Chapter 88 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 88: The Rotting Garden 06
Lucita had forgotten entirely what she had set out to do. She looked at the seed bag in her hands for a while before slowly remembering, then walked at a measured pace deeper into the cemetery.
Even though the sky had grown dark, the heat stored in the summer garden had not yet dispersed. In the lingering, humid warmth, insects drifted in faint clouds.
Foxtail grass brushed against her bare ankles, but her mixed-blood skin was resilient, and the strokes of grass left no marks at all.
She crouched down and pressed her hand against the soil at her feet. Life-force began to gather slowly in her palm. The wild grass around her visibly started to wilt.
Lucita had not held her life gift for long, and was still in the stage of knowing what to do without knowing why. Her command of life-force was very shallow.
This was the first time since mastering "life" that she had tried to influence the flourishing or withering of plants. She had been feeling her way through the process, and the inefficiency was inevitable.
After clearing a small patch of ground roughly five meters square, Lucita became keenly aware that she was working far too slowly. She opened her seed bag and decided to sow some seeds first, then try accelerating their growth.
The sowing required no magic. Lucita carefully buried one seed at each regular interval, ending up with both hands coated in earth.
The sensation of touching soil was deeply steadying. Power surged through her veins. Her slightly sluggish thoughts, bathed in the flow of living force, gradually regained their clarity.
That feeling was being alive.
Being alive was a very good thing. She had once said this to someone — she had said it to Delphine.
To touch. To sense. To feel joy at a good harvest and anger at injustice. To hear someone call her name —
"Lucita!"
The voice came from somewhere above her.
Lucita was still somewhat dazed. That strange yet familiar name stirred something within her, and only then did she register that it referred to her.
She looked up instinctively.
Beyond the gable wall, a familiar head leaned out from a second-floor window of her own home. Eyes like a pool of green jade, golden braids hanging from her shoulders: "What are you doing?"
The scene felt familiar.
Once before, someone had called her name from a second-floor window. The same jade-green eyes. The same golden hair. That was the first person Lucita had met after coming to Irttat.
Her origin. Her beginning.
The row of vine-covered wooden windows along the town street flashed through her mind, and then she realized something. In her heart, Irttat had already become her origin.
The birthplace of the original Lucita. And her own birthplace.
Lucita looked at Violet's face, unchanged across several hundred years, and felt a faint warmth in her chest. She was just about to reply when Violet stepped out and leapt from the second-floor window.
"Careful!" Lucita startled, and quickly looked left and right. No one in sight, she relaxed. "If someone saw you, it would be the end of everything!"
"It's fine." Violet laughed lightly, her gaze falling to the ground. "What are you planting?"
"Rice."
"Rice?" Violet repeated with a puzzled look. "That grain you mentioned, the one with the very nice fruit?"
"More or less." Lucita confirmed her description.
"I see, why are you planting rice?"
Violet crouched down easily as she spoke and pressed her palm flat against the soil.
Tender green shoots pushed through the surface soil. Leaves unfurled. Stems drew upward from their centers, and white rice blossoms opened at the tips.
The fine petals fell away, and green husks formed in their place. As the stalks bent, they gradually swelled and turned gold.
From breaking the soil to ripening, the entire process unfolded before Lucita's eyes, accompanied by the soft fragrance of rice.
Violet brushed off her hands and stood. "I remember you mentioned wanting to eat rice before. Have you tasted it somewhere?"
"Mmm... in a dream, maybe." Lucita blinked.
Violet was no fool, but as she had done many times before, she had the tact not to ask further.
Everyone had secrets they were unwilling to share.
From the small five-meter-square test plot, they harvested around ten jin of rice.
Irttat had never grown rice, so there were no improved strains to draw upon. The yield was not particularly high.
Ten jin, and that was still unhusked.
Lucita stored it in her spatial pocket and planned to take it to a nearby mill the next day to have it hulled on a stone grinder.
"Let's go."
They walked one behind the other out of the cemetery.
The small test plot lay covered with cut stalks, while the surrounding wild grass appeared wan and drooping.
That grass had been perfectly vigorous only moments before, certainly not wilted by the sun, but temporarily weakened from the depletion of life-force.
That was the cost of forcibly ripening plants at speed: drawing life-force from the earth. If done recklessly and without restraint, it would cause irreparable damage to the world's cycles of growth — a danger shared in principle with the risks of using magic.
