“Dear Uncle Pip.” Alexander narrated to himself, “Your instructions suck.”

If he was honest, the issue wasn't really his uncle's fault. The rear of the book contained a detailed description of the steps involved in tilling, planting, watering and eventually harvesting any sort of crop he'd be likely to plant on his farm. The only issue was that the instructions assumed a certain base level of competence.

Like knowing how to use a hoe.

Looking back, even to mere minutes earlier, Alex knew he must have looked like the dumbest city boy to ever set foot on a farm. He'd been full on overhead chopping at the soil, wailing on it as if he were trying to split the earth in twain. Fortunately, the book had put a stop to that.

He'd initially mistaken its buzzing as just another of the weird farm sounds that he'd have to get used to. But around the fifth time he struck the earth with the hoe, the gentle noise had finally drawn his attention. Apparently, his status book was set on vibrate. Why was he not surprised?

Upon further investigation, Alex had discovered a new heading at the front of the book titled simply, Event Log with a series of identical notifications listed beneath it.

Event Log

Incorrect form, Too hard! 50% increased energy consumption.

Incorrect form, Too hard! 50% increased energy consumption.

Incorrect form, Too hard! 50% increased energy consumption.

Incorrect form, Too hard! 50% increased energy consumption.

Incorrect form, Too hard! 50% increased energy consumption.

Perhaps his form might be a little off.

Further trial and error, with the book helpfully buzzing at him with each and every failure, eventually narrowed down his mistakes. Too hard, then not hard enough. Faster, slower. It was infuriating at first, but that irritation only made it all the sweeter when he finally struck earth without the book chiming in on his mistake.

Not that one successful strike would be enough. His grandfather's book required him to clear out a square roughly three feet to a side in order to plant even a single bag of the potato seeds that Marie had given him. So far, he'd done about half a foot.

Wonderful. I'm sure this won't take all day. Alex thought to himself, wiping sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his jacket, before thinking better of it and tossing the coat itself onto the porch.

Despite his concerns, it didn't take nearly all day. In fact, it took him longer to finally settle on a form to keep the book from complaining at him than it did to till the full three square feet.

“That should be...” Alex started to say as he turned over the last lump of dirt, only to trail off in surprise at what followed. The ground began to glow, a thin line of blue light starting at the corner he had just finished, then creeping down along the edges as it went. It formed a perfectly straight and even outline of the square he had just finished digging, then flowed inward, the light rippling across the dirt in waves. It was difficult to see against the brightness, but as each wave passed, the ground beneath looked different. Pristine.

All in all the process took less than five seconds, and when it was over, the haphazard, lopsided 'square' of dirt that Alex had tilled was gone, replaced by a textbook example of what a tilled field should look like.

Literally. It looked identical to the version at the back of the Status Book.

"Well, that is neat." He admitted with a grin. Terrifying magic beyond his comprehension, sure. But neat.

With the soil now correctly tilled, Alex returned to the house, leaned the hoe against the deck and retrieved his seeds. The book's description of planting was no better than it's description of tilling the soil, but he was pretty sure he had this one. Plant seed in ground. How hard could it be?

As it turned out, not very. It took only a few minutes to sow the plot he had tilled for himself, one hand holding the packet of seeds while the other scattered them onto the open ground.

Once he was finished, he took a second pass over the area, kicking the occasional seed back into place, or kneeling down to adjust them when the error was more grievous. When he was at last satisfied with his work, Alex stepped outside the boundaries of the seeded area and was rewarded as that same blue light washed over his work once again. In the blink of an eye, the tilled ground had shifted to perfectly surround the exposed seeds.

After the first time, it was exactly what he expected. He didn't have to be perfect, he just had to be good, and then the magic of this place would do the rest. Good to know.

All that was left was to water them.

However illogical it was, the book seemed to agree with Marie that a potato plant would be ready to harvest in exactly five days, provided that it was watered daily. It didn't seem to matter what time of day, nor did there appear to be any variance on how much water it would need at various points of its life cycle. The instructions were, more or less, just 'water it,' with a single caveat stating that he didn't have to water anything on a rainy day.

"Watering it is," Alex announced to himself, scooping up the watering can before realizing his most immediate conundrum. The can was empty.

