Chapter 10 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 10: The Nightingale's Past 06
Early next morning, Lucita first cut the potatoes into small pieces with sprout eyes, put them in a winnowing basket, and left them outside the door to dry.
The potato sprout eyes were where they would sprout in the future, so each piece had to have sprout eyes to be able to grow potatoes. The cut potato pieces didn't need to be planted right away. First dry them for half a day to let the cuts oxidize and blacken, forming a membrane, so that when buried in the soil they wouldn't rot from the cut surfaces.
She spent the whole morning clearing two small vegetable plots by the well, and a slightly larger one in the right back corner of the backyard near the courtyard wall and pond.
She planned to plant a large area of radishes in the backyard plot. After they matured, like the peas, she would sell them to Aurora's grain store. This would be the main source of income in her current plan.
As for the two small plots by the well, one would be used to grow potatoes. The harvested potatoes she would keep as one of her staple foods to eat slowly. The other plot she planned to plant with medicinal herbs.
Garcia's seed shop didn't sell medicinal herb seeds. To grow medicinal herbs, you had to dig them up yourself in the forest.
Lucita had asked Garcia why she didn't grow some medicinal herbs. Garcia's answer was that the town had few population and not much demand. Collecting from the forest was already sufficient. Moreover, various medicinal herbs required different growing environments, making cultivation rather troublesome.
The town was too small and had no market for medicinal herbs. Lucita didn't plan to profit from selling herbs either.
Reserving this medicinal plot was mainly to prepare for her plan to try making magical tools and potions.
Garcia's main source of materials for making magic potions relied on purchasing herbs that Mavis collected while hunting in the mountains, along with odds and ends gathered by children playing in the forest. They collected whatever they happened to come across.
Garcia ran a shop and would accept any kind of medicinal materials, but Lucita herself was different. If she needed specific herbs for certain tools or potions, who knew how long she would have to wait to purchase them? Repeatedly searching the forest herself would also be troublesome. It was better to reserve a small medicinal plot of her own.
In the afternoon, Lucita planted the potato pieces that had dried for most of the day one by one into the prepared vegetable field, covered them with a thin layer of soil, and scattered radish seeds in the backyard vegetable plot. Spring planting was basically complete.
Next, she just needed to carefully tend them and wait for the harvest.
She surveyed the results of her labor as if inspecting her kingdom and suddenly felt the satisfaction of putting her roots down.
No matter what her former self was like, from now on, she was truly going to build her new life here.
Lucita let out a contented breath and looked at the sky. It was already getting slightly dark, but it wasn't yet dinnertime. She planned to go to the butcher's to buy some meat to cook and reward her hard work.
Even without a sense of smell, she couldn't treat her tongue too shabbily!
The butcher Ida's shop was full of frost boxes. Fresh meat hung on iron hooks inside the frost boxes, emanating fresh cold air.
There were three types of meat here: beef, goat meat, and processed white-cut goose. All of them were common livestock in Irttat.
Although resources were abundant, the range of activity was limited, so the variety of meat that residents commonly ate was small. These were what people raised locally. When Mavis hunted nearby, she usually brought back wild boar, deer, or rabbits.
Lucita spent two silver coins to buy a pound of goat meat, and her gaze fell on the goats Ida raised in her yard as she formed a plan.
Two silver coins for meat every day was really too expensive. She had just arrived, with a bare house and empty walls. Unlike her neighbors who had no worries about food and clothing, she needed to know how to economize.
If she could raise a sheep, with endless descendants generation after generation…
"Ida, do you sell goat kids?"
Ida, who had just finished work and was removing her stained leather apron before dinner, glanced at her impatiently. “Twenty silver coins per kid.”
Lucita calculated her savings.
Of her original hundred-plus silver coins, the day before yesterday she'd bought a pile of supplies and used half, yesterday she'd spent ten silver coins on a cold medicine potion, and now she only had about fifty left.
To breed goats, she would need at least one female and one male—forty silver coins. She would likely starve before they ever produced offspring.
The most tragic thing after waking up, was it having to rely on raising goats for a living? No, it was not even being able to afford to raise them.
Reluctantly, she abandoned the idea for now and glanced instead at the fishing rod and bow hanging outside her house.
Fishing, hunting... these all required skills. If it really didn't work out, she could follow the children into the mountains to gather herbs and sell them to Garcia. She wasn't a child who just played around and gathered herbs on the side to exchange for candy. If she seriously gathered herbs, she would definitely have income.
After saying goodbye to Ida, she made a special trip to Aurora's mill to buy two carrots.
Although there were still unplanted potatoes at home, lamb just had to be paired with carrots to taste good.
Poor Lucita returned home happily, cut the lamb into pieces, washed it clean, blanched it and skimmed off the foam, added salt, pepper, leeks, and various spices to stew. When it was almost done, she added cubed carrots and simmered over low heat until cooked.
