Chapter 104: Practice
The planting of the garden went pretty quickly after that. It wasn’t exactly barter, but everyone on the floor was more than happy to empty out the useless bric-a-brac they had accumulated in their packs, giving Tulland anything he could use to balance the soil in his main plot. Most of it was useless, but almost everyone had one little fragment of something he could use.
Tulland didn’t use it all in one place, either. After digging soil out of a blessedly long-unused latrine trench, he planted his plants one by one, descending from the highest value plants he had down to the lowest. This let him add what bones and monster parts to the soil those plants needed first, not wasting them on lesser vines, bushes, and grasses that wouldn’t improve no matter how much he fed them.
He was given a full day to do just that, plus as much manual labor as he could have asked for. Luckily, he didn’t need much, since he now knew better than to let anybody but Necia anywhere near the main farm. By the time he went to bed the next night, he had the food farm done, most of his vines almost fully grown, and a good start on all his harder to grow stuff. Dumping as much magic as he had left before he finally laid down to go to sleep meant waking up to a lot of new green the next morning. It was a good start.
The beginning of his next project was less clearly heading in the right direction.
“Oh, the farmer.” The fist man slammed a heavy hand down at the soil, popping his entire body up off the ground and landing upright on his legs without using them in the actual action of getting up at all. Tulland understood what the man had done, and even suspected he could have done something similar himself, if not entirely as smoothly. Though it was still bizarre to see it in action. “I was wondering who they’d send.”
“I was wondering who I’d get.” Tulland set down his bags in the dirt, stretching out a bit before what he expected was going to be the most unpleasant kind of exercise. “How do you think they chose?”
“My guess? They put the guy who doesn’t know how to teach with the guy they aren’t sure knows how to learn.” The man slipped the metal plate off of one of his fists and held out a meaty hand to Tulland. “Brist.”
“Tulland.” Tulland’s hand disappeared into the big man’s fingers and palm like a fish into a net, but reappeared a moment later unharmed. “So how do we get this started?”
“The training, you mean? Like this.”