There were taps inside the house of course, but that seemed like it'd get really old, really fast if he was running back and forth between his plots and the kitchen sink, not to mention how messy it could get. A quick once around the house showed that it lacked any taps or hookups for a hose, not entirely surprising given this was a farm that still used a watering can as it's method of irrigation.

There were a number of small ponds scattered around the property, though none was close enough to his work area to really be useful. Which left only one option. The creepy well.

Alex had spotted the thing during his jog around the house and been thoroughly creeped out at the time. With a base of rough stone and a roof of old, sun-bleached wood, the well looked like something out of a horror film. Like he ought to be expecting a waterlogged child to crawl out of it and strangle him to death any moment. The phrase, 'Ten pounds of nope in a five-pound bag' came to mind.

But it was a source of water, and upon investigating it more carefully, it was probably the one he was intended to use. A bucket sat next to the well, but the hook at the end of the rope fit so perfectly around the handle of his watering can that Alex was sure it had been designed for it.

Despite the absurdity of it, Alex snatched up his ax in his spare hand as made his way around to the rear of the house. If something decided to crawl it's way up the rope, well he'd either chop the line or give the offending creature a swift ax to the face. He wasn't yet sure which.

"Just a well," Alex muttered to himself as he hung the watering can from the hook, making sure to secure it tightly before he began to turn the crank and lower it down towards the dark water below. "Just a really, creepy well."

In the end, it was just a well. Nothing jumped at him or chittered in the darkness below. The only sounds it made at all were the creep of the wheel in his hand, and the splashing as the watering can sunk into the depths and returned to carry the water up with it. Perhaps the only thing wrong with the well at all was that the water smelled, a thick earthy aroma accompanying it. Even that, however, Alex had to chalk up to nature. Had he ever even smelled water that wasn't chemically treated to hell and back?

The watering can itself was both lighter and less ungainly than he'd have expected it to be, despite gallons of water splashing around inside of it. Too lightweight, Alex realized as he walked. It barely weighed more now than it had while he was carrying it to the well in the first place. He should have been surprised, but where did 'ultralight watering can' even fit into the day's oddities.

Weight wasn't its only strange property, Alex soon realized.

He'd set to work immediately on his return, thoroughly dousing a corner of the seeded plot until the nearby book buzzed in annoyance at him. Alex didn't even have to look to know what it said. Too much water.

“Right on cue.” He said with a certain sense of smug satisfaction. The instructions hadn't told him how much to water, but with the book throwing a fit every time he'd gone too far, they didn't really have to. Just as he'd expected.

The only thing he hadn't expected was how fast the whole procedure would go. Considering the size of the plot and the size of his watering can, Alex had assumed he'd need at least two, perhaps as many as three trips to the well to fully saturate the ground. Yet each time he checked the can it seemed to have barely diminished. He must have used a third, perhaps even half a gallon when all was said and done, but the can scarcely showed that he'd spilled even a drop.

Periodically throughout his work, Alex stepped to the outer boundaries of the well-defined square. Each time he hesitated just long enough to be sure that there was no unnatural blue light about to work its way over the unfinished product. He didn't expect it to work, but it was good to know for sure either way. Whatever force was perfecting his imperfect work, it at least wanted him to finish before it tidied things up.

A few more drops fell from his can, darkening the last corner of the finished plot. As expected, that same power washed over it, merging too dark soil with tiny spots that he'd missed, until at last there was a uniform, immaculate plot of watered soil.

Alex stood back, and for what felt like the first time since he started, he smiled. It might have taken an invisible, perhaps even divine force, but the end result didn't look half bad!

Not that he was done. The box Marie had given him hadn't contained only the single packet. There were nine.

"Mid-afternoon," Alex said confidently to himself. It had taken a decent chunk of the morning to get the first one right, but now that he knew what he was doing, Alex was certain he could knock the rest out by mid-afternoon.

Well, perhaps not certain. But he never was one for setting the bar low.

***

In the end, it didn't even take half as long as he'd expected.

