・The Farmer’s Mojibake Skill
So. The great forest.
Great forest as far as the eye can see… actually, I can see mountains, so is this a mountain range or something?
In the middle of this incomprehensible nowhere, I stood all alone.
I’m basically in a shipwreck-survivor situation, except monsters supposedly spawn here, so it’s objectively worse than being lost at sea.
“First things first — check my gear.”
Sleeping bag.
Canteen.
Plastic bottle.
Knife.
Lighter.
One-handed pot.
Plate.
Salt and pepper.
Bread.
Chocolate.
Instant curry (solid roux).
That’s about everything that matters.
In short: exactly what I was carrying home from a day of mountain hiking.
The food won’t last a single day, but the real problem is water.
Fifteen hundred milliliters total. Considering all the walking I’m about to do, it won’t last the day.
—No water, no food. And on top of that, I probably have to worry about monsters.
Per the king, no human settlement is reachable without a map, and I know neither where one is nor which direction to go.
If I wander blind without even a bearing, dying of thirst and hunger is a mathematical certainty.
So for now, the plan is: survival-camp in this area while I map out the surroundings bit by bit.
I let out a deep, deep sigh.
☆★☆★☆★
Current priority list:
-
Secure water
-
Secure shelter
-
Secure food
That’s the order.
You can go about a week without food before dying, but water kills you in two or three days.
As for shelter — already done, actually.
See, a short walk from where they dumped me, there was a cave.
About two meters tall, seven meters deep.
I looked it over, decided it would do as a bed for now, and started by gathering dead branches and dry grass.
Then I burned the dry grass and branches inside the cave.
That’s to smoke out the resident bugs and small critters. Skip that step and the bugs will make sure you never sleep a wink.
“Okay. Now, water…”
While scouting the area before finding the cave, I’d confirmed a river.
Problem is, the water was murky… the kind of grimy little river that screams “drink me raw and die.”
Filter it, then boil it — mandatory. Except I don’t actually know how to filter water.
“Can I even drink this…?”
I tilted my head at the plastic bottle of muddy water I’d scooped earlier.
I guess I could let it sit and wait for the sediment to obey gravity and sink to the bottom, but…
“Man, if only I had internet right now…”
[Skill: Net Search Level 10, activating.]
“IT WORKS?!”
So one of my garbled skills was THIS, huh.
[Note: skill levels normally cap at 5. Level 10 is a limit-break level.]
I pulled my phone out of my backpack and hit the power button.
“Whoa… the battery meter says ∞… And full signal bars, apparently.”
The divine voice did say Level 10 is a limit break. So, well… it’s a cheat. That’s the explanation.
Honestly? I’ll take it. Gratefully.
So I searched up how to filter water with a plastic bottle.
Looked like a handkerchief or towel plus some gravel and dirt from around here would do the job — and when I actually tried it, out came clean water.
I boiled it in my little pot and drank.
The water was delicious, and my stomach registered zero complaints afterward.
“Yeah. The internet is the strongest search system in existence.”
And so, water problem and housing problem: cleared, for now.
☆★☆★☆★
Which leaves food.
For now I guess it’s foraging nuts and berries, hunting animals… that kind of thing, right?
So I left the cave and was wandering the forest looking for anything edible when—
“A corpse… huh.”
I found a skeleton in the woods.
Honestly, not a pleasant find, but I put my hands together for them all the same.
“But why is there farm equipment?”
Looking around, there was a rotted-out hut nearby, and something that used to be a field, now completely overgrown.
Seems this person farmed around here, once.
And apparently they collapsed mid-fieldwork from illness or something — a rusted hoe lay beside the bones.
”…There but for the grace of God, huh.”
This is another world; there are monsters, and starving to death is a very live option.
I checked the rotted hut — no food stores. The only salvageable supplies were some dishes.
Hmm… it’d be great if I could re-till this ruined field and grow something, but…
The field is a carpet of weeds, and even if I till it, I have no seeds.
[Skill: Seed Creation Level 10, activated. Fastest option determined: bean sprouts.]
Come again?
…Oh. Something that looks an awful lot like bean sprout seeds just appeared.
My palm glowed, and next thing I knew, I was holding a huge pile of apparent bean sprout seeds.
No idea what the underlying logic is, and it’s honestly a little scary. But I guess this is another of my cheat skills?
Let’s see… bean sprouts are the one you grow WITHOUT sunlight, right?
I’ve heard you can grow them in a planter in about a week if you keep them somewhere dim.
Well, a vegetable that grows fast is a godsend. I’ll accept this situation as-is.
Then I picked up the fallen hoe, and—
[Skill: Farm Tool Handling Level 10, activated.]
“WHOA! It’s slicing through like butter!”
Apparently this one’s a cheat skill too.
The hoe weighs nothing, like I’m swinging a feather.
In the blink of an eye I tilled the surrounding plot and sowed the bean sprout seeds. To finish, I stacked some lumber from the hut into a shade cover.
And then, one last divine announcement.
[Skill: Crop Cultivation Level 10, activated.]
Hm? What’s this skill do?
Crops grow faster, something like that?
The divine voice does not take questions, apparently.
”…Actually, bean sprouts alone is a pretty sad menu.”
After sprouts, the most important nutrient is sugar… that is to say, carbohydrates.
A fast-growing vegetable packed with carbs? That’d be root vegetables.
This might surprise you, but lotus root and carrots actually contain a lot of sugar — carbohydrates, I mean.
They should work fine as a substitute for rice or wheat, no question.
[Skill: Seed Creation Level 10, activated.]
“There we go. Carrot-seed-looking things acquired.”
I’d like to grow wheat and rice eventually too, but that sounds like it takes real time, so — shelved for now.
As I was thinking all this, a cold sweat ran down my back.
“Ah… this is bad.”
Because something genuinely bad had appeared in the shade of the trees.
Yes — about thirty meters ahead of me stood a giant wolf.
Picture a Siberian husky scaled up five times. The kind of look where a name like “Silver Fang” would fit right in.
…I mean, that is OBVIOUSLY a monster, right? Did the ward already wear off?
Oi oi, what am I supposed to do here.
The moment I raised the hoe—
—our eyes met.
Something bigger than a zoo tiger locked eyes with me, no iron bars in between.
Naturally, my heart nearly stopped.
Sweat gushed down my back, and my legs threatened to give out entirely.
After a long staredown, the wolf came charging, drool pouring from its jaws.
“UWAAH! Stay back! STAY BACK!”
I swung the hoe around wildly to threaten it.
The giant wolf was not threatened, and its gaping maw closed in on my face.
[Skill: Farm Tool Handling Level 10, activated.]
Hm? Skill activation?
Shwing!
With a whistle of cutting wind, the hoe buried itself in the crown of the wolf’s skull.
At the same moment, something hot flowed out of my heart — intuition told me it was something like magic power — through the hoe, and into the wolf’s body.
—KA-BOOM.
An explosion rang out.
Something like a magic attack had detonated inside the wolf.
“That is NOT what ‘Farm Tool Handling’ means…”
Chunks of exploded wolf scattered in every direction.
Staring at the carbonized meat, I stood there dumbfounded for a good while.
Eventually, it occurred to me that maybe monster meat is edible too.
But when I picked up a piece of wolf, it was charcoal through and through. Completely inedible.
“Okay. Getting food from monsters looks… difficult.”
And I let out another deep, deep sigh.