003 – The Genius of Farming #3
Hammer shouted.
“Then run to the training ground!”
Training ground?
It looks like this wall has everything.
The training ground we reached after running at a frantic pace was about the size of a volleyball court.
It was packed with scarecrows.
Was this where they practiced sword swings and stuff?
Hammer, who had arrived at the training ground first, caught his breath.
“You run pretty well for someone who looks so scrawny.”
“The guys who couldn’t run all got caught and sent to prison. I’m confident in my running.”
“……Well, fine. From what I can see, you’ll probably become a typical agility-type explorer. If it’s a weapon suited to your speed, then this should do.”
Shing—!
Hammer took a blade out of the weapon rack set up in the training ground and held it out to me.
When I looked to see what it was, it was a kitchen knife just slightly bigger than my palm.
“It belonged to your predecessor. It’s yours now.”
“Ooh!”
It was my first time having my own weapon.
You wouldn’t count soju bottles or rocks as weapons, would you?
“Hammer, I want to hurry up and kill monsters!”
Now that I even had a weapon, there was no way I could stay still.
“Aether” and “Night Diver.”
Maybe this world was the world of the game that had changed my life through farming.
So nodding when Mr. Ezekiel asked if I wanted to struggle against it really had been the right answer.
“This guy… Seeing you suddenly get motivated makes me even more uneasy. And call me ‘Mr. Hammer’!”
# # #
Inside the wall, there was a place called the “Strategy Room.”
When I entered, there was a wooden table with an enormous map carved into it.
Mr. Hammer placed his palm on the table.
“You put yours on it too.”
Thud.
I placed mine on it as well.
Then letters appeared before my eyes.
「Would you like to enter the Land of Night?」
“Oh! Something’s popping up!”
“Right. This table is also a teleportation magic device made of aether. I don’t know the details of how it works. Hermit knows that kind of thing.”
I didn’t know who Hermit was.
I vaguely thought it might be one of the people I’d seen as soon as I woke up here.
“If you’re really a blessed one, then when you first set foot in the Land of Night, you’ll usually arrive at a place where the protection of the old gods lingers. It’ll feel like a temple.”
What did “feel like a temple” mean?
Should I think of it as something similar to a church?
“Thanks to that temple, the monsters there are weak and pathetic. Of course, if you let your guard down, you die.”
“Even if they’re pathetic, don’t let my guard down! Understood!”
“Your first mission is to gather 5,000 aether there and bring it back. Once you gather 5,000 aether, the way back will open on its own, so don’t worry about finding the path.”
I didn’t show it, but I was in a good mood.
If, in exchange for being spared the death penalty, they’d made me something like a male prostitute for noble old ladies, I would’ve thrown up.
Fortunately, it was farming.
I couldn’t let an opportunity like this slip by.
I should work as hard as possible and make a good impression.
Of course, I’d only know the details once I experienced it myself!
“If you’re ready, shout ‘Enter’ in your heart.”
“Enter!”
Ah, he told me to do it in my heart.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—.
Soon, I felt as though my body was entering something like black mist.
When I opened my eyes, I was standing in the middle of ruins dyed in twilight.
The sight of moss thickly covering the stone pillars and broken statues felt somehow unfamiliar.
“So this is that temple.”
It probably was.
The fact that all the statues had no heads bothered me a little, but it definitely gave off an “old temple” feeling.
Was this a place that had appeared in the game?
I couldn’t get any sense of it with my own eyes.
I was the type who hated reading game stories or backgrounds.
I’d skimmed the tutorial too, and I’d raised my level all at once with a jumping event.
“If I’d known this would happen, I should’ve at least watched a MyTube video summarizing the story.”
Ssssss—.
At that moment, something began crawling out from here and there in the darkness.
Squelching, sticky mucus.
Purple jelly, wobbling and jiggling.
Was it about half my size?
If a rat or dog got drenched in some terrible chemical and melted, it would look exactly like that.
—Kwieeek!
—Sluuurrr….
At a glance, it was an alien sort of creature.
But it wasn’t unfamiliar. No, if anything, I was damn glad to see it.
“Isn’t that a Nightling?”
The monster I’d farmed relentlessly in the beginner zone of “Night Diver.”
Yeah, it was definitely that guy.
It looked exactly like it did in the game.
No one told me, but at that moment, I understood for certain.
I had to kill that thing to gather aether—.
“Die!”
I quickly drew my dagger and stabbed the lump of jelly.
Puk—. Boing—.
But it was so mushy that it didn’t feel like I’d stabbed anything.
—Kwieeeek!!
The thing even sprang up and crashed into my solar plexus.
Thwack!
“Gaaak!”
It felt like I’d been hit in the stomach by a soccer ball kicked at full power.
My breath caught in my throat, and my vision spun.
“…Fuck.”
I can’t breathe. I seriously thought I was going to die.
Drip—.
Even though I hadn’t been hit in the nose, blood trickled from it.
My clothes sizzled and charred as if acid had splashed onto them.
“…Aha, so that’s how it feels. I really could die.”
I had to rethink Hammer’s definition of a “weak monster.”
Swipe—.
Wiping the nosebleed with the back of my hand, I raised my dagger again.
Puk, slash—!
This time too, I charged at the thing and stabbed its body with my blade.
Only, this time, I lightly twisted clockwise, and that turned out to be extremely effective.
Pop—!
The liquid monster burst like a water balloon.
Its remains melted away, leaving behind a few coins and a lump of mucus.
「+50 Aether」
「Nightling Fragment: A lump of mucus. It has no particular use. Its taste is said to be fairly edible.」
“I was right! A Nightling!”
It was a lethal bastard.