The repetitive nature of the task lent itself to a certain rhythm, and once Alex had found that rhythm, his productivity began to skyrocket. What had been an imposing challenge at the start of the day had become a rote exercise, still time-consuming but in no way difficult. The warnings of the book came fewer and fewer, until there were none at all, leaving him to work with nothing but the sound of his breathing and the scrape of metal across the soil.

It was an almost surreal experience for him. In all his years, Alex could count on a hand the number of times he had ever been somewhere so quiet. There were still the occasional noises, woodland chirps and scuttles, but no roaring trains, no revving engines, arguing neighbors or distant sirens. The closest he could remember was what, that power outage when he was twelve?

Working in that silence was so easy. Strike the earth, pull the soil, strike the earth once more. The sun was almost perfectly overhead as he watched the last his new plots shimmer into perfection, filling out the final corner of the larger 3x3 set of plots he'd made. He never really was very original when it came to shapes or designs. Squares and rectangles for him, all the way.

Seeding and watering took almost no time compared to the heavy labor of tearing up the soil. He didn't even need to make another trip to the well, the watering can still well over half full despite the gallons of water he had emptied from it.

When he was finished, Alex bustled around, collecting his tools for storage along with the seed bags and other garbage he had pulled off the farm during his preparation. In the process, he stopped just long enough to admire his work. Eighty-one square feet of tilled planted and watered ground. Tilled, planted and watered by him. Not half bad for half a day's work.

“What now though?” He asked himself aloud. It was a good question. Half his reason for planting the crops in the first place had been as an experiment, to test some of the boundaries of this bizzaro world he'd found himself in. But he hadn't really learned much he didn't already know, had he? 'Magic' was real, plants were weird, and he didn't completely suck at farming, despite all evidence to the contrary. Was any of that helpful?

Alex walked inside, carrying the Status Book to the kitchen table and flipping it open to the Event Log. As expected, the log was filled with warning after warning. Too hard, too much water, seed out of place and so forth. The only unexpected, and as a result most intriguing warnings, read:

Task Complete (Watering)! -2 Energy.

There were a host of similar warnings for watering, though none for seeding. Some, particularly the older ones on the following pages, listed -3 instead of -2, though they were otherwise the same.

It didn't take a genius to figure it out. Each time he completed a task and had it touched up, he lost a little bit of energy. If he screwed up enough, the cost was increased, just as the earlier warnings indicated.

In total, he'd lost forty-eight energy between the nine plots he'd worked that day, a number reflected a few pages later where his energy listed him at 152/200. Meaning that realistically the maximum number of plots he could plant and water in a single day would be around thirty-six. Fifty, he supposed, if he did everything perfectly, with a daily upkeep of half his energy.

“Assuming energy recovers to full daily.” He corrected himself. Considering the remarkable parallels between Blue Hills and reality, it was a safe assumption, but still an assumption. “And that there isn't any way to recover energy during the day.”

What form would that take, he wondered. Was he going to stumble across mana potions while he was here? Or would it recover naturally over time? Alex double checked his status once again, but it hadn't adjusted since the last time he looked. Sitting around didn't help, what about laying down? Or having a shower? He always felt surprisingly refreshed when he finished a shower, after all.

Then again, it wasn't like he felt tired at all. Which was weird when he paused to think about it. He'd spent hours out in the field, doing the sort of dirty, menial labor he hadn't done in, well... ever. Alex liked to think he was in pretty good shape, but he wasn't in 'hours of farm work without feeling tired' shape. Even the muscles that had ached in the moment, his shoulders and lower back primarily, felt fine now.

And I'm not hungry. He realized. It was halfway through the day. If Marie was to be believed, he had slept for an entire day after arriving here. But he didn't feel even the slightest craving. He knew he could eat, that if someone put a bowl of strawberries in front of him, he'd happily munch down without question. There was just no urgency to it, no hunger, despite how ravenous he should be.

Alex shuddered. Part of him had been prepared, even looking for some hint to what he'd suspected. So many things here were similar but different, and the moment he saw those two scores, HP and Energy, his mind had started racing. If a bag or a watering can could have mystical powers, then what reason was there to think that he hadn't been changed as well.

Then again, if a bag had those sorts of powers, was it really just a bag?

And if he had been altered, was he really himself at all?