Midday arrived to his assigned plot of farmland at about ten in the morning. It had taken him about 45 minutes of walking to get there, and he was tired after having gone through what had already felt like a long day, but there he was with a rusty scythe and a giant plot of wheat to cut.

“Better get to it,” he said, taking the scythe out of the holster on his back and the first swing of the day. A little patch of wheat fell to the ground and then, a few seconds later, another patch followed. He made no effort to pick the fallen grains up or tie them in bundle or really do anything at all besides the simple of act of swinging his scythe.

The reason for this was because of the very strange way in which Neighborhood 8 was operated. Generally speaking, all the fieldwork slaves had to do was tend to and then eventually cut the grains. The remaining steps after the initial harvest were completely out of their hands—for everything else was done by the tiny yet innumerous tornadoes that appeared once every couple nights and scooped up the fallen grains to be brought to the main processing facility.

It was a bizarre and wholly unnatural process indeed, and Midday hadn’t believed that such a thing could really be possible at first, but sometimes he could look out and see the faint outlines of thousands upon thousands of narrow cyclones coming down from the clouds like tendrils of the night sky and so he had no choice but accept it as reality.

The simple explanation for this otherworldly phenomenon, according to the veteran slaves he had asked not long after arriving to the plantation, was a single individual with the power to control the weather to such an extent as to create and simultaneously maintain the 12 climates of Elvanera Island: one for each of the 12 Neighborhoods—which all contained well over 250,000 acres of usable farmland. Midday still had a hard time believing that any one person could possess the godlike amount of power necessary for such a feat, but he had no alternative explanations for why the daytime weather in Neighborhood 8 was always—without exception—hot and sunny. There was never a cloud in the sky during the day, and it never—literally never—rained until late in the evening after the workday was finished.

After about half-an-hour of work, he stopped abruptly and let out a sigh as he turned his attention to his bandaged-up hand. The bandages had pretty much entirely turned red by then, and little drops of blood occasionally seeped through to the surface, but the blood loss seemed to have slowed down a good bit by then. Even so, it hurt like a bitch.

It didn’t seem to matter how he held the scythe. As long as his left hand was wrapped around the handle—as it needed to be, seeing as the scythe was even taller than he was and therefore far too heavy to use with one hand—the pain in his finger was excruciating beyond belief. Everything he did seemed to agitate it more, and he struggled to see how he had any chance at all of completing his daily quota before the sheer agony of the wound made it impossible to even think about working.

But he had to find a way. If he failed to reach his quota for the day, that would make two failed quotas in a row—a losing streak which would technically not result in any immediate punishment but would nonetheless not bode well for him either. Strikes were essentially permanent, and the only way to get them cleared was to spin the wheel: something Midday didn’t want to do ever again. As such, getting even one strike was something to be avoided at all costs.

He bit his lip and wrapped both hands around the scythe, immediately grimacing upon feeling the pain in his finger stub return. There was only one way Midday could think of to complete his quota for the day, and the solution was simple: push through the pain.

He widened his feet, brought the scythe over his shoulder, and swung. The pain, as before, was agonizing, but he nonetheless tried his best to ignore it and took yet another swing. Two patches. As if the injury wasn’t bad enough on its own, Midday also had to contend with the eternally hot weather of Neighborhood 8. It was no more tolerable than it had been yesterday when he had gotten heat stroke. If anything, it was worse. Why me? He felt more discouraged with every swing. The task at hand seemed insurmountable, but he just shook his head and kept swinging. What else can I do?

Midday sighed again. His naïve hope upon finding the Elvanerean Ring was that his general quality of life would skyrocket immediately after finding it. His plan had been to find seeds for and subsequently cultivate each of the agricultural treasures, using their powers to rapidly become tremendously powerful, but the truth was that getting to that point would take a long time—and there was a good chance he would drop dead long before ever getting that far.

He would soon have unlimited access to Devil Peppercorn, which was an exciting prospect to be sure, but all it did was make food healthier. It was true that the extent of the improvement was drastic to the point where there were many stories about people who consumed it regularly throughout their lives living several decades past 100, but the fact remained that all it did was boost nutritional value. Midday didn’t know exactly how the ingredient worked—he had never actually seen it, only heard about it—but he struggled how something like that would start showing benefits in anything less than a few weeks.

