Farm Life

The spring days went by peacefully.

Each day the stalks of wheat grew a couple of centimeters. Between spring thawing and harvest in the fall, Haruki’s primary job was simply to monitor their growth. He was always closely checking that the plants were growing healthily, removing weeds and pests, and fixing any irrigation issues.

This is the first crop cycle where he would be there from start to finish, from planting to harvest. He had played a large role in planting these fields last fall, and was now carefully nurturing the plants as they grew up.

In a way, the plants were almost like his children, and he felt a strange sort of attachment to them.

I can understand why farmers treat their crops with such dedication, he thought to himself. I guess it’s sort of inevitable; when you expend so much time and energy into creating something from scratch, you can’t help but think of it like it’s your own child.

After winter had concluded Johannes was able to gradually ease back into working with his arm again, although he left most of the serious farm work this year to Haruki. Johannes mainly helped with chores around the farm, and also supervised Haruki while he worked, teaching him how to do the various things needed to run the farm.

Proving that I can run the farm on my own must be some kind of test by Johannes, so that he can feel assured I’ll be able to one day handle things as his successor. The thought of managing the farm in the future without help from Johannes seems scary and intimidating, but I hope by then I’ll be just as experienced as Johannes himself.

In his free time, Haruki had taken up the hobby of learning more about this world from Lillianna and some other knowledgeable friends in the village. Everything he learned about this isekai world was very interesting to him, everything was vaguely similar to a lot of the fantasy stories in his previous life, but also different in a number of ways.

For instance, instead of the country being run by a king, it was run by an unelected council of high mages, with one member each representing the descendants for every magical race — but leaving the pure humans entirely unrepresented. Nevertheless, it all seemed so distant from his life on the farm that he didn’t mind it much.

Lillianna also taught him how to read and write in this world’s scripts, as unfortunately only their spoken language was the same as his.

Life was good, for the first time Haruki felt excited for whatever the future had in store for him. He desired nothing more than to spend the rest of his life peacefully like this, a tranquil farm life together with Lillianna and Johannes.

***

Some sixty kilometers away at a small town called Windrasil, strange things had been occurring as of late. They had been receiving reports of an unknown monster stalking the wilderness, leaving behind wherever it went a wide path of missing trees through the forest.

Furthermore, Rindwyr and other farm animals had begun disappearing when set out to graze, leaving behind not even a drop of blood. The people of the area didn’t know what to make of these weird occurrences, they had never heard of any type of monster that could make beasts and trees alike disappear without a trace.

A local shepherd named Roth Krieger was the first to witness the creature.

On one warm June morning while he was out tending to his flock, he heard a gentle rumbling sound begin to appear off in the distance. The sound quickly grew louder, becoming a deafening roar while the ground started to steadily shake.

Over the treetops of the nearby forest he saw a glimpse of it, whatever it was: just above the tree he could see a faint blue hump.

Just as he saw the creature, the trees at the edge of the forest began to crash and fall over, clearly being pushed by some type of overwhelming force. At that moment his instincts took over and he ran, alongside his whole flock of sheep-beasts, not even daring to look back at whatever creature had just emerged from the forest behind him.

He was just thankful to have lived to tell the story. Shortly thereafter he fled the region with his herd, fearing for his safety.

Windrasil’s guild began sending out small parties of adventurers to investigate what was happening, but after a few days they all failed to return.

About a week later, an entire farm village disappeared from the face of the earth. Everything from the crops to the buildings to the people had up and vanished, as if they had never been there in the first place. Not even a single witness had survived to describe the event.

Records are uncertain of what exactly happened next. Some say the event happened on a Monday based on one person’s testimony, and others on a Thursday based on a conflicting account. All that is known is that on Saturday, June 15th a young blacksmith had left Windrasil to visit some family, and that on Friday of the following week a traveling merchant named Daniel Macleem arrived to sell his wares, only to find a few scraps of rubble where a town of over 300 people had once been.

In the rubble of one of the few partially-surviving homes that were left, the merchant had found a single person left barely alive. She was a young woman who was missing the bottom half of her body, her legs nowhere to be seen. A hard, blackened crust sealed shut the stumps where her legs had once been, preventing her from bleeding out too quickly.

As she lay there taking her dying breaths, she recounted what had happened to Mr. Macleem:

On the evening of the fateful day, just as everyone in the town’s market were packing up their goods to head back home, a loud rumbling sound appeared and the ground began to shake. All the sudden, a massive wall came crashing through the center of town, tearing through the buildings without any resistance.

It was a colossal slime, a giant bright blue orb over ten meters in height. It was feeding on everything in its path, consuming everything that touched it and dissolving it all within its gelatinous interior.

The giant mass rolled through at a speed far exceeding the ability of any of the humans to flee, quickly tumbling around the town and crushing everything under it before anybody could escape.

If what she had told the merchant before her death was all true, then this event was unprecedented.

Slimes had never before been recorded at such astronomical proportions, the largest they had ever reached before was a couple meters in diameter. This was usually because the larger they got the quicker they would be found, and the more glory-seeking adventurers would think they’re worth killing.

Slimes get their bodily energy from the chemical reactions that occur as they dissolve organic matter within their bodies. The excess energy that isn’t used to keep them alive and moving is converted into growing their body mass, but this is a very slow process. 

Somehow this slime must have survived long enough to reach this massive size, hidden away in some distant place far from the eyes of humans or any of the monsters that are their natural predators, before eventually moving its way into civilization.

Sightings of the creature began to skyrocket as it continued its path of destruction across the countryside, eating up several more small towns and villages.

After adventurers kept failing to return from their attempts to stop the beast, guilds everywhere started refusing to do anything about it, including the adventurers at the nearby town of Thistleholm. They would need expert magicians from the capital or another large city to take on a beast like this. Until then, nobody stood a chance. 

Rumors about the giant slime spread across the region like wildfire. Everyone around began to fear they were next, and the creature slowly took on a quasi-mythical reputation.

By early July, Haruki finally got wind of the story. All of a sudden his peaceful life on the farm came to a screeching halt.