If there were one thing farmers and gardeners loved, it would be worms. They made great gardening assistants, and Rino learned this the hard way after using magic to forcefully plough the land.
"Stop!" Fronzo, his newly named farmhand and spare body cried.
Rino was startled. The youth had a terribly shy and timid character who was kind and gentle. He never did anything that made Rino angry, but when Rino mass ploughed the field by causing a small earthquake, the farmer in charge quickly stood in between him and the field.
"The worms will die if you do this. We need the worms to help the plants grow better."
After a long explanation of how the earthquake would startle the earthworms out of hiding and into the sun, Rino relented and gave in to Fronzo. He did not want dead earthworms attracting flocks of ravens, although he did want a raven or two as a spare body.
The soul splitting magic worked marvellously on Fronzo, who generally remained unchanged in personality. One thing Rino noticed was different about Mutt and Fronzo, who were both his spare bodies and named subordinates, were their growth potentials.
Mutt had a better raw growth potential in powers and grew stronger as a monster of the dark. His growth was proportional to Rino's strength and was now a menace to most people. Rino had his very own guard dog who kept everyone on their toes and occasionally brought back trinkets in the form of hunted corpses for Rino to add to his shadow army.
On the other hand, Fronzo was like the nurturing mother of his army, often seen sorting out differences and playing the mediator for arguments. Thanks to his tactful nature and gentle manner of speaking, the different races were starting to work well together. Half of the field was already weeded and ploughed under Fronzo's careful coordination.
The goblins and humans started taking the initiative and alternated between collecting mulch to spreading it on the ploughed land. In fact, the experienced farmhand was taking matters into his own hands by checking on the resting potatoes.
Rino had no issues with anything Fronzo did. The lad knew more than him, and the lich only dropped by ever so often to smooth out any issues he came across with magic to meet the deadline. A day had passed, and Rino felt slightly restless, hence the situation where he forcefully ploughed the newly weeded field using magic.
Looking at the mess of overturned soil and ruined trenches, the lich felt guilty. He should have consulted Fronzo first, but he was too prideful to apologise as the ruler.
"Is that so?" he asked when Fronzo explained the importance of worms.
Rino took a look at the soil by his feet. Already, there was one squirmy thing struggling to find its way around. The sun was not up yet, and Rino wondered if there was a way to rectify this. He only had twelve more hours before he received a quest penalty.
Fronzo looked at the worms and sighed. With the neat trenches for planting ruined, he could only manually dig them again. Thankfully, the back aching work of ploughing was done in a split moment. The undead youth could not help but feel in awe of the magician's power. It took him with the combined strength of six other farmers to plough half a field in a day without pause, but it only took their master less than five minutes to complete everything.
"Yes. Worms are powerful gardeners, more so than us. They help to loosen the soil beneath and provide the soil with nutrients that the plants require. However, they're not as powerful as Master, who could loosen the surface soil in less than five minutes with a single spell. Thank you for making our task easier. I will gather more volunteers to dig the trenches and spread the mulch now."
Rino pretended to be generous and dismissed Fronzo, but internally, he felt sorry for what he did. Who would have thought that these squirmy existences would be so important behind the farming scene? Thankfully, the sun was not up, and much of their farming work was done in the dark.
Rino decided that these farmers needed torches to work in the night. It wasn't very wise to use wisps as lights because Rino's mana regenerating factory was getting very close to running in deficit whenever so many minions were summoned.
On the bright note, his daily chain quest was completed before the time, and Rino could now explore the benefits of his new skill.
"View Shadow Sack."
Almost at once, the familiar quest window popped up and automatically showed him what was in his new skill's inventory. Shadow Sack was a hybrid skill created by the system using the power of his shadow count to determine the number of items he could store in it.
For now, Rino stored all his potato seeds in the shadow sack. It was not accessible by his minions, and Rino preferred to keep it that way. If anything, he preferred if his minions also had a shadow sack skill of their own, but he supposed the Gods would not grant them that ability. Only he was chosen to have a daily quest system and a task to build a kingdom. His minions were merely his extra hands and legs, so they did not deserve such incentives in the eyes of the Gods, even if it was an extremely useful feature.
For now, he did not receive any new quest, but Rino had a feeling it would be related to planting potatoes. If the Gods did not mention how he should plant his potatoes, he would plant the seeds first. The seed potatoes would take a week to grow, and he doubted they were that patient to wait for it to happen.
Although the lich was not a farming expert, he knew that watering was something that many farmers spent a lot of time doing. Due to the limited manpower he had, Rino thought about creating something to assist Fronzo's team with their farming project. He heard about water pipes, and those were often used within the palace to transfer water from the well to all parts of the palace for various needs. If possible, Rino wanted to link water pipes all over his farm to water the plants for him without needing to carry buckets after buckets of water. He did not have that many buckets, to begin with.
Ping!
Rino checked his quest log and discovered that the side quest updated itself.
===
Side Quest #11
Objective: Craft Runes of the following elements.
- Fire
- Earth
- Water
- Wind
- Light
- Dark
Reward: Increased affinity with spirits.
Claim your reward here.
===
That's right! He could get the help of faes during the day. Rino rejoiced at the existence of fairies in this new world. They might be a pain to talk to most times, but Rino would rather deal with them than handle the repercussions of mana drain by forcing his undead farmers out to maintain the plants during the day.
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