“And your second theory?”
“Perhaps the laws that govern our lives have grown, changing, and Arnold is simply the first to achieve this outcome. As there have been no cataclysmic events, I believe the first is far more likely.”
Jeric nodded. “Interesting, I would love to discuss this further over a glass of wine before you leave Blackwood if it doesn’t inconvenience you?”
Ranic chuckled. “Arnold failed to mention that along with my oath of secrecy, I have sworn to use my skills to aid him to the best of my ability for the next five years.”
Jeric lost all of his usual discipline, leaning forward excitedly. “What is your exact level and specialty?”
“Ninety-nine and farming.”
Jeric’s jaw quivered as he turned to me. “Do you have any idea what you have done?”
Ranic smirked. “He’s completely ignorant. It’s kind of charming.”
“Hey, I’m not ignorant. Also, what have I done?”
Jeric stared at me. “He’s a level 99 master scholar who specialises in farming. If we build him a house of scholars, his knowledge will affect the entire village even without the building having leveled.”
I frowned. “Affect the village in what way?”
Ranic chuckled. “The village farmers should receive more information about their fields when they look at them. They should have better indicators to help them see what is wrong or right. It will stop them from being able to make basic mistakes, so quality should improve. Fields should also start leveling quicker and there should be a small increase in experience.”
“You call a 9.9% increase small,” Jeric said.
“Well, maybe not that small,” Ranic said, a smug smile on his lips.
“You didn’t tell me that,” I said, trying to stop my jaw from dropping.
Ranic shrugged. “Originally, I thought you knew. By the time I worked out you didn’t, it wasn’t important because it wouldn’t affect what you were attempting to do.”
“Oh.”
Jeric shook his head. “I’m going to have to write an apology letter to the governor of Weldon. He must be furious.”
Ranic shook his head. “Don’t bother. Weldon has never had a house of scholars devoted to farming. My absence won’t change anything in a significant way. But enough of that; I’m interested in knowing if you are truly on board with Arnold’s plan? He says you are, but I would rather hear it from you.”
“I am.”
Ranic took a deep breath and became much more serious. “You realise the danger to your village?”
Jeric leaned back and folded his arms. “I do. However, I believe this experiment is worth the risk. The kingdom’s been waging so many wars with the southern orcs over the last thirty years that there aren’t enough warriors to go around; even with the king asking them to have more children we can’t keep up. The adventurers have needed to join the wars more often than not, taking them away from clearing dungeons and leading to an increase in monster breakouts throughout the kingdom. The southern border villages have been emptying for decades due to increased attacks and danger. Food hasn’t become a problem yet, but that could change if goblins sack more eastern border villages and towns.”
Ranic stared at Jeric for several seconds. “You, sir, are wasted here. Why are you not somewhere that could take advantage of your mind?”
“I’m the bastard son of a nobleman and a prostitute,” Jeric said without hesitation. “I’m lucky that my father was so powerful that the stain on his reputation for allowing me to become an adventurer was greater than the cost of me keeping my class.”
I turned and looked at him. In all our conversations, this had never come up. Jeric hadn’t spoken like he was ashamed of his parentage, but like someone who was just stating things how they were.
Ranic nodded. “I suppose their loss is Arnold’s gain. He’s lucky to have the support of a nobleman who can see farther ahead than his nose.” Ranic frowned, looking at Jeric more closely. “Your father wouldn’t be Nobleman Eric, by any chance?”
Jeric nodded. “Yes. I’m told we share similar features. You’ve met him?”
“Yes, at the academy, back in my teaching days. He was little more than a boy then, but he had very particular and brilliant questions about farming and its relation to the royal class. I wasn’t surprised when I heard he had been made a member of the royal council of scholars.”
Jeric gave a tight polite smile that didn’t reach his eyes and then turned to me. “So, Arnold, what brought you here, outside of introducing me to your new comrade?”
I crossed my arms and leaned back, matching Jeric. “Well, Ranic was able to get a few scholar books on the trapsmith skill and class before we left Weldon and I figured you should have some idea of what I was going to be doing out there.” I pulled out the new series of drawings that I had developed with Ranic’s help and unfolded them so that Jeric could see. “So basically, we think we’ve worked out how to turn the barn into something that can take out at least half a dozen trolls, and we don’t even have to get anything new. Everything should be a whole lot safer now.”
Chapter Nineteen
ANOTHER UNFORTUNATE EXPERIMENT
A single lantern burned, barely revealing enough of the barn for me to see. I hadn’t had enough time to get the straw wall burning with that damn ogre so close behind me, but that didn’t matter now that the ogre was trapped in the pit. The massive ten-foot-tall creature continued to bellow, its growls shaking the walls of the barn as it forced its way up and out of the spike pit at the barn entrance.
The ogre’s musk was so strong it overpowered the barn’s ventilation, making me gag. It was a foul combination of rotting meat and excrement.
Salem ran over and leapt onto the wooden crate next to me, unconcerned that it was filled with jars of highly-combustible moonshine. “There are no other ogres on the property. This one seems to have come alone.”
