Foreign Land Reclamation By a Vegetable-growing Skeleton

Harvey stretched lazily, sinking into the stone chair in a more comfortable position. Heaven knows how his skeletal frame could differentiate between comfortable postures. His bones scraped the stone chair until it flaked.

Then he remembered something, “What are you here for?”

“I’ve met the God of Knowledge,” the Great Sage said excitedly.

“Oh? Where did you meet him?” Harvey’s spirits lifted, and he sat up in the stone chair.

However, after the Great Sage relayed the circumstances of meeting Negris, Harvey immediately lost interest and lay back down.

“Um, aren’t you excited?” Harvey’s unexpected reaction left the Great Sage a little flummoxed.

“Not excited, it doesn’t want to meet us,” Harvey replied.

“What!?” The Great Sage had been so excited since meeting Negris, he hadn’t had time to think things through. It was only when Harvey reminded him that he finally caught on.

Indeed, Negris didn’t want to see him, otherwise it wouldn’t have revealed his identity only when he was about to force the issue. Furthermore, it was clear that Negris hadn’t just arrived in the Land of Fallen. If he hadn’t sought them out after all this time, he obviously didn’t want to meet.

This was hard for the Great Sage to accept: “Why doesn’t it want to see us? I arranged for its droppings to be cleared, even its lamb meals are procured by me, and it didn’t want to see us? Doesn’t it know we miss His Majesty deeply?”

“His Majesty, is no more,” Harvey muttered absent-mindedly.

If their monarch was still around, Negris would not have been so standoffish towards them. This change of attitude only confirmed their previous conjecture – their monarch was gone.

“It said that Piero saved it. Something must have happened to the Resting Camp, otherwise it wouldn’t have been able to leave the seal. However, it didn’t say what happened, only that it didn’t know,” the Great Sage furrowed his brows.

“Piero, huh…” Harvey too couldn’t help but sit up: “This guy is much more difficult to deal with than the God of Knowledge, too slippery.”

Even the mourned Harvey felt that dealing with Anthony was challenging, at least lying down wouldn’t cut it.

“So, what do we do now?” The Great Sage asked.

Harvey hesitated for a moment, and reluctantly got up: “Let’s go see it first.”

He reluctantly shuffled his way to the cave entrance, and the sky suddenly brightened.

Harvey looked up and said, “Eh, the eternal night is over. Forget it, I’ll go see him during the next eternal night, I’m going to sleep now.”

Having found an excuse, Harvey turned around and went back, once again throwing himself into the stone lounge chair.

The Great Sage stood there for a while, sighing helplessly: “If only you were a bit more diligent, we wouldn’t have needed over a thousand years to break the human line of defense.”

From the depths of the cave came Harvey’s languid voice: “Can’t do it, my lumbar disc is herniated, can’t get up, the more active I am, the worse it becomes.”

The Great Sage drove back on his own, against the first rays of sunlight after the eternal night…

…

As the first sunlight broke after the eternal night, Ange was getting ready, hugging a breadfruit. When the Druids were scared off by the lightning earlier, they left behind a saying, ‘Stealing the breadfruit is useless, they can’t cultivate the seeds’, which seriously underestimated Ange.

From the moment he watched them eat the breadfruit, Ange knew why there were no seeds inside the fruit – because it wasn’t ripe yet.

Some fruit from certain plants only develop seeds once they’re fully ripe, and evidently, the breadfruit is one of them.

What the Druid had said was correct. Once a fruit without seeds is picked, it cannot grow again, hence, it cannot bear seeds.

However, Ange was no ordinary person. He could make a cut-off branch from the Tree of Life bear fruit. So why would he fear such an ordinary breadfruit?

Pouring essence onto the fruit, the Instant Death Halo was activated, causing the once plump fruit to shrivel quickly. When opened, almost all of the starch inside was consumed, leaving only dozens of black seeds.

Ange picked a full seed and planted it in the east side of the ground.

Around lunchtime, the druid parted the bamboo forest and entered the enclosed breadfruit tree grove. To prevent the fruits from being stolen, they had to plant bamboos to surround the breadfruit tree, making it impossible to see the tree even from the tower, hence preventing theft.

However, the druids did not realize that many bamboo shoots not yet out of the ground had been plucked.

Parting the bamboo forest and counting the fruits – none were missing. The druids kept track of the exact number of breadfruits on the tree.

When the fruits for lunch were picked and just about to be brought out, the druid suddenly smelled the aroma of roasted breadfruit. This led him to involuntarily glance inside his arms.

All the breadfruits were there. So, who was roasting the breadfruit?

Following the scent, the druid reached the bramble wall. Speaking a spell, a vine from the bramble reached out and lifted him, allowing him a view beyond the wall. Immediately, he spotted that particularly annoying unicorn.

Lightning was sitting on the field ridge, holding a roasted breadfruit in its front hooves. It bit a piece off and licked it continuously.

Seeing the druid poking his head out, Lightning greeted him cheerfully, “Hello, have you eaten? Are we arguing again today?”

The druid, his face turning pale with anger, couldn’t say anything. He just muttered to himself, “You only stole one breadfruit, let’s see what you will eat when you finish it.”

However, such ‘mumbling’ was loud enough for Lightning to hear.

After lunch, busying himself the whole afternoon, the druid coming to pick the breadfruit again smelled the scent of the roasted breadfruit.

When he climbed up the wall for a look, he found the unicorn sitting in the same place as noon, glancing at him as it slyly extended its tongue, licking the inside of the breadfruit from a hole.

The druid was so mad that he was about to explode. He comforted himself, saying, “Don’t get angry, don’t get angry. It’s the same fruit shell as before. He’s just trying to annoy us by stuffing something else into it.”

At dinner, the unicorn came again, carrying two breadfruits this time. It licked one and then the other.

The druid was infuriatingly mad. He roared, transforming into a giant bear and smashed the bramble wall in front of him, “I will tear…”

Just as he was halfway through his sentence, he saw many heads popping out from behind the unicorn, from a field ridge. An excited little girl was just about to climb out but was stopped by a gold skull holding her collar.

Was this an ambush? A sense of unease hit the druid. He quickly changed his sentence, “I will tear… tear some wild vegetables, for seasoning back at camp.”

The giant bear paw randomly grabbed two handfuls of wild grass from the ground, and then shrunk back, uttering an incantation as the smashed bramble wall slowly grew back again.

When he reported to Dobinki later, the druid said, somewhat aggrieved, “Those things are obviously trying to provoke us into a fight. Then the competition will end, and they won’t be obligated to lose.”

Dobinki felt the same way. They – a group without any druids – dared to compete with them in farming, there was no way they could win other than resorting to underhanded tactics.

However…

“You said they have many breadfruits? It seems they’ve managed to plant the breadfruit seeds, they do have some skills. We should also not let our guard down. If we lose to them, it will be embarrassing, so from now on, let’s add another two hours of prayer.” Dobinki announced.

The other druids sighed without any objection. Indeed, if they lost in farming to a motley crew of skeletons, a little girl, an embryo dragon, and a nasty-mouthed horse, it would indeed be embarrassing.

When everyone else was asleep, Dobinki stealthily went to the location of the water buckets. These were dew collection buckets, used to collect nighttime dew for watering, which can save a lot of Magic Power.

Dobinki took out a bottle and poured the black liquid in it into the water, murmuring, “It’s time to show you what real skills look like.”