Foreign Land Reclamation By a Vegetable-growing Skeleton

As the Little Zombie moved along these guidelines, it dug straight ditches swiftly with its hoe. The dug-up soil was piled to the side, forming ridges, and naturally, a ploughed field with neatly arranged ridges and ditches took shape.

The Little Angel, carrying the Earth Hammer, ran around in the field, smashing any sizable stones in sight.

The Bronze Dragon flew around with a seed dispenser. Every sway of its claw dropped seeds into the furrows.

They buried the seeds, watered them, then stepped back and looked up at the sky.

The sky was in perpetual darkness.

A mistake has been made. They needed to try again.

They collected gravel and structured a drainage channel, moved the Luminous Moss over for breeding, and nurtured seedlings while cultivating the moss. They artificially raised the soil temperature indoors and provided suitable light for germination. Once sprouted, the seeds were transplanted outdoors.

Any which way this procedure was viewed, the workload was massive. Ange alone couldn’t possibly manage it all.

Ange ran in circles around the relay tower, pulling out the dormant Skeleton Zombies from the ground during his route, as if he was dancing.

A sparse group of over three hundred skeletons, brought to the fields under Ange’s command, instantly threw the place into chaos.

“This won’t work, Ange,” Negris interrupted. “These skeletons have no souls. They are purely conjured by your King’s Arrival. Directing them in a charge or sporadic assault is easy, but making them bend over to transplant crops is too hard on them. You could use telekinesis to micro-control three to five units, but managing this many? It’s bound to get messy.”

At Negris’s suggestion, Ange attempted to control five of the skeletons and found it to be far more orderly than gathering a whole herd.

But if Ange were to stop controlling the skeletons, they would cease any movement too.

He singled out one sturdy skeleton, imbued it with the Soul Fire and thereby gave birth to a self-sustaining skeleton.

Recollecting how his master treated him, Ange repeated the process on this skeleton and imparted all his farming techniques onto it.

But Ange still underestimated the complexity of the task. The skeleton, despite having been imbued with Ange’s farming techniques, was hopelessly lost when put in the field.

“Why is this happening?” a bewildered Ange pulled Negris over.

“Perhaps this skeleton’s soul is not competent enough to process such complex information. It’s just like an imbecile. Teach him all the magic knowledge in the world, and he’ll still be unable to perform a single spell,” Negris speculated.

“We can do it,” Ange referred to the skeletons at the farm, including himself, who were all low-rank skeletons.

Why could he manage farm work but these skeletons couldn’t? Was the knowledge he instilled flawed?

Negris looked Ange up and down, grudgingly saying, “Although I’m reluctant to admit it, in any way, your intelligence is not low. Sometimes, I seriously doubt if you’re pretending to be foolish. Maybe you skeletons of the farm were specially selected, or created in an unconventional way, such as this…”

Meanwhile, Negris pulled out a few globes. These were shaken loose from the Dimension Beast. They apparently housed spirits, like the one the Spirit of Terror was in.

“Upon investigation, I found that these globes can incubate souls. Put them in a place where the Breath of Death is particularly strong, and they can incubate souls. This globe, for instance, already has a soul in it. In about three to four months, a Soul Flame would take shape.”

“How slow,” Ange responded, and reached out to accept them, throwing them into the Temple of Rest.

A lonely hand floated to a large barrel, opened the lid, and tossed a globe inside.

The barrel was filled with Liquid of Breath of Death, in which a Purple Gold Skeleton was immersed.

After a moment of soaking, Ange withdrew the globe which now contained a new Soul Flame.

As Negris held the globe, his was filled with mingled feelings. “If only that undead met you earlier. Each of these globes carries soul fragments at different stages, clearly collected and incubated in batches by that undead using the breath of death. If it knew of someone lavish enough to use the liquid form of Breath of Death to speed up soul incubation, it would surely weep on the ground for the time and effort it had wasted.”

“I’m not sure what to call these globes, so for now, I’m going to call them Soul Spheres. They bear the rune imprints of Durken, so they must have been created by Durken. This says something about the undead: he was probably a night guard at the graveyard of the Land of Slumber,” Negris continued to mumble.

However, Ange was not interested in what he was saying and just continued his manipulations; he channeled the sphere-incubated soul to a skeleon, leaving the sphere empty. He then tossed the empty spheres into the same barrel of Liquid of Breath of Death. After a short while, he fished them out. Sure enough, each housed a new Soul Flame.

Like so, Ange obtained several dozen Soul Flames. However, this incubation process significantly drained his Liquid of Breath of Death. Soon, his last barrel of the precious liquid was left a notch less full, revealing part of Locke’s skeletal skull, which looked eerily hollow.

This was Ange’s last barrel of Liquid of Breath of Death. If he didn’t return to the Resting Abyss, it would be difficult to find more such refined liquid.