Foreign Land Reclamation By a Vegetable-growing Skeleton

“Do you know about locusts?” Anthony asked.

“…Of course, I do.” Silver Coin replied speechlessly. He was not an ignorant noble, and Anthony’s question made him feel insulted.

“I’ve gotten used to it. Ah, you have no idea what I’ve been going through lately.” Anthony said with a bitter smile.

“Centuries ago, a carefree boy lived in a village until a locust plague struck one year. Crops were devoured, a famine ensued, and his parents starved to death. Driven by hunger, he caught locusts to roast and eat, eventually surviving…”

The surviving boy was Hermorth. In divine language, ‘Tos’ means ‘supreme.’ Hermorthos translates to ‘the supreme Hermorth.’

Having lost his family and with most of his village friends dead from starvation, Hermorth, who had been eating roasted locusts, not only survived but also saved the remaining villagers. They weathered the most challenging phase until the Church of Light came to their aid.

However, the arrival of the Church of Light did not save Hermorth. Soon, the church learned from villagers of Hermorth’s actions—roasting and eating locusts to save some villagers. This was unthinkable!

We went to great lengths to collect food and money. Ninety percent of the resources were ‘used up’ during the journey. The remaining ten percent was allocated for aid. Instead of being grateful to the Light, they praised the farmer who roasted locusts!

This was unacceptable. If everyone starts roasting locusts for survival, then where would our church find followers?

So, they fabricated an excuse. For instance, eating locusts was sacrilegious, and they had the villagers banish Hermorth from his birthplace.

Given these circumstances, the villagers chose to drive Hermorth away, completely forgetting who saved them during their darkest hours. They even deluded themselves, “Hermorth knew eating locusts was blasphemous, yet he fooled us into doing so. Drive him away!”

A plain boy, exiled from his village in disaster, where could he go? The land for hundreds of miles had been stripped bare by locusts, not even grass and tree bark remained. What could he eat?

In the end, he survived by eating locusts again. Not only that, but he also started farming them in a secluded cave.

With time, Hermorth gained insights from farming locusts and even learnt how to rapid breed and fatten them. In a normal world, he might have used this expertise to start animal farming and become wealthy.

However, this was not a normal world. Common sense could make one a god. A man that farmed millions of locusts suddenly developed a certain premonition.

Farming millions of locusts in a cave was an impressive feat. Simply feeding them exhausted most of Hermorth’s time and energy. When the numbers became too overwhelming, the locusts began to cannibalize each other.

Hermorth threw whatever he could find into the cave. Initially, it was just plants and minerals, but then, on a whim, he threw in some animal carcasses and discovered that the locusts would eat them too.

At first, he merely fed them. But after several years, Hermorth could control these locusts, directing simple movements like where to go.

From that point on, Hermorth’s ‘feeding’ turned into ‘farming.’ He ordered them outside to eat what they find in the open.

The locust population saw a massive increase, reaching over ten million. Food in the wilderness quickly became insufficient.

In the absence of food, locusts would resort to cannibalism. This pained Hermorth, for these were ‘children’ he had carefully reared.

This suffering agonized him for a long time until one day, he drove the swarm back to his former village, watching the locusts consume crops, livestock, and even the people…

Every edible thing was devoured and it was then Hermorth finally escaped his torment. From that moment, he no longer saw humans as his kin, but as food for locusts.

With a substantial food supply, the locust population grew exponentially from ten million to hundreds of millions, a new locust plague was forming.

At first, nobody paid any attention to this disaster. It was just another locust plague. When the Church of Light’s priests received the news, they routinely reported it and requested disaster relief. Meanwhile, they were thinking about what they could do with the relief fund.

Not long after, the carpet-like swarm of locusts stripped the villages bare and advanced toward the cities.

It was then the people realized these locusts were different; they ate meat.

Faced with this unexpected change, humans, elves, dwarves, and the dragon clan united unprecedently and swiftly eliminated the locust plague. However, no one knew that Hermorth had taken a batch of new locust individuals back to the initial cave.