I couldn’t believe that thing came from an all-ages game.
Still, I was happy to have run into something I knew.
If I’d had my way, I would’ve danced, but in that time, it was better to kill even one more Nightling.
Because time is life when it comes to farming.
# # #
“Hammer, what do you think? The new recruit.”
Hermit, the female mage in a conical hat, asked the fighter Hammer.
Hammer quietly crossed his arms and fell into thought.
“He was more sociable than I expected. Maybe because he’s from the countryside of Maril Land, he also has an innocent feel to him.”
“Innocent? There’s no way an innocent guy has fourteen prior convictions. And what con artist goes around with ‘con artist’ written on his face? They all smile pleasantly, like good people.”
Throb, throb—.
Mage Hermit tried hard to ignore the pain that kept coming from her back.
It had been her mistake for trusting a face smiling so pleasantly.
“I’m not even sure whether a party needs a thief. I don’t understand why we have to deliberately include criminals in the party and take on the risks of betrayal, backstabbing, and lies.”
“Hermit, I know how you feel. But the rooms with the real aether rewards are usually locked, and they’re full of traps too. Without a thief, we can’t even approach them. Then our unit won’t meet its quota.”
“The quota….”
Mage Hermit groaned.
“What about the new recruit’s skills?”
“He looks scrawny, but he’s pretty fast. His first exploration shouldn’t be difficult, so at the latest, it should take about two hours. If he’s a slacker, it’ll take more than three.”
“The predecessor came out around the four-hour mark, didn’t he?”
The first dive was perfect for gauging someone’s skills.
Both Hammer and Hermit waited, intending to evaluate the new recruit.
And so, 27 hours passed.
“…This is the first time someone hasn’t come out for this long. Isn’t he dead?”
Hermit asked.
At that, Hammer, who had been in charge of training the new recruit, stomped his foot irritably.
“This is driving me insane. The new recruit we finally got died on his first exploration?”
It wasn’t something that had never happened.
After all, no one could know what lay even one step ahead in human affairs.
# # #
Kill monsters and earn aether—.
This simple task was so fun that I simply couldn’t hold back.
Growl—.
The problem was that, as a human being, I got hungry.
I also had to sleep.
If it had been my previous life, I would’ve ignored it.
If I got hungry, I’d just make do with some drink or an energy bar.
As for sleep, I’d solve it by closing my eyes during loading screens.
If I followed my heart, I wanted to do the same in this life too.
This was a chance at success I had finally met again.
I didn’t want to waste time on anything besides farming.
But on the other hand, a thought occurred to me.
Would that really be okay?
If the reason I’d died of something like heart disease in my previous life was because I hadn’t properly taken care of meals and sleep—.
—What if I died of something like heart disease in this life too?
When I had that thought, a chill ran down my spine.
“There was a reason people said you had to take care of your health.”
At that moment, I decided on an important course for my life.
I would thoroughly take care of eating and sleeping.
Only if I was healthy could I farm for a long time.
‘Don’t I seem incredibly smart right now?’
My head spun rapidly.
Riding that momentum, I quickly finished thinking through the situation.
‘Let’s say I can sleep roughly somewhere nearby.’
‘The problem is where to get food.’
The problem was that there was nothing to eat here.
According to the farming rule I’d just made, if I couldn’t resolve food here, then leaving for the outside would be the right thing to do.
Then one thing entered my sight.
「Nightling Fragment: A lump of mucus. It has no particular use. Its taste is said to be fairly edible.」
An item that was edible.
Thinking it might work, I put it in my mouth and swallowed it.
“…Uwegh, it’s cold and slippery!”
It felt similar to konjac I’d eaten before.
It didn’t taste good.
But it felt like it could fill my stomach.
“This is it!”
I could make money while killing Nightlings and fill my stomach too?
It was truly the completion of a perpetual motion machine!
To think I was this much of a genius!
And so, I took short naps.
As I kept eating fragments, time passed until I had no idea how many hours had gone by.
My stamina was still perfectly fine.
However, there was one problem.
“My pockets are full.”
When gathered together, the aether coins transformed into bills or money pouches.
In the game too, the appearance of the money differed depending on the amount, and it was the same here.
Before I knew it, the number of money pouches I’d gathered had reached 28.
A total of 280,000 aether.
It was too much for me to carry all by myself.
I tried stuffing them into my sleeves, shoving them into my pants, and all kinds of ridiculous things, but it seemed I couldn’t carry any more than this.
“I should’ve brought a bag.”
「Personal Goal – Gather 282000/5000 Aether achieved!」
「Reward – Eligibility to enter Night World」
「Leave Hunting Ground」
In the end, I had no choice but to leave with heavy steps.
How did he say I was supposed to get out?
Should I shout “Leave” in my heart like when I came in?
While I was agonizing over all sorts of things, rustle—the brush among the ruins moved.
If it was a Nightling, killing more of them now wouldn’t let me carry any more aether.
Just as I was about to pass by the brush without thinking because of that—
【Well now, a very strange fellow has come to my temple.】
Someone spoke.
Startled, I aimed my dagger, and from the brush, a boy-like creature, small enough to be half my size, was approaching me.
What was bizarre was that everything above his neck had been smoothly cut off.
Just like the severed statues in the ruins.
There was no head where a head should have been. Instead, he was holding his own severed head in his hands.
A monster…!?
No one told me there would be something like a boss monster.
I’d never seen a guy like that in “Night Diver” either.
Maybe if I killed it, it would give me a ton of aether.
I was gripping my sweat-soaked dagger tightly when—
【Kehehe, offer me aether, and in return, I shall bestow upon you my blessing.】