Oh Great! I was Reincarnated as a Farmer

by Benjamin Kerei

  I smiled.

  Months ago, I’d stood in Jeric’s parlour outlining the objectives we needed to complete in order to succeed. The reservoir had been the biggest and hardest one. Nevertheless, now, it and all the others were done.

  I didn’t have any of reservations I had in the past.

  Jeric and the others were all more prepared and skilled than I had been the last time the giant showed up. They knew when to trigger and when not to. They knew what sorts of risks they should take and what they should run from. They were as ready as they would ever be.

  “I’m going to try,” I said.

  “I rarely give praise, so listen to my words. If you fail, it will not be because of this trap. You and your people’s work is impeccable.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You are most welcome. Now when do you plan to start baiting the forest?”

  I groaned. “I would like to start tomorrow afternoon. Most of the people that are still in Blackwood are ready to abandon the village tomorrow morning; however, the holdouts are being difficult.”

  “You paid them to take an oath like the rest of the villagers so they know the risks of staying. If they choose to remain, it is on them.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair and scratched the back of my head. “I wish that were true. But it’s not like the giant is going to randomly appear. I’m going to bring it here.”

  She nodded. “Have you tried bribing them?”

  “It wouldn’t go over well. They seem like proud people. They could have made a small fortune selling me their land, but they chose not to. If money couldn’t make them leave then, it’s not likely to make them leave now.”

  Adoya patted my arm. “They might be proud people who want to stay, but I doubt that is what is keeping them here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One thing Ranic has taught me is that unlike you, the farmers in Blackwood are poor. I don’t doubt they love their land, but they may not be staying because of that love. They may be staying because they are too poor to leave and too proud to admit it.”

  “If that is the case, how do you bribe proud people?”

  Adoya chuckled. “That’s easy. Treat them how you would treat me. Tell them you want to pay them to leave because you do not want to deal with the variable of them remaining around the village and potentially distracting the giant. If they feel like they are giving you something you need, which they are, their pride won’t interfere with them accepting your offer. I promise you if you treat them this way, you will be baiting the forest in the next few days.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  RISKS HAVE THEIR REWARDS

  It felt good to be holding a spear again, even if I didn’t need it. The sun had been up for an hour and was just above the tree line, shedding wheat husk coloured light on the fields around the automated barn. The smell of rotting meat and morning dew covered grass permeated the air. Lenlin, Manson, and Pel clutched their spears nervously. Jeric had his sword out and a shield on his left arm but seemed otherwise relaxed.

  Quilly was the only one not taking the danger seriously. Every few seconds, she would titter as she asked Salem an avalanche of questions. It happened so often she was bordering on a giggle fit.

  Salem gave short answers, grouchy from being awake through the night, patrolling the tree line. She didn’t seem to mind.

  Last night had been a test of concept, so to speak. It had now been a little over five months since the giant had appeared. The increase in the number of monsters in the forest and the giant's proximity was something we were all well aware of. Yesterday, Salem had found the giant’s footprints only four miles from the edge of the village, showing us how much the villagers leaving had drastically reduced the strength of the village’s defence aura. The six of us were supplying so little ambient magic that the only source of water was now the fountain in the village square. It was not surprise to Jeric that, the village resource production was at zero, but it had concerned him that, the field Lenlin was cultivating to keep my farm status active was no longer offering the usual assistance.

  With the giant’s territory so close, there was always the chance that baiting the forest would draw the attention of the giant the first time, but no one had thought it likely. Enough time had passed since I’d done anything to annoy it that it likely wasn’t on guard. From what I had read, the disappearance of a few of its increasing horde of minions would likely go unnoticed by it.

  That meant luring monsters to the automated barn closest to the tree line was a calculated risk. I knew how effective my regular old barn was, but testing out the new version was still essential. If this hadn’t worked, it would be one less line of defence.

  But it had.

  I kept my eyes on the barn as we approached. The two-storey structure, built from concentrated granite, appeared undamaged. I signalled the others to move wide around the side of the building to create some extra space in case anything leapt out. That wasn’t likely to happen. The sun was up, and if something had survived its encounter with the barn, it would be long gone by now. There were also no tracks leading away from the barn and the grass was long enough to easily tell.

  As we came around the side, we got our first look at the entrance. The wooden floor glowed red where the trapdoor sat inside the entrance. Farther in, areas of the floor also glowed red, indicating the paths of swinging axes and spiked logs.

  “Salem, check the barn, please.”

  Salem swished his tail and padded forward, checking the entrance before darting into the building at speed. He knew where every trap was, so I wasn’t worried about him accidentally setting something off. The speed was for if something was waiting to attack. Not many monsters could harm him, but he wasn’t invincible or foolish.

  It was a minor inconvenience that he hadn’t gained access to the farmer class or the attributes from me passing through my threshold and leveling. The attribute bump wouldn’t have made much of a difference for him, but having the farmer class would have allowed him to see the hazard overlay.

