John squelched his way back to the farm, which he found to be much as he left it. Making his way over to the storm cellar he popped the door out of his inventory and maneuvered it over the hole. He then used a slow, and low power application of Move earth to sink the frame into the stone. He leaned down and opened the door, tested the steps, and then made adjustments. In the end he had to adjust the steps to be slightly steeper in order to accommodate the doorway, but it was worth it in his opinion. Door dealt with, he got back to work.

First thing on his agenda was figuring out composting, so he wandered down into the cellar and sat on one of the straw bales while he googled the process. After a short time of searching he determined that composting did not work as he’d imagined. He had assumed he could just pile all of the grass, straw, and wheat together and that it’d break down and turn into soil eventually. This was only partially true, and really only if he used the anaerobic composting method, which tended to have bad side effects. The other popular method was aerobic composting, which required that the composted material be aerated regularly by stirring it, a difficult process for the sheer amount of material he was working with; and that didn’t include the fact that grass needed a secondary material to keep it from collapsing into a black, slimy, stinking mass.

If he had manure that would fix the problem, but he didn’t, and to be honest he was unlikely to ever have enough cows to produce manure in quantities he would need. It was too bad there wasn’t a way to produce fertilizer out of thin air. John paused at that thought, because he realized there was a way for that to happen. John pulled up a new search tab and spent several minutes sifting through various articles until he was certain of his plan. He then checked his contacts list and saw that Sally and Ex were online. Clicking on Ex’s name he got a prompt.

[It appears you would like to communicate with a contact. Would you like to purchase the Communications module for 10 USD or 10 gold?]

John narrowed his eyes and considered. He was already 120 dollars into modules and he wasn’t sure he wanted to purchase another one. How often was he going to want to contact someone via the game interface? After several moments of thought he decided against it. He could always purchase the module later if it became an issue. For now he’d just talk to Sally and Excelsior when he went into town next.

Turning back to the problem of the grass, John decided he’d pile it and burn it. The plains were wet enough now that chances of a large brush fire were practically non-existent. Standing up he left the cellar and began the next task on his list, clearing the land.

For the remainder of the day John worked on clearing out grass. The mud proved difficult to move with just Move Earth, and after the first frustrating hour of work, John began using Control Water to dry out the patch of earth he was working with. This further slowed his work, cutting his speed almost in half. However, he pushed on, and he managed to clear maybe a twelfth of an acre.

Fortunately by morning the ground was dry enough to easily work with Move Earth which sped up the process enormously, and by the end of the day he’d managed to finish clearing the north-eastern quadrant of his plot. Further, he’d found that he no longer needed the shovel, he’d become strong enough to simply rip apart the roots, which only increased his speed. In addition his strength and constitution both increased twice, and intelligence and wisdom both increased once.

The next six days followed a similar pattern, though it did rain twice, which meant that he had to add Control Water into the routine for four of the days. Working in the rain, John found, was even more miserable than working with the muddy ground on the days after; he was wet, cold, and constantly worried he was going to catch a fantasy virus of some kind. Fortunately his hearty constitution seemed powerful enough to keep him from getting sick, and made the cold just unpleasant instead of unbearable.

By the end of the seventh day he was thoroughly sick of the work, even though he’d seen great returns. The southeastern quadrant was clear as well as about a sixth of the southwestern quadrant. In addition, he’d also gained six points in constitution, strength, wisdom, and intelligence. However, his best gains came in the form of two spell increases when Move Earth jumped to Journeyman rank and Control Water jumped to Apprentice, netting him another 475 leveling points. On the eighth day John headed back for town. He’d eaten the last meal bar the day before, and he didn’t want to find out what happened if he let his avatar starve.

The walk to town was, as usual, uneventful, and John wondered if there weren’t any monsters that lived on the plains, or if they just didn’t live so close to a human town. He hadn’t seen much out there, aside from the rabbits that had menaced his wheat and the bugs he’d had to contend with while clearing the grass. Could it be that there weren’t many natural threats on the plains? He decided he’d have to ask someone about that.