Said ogre continued to rage inside the pit. Outside, the caged puma growled for help, not knowing that its mother and sister were already dead.
Annoyance mixed itself into my excitement. “The stupid ogre is still here though, which makes it two for two when it comes to accidentally attracting larger monsters, if we don’t include the fox.”
Salem nodded. “Do you want to try again or would you like to test your theory about weaker monsters first?”
If a passerby stood outside and looked at me through the barn door, they would think I was insanely calm considering that there was an ogre no more than thirty feet from me. But then, they wouldn’t see the pair of massive axes connected to the rafters, or the swinging spike walls, or the log spears. There was literally thirty feet of ogre death between me and the entrance.
I kept an eye on the ogre as I considered Salem’s questions. “I think we should try luring the weaker monsters first. This guy doesn’t scare me so much, since he was by himself, but I would still rather not have to deal with him.”
The ogre’s hand appeared over the edge of the pit as it pulled its massive bulk up and off the barbed spikes that were skewering it from the bottom. A stream of blood ran down the side of its face. Its glare promised murder and its roar promised a painful slow death followed by a long digestion. The force of the roar shook my chest, reverberating like thunder, but I didn’t get the stunned prompt I had when the troll had done the same thing. It reached forward, hauling its shoulder up above ground level, trying to drag itself towards me.
I pulled a lever.
A double-sided axe blade larger than I was tall silently dropped, swinging from the barn's left-hand side to the right, inches above the ground. Several hundred pounds of steel blade, backed up by gravity and a counterweight pulley system to give it more strength and reset it for a second use, collided with the upper half of the ogre, splitting it at the shoulder before coming out the other side and rising to lock into place on the opposite section of the barn rafters.
I stared as the ogre’s body separated into
two pieces and the front of the ogre collapsed forward. “Holy shit. I mean, I designed that thing to be able to kill trolls, but damn. That’s horrifying.”
Salem stared at the dead ogre and then looked up at me, a little shocked. “Agreed…now, I’ll go do another sweep of the farm to see if it is safe for you to come out. Remember, don’t loot the corpses. Ranic wants to study them first.”
“I know,” I said, exasperated.
“This is brilliant, just brilliant,” Ranic said for the third time in fifteen minutes. His few previous complaints about my method of farming were nonexistent now that he had results in front of him. His level of energy was something I could not mimic.
The sun had barely risen before his carriage had come charging down the road behind Salem, ready to see what I had done. Right now, you wouldn’t think he was a 143 years old. You wouldn’t even think he was 70 by looking at him. He seemed so full of life.
I on the other hand wanted to go back to bed. It was far too early in the morning to be awake.
He gave the ogre’s eye another poke before writing something down in his journal. A chest full of bizarre tools waited behind him, ready for experimentation. He frowned at the page before turning to me and smiling. “I’ve just had an idea that is nearly as crazy as your own ideas.”
I yawned. “What is it?”
“I think we should feed the ogre to the puma in the cage.”
“I agree,” Salem said. He’d developed a bad habit of immediately taking Ranic’s side in everything, simply because he noticed how much it annoyed me.
I swallowed the grouchiness I wanted to let flow from being awake at this hour. “I’m not giving up that sort of money to test a theory,” I said, shaking my head at them.
“You wouldn’t have to. We’d do it after you had looted it for the defence experience.”
I frowned. “Why?”
Ranic stood up, wiped his hands on the towel he had brought with him, walked over to an empty crate, and took a seat. “Well, that involves explaining a few things. And you don’t look nearly awake enough for me to do so.”
“Try me.”
“Simplify it for him,” Salem suggested.
Ranic looked at the familiar and nodded. “As you know, farmers gain experience not from killing monsters but from defending their farms. This experience is generated by the magic of a farm, perhaps all farms. Because the experience you receive comes from your farm and not the carcass, the carcass retains its experience. This wouldn’t matter if you were a warrior or adventurer, but it matters if you are a monster. Now, monsters usually gain levels from aging, but they also gain levels from consuming other monsters. I believe that if you feed the carcass to the puma, then the puma will absorb the experience trapped within the carcass and gain levels. This is what is done on farms where they raise more than one variety of monster.”
A goofy grin began to flow over my cheeks. “At what ratio do monsters gain experience from killing other monsters?”
“Fifty percent,” he said.
Excitement filled me. “So if this worked and I managed to trap half a dozen monsters, I could kill the first monster, use its carcass to fatten up the second where I would get a further 50% of that added experience, feed it to a third for 25%, and just keep going.”
Ranic nodded. “I believe so. Luring monsters to a farm this way opens up all sorts of possibilities for exploitation. We will have to see if this works first. I know it does with farm-raised monsters, but it doesn’t work for monsters killed off a farm and brought on for some reason. As it is, this has likely never been tested with wild monsters caught in this way. But then again maybe it has, as I’ve told you in the past, those who farm monsters do not like to advertise or share their knowledge.”
