Joey pulled himself off the soft, rough sack and stretched a bit. His memories of last night remained vivid, but that didn’t lead to overconfidence or a new level of caution to appearing, he simply realised how dangerous even just zombies could be when allowed to group up to a large point.

32 zombie hearts. 8 zombie brains.

Those were his spoils from the night, but he was forced to stop as the rate at which zombies appeared was no longer alone but groups in growing sizes.

Unless he improved his skills to the point of always killing one in a single hit, he simply lacked the confidence to handle more than two at once. If stronger monsters appeared as well…

He dismissed the thoughts for now. What mattered was getting a hoe made and mining some more before rain set in once more. His necklace informed him of an upcoming heavy rain tonight, not to mention a lighter shower during the evening. That gave a perfect amount of time to try and grab some poppies, mine out a dozen or so more pieces of copper, and finally make a whole batch of those nails.

Hopefully it meant having enough to make all the bronze tools he’d need for the foreseeable future.

Also, he really wanted to try making bricks with the fire clay.

If he lined the clay oven with them, he believed it could survive the temperatures required to melt iron, or make steel workable.

“I have to check on the wood pulp anyway, so grabbing more clay makes sense too.” It was a simple intention, and after some full body stretches, he left the safety room he called his home with the lantern. As well as this, he left behind the wooden shield and hemp shirt as neither truly helped anymore.

He could hold the spear with one hand, but the drop in accuracy it resulted in simply made that useless. As for the shirt, it was already warm enough in the leather armour, anything more and he’d start sweating from being outside.

At the river, he was pleased to see the little dugout with water hadn’t completely drained, and the cube even recognised as the thin paste of yellow fibres within was wood pulp. In truth, he expected some more crushing being required.

He could have made paper right there, but he saw no real point in doing so, instead just removing the bark of another log and pulverising it before dropping it in the dugout with more water. Then a quick search of the river with his chisel and mallet was done, where he pried off several large lumps of clay. His total raised up to 36 pieces.

“What’s even to the south again? I think the forest continued on for a while, but I didn’t really check if they were the same tree… Well, I’m at the edge anyway.” He nodded his head back and forth, but eventually decided to take a small detour for the sake of investigation.

He wasted a few hours if it turned out to be for nought

The horror!

The southern side of the plains joined into the forest of brown trees, which he still didn’t know the name of, and continued for quite a distance.

For the most part he didn’t encounter anything of much promise, these earlier parts had been jogged through earlier when he searched for flowers. But it surprised him to see another shack after just 20 minutes, within were notes for the ritual of the serpent. The only noticeable difference was the fourth page which talked about an advanced ritual with a totem of ‘average’ quality. It claimed that better totems could store more of the ritual’s power, causing less leakage and granting more runes from a single attempt.

Also, he noted one line which stated them to have a greater chance of success.

For now he couldn’t be sure if this was true or not, but he still took this fourth page with new information with him.

With continued pace, he already walked an hour through the brown forest with little changes, and at some point said, “Really should empty out this thing when I get back though. I’ll just dump all the coal and ores into crates.” This couldn’t have been truer because after so long, he’d actually found what he was hoping for.

Poppies… Which also meant all 30 slots of the thing had been filled up.

But as the forest appeared to continue for quite a while in this direction, and the top of a slightly taller tree confirmed this, he returned home for now. He gathered 10 of those poppies for now, but with the large patch’s rough location, he knew to come here if more were ever required.

The reason he wanted to make the hoe so badly was none other than the patch of hemp stalks he depended upon so much. If his need for fabric only rose, then he’d be out of the stuff in a week! Perhaps even less!

And while he could farm without the hoe, the fact that it was magical led him to trust its effectiveness. What was its effect?

Well… He’d find out soon. That poppy truly was the last ingredient for the heart of flowers. And an hour later, he made it back to the oak tree with another 30 logs to make wood crates. As well as that, he collected 16 more sticks simply due to the consumption never actually slowing down. If anything, the number of rods that recipes called for only increased overtime.

Besides making 4 more crates, he also created a small platform using the wood panels to keep the boxes off the dirt. The various flowers took up one of the totalled five crates, with another used to store the tin and copper ores. He did end up finding that due to the sheer amount of coal he had, a single crate only took 50 pieces before filling up. So, he shrugged once and created a sixth crate to store the rest of it.

