Chapter 15: A Farmer’s War Table
Eren didn't sleep that night.
He tried. Gods knew he tried. He lay on the straw mattress with his hands folded on his stomach like a medieval corpse, staring up at the warped ceiling. But the moment he closed his eyes, all he could see was a giant banner reading "FAILURE TO PRODUCE INFLATABLE SQUASH = PUBLIC SHAMING" in bold red letters.
Sleep was not happening.
So by dawn, he sat outside with a mug of something pretending to be coffee, watching the mist roll across his fields. Dew glistened on the tips of his onion stalks, and somewhere far off, a rooster screamed like it had just lost a custody battle.
"Thirteen days," Eren muttered.
He had accepted the competition quest. That meant pressure. Expectations. Judgments from sweaty old men who'd grown up massaging their carrots with jazz music and moonlight. He, meanwhile, was still trying to figure out how to rotate crops without turning them into demon bait.
"Lira," he said without looking. "Pull up the growth logs. I want a breakdown of all current crops, soil ratings, and potential harvest yields."
She materialized next to him with an unsettling silence. Her heels didn't even crunch the gravel.
"Morning, Master Eren," she said in that perfectly neutral AI voice that sounded like Siri if she'd been raised by stern librarians. "Displaying your request."
A blue projection opened in the air beside her, pixelating into neat boxes.
[Current Crops: