Chapter 34: Operation Field Good Harvest

Author: 十一屋　翠 (Juuichiya Sui)

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“I would never have thought they were con men…”

We explained to the villagers how the three men we had caught were scammers, and the village chief, who had born witness to their attempted escape, told them about how they had almost killed him when he found out they were trying to run away.

The villagers were quivering in anger, glaring at the three men lying tied-up on the ground.

“““Eeek!”””

While the bleeding had stopped, all three of them were trembling uncontrollably in fear, severely injured in their legs and unable to run away.

“I can’t thank you enough for capturing these people.”

The village chief said, bowing to us.

“Don’t worry about it.
I only fought them for revenge, after all.”

Liliella-san said waving the thanks away, but I knew she had actually been worried about the village being deceived.

It definitely hadn’t been only for revenge.

“If you want to thank someone, thank him.
It’s all thanks to him that we were able to follow them without being discovered and capture them red-handed.”

Hm? I’m in the line of fire now?

“My, thank you so much! We were saved thanks to you, sir!”

““““Thank you very much!””””

“Uwa, I really didn’t do anything major this time!”

“Nono, them not noticing us even when we were literally right in front of their noses is not normal.
If you say something like that, then what I did really is nothing.”

Liliella-san was confused as to why she was being thanked when she ‘hadn’t done anything really’.

I know that feeling quite well.

Now that I think of it, it’s been like that ever since I became an adventurer.

“Well, it’s still a fact that we were able to capture them thanks to you.
And I only got this far because I met you too.
You were able to solve all my problems.
So… thank you, really.”

Liliella-san expressed her gratitude, bowing her head.

Calm down calm down.

“Ahaha, please don’t worry about it.
You’ve been working really hard the whole time, and all that hard work was just rewarded.
So congratulations.”

I congratulated Liliella-san on being freed from the shadows of her past.

“Ooh, I have no idea what this is all about, but congratulations!”

““““Congratulations!””””

All the villagers congratulated Liliella-san.

“Ooh, look! The morning sun also seems to be blessing us!”

Said the village chief, pointing at the sun peeking above the horizon.

Ah, morning had finally come while we had been busy keeping an eye on the tree swindlers.

“I’d like to thank you properly for saving us, so please do come have breakfast at my house!”

Then, pushed along by the village chief, we made our way to his house.

♦ ♦

“It’s a good thing you caught those swindlers, but what should we do now?”

The village chief said sighing after we had finished breakfast and were letting the food settle down.

“Ah, you have a point, things going back to how they were before won’t solve anything.”

We hadn’t done any monster extermination, so the situation hadn’t improved even one bit.

“And with what happened earlier, we can’t really rely on others’ goodwill either… whatever shall we do…”

Well, they had just been tricked, after all.

“I’d offer for us to exterminate the monsters, but that won’t solve the root of the problem.”

As Liliella-san said, since there were a lot of monsters appearing near the royal capital lately, if the cause of it all wasn’t addressed, the village would have to hire adventurers again to protect itself when monsters came again.

The country would also definitely be looking into why this was happening, so it would be solved eventually.

But until that happened, protecting this town would be a bit, no, rather dangerous.

“Say, Rex-san, don’t you have any good ideas?”

Liliella-san asked me, having given up herself.

“Lemme think.
…what if the monster extermination wasn’t a request?”

“If it wasn’t a request!? What do you mean!?”

Both Liliella-san and the village chief were puzzled.

“Well, basically, you won’t have enough money to keep turning back the monsters coming after your fields, right? But you thought if you were to limit the contents of the request, you could make it cheaper, right?”

“Limit it? But no-one took the request when they said they only wanted the weaker monsters killed, right?”

“Yes, you are correct.”

Having heard what I said, Liliella-san asked the village chief for confirmation.

He answered that it had indeed not worked.
Yep, not surprising.

“So, wouldn’t it be the best if you didn’t need to fight with the monsters in the first place?”

““What do you mean?””

Liliella-san and the village chief asked, confused.

“So, we just need a way to keep the monsters away!”

“Something to keep them away!? Something like that exists!?”

“Ah, right! Like we did back home!”

Liliella-san seemed to have figured out what I meant.

“But, wouldn’t that cost quite a lot? It was turned into a stopover town because the country and the adventurers’ guild got involved.”

“P-please wait! We don’t have that kind of money! And this village isn’t in a good location to be turned into a stopover town either.”

Indeed, this village was in the middle of nowhere.

“I know that.
Which is why it’ll be even cheaper.”

“Really!?”

“Yeah, your home village is slap-bang in the middle of the Forest of Magic Beasts, so we had to make a barrier, but there’s no need for that with normal villages.”

“Ooh! Splendid! But how!?”

The village chief pressed me eagerly.

Liliella-san also seemed really curious.

“We use a certain type of herb to make potions.”

““Potions?””

“Yes, like insect repellent, but for monsters.”

I then explained to the two of them what exactly monster repelling potions were.

“They’re like scented candles that give off a smell that monsters hate.
The reason monsters are coming here is because they can smell your livestock and produce.
So all we have to do is overwrite that delicious smell with one they hate.”

“I see, so they won’t come here if they smell something they hate!”

“Ooh, splendid! Now we just need to find out how to make those potions, and then the villagers will be able to make them for themselves!”

That was one of the good points about this way of solving the problem: anyone could make the monster repellent if they had the materials.

In fact, in my first life it had been so wide-spread that people often made them at home and gave them to their children in small bags to protect themselves.

It didn’t work on really powerful monsters, but it was plenty for monsters of average strength.

“I’ll go look for the materials, so please submit a request for gathering them at the adventurers’ guild.
Then, Liliella-san will accept it.”

“And it’ll also give me an excuse to guard the village chief.”

As expected of Liliella-san, she caught on to my intentions immediately.

And so, we went on our various ways to do our jobs.

“Kyuu!”

Eh? Is the furball going hunting for breakfast?

Don’t go too far, okay?

♦ ♦

“Hmm, which one should we make.”

I was walking along near the village, looking for the materials for the monster repellent.

“Its materials need to be easy to grow and process, as well as be able to live in the soil here… oh and they need to be able to grow somewhere where they’re easy to collect in case of an emergency.”

Having decided on what herbs to use, I began collecting the ones near the village.

“Gyuuu!”

“Kshaaaa!”

The furball seemed to be hunting monsters.

It seemed to only eat meat, but was it all right for it not to eat any greens?

“Nomnom!”

Upon closer inspection, it seemed to be eating a purple grass with the monster meat.

Good, it is thinking of its nutritional balance.

Wait is the furball an omnivore?

“Eh, whatever.
What matters is that it’s removing monsters from the village.”

Leaving the monsters approaching the village to the furball, I resumed my herb-gathering.

“Gyaooo!!”

Oh, a Shadow Fox.

It wasn’t all that big, but it would definitely become a pain once it grew some more.

“Hayyah!”

I downed it in one hit as I passed by it.

“Huh? This thing…”

There was a purple herb sticking out of its mouth.

“That’s Magic Grass.”

Monsters liked Magic Grass.
And there had been an incident due to Magic Grass on our way to the capital, hadn’t there.

“Does the fact that this guy was eating that mean there’s a bunch growing somewhere nearby? I’ll have to burn it down if I find it.”

It was contraband in this era anyway.

I burned the Magic Grass the Shadow Fox had had in its mouth first.

♦ ♦

“Alright, this much should be enough.”

Having collected enough herbs, I made my way back to the village.

Then, asking the villagers to help, I had them plant most of the herbs in their fields.

With that, the village was ready to mass-produce monster repellent herbs.

“Now we just dry the rest of the herbs and wait for the village chief and Liliella-san to get back…”

With nothing left to do, I checked the progress on the drying of the herbs and gave the villagers a few tips on how to grow the herbs better.

“…’M bored.”

Still, it would still be a while ‘till the two of them got back from the royal capital.

I was starting to get bored out of my mind.

“…Ugh… I guess I could help out in the fields?”

Having decided to do so, I immediately took action.

“Excuse me, is there anything I can help with?”

I asked a villager nearby.

“Eeh!? W-we can’t very well ask the saviour of the village to work!”

Ahaha, I really didn’t do anything that big though?

“But I have nothing to do until the village chief and Liliella-san get back.
I used to work in the fields back home, so please let me help.”

“…If you insist.
Could you help with the weeding then?”

“All right!”

The villager reluctantly gave me something to do and lent me his sickle.

Hahha, weeding is my specialty!

“Still, the weeds here are tiny.
I guess I’ll use weaker magic than normal.”

In order not to damage the village’s crops, I carefully selected the weeding magic I would use.

“Alright, this one’ll work just fine! Chase Tinder!”

I use magic to create small embers.

But this wasn’t just any old magic that created embers.

“Burn only the small weeds!”

Following my command, the embers began targeting the weeds and burning them.

“O-ooh!? What’s this!?”

The villager exclaimed in surprise.

“It’s magic that burns only small weeds.”

“S-such handy magic exists!?”

“Yes, it’s ultra-simple beginner-magic.”

“O-oh.
Magic is amazing…”

Even while the villager and I had been talking the embers had been busy burning the weeds.

“If you leave the ashes of the weeds there, they’ll turn into nutrients for the field, so you don’t even need to get rid of them.”

“U-understood! We really are grateful, not only did you remove all the weeds in the blink of an eye, you even made the fields better! This field always produced a poor harvest.”

“Really?”

“Yes, for a few years now.
Not only did the constant monster exterminations cost a lot, our income has also decreased in recent years due to the bad state of the fields.”

“So that’s what happened.”

That might also be a reason as to why they hadn’t been able to pay the reward for the monster extermination request.

But still, bad harvest, eh.
If that was the case, then just the ashes from the weeds wouldn’t be enough nutrients.

“Thank you very much for helping!”

The villager said once I had finished getting rid of the weeds.

“Still, this was but a momentary alleviation of my boredom…”

It was over in the blink of an eye, and I was once again bored.

Although, I had found another thing I wanted to do from that conversation with that villager.

“I guess we could also make potions to help the plants in the fields.”

Mhm, that’s also helping out with the farmwork.

I’ll just be pouring some of the potion on the field.

Having decided on that, I left the village to look for the right herbs.

♦ ♦

“W-w-w-w-what is thiiiiiiiiiiiiiis!!”

My name is Oosaa.

I am the chief of Honjio village.

I went to the royal capital to ask for adventurers to exterminate monsters causing our village trouble, but the village didn’t have enough money to pay the reward, and the guild wouldn’t accept the job.

Then, we were fooled by scammers and what meagre money we still had was about to be stolen from us.

It was money that everyone had sweat blood to collect.

Right when it got really life-threatening for me, two young adventurers who seemed to have a bone to pick with the scammers appeared and saved me.

What’s more, Rex-dono, our saviour, said that he would show us how to make monster repellent potions.

Doing as Rex-dono had suggested, I had gone to the adventurers’ guild in the royal capital to submit a herb-gathering request with our other saviour, Liliella-dono, and had just gotten back to the village.

And when I finally got back to my beloved village, what greeted me was a ridiculously large pile of harvested crops.

Seriously, what the hell?

“Ah, he did something.”

Liliella-dono, who seemed to know something, facepalmed.

“D-do you know what happened?”

“Umm, wouldn’t asking the person himself be better?”

Liliella-dono said, pointing at a corner of a field where Rex-dono and some youngsters from the village were carrying a huge vegetable.

“R-Rex-dono! What the hell is going oooooooonnnnnnnnn!?”

“Ah, village-chief-san! Welcome back!”

Rex-dono greeted us as if nothing had happened.

“Rex-dono, what is that humongous vegetable!?”

It had looked large from far away, but up close it was positively overwhelmingly large.

Was it even a vegetable at this point?

“Weeell, I made a potion to raise the yield of your crops, and they got a bit bigger than expected.”

“P-potion!?”

“Yes, I heard that the harvest has been bad here lately, so I poured a potion that would add extra nutrients to the soil on the fields.”

“That’s probably not all though, right, Rex-san? Why are you already harvesting them?”

I-indeed! It wasn’t even harvesting season yet!?

“Ummmm, welll, y’see, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the potion to everyone, I grew them until they were ready to be harvested with growth acceleration magic.
Ah, I got permission from the owner of the field, of course.”

Said Rex-dono, looking away, making the village’s youngsters giggle.

“And umm, we were told that we could harvest them as soon as the fields were okay…”

“…”

Did he use that potion and magic on everyone’s fields…?

But this vegetable… how should I say it…

“Aand, is this vegetable here even edible?”

Liliella-dono put into words what I had been thinking.

I-indeed, was it even edible?

He might have grown it out of good will, but was it really all right to eat it?

And what if it had become tasteless, or if it now had some sketchy contents?

“Well, I had everyone do a taste-test and they said it was fine.”

“R-really!?”

The youngsters all grinned, giving me a thumbs up.

“It’s good! Rather, it was so delicious we all had him do the same to our fields too!”

It seemed like they had tried it out on one person’s fields and then done the same afterwards to everyone else’s who had asked.

I’m relieved they had at least that much caution.

Actually, I’m not relieved at all.

“Do you two want some too?”

Said Rex-dono holding out a skewered cooked vegetable to each of us.

The thing had grown so big they had only been able to cook it after cutting it up into smaller pieces.

“Since I want you to see what the crop itself tastes like, I haven’t put any seasoning on it.”

Mhm, all right then.

“All right…”

Steeling myself, I took a bite out of it.

“Whoo!”

It was so hot it almost burned the inside of my mouth.

But what a flavour it had.

“D-delicious!!”

I had no words beside that.

Delicious, simply delicious!

I thought it would taste of nothing, but that was not the case at all.

It was moist and mellow flavoured, almost as if I was eating a rich potato soup.

“This is amazing.”

Said Liliella-dono in surprise.

I know what you mean, I really do.

It’s so delicious I can’t speak.

“Amazing innit chief! An’ we’ve got a whole ‘eap of ‘em! Multiple types too!”

So there’s other things this delicious!?

Ooh, this is wonderful.

There was only one word I could think of that could convey my thoughts.

“Deliciousssssssssssssssssss!!”