36 – Strength can be Infectious
Tending to the farm, Haita found, wasn’t particularly difficult. He arrived early in the morning, just after dawn, to do a brief tour of the grounds, largely to make sure the fence was still in tact and that nobody and nothing had come through it.
Apparently there was a risk of wild animals coming through to feed on the crops, but so far he’d found no sign of anything.
Then, after that little security sweep in the morning, he’d venture back around to water the crops and check them for any trace of damage or infection. Over the past few days the crops had been perfectly healthy. Or, at least, they looked much the same as Master Amon had left them. Haita trusted that his aniki had left them in perfect shape to start with.
He still had no clue what a potato was, but the ones in the ground were fat and large. Certainly, the entire expanse of his aniki’s acres seemed to be rich and vibrant with life. Even the air itself felt different when he walked around it.
Well, that was land tended by a cultivator. Of course Haita had never been in such a place before, but he had certainly heard a fair few stories about how cultivators could cultivate the very land they lived upon, their qi filling the soil and strengthening all that which grew upon it. Well, so long as it left him with less work to do, and lessened the risk of the farm going tits up in Aniki’s absence, Haita didn’t mind the particulars of it.
When he finished that morning check, he was able to get back to his usual daily chores, tending to his father’s fishing business. Then in the evening he’d meet up with Mikan and they’d spend a bit of time checking the grounds togther.
Which, for Haita, was a touch... awkward.
“It really is impressive,” Mikan said, her hands roaming among the fence boards. “I mean only a few months ago this whole spot was wild and untamed. Never thought anybody would make a viable farm out of it.”
“H-ha, yeah, Aniki is a very impressive guy.” He turned from her, his mouth dryer than an ash pit. Being alone with Mikan like this, it was more than he was used to. Even if the other guys had been here, that would have taken some pressure off of him. Though they probably would have said stupid things that embarrassed him, but he could have lived with that.
“Interesting too. What do you reckon his story is?” Mikan glanced his way, rubbing the back of her neck. “I mean, I don’t want to be nosy but... well come on, he’s the most interesting thing to ever happen in Tiode.”
“Oh... I couldn’t say.” Which was true. He had at least some solid idea of what had brought Aniki out to Tsukio, that some cultivators had wronged him and he had fled from the ruins of his past. But it wasn’t his story to tell, and he hardly wanted to be the one to break Amon’s confidence by spilling his story to someone else.
Even if that someone else was Mikan.
His stomach grumbled, and he felt his face burning all the way up to the tips of his ears.
“Oh? Did you miss lunch?” she asked.
“Aha... guess I... guess I must have forgotten to grab a bite, yeah.” He wanted to punch himself, he must have looked like such a damn imbecile!
“Oh, I can cook something up. Might as well use Master Amon’s firepit for cooking...”
“Huh? But... he’ll know we touched his food store.”
Mikan smiled, waving him off. “Oh, relax, I can fetch something from my home. You, in turn, can go and fetch a bit of kindling to light the firepit up.”
“If... you’re sure.” The more rational side of him said it was foolish, borderline dangerous, to make such free use of Aniki’s home. The other, much louder, part of his brain told him he was getting a hand cooked meal by his crush. And what fool of a man would turn that down?
They parted, and Haita ventured northward into the nearby woods. Once alone he felt his breathing return to normal, the anxious sweat on his face turning cold and clammy in the evening breeze.
“Goddess,” he huffed, leaning his weight against a nearby tree. “Just tell her how you feel... easy for you to say, Aniki!” Haita growled. He swung his fist, whacking the tree... and denting a chunk of the bark inward.
The young man was left blinking, stating first at the trunk and then at his undamaged hand.
“What the hell?” He flexed his fingers a few times, felt no pain or discomfort. “Maybe... maybe the tree is just old and rotted?”
Haita made for another tree, pressed his palm against it and tested how firm it was. He struck the truck with a testing punch, bracing for any pain he would feel. But while he felt the jolt of the impact running up to his shoulder, there was no pain in his fist. And, as before, the bark fractured and crumpled inward.
Haita blinked in confusion, slowly clenching and unclenching his fists. He felt... something in that moment, like a current tingling through his muscles at a steady speed. “Is this... there’s no way...”
But he’d heard plenty of stories about it, the sensation cultivators felt when they started to tap into their power. The sensation of qi pulsing through their bodies, rendering their muscles alight with energy. And once that power pulsed to life, their strength and toughness instantly pushed beyond what a human could normally handle.
In his case it was only a spark. A flickering ember of qi that established cultivators would have sneered at, where even lowly initiates could surpass him without much in the way of difficulty.
Still, to a mortal, even the faintest sensation of power was a rush.
“But... how...” He paused, glancing over to the shadowy outline of the farm in the distance. He’d spent a lot of time around Aniki, in the aura of his qi, and then walking among the qi-infused soil of the farm. Had that been enough to wake... something inside of him?
That was another thing that cropped up in stories from time to time, where the potential for cultivation awoke simply by spending a lot of time in the proximity of a cultivator. Haita had always thought that such tales were simply stories, but clearly there must have been something to them.
“Just... just a fluke, probably.” Haita swallowed hard and set about gathering dry branches from the forest floor. He wanted to focus back on normalcy, just for now. But when Aniki came back, he’d probably have to talk to the old man.
And somehow he got a feeling Amon would be far from chatty about it...