  He was stuck doing everything from memory.

  It only took him a few seconds to search the barn. He sauntered out the entrance. “It’s clear of threats. Though you have creatures alive and trapped in two cages.”

  Everyone lowered their weapons.

  “Thank you.” I cleared my throat and changed to my teaching voice that I’d used in the past to lecture my team. “Okay, everyone, as this is your first time, we are going to take it slow. I want everybody to tell me what they see and guess what happened.”

  I walked up to the entrance of the barn and looked inside. Oak boards covered the ceiling twenty-five feet above, making it impossible to see the traps before they were triggered. The boards on the ceiling gave the impression you were looking at a wooden floor. But the boards were smaller than they looked. Quilly designed them to rotate so monsters couldn’t see where the traps were before they were triggered.

  The familiar stench of blood and ogre grew stronger as I approached. That thick coppery stink hugged my nostrils as I looked around and tried to deduce what had happened.

  A large, green-furred tiger lay in two pieces in the middle of the barn floor, its front separated from its back. Two of the spike logs had been triggered and now hung in the air above it.

  A much smaller tiger was impaled beneath weighted ceiling spikes at the back of the room. And I could hear faint growling from the direction of two loose haystacks. There were a total of eight haystacks in the interior of every barn and each of them was there to hide the presence of a cage. The cages were all above pits that would open up and drop the cage when triggered. The goal wasn’t only to trap something inside but to keep it alive once there.

  I was tired of having my cages destroyed by larger monsters as they tried to get at the smaller ones. Now that I knew I could feed the monsters to each other, live monsters were literally worth more than their weight in experience. Dropping the cages they were trapped in
side into the small pits was the easiest way to protect them. The cages were a must, but baiting eight cages in each barn was not cheap. It took over a hundred chickens a day to bait everything. The number of chickens I was sending to the barnyard in the sky was sort of horrifying.

  Once I’d surveyed the room, I checked the trapdoor in front of me. I’d put a tiny stamp on the trapdoor which showed which side was facing up. Each time the trapdoor was triggered, it would rotate 180 degrees, giving a 50% chance of knowing if the trapdoor had been activated without needing to look inside. The wrong side was facing up.

  “Alright, what does everyone see?”

  “Well—”

  “Not you, Quilly.”

  She pouted. “Fine.”

  “Lenlin, how about you start us off.”

  Lenlin scratched his jaw, staring at the carnage. “Ah, the goat pen is empty. But the caged chickens are still there which means that the tigers were interrupted while they were feeding and killed on their way out, not on their way in.”

  “That is an excellent observation, Lenlin,” Salem said. There wasn’t even a whisper of condescension in his tone. Lenlin had improved under Salem’s tutelage more than the others. He had the right mixture of caution and thought that the other two lacked. And unlike them, he was in this for the long haul.

  “Yeah, good work. Manson, what do you see?”

  “The spike logs triggered after the larger tiger was dead. Its body bounced across the triggers, setting them off.”

  “Good work. Pel, you are up.”

  “The one at the back in the spikes was running from something.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “There’s no food back there to entice it, and the trapdoor has rotated, which only happens for monsters heavier than two full-grown men.”

  “Good work. Now Jeric.”

  “The tiger that was cut in half is the mother, so I would guess that the others are her cubs. They are getting a bit bigger, so she probably took out the goat and decided not to share. The cubs then smelled the bait and climbed into the haystacks, which is why two of the cages are filled. But I could be wrong. They might have gone straight there. However, under the circumstance, I don’t think the mother would have gone to the goat if her cubs had been caught first.”

  “THEY SAW THE TRIGGERS!” Quilly yelled, face red from holding back.

  I sighed and glared at her. “Quilly, we talked about this. They need to learn how to recognise problems themselves and that isn’t going to work if you immediately tell them the answer.”

  Quilly didn’t look even slightly chastised.

  I shook my head. “Quilly, start working on the pit. We need to know what’s down there. I’m going to take everyone through the barn.”

  Quilly grinned.

  Over the next thirty minutes, I took everyone through the barn, asking questions about each trap that had and hadn’t been activated, like why everyone thought something had or hadn’t worked. Last of all, we moved the haystacks aside and opened the trapdoors where the tiger cubs were caged.

  We talked about how we could safely move them to the holding barn further inside the property and what sort of extra precautions we would need to put in place for them as they grew. By the time we were done, Quilly had the trapdoor open and had gone through the barn and engaged the safety precautions.

  We made our way back to the main trapdoor and looked over the edge into the pit, fighting against the smell of dead ogre.

  “Can anyone tell me what sort of monster died down there?”

  “It’s too dark to tell,” Pel said, face pale. She wasn’t really looking. She kept turning away.

  “Ogres, at least two, I can see their heads,” Manson said.

  “I count three,” Lenlin said. “I can see the right hands.”

  “Nice catch, Lenlin,” I said, genuinely impressed. “I saw the heads too but didn’t notice the hands. Alright, we’re all going down there.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Pel said.