This was precisely why the elves preferred to use their gift to cultivate superior seeds, to keep pace with the farming calendar and ward off natural disasters, rather than forcing crops to ripen one harvest after another with their life gift, exhausting the life-essence of the soil without end.
There was also, of course, the fact that Irttat's mountain resources were plentiful enough that grain never ran short.
Back at home, there was no sign of Linnea teasing the sheep in the courtyard, nor of Delphine perched as usual in the linden tree by the front door.
Lucita called out, and heard Linnea's answer drift down faintly from upstairs, accompanied by the sounds of various rattling and banging. She asked with mild puzzlement: "What is she doing up on the second floor?"
Violet explained: "This afternoon she received a painting, a portrait sent to her by one of her friends, a certain charming little knight named Isabella. She has spent the entire afternoon deliberating about where to hang it."
"Oh?" Lucita stepped onto the staircase. "How is it painted? Where is she planning to put it?"
"In the corridor, apparently. Her friends told her that hanging a portrait in the bedroom is frightening when you wake up in the night — moonlight comes in and the vague face of the portrait looms at you — which does sound rather unsettling, I admit. And really, how do humans come up with so many ghost stories? Looking for thrills when they have nothing better to do..."
Lucita glanced sideways at her.
Needless to say, Violet had been neglecting sleep and food to read novels again.
"And hanging it in the corridor won't be frightening when you walk past it at night?" Lucita shook her head, amused. She rounded the corner of the staircase and found Linnea standing on a small wooden ladder, hammering nails with a small mallet in a succession of taps. Below the ladder sat an overturned toolbox, its contents of pliers, wrenches, and nails scattered across the floor.
"I don't walk through here when I get up at night!" Linnea called back without looking up.
Lucita looked. and indeed: this section of corridor where the painting was to hang did not lie on the route between Linnea's bedroom and the washroom.
She couldn't help laughing.
Delphine floated in the air, using her spatial force to hold the painting steady for Linnea. Hearing Lucita arrive, she turned with restrained dignity, her pupils bright enough to give off a gleam of gold: "Lucita, I remember I have portraits too!"
Lucita blinked for a moment before recalling what Delphine meant — the works by the human Delphine's artist mother.
Come to think of it, it was perhaps more fitting for Delphine to keep those portraits. After all, she too had been awakened by the same mother, and carried the traces of that other Delphine, which could not be erased.
"Would you like to look at them?"
"Of course!" Delphine nodded immediately. In her excitement, her hold on the picture frame slipped. The frame, freshly secured with only a single nail, immediately lurched sideways.
Linnea gritted her teeth. "Delphine!"
"Oh, sorry —" Delfina caught herself at once and hurriedly pulled the frame back into place with her spatial force, straightening it again with a relieved sigh.
Paper was fragile, after all. Exposed to air, it aged quickly, and some oxidation of the natural pigments was nearly unavoidable. For that reason, Lucita had always kept the picture box stored inside her spatial pocket.
Leaving them to their bickering, Lucita stepped around the ladder and set the picture box on the side table in Delphine's room.
These Delphines: Delphine in the wind, Delphine in the rain, Delphine at her writing desk, Delphine in the garden. Laughing, surprised, dreaming... For Lucita, they were dusty collector's pieces. But for her friend — the Delphine of now — perhaps they were something of a tether.
To be in this world with almost nothing holding you to it — Lucita understood very well how important it was to build those tethers.
Lucita let it be known that she had no desire to cook dinner that evening, and asked Violet to pick up something from the tavern on her way back. Violet didn't ask questions, and readily agreed.
Lucita returned to her bedroom, closed the door, and lay down on the bed.
She had said nothing, but while this had been an ordinary day for her friends, it had already been an exhausting one for her.
Her gaze drifted unfocused toward the ceiling, wandering now and then to either side, not quite sure what she was thinking — and then she went still.
Beside the bed in Lucita's room was a small bookshelf, stacked with several research magic texts she had borrowed from the Spring Tower.
Among that pile of books, she now caught sight of a spine with a name embossed in gold, a name that she recognized: Valentina.
She sat up at once, and pulled the book free.
On the brown hardcover, the title was printed in ornate script:
The Most Powerful Research Magic: The Force of Time.
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