A decade later, a man appeared in a small mountain village hundreds of kilometers away, calling himself Hermorthos, asking the villagers to worship him.

Of course, no villager would believe such a person who came out of nowhere, so they drove him away.

However, within a few days, strange insects appeared near the village, devouring all the villagers’ crops and injuring people.

Just when everyone was at a loss, Hermorthos, who had been driven away a few days ago, reappeared. He drove away the strange insects with a wave of his hand and once again asked everyone to worship him.

It seemed too coincidental that just after he left, the strange insects appeared, so some people questioned if Hermorthos was controlling the insects.

In response, Hermorthos simply ordered the insects to bite to death those who questioned him. Well, then everyone stopped questioning and shakily swore to worship him.

Afterward, Hermorthos displayed a new miracle. He sprinkled a substance called ‘Yin’ into the fields that had been nibbled clean by the insects. A few hours later, the plants that were left with only roots amazingly began to grow again.

With these two miracles, the Chaos Temple founded by Hermorthos steadily grew stronger, taking root and flourishing in places beyond the reach of light.

It wasn’t until decades later that Anthony accidentally discovered this religion.

At that time, Anthony was not called Anthony, he had another name and his rank was that of a senior priest. However, he still retained a heightened sensitivity to the aura of death, he noticed that some places had a lot of scattered traces of death. Upon further investigation, he discovered a large number of strange insect corpses.

He later found out that Hermorthos was using these insect corpses to ferment the so-called ‘Yin’.

Anthony reported his discovery to the church, then, the various races again united to jointly crack down on Hermorthos.

And this time, the Gods of Light, in a rare event, descended. A God, descending upon the Pope, uttered only one sentence: “In the places where light shines, I can see you, and I, do not want to see you.”

Just with this simple sentence, the strange insects that had become a huge threat and were increasing exponentially, began to disappear in smoke.

It was because of this miracle that Anthony, to this day, cannot believe that the Gods of Light have disappeared, because by this time, the King had already disappeared, and he had been infiltrating the Church of Light for decades.

However, Hermorthos did not fully disappear. He might have hidden in places beyond the reach of the light and would occasionally reappear to make trouble.

To guard against him, the various races established a mechanism to monitor his whereabouts throughout the whole plane.

To achieve this was not difficult because the proliferation of the strange insects required a lot of food. If you noticed that a large number of plants and animals were disappearing in a short amount of time in any one area, you just needed to dispatch someone to go and check.

“Lord Ange suddenly issued a divine decree to kill him. Does this mean this guy has reappeared?” Anthony frowned, distressed.

This was a big deal. In principle, he had to inform everyone. But if he reported it, it would once again drag Ange into this type of plane-wide conflict since Ange was the one who discovered it first.

“The best way is for us to quietly get rid of Hermorthos. Well, not exactly get rid of him, because every few decades, he’ll pop up once. Just need to erase the traces of his appearance this time.” Anthony stroked his chin, murmuring to himself.

Ange turned those two beetles into ashes, then huffily returned to the village.

As a farming skeleton, he knew too well how terrifying it would be if these two types of bugs proliferated. They would devour all visible plants, which Ange absolutely could not tolerate.

When he thought of the date tree of the Oasis, the Axe Potato, the World Tree, and the Saline Demon Rice he had just planted by Fallen Dragon Lake that would all be eaten, Ange couldn’t help but fume.

This rare emotional outburst made everyone unconsciously tremble, even the usually rowdy Little Angel was subdued at this moment, meekly following behind Ange.

It took Negris quite a while to realize and mumble in astonishment, “Is this divine power? Is it actually divine power? Has the farming skeleton awakened his divine power? Kvada!”

In order to quickly bring Ange out of this emotional turmoil, Negris’ eyes spun around. He suddenly pointed to the ashes of the insects on the ground and said, “Ange, look.”