Walking into town he looked around at the stalls and booths that players were just putting up. After a moment he spied his targets and wandered over toward their booth. Sally and Ex paused in their setup to wave as he walked over and then they continued pulling pieces out of their inventories.

“How do you keep so much in your inventories?” John wondered aloud as he stopped next to them.

“Hi John!” Sally said excitedly.

“Hey John, and mostly it’s just Sally; she took the Bigger on the Inside feat at level 5, it quintupled her inventory capacity,” Ex explained as he slotted boards together.

“Yeah! It’s pretty awesome! I got that and Claws of Steel! It’s a racial feat that allows me to turn my fingers into claws!” Sally held up her hands and demonstrated, her fingers growing more bestial, the ends becoming sharp and pointy.

“Wow! That’s pretty cool actually. More storage space could be really useful, I’ll have to keep that in mind for level five,” John said, impressed at the display.

“You’re still not level five?” Ex sounded surprised.

“Nope, leveling happens really slowly when you’re clearing land. I got two levels out of a single crop though, so hopefully it speeds up once I grow more. Still, it’s been really good for my skill points, I’ve gotten a bunch of skills to Apprentice Rank and Move Earth is Journeyman ranked now,” John explained.

“Huh, how many points are you sitting on now?” Ex inquired.

“Uh…” John pulled up his sheet an checked it. “Two thousand, three hundred, and twenty-five,” he said finally.

Ex and Sally both looked surprised.

“Wow! You might be able to purchase three whole feats!” Sally said excitedly.

“That’s really good, I barely scraped by at 2,000 points, and only because we got a last minute quest,” Ex admitted.

“I saved all my points! I had 500 left over after buying my feats!” Sally said with a grin.

“Yeah yeah, you were right, I was wrong, saving points is the way to go,” Excelsior said with a roll of his eyes.

“What did you take Ex?” John asked.

“I took Dynamo and Deep Pool. Dynamo doubles your mana regeneration rate, and Deep Pool doubles your mana pool,” he explained.

“Huh, I wonder if Dynamo stacks with Mana Drawing,” John mused.

“The forums say it does, but I don’t actually know Mana Drawing so I couldn’t say from personal experience.”

“You should ask Grandma Loren to teach you,” John told him.

“You think she would?” Ex asked.

“She teaches me!” Sally said with a grin.

“What! When?! You’re practically never on without me!” Ex exclaimed.

“Fridays, when you have those work meetings! It’s how I knew to save points for feats!”

“Ugh, so I could have been getting magic lessons all this time?!” Ex sounded aggravated.

“Probably,” John replied with his own grin. “Just be sure to be nice, respectful, and listen to her.”

“Yeah, I’ll talk to her when she shows up,” Ex muttered. “Anyway, what brings you into town today? Anything we can help with? Mana Stones? Implements? Armor?”

“Nah, I’m here to get more food, I ran out of meal cakes yesterday,” John explained. “Oh yeah! I also wanted to ask you guys, what happens to the bodies of the creatures you kill in the dungeon?”

Sally and Ex gave John a perplexed look.

“Mostly we just leave them there after we dig out the cores,” Ex said.

“Grandma Loren says they probably have parts that can be used for making potions and stuff, but there are no alchemists out here, so we don’t usually harvest them,” sally said a moment later.

“Cores?” John asked, remembering seeing a mention of those in the writeup he’d read on mana wells.

“Huh? Oh, yeah, cores.” Ex held up his hand and a small milky-white sphere appeared in it. “These things, not all monsters have them, but they’re pretty useful if you know what you’re doing. They’re a lot like a reusable mana stone, they can store mana and you can retrieve it later. They don’t have very good capacity though. This one can only store a few hundred points, but the forums say that alchemists and some casters can refine them down into purer forms, and even combine them to make larger containers.”