“If only I could get my hands on some Vigor Lentils!” He shouted to a field empty besides himself. The plantation was so massive and horrendously understaffed that the nearest person was working several hundred meters away. Anything Midday said or screamed would be all but drowned out beneath a flat sea of wheat rustling under a light breeze. “Is that really too much to ask?”

Of course it was. Unlike Devil Peppercorn, Vigor Lentils were unquestionably useful with no tremendous downsides—well, none besides the incredibly time-consuming process of preparing the ingredient for consumption. Strongheart Soup, the final, consumable form of the ingredient, was apparently able to boost one’s endurance for up to six hours at a time—though the duration was largely dependent on the skill of the chef. If he could get his hands on something like that, working in the fields would be cinch.

But the obvious usefulness of Vigor Lentils was the same reason for why he couldn’t have them: the ingredient was always in high-demand and extremely lucrative to produce. As such, the security surrounding Neighborhood 4, where the crop was grown, was virtually impenetrable. It was hopeless.

He returned his attention to the wheat. Regular wheat. There was nothing special about it. In a plantation where special-grade plants were the norm, it seemed mighty unfortunate that he was tasked with harvesting the same kind of plain old wheat they had grown in his village. But there was nothing that could be done about it. All he had to do was meet his quota. He got back to swinging.

Midday never hummed or whistled during his work. The sound that filled the vast majority of his waking hours was the rustling of wheat in the wind. He generally worked silently, thinking about nothing in particular, until his work for the day was complete but, today, his thoughts were all over the place: between coming up with ideas for how he might survive and dealing with the pain from his finger, it was difficult to focus on chopping—not that he really needed to, the work was mindless as could be.

Six hours of backbreaking labor passed by uneventfully. Midday, already exhausted to the point where it was difficult to stand, stopped and surveyed his work:

Just over halfway finished. He frowned. At this rate, there was no way he would finish everything he was supposed to do by the end of the workday, which would be marked by sunset. It simply wasn’t possible for someone like him clear the remaining portion of his quota in the 4 or so hours that remained. He needed to speed up.

“Fucking hell.” Midday looked at his scythe, which he reckoned might be older than he was. The rusty iron blade never held an edge no matter how many times he sharpened it, and the handle had given him more splinters than he could count. “Worthless junk.” He decided that it might be a good idea to look into getting a better scythe. He knew that the slaves in the so-called ‘Upper Neighborhoods’—which what Neighborhoods 1 through 6 were called, due to the fact that they were the ones tasked with producing agricultural treasures—were treated relatively well and were given tools made from high-quality steel. If he could get a well-made scythe with a genuine-article steel blade smuggled in through the barrier walls, he reckoned his efficiency in the field would improve. As if that would ever happen… No, wait, hold on a minute, it actually could!

He recalled his conversation with Romulo. Romulo had first obtained Devil Peppercorn by trading smuggled whiskey to someone in Neighborhood 6. In other words, Romulo had to be at least somewhat involved in the world of smugglers. If I can start growing Devil Peppercorn en masse and sell it in bulk to people in the other Neighborhoods, I could probably trade my way up to a half-decent scythe before long. Midday hopped up to his feet, excited to get his feet wet in the black market as soon as possible. He felt a little revitalized after having hatched what he considered to be one of his first fairly decent schemes. It gave him hope some hope for his future.

He picked up his scythe and got back to work. His missing finger had long since started bleeding again, and he was now steadily losing blood through it, but there was nothing that could be done about that for the time being. The only thing that mattered at that time was cutting all the wheat left in his quota—which was essentially just a giant box whose borders were marked by painted wooden poles that a group of higher-ranked slaves were responsible for moving the location of every night. Probably due to human error moreso than anything else, the size of this box varied by the day and, today, it just so happened to be on the smaller side. He took that as encouragement and continued his work with the greatest zeal he could muster.

Finally, after ten hours of nonstop hard labor, he had done it: despite a late start and a missing finger, Midday had cleared the entirety of his quota, finishing just minutes before sunset, and had avoided gaining a strike. For the first time in ages, Midday was proud of himself.

Now all he had to do was make it back to the cabin in one piece. He groaned, dreading the three mile walk ahead of him. It was all too temped to find a nice comfy spot in the wheat and pass out there, but he soldiered on nonetheless, propelled forward mostly by Romulo’s promise to have some Devil Peppercorn ready for him by the time he got back.

Hobbling forward as best he could, Midday journeyed back to the cabin.