Unlike the greasiness of wild boar, lamb itself was fragrant without being greasy, except for a mutton smell that was hard to deal with. Using spices to remove the gamey smell once, then neutralizing it with the fresh sweetness of carrots, what remained was the soft, tender, and fragrant meat flavor itself. Soaked in the savory broth dotted with oil droplets and paired with thoroughly stewed radish chunks, the entire mouth overflowed with fresh fragrance. It was truly comforting.
She took out the last piece of white bread from the morning, fried it, and ate it dipped in the broth with the vegetables.
This was far more satisfying than roasted fish or meat.
As Lucita ate, she reflected that no one had taught her this recipe. She had simply bought the ingredients and cooked it instinctively. Perhaps it had been a favorite dish of her former self.
The town’s food consisted mostly of pan-fried or roasted dishes. They tasted good, but she had never quite grown accustomed to them.
After dinner, Lucita sat by the pond fiddling with her fishing rod.
This pond had running water and should belong to a branch of the Valen River to the north. The water was clear, and faint shadows of fish could be seen swimming below.
Spearing fish was beyond her capabilities, but fishing was quite feasible.
The last piece of bread had been eaten at dinner, and with no ready-made bait, she kneaded flour and honey into small dough balls and hung them on the fishhook as bait.
Two sturgeon-eye lamps were also installed on both sides of the back door, illuminating the rippling pond water. It was quite clear for her to see.
Lucita sat by the backyard pond fishing from after dinner until the moon was about to set in the west before she reluctantly got up.
Who knew that fishing could be so addictive?
After fishing all evening, the small fish bucket beside her held three palm-sized crucian carp, lively and jumping, very pleasing to look at.
A victorious first outing. Lucita stretched and, satisfied, called it a day and returned to her room to bathe and sleep.
The next day, after watering the pea field once more, Lucita went to find Garcia again, planning to consult about purchasing medicinal herbs and also ask about the progress of the nightingale Sophia's condition.
As soon as she entered, a strong grassy fragrance hit her face. Lucita took a deep breath and felt her whole body lighten a few degrees.
It was "life"!
The source of the smell was…
She stepped forward. Garcia was bending over in front of the shelf organizing seeds.
She circled Garcia twice and asked excitedly, leaning forward: "You found the active ingredient in that cold medicine potion?"
Garcia hadn't noticed her come in and was startled, nearly dropping the seed bag in her hand: "What?"
"You're covered in that scent," Lucita said with certainty. "That 'life' scent."
Garcia put down what she was holding and frowned: "But I haven't prepared any cold medicine potions these past two days."
"Then you must have gone somewhere or done something," Lucita said. "Since you had that potion on your shelf the day before yesterday, it should have been prepared not long before. When you prepared that potion, what did you do that you also did again last night or this morning?"
"Except for going to Aurora's mill to buy vegetables, I haven't gone anywhere these past two days. In my free time, I've stayed in the house," Garcia explained. "You know, the elven talent has this effect. I have many flowers and plants keeping me company at home. I can clearly sense their emotions and don't need to go out socializing at all."
No, I don't know. That's a racial characteristic only pureblooded elves have. Your bloodline concentration is much higher than us tenth-generation hybrids, which is why you have such a talent.
Lucita grumbled internally. Is this the world of geniuses?
Before she could speak, Garcia suddenly paused: "Wait... if I must say I did something the same," she said hesitantly, "I might have had the same dream."
"Dream?"
Normally Lucita would dismiss such nonsense. But after so many mind-blown experiences in this magical world, she almost immediately felt this dream was important: "What dream?"
"A lake, a lake in the forest."
"Ever since I moved to Irttat, I've inexplicably dreamed of it all the time. I've almost gotten used to it," Garcia said. "I asked elders from the merfolk race who are skilled in dreams. Because there was a lake near where I lived as a child, it's probably like imprinting, nostalgia for my childhood." Garcia explained somewhat embarrassedly: "This doesn't seem to have anything to do with that 'life' scent."
Even if it really was this so-called dream, Lucita had no way to verify it.
Could she run into someone else's dream to smell it?
Garcia led Lucita around her house for a tour. Aside from Garcia herself being saturated with the strong scent, there was no such smell anywhere else.
And the only place Garcia had gone out to, Aurora's mill, Mavis had gone there last night to buy radishes and hadn't noticed any scent.
"Did you take the Iris Street crossroads?"
"Yes, you know, that's the closest route."
This was strange.
From Aurora's mill to her own farm, one had to pass by Garcia's seed shop. Lucita had taken this very route last night and hadn't noticed anything unusual.
Given the intensity of the scent on Garcia, she must have stayed for a long time in a space where the smell was particularly strong. And if there were such a place on this street or at Aurora's house, she couldn't possibly have missed it.
With all these impossibilities occurring, things seemed to have fallen into some kind of magical deadlock.
For a moment, Lucita even flashed a suspicion of Garcia.
Her emerald eyes were so confused and sincere, but was that the real her? Was she telling the truth?
Lucita widened her pitch-black eyes and pleaded: "Then, Sister Garcia, for Sophia's sake, would you be willing to let me move in and stay with you for a couple of days to see?"
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