John took a moment to Inspect the core.

[Name: Small Mana Core]

[Quality: Poor]

[Description: These cores develop in particularly magical or powerful creatures and can be used in a variety of ways that make them useful to both magical practitioners and alchemists, in addition they can store some mana.]

[Mana: 625/625]

“Huh,” John said. “I wonder why the help system didn’t mention these when I asked how to get more mana.”

“Probably because of how uncommon they are. The NPC- erm, townsfolk, didn’t even know that the dungeon could produce them until we started bringing them back,” Ex said.

“They’re not super reliable though,” Sally said. “They can break if you overfill them, or drain them too quick, or sometimes just because. Mostly we just use mana stones instead, we find bunches of them anyway.”

“What happens when they break?” John asked.

“They evaporate, a lot like an empty mana crystal actually,” Ex said. “Anyway, you wanted to know about creature corpses?”

“Oh yeah! I was wondering if the dungeon produced creatures I could turn into fertilizer,” John explained.

“OH! That’s smart!” Sally exclaimed. “The dungeon is basically an infinite source of carcasses!”

John nodded and Ex looked thoughtful.

“Well, the Slimes probably wouldn’t work… actually, no, Sally, aren’t there Herb Slimes in The Garden?”

“Yeah, why- OH! Right! When they die plants grow around them!” Sally said with sudden realization.

“What?” John asked.

“The first floor of the dungeon is all Slimes, you know, like slimy balls that roam around and try to dissolve you?” Ex asked, and John nodded to show he was following. “Well, there’s this one room we call The Garden, it’s all full of trees and plants and stuff, mostly we just leave it alone because there’s no one to process any of the stuff we could harvest there.”

“And it has Herb Slimes in it!” Sally butted in excitedly “They’re not aggressive unless you harm the plants, but if you do, they swarm you!”

“And,” Ex said, giving sally the stink eye and taking back the conversation. “If you kill them the plants around them grow really fast.”

“Oh! Like a magic fertilizer!” John said.

Ex and Sally both nodded.

“You could probably pay people to get Herb Slimes for you, or their ooze at least. You’d need to provide some way to transport it though.”

John nodded as he considered the possibilities, then he asked, “What other kinds of slimes are there?”

“There’s Earth Slimes, and Metal Slimes, and Crystal Slimes.” Sally ticked off the different kinds of slimes on her fingers.

“I wonder how plants would react to those ones,” John said.

“OH! Are you gonna experiment with Slimes and Plants!” Sally asked excitedly.

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t,” John replied. “What else does the dungeon generate?”

“Well the second floor is all twisty tunnels and caves with roaming swarms of bats and rats. Normal sized, but dozens of them at a time, sometimes both types at once,” Ex said. “After that is The Spider Level, it’s filled with… wait for it-”

“SPIDERS!” Sally cut him off. Ex rolled his eyes and nodded.

“Then there’s the Rodents of Unusual Size, giant rats, bats, prairie dogs, marmots, that sort of thing,” Ex continued. “The fifth floor is all Oozes, they’re like Slimes but they don’t have a core and move really fast. They’re really hard to kill without magic since they just reform after most physical attacks. That’s all the floors that’ve been accessed so far, no one has gotten past the Prismatic Ooze Lord yet.”

“Prismatic Ooze Lord?” John echoed.

“YEAH! It’s super cool, it looks like a giant puddle that scintillates with all the colors you can imagine! It even glows! It’s super hard to kill though, if you hit it with an elemental attack its color changes to match the type of attack and it becomes immune. Ex and I only have fire and life magic, so we’ve been unable to beat it alone,” Sally explained.

“That does sound really cool,” John affirmed.

“It’d be more cool if we could kill it, no one has gotten level five loot yet, hopefully it’s something better than this trash we keep picking up. Honestly, we’ve started leaving most stuff behind, there’s just no market for it. We don’t have enough new players showing up to purchase this stuff, and none of us need it aside from the occasional piece of armor,” Ex complained.

