survival was the barn trap, which was why I kept the barn door open at all times. Despite how lethal the traps seemed to me, Salem was quite sure the pit and spike trap wouldn’t kill a troll or ogre outright, which was why I had piles of straw and jars of 80% alcohol moonshine nearby.
I didn’t like the idea of burning something alive, but I liked the idea of being eaten even less, and I’d been told twenty feet wasn’t too high for an injured troll or ogre to climb out of.
If you didn’t include the two cages with the pressure plates, the only other traps in the barn were the log swing and another two sets of falling spikes.
For the log swing, I’d suspended three large logs in a row, binding them together with ropes so they could swing towards the barn door. I’d gotten the idea from Home Alone. The scene when the burglars were climbing up the stairs only to be knocked back down by paint cans always made me laugh. I had no idea if the logs would work the way I hoped—knocking something back into the pit—but they were simple to build and hopefully I’d never have to find out.
After oiling everything and checking that they worked, I left the barn and made my way around the property, checking the other camouflaged pitfalls I’d dug. For the most part, they were still well hidden, but there were a few that required touch-ups.
I even receive a prompt and a rank up.
Well done, you have successfully maintained your pitfalls and gained a new rank of proficiency with pitfalls. You can now boast that you can make a pitfall as well as any Initiate.
After the rank up, I didn’t notice any details around the pitfalls that could be improved upon, but then I didn’t expect to. Tool proficiency and lore proficiency rank ups were only noticeable if you were actually below that level of capability, like when I had ranked up with the spear. I’d been so ignorant that even the slight improvements were noticeable.
Checking that everything was working correctly and resetting the traps safely took me past lunch, so I decided to take the rest of the afternoon off and read a book.
As I headed back to the house, I spotted a large wooden tub out on the veranda and groaned. I liked my ghost. Every day she cooked me breakfast, and every three days she did the laundry. Her tenth day mayhem, where she ran through the house laughing for fifteen minutes, didn’t bother me at all, but every ninth day she pulled the tub out onto the veranda, heated a whole lot of water, and then took a bath. It was not a pretty sight—and that was her in the tub.
I’d experienced this before. She’d go back and forth between the tub and the kitchen, naked as the day she was born, refilling the tub with hot water as her ghostly presence quickly sucked the heat from it. She’d go on like that for hours.
The sight of the tub changed my plans.
I’d been intending to go to the village and purchase more chickens in a few days, but now seemed like a better time. I thought about taking in the experience I’d earned from the fox to show Jeric but decided against it. Salem was an ass, but he had also been right. The experience I'd received wasn’t proof of anything. It was better to wait until I had something more concrete.
So, I went into the house through the window, grabbed my coin pouch, and then made the hour-long walk into the village.
Walking down the main road on the village's eastern side always reminded me of a zombie apocalypse. Every farm either had the burnt-out shell of a barn or farmhouse and a run-down version of the other. Goblins, for some reason, only ever burned one or the other, never both. The east gate was closed, as usual, and the guard in the tower told me to go around the other side, even though I was already headed that way.
I glanced at the palisade as I made my way past the farmhouses. It was in a poor state. Some of the logs had begun to rot. They weren’t falling apart yet, but given a few more years, the wall wouldn’t keep anything out. The village didn’t have the money to repair it. They didn’t have money for a lot of things, from what Jeric had told me.
I made my way through the west gate to Gretel’s and went inside. It was empty. I walked up to the bar and placed two silver nobles on the counter as she came out of the kitchen. “Afternoon, Gretel. I need another twenty chickens. When do you think I can pick them up?”
She looked at the two silvers on her counter. At five coppers a chicken, the price was a little steep, but Gretel knew all the local farmers. She was their main buyer for live chickens and I didn’t want to step on her toes. She’d been good to me.
I fished out another copper and added it to the silver. “And, I’ll take a Sommertown ale.” The local ale was absolute crap.
Gretel smiled and finally swiped the coins off the counter. “I can have them ready by tomorrow afternoon or the morning after if that works better for you.”
“Tomorrow afternoon’s fine,” I said. “What’s the news?”
She shrugged as she picked up a mug and went to fill it. “A village called Bertwine was massacred by goblins and hobgoblins a few days ago. No one is sure how many there were as no one survived to tell, but the royal investigators believe there might have been tens of thousands.”
I’d studied the maps in the inn enough to recognise the name. “Bertwine, wasn’t that village only five days south of here?”
She nodded, not seeming worried. “The orcs are having food issues again, it might be war, or it might be nothing. It’s caused another migration away from the southern border villages. It triggered the dungeon in Worland to grow another floor which has the northern adventurers all excited. They’ve swarmed the city in search of loot.” She finished pouring the ale and slid it across the bar to me.
“That’s the blacksmithing city, right?” I wasn’t surprised by the prospect of war. There always seemed to be some sort of calamity occurring in the kingdom.
“No, Worland’s known for books. It has the greatest library in the kingdom. You’re confusing it with Warlan…”
“Everyone does,” I said sarcastically.
Gretel snorted. “So, how is farming treating you?”
“Oh, just great. Rimble came by this morning to complain about my first two harvests, which earned me under a noble, and up until this ale that was the highlight of my day.”
“If you need cheering up, I’ve had a few more ladies inquire about you and your dungeon since we last spoke.”
I was mid-swallow.
I coughed and spluttered and wheezed my way through the next few seconds. Once my lungs were clear, I wiped my mouth with the back of my sleeve and glared at her. She had waited until I was drinking on purpose. She was laughing too hard for her not to have.
I sighed; ten weeks and she was still teasing me. “Don’t you have anything els
e to do besides pick on us poor defenceless farmers?”
Gretel shook her red mane. “Not at all.”
We chatted for a few more minutes and then I swallowed the last of my ale and handed her back the empty tankard. “I’ll see you tomorrow. I’m going to go see if Jeric has—”
As I turned to leave, I spotted an acoustic guitar sitting in the corner of the room. It wasn’t flashy or an overly expensive looking instrument, but its presence stunned me.
I wasn’t an amazing guitarist by any standards, but I could play most modern pop songs, a little bit of old school rock, and a fair bit of country music. My father had taught me how to play, hoping that he could make his nerdy son a little bit cooler in the eyes of the opposite sex. It hadn’t really worked out that way, but I was glad he’d taught me.
Something clicked in my head, and I turned back to Gretel. “How much do you want for the guitar?”
Gretel paused, momentarily thrown by the change in subject. “It’s not mine. It belongs to a travelling bard. She arrived late last night, woke me up, and had the audacity to ask for a discount. She’s out in the village trying to badger people into coming for a show.”
Her scathing tone shocked me. Gretel had always been easygoing and approachable as long as I’d known her. “You don’t like bards?”
“No.” Gretel’s tone told me if I asked a follow-up question, somehow I was going to get in trouble.
“I’ll take another ale.”
She frowned. “I thought you were going to visit Jeric?”
“After,” I said, sitting back down.
I spent the next hour and a half nursing ales as I waited for the bard to show up. Gretel had jobs to do, so after the first half-hour, she left me alone to take care of myself.
Let me tell you, putting your money on the counter and getting up to pour your own ale in a tavern is kind of great. It makes you feel like you belong, far more than it should.
Oh Great! I was Reincarnated as a Farmer Page 11
