John was beginning to detest rain and, not for the first time, considered taking time to set up covered walkways from his house to the various locations around his farm. As he listened to the rain drive itself against the stone roof and saw it through the window, he briefly wondered if he could just take a sick day. Of course, if he didn’t feed the chookers no one else was going to, so he’d still have to go out for that. And, if he was already going to have to get wet, there was no reason not to check on the plots, and spend some time with the tree.

With a sigh he rolled off the sleeping platform and onto his feet. To be honest, he hadn’t really expected this to be as hard as it was. He’d never expected to have to clear his own land and build his own structures. Nor had he expected to be working 16-hour days, not including the hour-long lunch break and the thirty minutes or so breakfast and dinner cost him. The long days and short nights were beginning to wear on him, however he felt he was almost to a point where he could start to cut back. Once his land was saturated the only things left on his plate would be the chookers, the tree, and the plots.

The chookers only needed to be taken care of twice a day, morning and evening, and while it was raining and they were well fed, they were disinclined to get into trouble. The tree wasn’t really a problem, it probably wouldn’t notice if he switched their daily sessions to a different time. The plots could be checked at any hour of the day, so long as it was fairly consistent. So early nights and late mornings might be in his near future.

As he went about his morning, he tried to think of the other things he’d need to do. The first was grow some more wheat, he needed more straw for both ground cover and the coop. Next, he’d need to see if anyone could make enchantments for him, and perhaps a Mana Well. The reality was that he would need certain enchantments for the winter. The coop, while mostly weatherproof, was not well insulated, it would need some heating if the chookers were to survive. The barn would need the same eventually. To keep growing plants he’d need greenhouses, and those would work best if he could control the ambient temperature. This of course didn’t mention his plan to simulate different environments, nor create elementally saturated plots.

Finishing with the tree, he got a pair of messages informing him that intelligence and wisdom had increased again by one point each. Once more he wondered what the cap was. Hellen had mentioned something about not everyone needing 100 in their stats to Axia, so perhaps that was the cap for any given stat? He shook his head, unsure and not really caring at the moment, and carried on with his day.

After he took care of the chookers he once more visited the plots, and spent some time looking over the plants. The straw was doing a good job of keeping he weeds down, and he saw only a couple poking through. The plants themselves were looking good, except for the few signs of insect activity and again he wished for a liquid pesticide he could spray. Finally, he stopped at the last plot and examined his test plant. It was smaller than all the other plants, but was clearly just as healthy, if not more so. Deciding to continue on with the experiment he dumped his mana pool into the plant and then returned to the house.

A quick gesture and an application of Control Water saw most of the excess water sluice off of John and out the door. He then wandered into the bedroom and sat on the raised platform. He reached out and began feeding mana into his land. Meanwhile he opened the web interface and brought up what information he could find on wettable sulfur.

Normally sulfur is non-water soluble, that is to say when it’s mixed with water the two separate. Wettable suflur was a type of gardening sulfur that had been treated to become, somehow, water soluble. The problem was figuring out what that process entailed. While he did find a glue-based recipe dating back to 1919, he also found a patent that indicated that the recipe would cause a marked reduction in the effectiveness of the sulfur. The patent itself described a process to make wettable sulfur, but it was obtuse, extremely involved, and lacking in specifics. After about an hour more of searching, he gave up; there was simply no way he could make it with his limited resources.

John ran his fingers through his beard as he considered. The insect activity wasn’t too bad right now, it was only showing on a few of the plants, but he was sure it’d spread. He couldn’t make any of the pesticides he knew about, alchemical pesticides would taint the crop, and the sulfur was just getting washed off by the rain. This didn’t leave him with a lot of options, except perhaps the obvious. If he covered the crops, he could control both the amount of water they were getting and, more importantly, when they were getting it.

This brought him to a new problem; if he was going to build greenhouses, what should he build them out of? The obvious answer was quartz of course, he could make it translucent instead of transparent so that it caused diffused light instead of direct light, and he could make it fairly easily with Create Earth. The downside was that he was building it out of magic and there’d be very little labor involved, which meant his greenhouses likely wouldn’t have any special properties. On the other hand, he had no way to source materials for any other kind of construction, making it mostly a moot point.

Having decided on his course of action, John opened the blueprint module, and spent the hour before lunch designing a greenhouse.

***

Upon returning from lunch the first thing John did was create pieces of quartz with varying translucency. Giving him a range of samples from nearly perfectly clear, to almost totally opaque. He then proceeded to create a flame and hold each sample in front of it until he found one that diffused the image sufficiently, but still let most of the light through. Discarding the other samples he headed out to the plots and began his work.

He started with the north-western most plot, the one he thought of as the ‘first’ plot. With a gesture and an effort of will he used Move Earth to bring the wall down, turn it into a fine sand, much as Shinespark the mage had done to his house a few weeks ago. He then started building up new, thick walls of perfectly transparent quartz. Raising the walls about eight feet high with a gentle inward curve to finally create a domed roof. At first he’d thought he’d need to add interior pillars to hold it up, but then he realized what he really wanted was just an elongated arch which made it perfectly capable of holding itself up.

The basic structure finished, he proceeded to lay a thin film of the translucent quartz over the inside of the structure, taking it from perfectly clear, to and almost milky white. Finished with that he proceeded to ensure proper ventilation for the area, placing small holes near ground level on the north and south sides of the structure to encourage crossflow of air, and a few ventilation holes near the ceiling to allow heat to escape.

The creation of the structure took no more than twenty minutes thanks to his familiarity with Create Earth and the benefits of the Domain feat. John was particularly pleased by this as it meant he’d be finished with the final plot around the time it was getting dark. He had no wish at all to be building in the dark, and he’d much prefer to give the plants the night to dry off so that he could dust them in the morning.

Taking a moment, John Inspected the greenhouse.

[Name: Quartz Greenhouse]

[Quality: Common]

[Description: Made entirely of quartz this greenhouse is sufficient to keep rain off, diffuse light, and deter larger animals. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do much else, granting neither a bonus nor detriment to growth efficiency.]

Common wasn’t great, but it was acceptable, especially since it was apparently possible to give debuffs to things with shoddy construction. He moved quickly to the next plot, and began altering it as well.

About four hours later it was fully dark, but all twelve of the plots had been covered in greenhouses. He had actually built the last one in semi-darkness, because he’d forgotten he’d need to stop and feed the chookers, however he’d gotten it done.

Retreating indoors and out of the rain he sat down once more on the slab he generously termed a bed and began planning for the morrow even as he started pushing more mana into the land. He would need to head into town and see if he could purchase straw from Frank, and if that didn’t work out he’d have to create more greenhouses to grow wheat in himself. He was starting to run low on straw for the coop and he’d be needing more ground cover once this batch of alchemist’s sponge was grown.

Plans set, John leaned back, and pulled up the browser. It was time to relax for the evening.