This one piece of advice made bringing Ranic here entirely worth it. If I never got another useful idea out of the old man, it would still be a complete success. A thought occurred to me as I stared at the ogre’s head. “How the hell is that puma going to manage to eat all of it?”
Ranic frowned. “That’s our first obstacle. Though, I have read about monsters resting next to the rotting corpses of larger monsters and gaining levels that way. You should bring the puma’s cage in here to test it out.”
I swallowed the nervous lump that had formed in my throat. “The cages weren’t designed to be moved with something inside.”
“They’re sturdy enough,” Ranic said, climbing off the crate to examine the ogre further. He prodded the corpse.
“No, I mean, there is nothing to help me move that damn cage safely.”
Ranic paused but didn’t look over. “I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want to do, but if I’m right, and you don’t, you will be walking away from a lot of free experience.”
I started to swear as I turned and made my way towards the puma’s cage. “Salem, help me figure out how the hell I’m going to do this?”
The following morning, Ranic sat across the breakfast table, shaking his head. “I can’t believe you allow a ghost to remain in your house. If you need money to remove her, I will gladly loan it to you. Though I don’t see why that would be the issue, it’s not exactly expensive.”
“She’s not harming anyone.”
“She kissed you.”
“On the cheek,” I mumbled through a mouthful of delicious bacon and fried potatoes.
Ranic shook his head one more time and finally dug into the meal she had cooked. The old man had been at the farm hours before I was up, and the ghost had made a second plate for him, incorporating his presence into her memory, treating him as a farmhand and calling him Damor. He took a tentative bite and then a much bigger one. “This is good.”
I grinned. “I know, right?”
“And she does this every morning.”
“Yep.”
“I take back my judgement.”
“Don’t let Salem hear you say that. He’s adamant I should get rid of her.”
“Why?”
“She petted him while he was sleeping once.”
A frown crossed Ranic’s face. “Has she tried to sleep with you yet? You know ghost sometimes do that, right?”
A shudder went through me.
“Okay, you’ve tested my theory and shown it works, which I’m grateful for, but I think it’s time you killed that poor beast,” Ranic said, holding a scented rag to his mouth. It had been a long week, during which the smell of rotting ogre had steadily grown worse.
“There is still more experience in there,” I said through my own rag, while trying not to look at the puma stuffed into the cage.
It had grown monstrously fast in a single week of captivity, eating nonstop and quadrupling in size until it was nearly as big as a grizzly. It no longer had room to move, its body squashed against the bars. Keeping it in the cage was a level of cruelty that I was becoming more and more uncomfortable with.
“Well, besides this whole situation being sort of brutal, that puma is getting strong enough to break out of the cage. As a farmer, you can’t see the stats of the cage with your analyse ability, but I can, and its durability is down to half.”
“The puma can still gain two more levels,” I said, annoyed.
“I agree, and I would love to study it further, but I think it might be able to force its way out with just the next level. We need to put it down for our own safety.”
I sighed. “You could have said that in the first place.” I picked up the spear from where it rested against the barn wall and walked over to the cage. The puma began to twitch and flex as it saw me approach. For the first time, I heard metal buckling. “You got any particular way you want me to kill it?”
“Quickly and cleanly,” Ranic said, moving closer to the cage, unafraid of the monster trapped inside. “If you hit him right here between the vertebra with your weight behind your weapon and then twist, it won’t suffer.”
I moved into position, ready to end the creature’s life—and had a thought. “I’ve got a quest
ion. If adventurers and warriors gain their experience when looting monsters, then how come I’ve gotten experience for both my trapsmith and spearman skills when killing them?”
“A small amount of experience is automatically awarded to the weapon skill that is used to kill,” Ranic said. “We don’t know why. It’s one of the great mysteries of gaining experience.”
I nodded, lining up my spear tip with where he had pointed. Then I took three steps forward and lunged, putting my weight behind the strike. The sharp steel bit through the puma’s skin, parting flesh as it went down between the bones. I gave it a violent twist and felt something in the puma snap.
It went limp, its death swift, clean, and violent.
Light surrounded me and a prompt appeared.
Well done, you have killed a puma and gained a level in the Spearman skill.
Skill: Spearman
Level: 2
Effect:
+4% to spear wielding ability
+4% to spear attack speed and damage.
I dismissed the prompt and sent my logs to Ranic so he could study them. “Tell me when you are done studying. I want to butcher the puma for the butcher experience,” I said and then turned to leave the barn.
“Will do. Can you loot the ogre before you leave?”
I turned, shocked. “I can still loot it? The loot orbs faded.”
Ranic nodded. “You won’t get anything valuable, but I imagine you will get some good quality fertilizer and maybe something magical if it has survived. All you need to do is touch it and focus on wanting to loot it.”
I moved over to one of the putrid rotting arms and touched the slimy skin, focusing on wanting to loot it. I’d had to haul the carcass out in pieces, so the pile of rotting ogre chucks was absolutely revolting at this point. There was a pool of slurried pustulous slime that made me gag every time I looked at it.
Oh Great! I was Reincarnated as a Farmer Page 21