“Have you tried teaming up with a water user?” John asked.

“Huh? Why?” Ex asked in turn.

“Because water and fire are opposites, maybe when it makes itself immune to fire it makes itself weak to the opposed element, water. Then you can alternate between the two,” John theorized.

“That’s… not a terrible idea,” Ex admitted. “We’ll have to find someone who knows water or ice magic. Ice would be better.”

“Not a common choice I take it?” John inquired.

“Nah! Most people like fire! It’s really easy to kill things with fire!” Sally explained.

“Sally’s mostly correct,” Ex interjected. “Fire is what the majority of mage builds went with. The second most prevalent is probably Life, on account of healers always being useful.”

“I wonder what the benefit of joining a church is, given that healing magic isn’t tied to deities,” John wondered aloud.

“Boons,” Excelsior answered immediately. “Deities can grant Boons, they’re like feats, and in some cases replicate feats exactly. Basically, if you show enough devotion, or do enough quests or help the church in a meaningful way you can get a boon from the deity. You have to keep doing whatever you were doing to get the boon, but it can be worth it, especially since the boons aren’t level restricted. In theory a boon could be equal to a rank 20 feat, though I’d bet you have to do something really spectacular to get one that high.”

“Huh, that makes me rethink building a couple of shrines,” John admitted.

“Ooooh! Who would you build shrines too?” Sally asked.

“Probably Ledos and Ira,” John said.

Sally’s eyes focused briefly in the air before her. “Oh, God of Magic and Goddess of Cultivation, nice. But you wanna sell things, right? Maybe you should include Aarus, he’s the God of Trade!”

“I take it there’s a forum post about the gods?” John asked.

“Loads of them,” Ex replied. “Mostly people asking how to get boons. There’s a ton of suggestions, but most of them don’t actually work. Except Aarus, he’s easy, just fork over something with enough value.”

“Well that’s good to know, I wonder what the cost of a boon is,” John said.

“It varies, he offered one guy a boon for a literal arm and a leg!” Sally said with some mirth.

“They didn’t take him up on that offer, did they?” John inquired.

“Nah, that’d make the character basically unplayable, so they refused,” Ex interjected.

John shook his head. “Maybe I’ll build the shrines and see where it takes me. I could use all the help I can get.”

“Farming not working out?” Ex asked.

“I’ve planted one crop, which came out poor quality. The majority of my time has been spent clearing land to get it ready, and to be honest I have no idea what I’m going to do next, beyond a vague idea of making plots and experimenting with different fertilizers and substances.” John shook his head.

“Are you on some kind of time limit?” Ex inquired.

“Yeah, I’ve got five months left to turn a profit,” John admitted. “And two of those months are the winter season, when I doubt anything will grow.”

“Ouch, can I ask the reason for the limit?” Ex asked cautiously.

“Yeah, my dad thinks I’d be better off going to college,” John said.

“College isn’t a bad thing!” Sally chimed in. “I’m learning all sorts of interesting things!”

“I’m not going to college so I can be someone’s secretary and earn minimum wage,” John said, disgruntled. “And that doesn’t even touch on the subject of student loans. Do you know the average person spends twenty years paying off a college loan? That’s double what it took just twenty years ago.”

“It does?” Sally asked, looking startled.

“Yeah, didn’t you research it before you started college?” John asked, puzzled.

“Uhm… Not really.” She admitted reluctantly. “I didn’t have to take out a loan.”

John, sensing this was something Sally was uncomfortable with, didn’t press her. The trio fell into a slightly uncomfortable silence for a few moments.

“Uh, anyway,” John began. “I should go pick up some food before I forget.”

“Alright, we’ll see you later,” Ex said.

“Yeah, later,” Sally echoed.

Giving an awkward wave, John headed off for the store.