  She was beginning to turn as green as the tiger's fur. The poor girl was a vegetarian. Manson had to kill the chickens she used as bait. I was just glad she could stomach handling the meat to bait the traps. Otherwise, I would have had to replace her.

  I shook my head. “Vomit up here, please.”

  Over the next hour, we helped Quilly set up the scaffolding system, and then she climbed down and loosened the tension on the mithril razor thread net and pulled it to the side. I could have done so myself, but with her being a trapsmith, she had special promotions and abilities that helped her disarm traps more safely than I could. It made more sense for her to do it when everything was slippery and covered in blood.

  Once the threat of immediate death was removed, I climbed down. The farther down I went, the more ungodly the smell became, making me regret not stuffing something in my nostrils.

  I yelled the suggestion to the others.

  At the bottom of the pit, thick slabs of meat were piled on top of each other like abattoir sashimi. There wasn’t enough to fill the pit, but the bodies weren’t exactly sitting in the middle, so when I took my foot off the bottom rung of the ladder, I felt my boot sink into blood and guts, all the way up to my shin.

  Quilly was still grinning, despite being saturated in blood. “It worked. It fucking worked. You killed three ogres with a pit trap. I got so much experience.”

  I turned to the little frizzy-haired maniac. “You got experience? How did you get experience? When did you get experience?”

  Quilly looked at me, surprised. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Well, I don’t just gain experience for building and designing traps. I also gain experience when they are used. It’s about a tenth of what you receive.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded, grinning like a maniac. “Why do you think I’ve been so fucking excited for these past few months? I gained more experience in a single night than I usually make in a month. And you’re going to keep doing this. I’m going to gain so many levels that I might reach my second threshold. No trapsmith has done that in a century. Not without buying experience at least.” She started giggling again.

  I went around each of the three corpses and touched each head, focusing on the thought that I only wanted to gain the experience from the one I was touching. The crystals formed and I slid them into my pockets.

  Lenin came down the ladder first. He stepped into the mess and looked around in disgust. Two bits of cloth hung from his nostrils and he was breathing sparingly. “This is a lot more nightmarish than I imagined.”

  I held out the crystal of experience I had looted from the level 22 ogre. Lenlin was level 11, since his parents were decent people, so the boost from my mark and Ranic’s house of scholars turned the experience I was holding into enough to get him to his first threshold.

  He stared at the crystal hungrily but hesitated to grab it. Finally, he looked me in the eye and shook his head. “I agreed to 25% of what I earn in my barn. These automated ones aren’t part of that deal. It’s yours.”

  “And I’m choosing to give it to you.”

  He shook his head again. “I may not be the brightest man, Arnold, but I have my pride and I want to earn my place in the world. Thank you, but I can’t accept this gift.”

  “Dude, think about where you are standing. You are literally ankle-deep in monster guts. This was a trial. From tomorrow onwards, we are all going to be constantly laying out bait. We need every advantage we can find if we are going to survive this. I’ve been through this when it’s bad. Any advantage no matter how small is worth having.”

  Lenlin took a deep breath. “A loan, then,” he said, taking the crystal from me. “One I will pay back as soon as possible.”

  “If that’s how you feel, I understand.”

  Lenlin smiled and the crystal vanished. Light flooded the pit, making the carnage appear ten times worse.

  When Lenlin finished glow
ing, we called for the bag and started loading the slabs of dead ogre into it, so we could feed it to the tiger cubs. When we were a quarter of the way through, Lenlin went up, and the next member of the team came down. They all needed to experience the carnage. Seeing it happen before their eyes was going to be worse than this and I didn’t want them to freeze unexpectedly.

  Manson and Pel took their bigger crystals without a word of protest, both bursting into tears as they reached their first thresholds. I got tearful bloody hugs from them. Their reactions gave me a glimpse of what it meant to be without levels. The two of them had been born to assholes that had taken their experience rather than help them develop it. It wasn’t the same cause as those who had lost everything, but it was the same result.

  They couldn’t stop grinning as they loaded chunks of ogre into bags. Pel even stopped looking ill as she grabbed armfuls of bloody meat.

  That, more than anything, confirmed for me that I wanted to help people like them.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  WAR SONGS

  I stood on the trapdoor of my new barn staring into the night. A crescent moon illuminated a silent tree line, devoid of even the smallest animal call. Uneasy anticipation weighed heavy on my tired shoulders. Tonight was the night. There was an indescribable feeling I could only compare to travelling through the northern Melgrim forest. It was coming.

  Our first success was just a taste of what the last month brought to our door. With the village entirely abandoned and its aura down to nearly nothing, we’d been baiting the forest continually. There was barely a night where one of the automated barns wasn’t used. We’d all had to fall back to our controlled barns at some point to deal with something that had bypassed the automated ones, but no one had truly been in danger. Even when monsters we hadn’t baited came out of The Wild Woods, we still managed to deal with them.