After setting up all that, the only remaining part was to finally make those hearts of flowers. Although, for now he only made one as it was pointless to have several.

One bronze ingot in the top left, a hemp rope in the top right, the heart of flowers in the middle, with just two rods completely filling up the central column… And he finally had the hoe. A very strange one at that, which he hadn’t paid that much attention to from the image, but seeing it personally was damn strange.

The hemp rope worked similarly to every other tool he made with it, used to maintain tension on the tool head and keep it in place. But here, the sharpened hoe’s head, if it could even be called that, literally grew into the heart of flowers.

Not as in the stems wrapped around or grew into the metal…

No, that’d make too much sense.

The metal itself, in all its reflective brown glory, literally turned pliable and weaved itself into a sort of orange vine and connected to the ball of mass called a heart of flowers.

And then, that simply had the rod jammed into it, but every ounce of insight about the weapon convinced him the rod and heart were actually one item. And not in the sense that they merged together like the dirt did, but as though the heart literally grew out of the rod. He tried to make sense of it, however, he ended up with a simple enough description for the hoe.

It was magic.

Simple as. While there may be some underlying principle and explanation for this all. He knew to stop treating it like a science, especially as magic might just not follow the usual rules of the world. Like how materials merged back together, there was no way to analyse it if the world worked this way.

Like when some asked why heat travels to cooler places. It just does. That’s how reality worked on Earth.

Well, it took that much thought for him to finally rationalise the hoe in his hands.

But from there he found it rather easy to work with, finding a spot in the plains near the river and relatively flat which made the start of his farming pretty damn easy. Super Strength remained the most important factor once more. Each swing downward would dig half a foot into the soil, embedding the hoe deep within, if he swung with every ounce of strength. So, he made sure to lower that whilst making sure to best separate the earth and loosen soil for easier seed growth.

It took just half an hour for him to till the soil to create channels of raised dirt where he’d plant seeds. Well, he didn’t actually know if seeds were planted in the raised or lowered portions, but when he considered rainwater, it made more sense to use the mounds.

After all, plants can drown.

Now just came the matter of collecting seeds.

His first target were the hemp stalks simply out of necessity, fortunately, he found a few when stripping them drying in the past.

All its seeds grew in small pods at the top of mature stalks, and while he never saved any prior, it was a breeze to gather a bunch of the wet pods and leave them to dry out in the field of tilled land for a day.

Midday passed soon after that farm work, and he finally headed north to the prairie once more. First came the search for barley. Instead of just visually attempting to distinguish the grass seed pods and barley, or even wheat if that grew here, he did his best to grab handfuls of random plants and threw them into his cube for testing.

“This whole place is a field of wheat? What the hell? Is any of it even grass?” Needless to say, the realisation of his mistake couldn’t have been clearer, especially as not once had he doubted his less than average gardening skills.

This process went on for roughly half an hour, where he tested literally any plant which looked different from the stalk of wheat in hand.

30 minutes.

That’s all the time it took to finally find a handful of barley when he stopped using his eyes and actually depended on the universal identifier. Why did he even try utilising his own crappy skills? It was no wonder he failed to find barley all this time.

He waded through a huge patch of it for days now!

Not to mention the prairie full of wheat. It would’ve helped if he asked the chief about this as well, rather than just nodding his head along to the confirmation of this region’s title. At least he bothered to confirm instead of acting the fool for any longer. Now he just wanted to know where he’d get yeast from. He always knew trading with the village to be an option, but for now he wanted to save the fragments in exchange for a glass lens… If they had the ability to create such a thing.

Besides that, perhaps the dough would just rise enough naturally? Actually, how did bakers go about getting yeast before it was mass produced?

“It has to be somewhere… I’ll try making the dough and leaving it to rise for a day.” This could realistically fail, but why did he have to care about it?

With knowledge in hand, Joey stopped fretting about the future of his diet and descended the mine once more for copper and tablet fragments. He found it oddly soothing to be in the deep tunnel to himself. No monsters appeared down here, so clearly they didn’t hide in the dark during the day, which pleased him more than anything about the next few hours.

With just 20 more pieces of copper, and 4 more tablet fragments, he couldn’t help but agree that a proper pick truly made all the difference.

Just as he left, the necklace warned of rain starting in minutes. Whilst he did get a bit wet before reaching the oak tree, he kept the oil lantern dry enough that he lit the oven and began that day’s smelting. Now… How about finally making that bronze axe?