It took about a week to search for an ideal spot. I traveled up some hills, where I could see a lake in the distance, followed by forests down below with hills on the other side. Not good enough. So I traveled across to the other hills. Ah, there was a good spot down below, by another lake with what looked like a stream coming to an end. There, that is where I'll make my spot. A good amount of plains to start a farm. Or at least attempt to grow crops till I got it right. You would have thought that being in agriculture I would have some talent with nature, especially crop growing. But alas, I left it to nature and gave them just an extra bit of Ishu. It was an optimal environment after all. I had bought some seeds during my time in Xocha. Rice and Wheat. Maybe bland but it is a renewable source. So long as I didn't kill the crops that is. I had grown rice before, it takes a few months and I didn't have a calendar with me to mark the days. So at the minimum I'll at least have rice to eat while rationing what I can find.

This is probably the boring part of the story, haha. Only simply because it consisted of many months of setting up a place to live, growing crops, fishing, and whatnot. So I won't go into much detail about it. I set up my little homestead over the course of 3 days. That was after a few days of gathering wood. If I were going to set up my home as somewhere to live for quite some time I'd rather it not be a mud house as I'd be keeping food within it. But there wasn't much in it, just a secure place to sleep and eat indoors, a small amount of baked mud pots for storage. Half of the metal that I found in the mountain went to making a crude furnace. I wasn't much of a metalsmith for having a metal mastery. I ate once a day every other day while the rice grew. While gathering wood for the furnace, I noticed that a lot of trees on this continent produced nuts of some kind. I remember while in Akri there were some nut spreads, mainly combined with fruit spreads on bread. Unsure how they made it a spreadable paste, I mainly ate them raw or toasted them. I could've spent the time experimenting with how they did it, but I already had my schedule full. While gathering water by the lake, I noticed a school of fish. I don't know the name of fishes by looking at them, as I'm more used to eating their cooked meat. Though the good thing about a mastery in water and blood is that I happen to be decent at fishing by happenstance. I didn't want to shape often as my life was once accustomed too, since I have less food intake, but this would be a good opportunity to get some meat in my diet. At this point I was thinking of preserving perishable food. Though I was on my own, so It's not like I had to stock up on food, So I only got what I needed for myself. Two fish every four days. Pull a fish out by Shaping, cut it's throat with the metal I've shaped into a small knife, and pull out it's blood with shaping. Carefully using a small amount as possible. After a month of doing this, I noticed that the grass I usually did it at was noticeably taller and a brighter shade of green, albeit a bit crimson tainted at the bottom. This gave me the idea of using the blood and bone as a fertilizer. But what would it do to the rice that I was growing? During the next batch I would use half of what I was cultivating as a test. Risking half my food wasn't that bad of an option considering the other food source I had around me. I had to start tracking days somehow at this point, some days were starting to blend together, and keeping mental notes of how long things have been going on with keeping a schedule of how often I was doing things was beginning to be much. Especially living out here where I have to watch for predators or animals coming to eat my crops. I had been here for two or three months now. Possibly four. It was hard to say when you're not keeping track and on some of the days where over exerting myself Shaping has caused me to pass out for some unknown amount of time.

I had the brief thought. How was Yè? I was used to seeing his face nearly every day. and now, for possibly over a year or so, I haven't seen him since or heard anything about him. I wasn't worried about his situation at all. He was good. He most certainly had to be in a good position. He has saved money because I was constantly buying us food. But it's not like he was ever in a bad position, at least not one I would recall. He worked for the government for many years, providing food. In his off days he would water paint. I never saw any of his finished works. He must have had a reason for that, but I rarely did visit his place. He'd mostly show up to mine, mostly unannounced, but I never turned him away for I had no reason to.

It's too bad I wasn't much of a survivalist before setting out, it would've made my life easier. I made a small simple dirt and rock calendar to track 30 days and call that a month. I didn't know where I was exactly on it. Now, mind you, that the calendar I'm referring to is a Fenzoshu growth calendar for crops, which is something you learn in either nature, plant, or crop studies in Intermediate Studies or in Agriculture work. As at the time there was no globally accepted calendar, which is something I learned on my travels. Everyone went by their own calendar regionally or even locally. I should have had the forethought to make it before I set up the experiment. Now these next measurements of time will be guesses. Some days I slept longer, some days passed out, and whatnot. Roughly 30 days passed. Both crops still growing. Reset the calendar. 20 days passed. Both still growing, though the fertilized one looks slightly bigger than the unfertilized one. Over the course of the next 10 days, I would design and set up a small storage. Somewhere to keep water, food, wood, and the fertilizer. I used some of the metal to make a chain, something I could easily undo with a small amount of shaping but enough to keep out most beasts. Day 78, the fertilized rice looks like it was fully grown. So I harvested some. And so my experiment was a success. Before replanting it, I waited out to see how long the non-fertilized one took. Roughly 30 days later. That will cut down the waiting time by nearly a third.