kscans

Chapter 66 - End Village (Part 1)

Guided by the three, I headed toward End Village. It was my first time visiting another village since I was reincarnated into this world. I had to be careful not to make any mistakes. It would probably be best to keep my skills, starting with the Status Board, sealed until I returned.

It seemed to be about a four-hour walk to End Village. If it were just Otta-san and me, we would probably arrive much faster, but with an old man and a girl in our party, we could not rush. Well, I would just take it easy, like a picnic.

So Yuri thought, but he remained unaware of the fact that he himself was the biggest "child" in the group. Of course, the other three had long since lost any inclination to treat Yuri like a child.

Just as we were getting close to End Village, Yuri noticed it.

"Um, Audel-san, there seems to be a lot of wild garlic, I mean, Hyra, growing here. Does no one pick it?"

"Hm? Is that not Lycoris?"

"No? They look similar, but they're different. It's called Hyra, and it's not poisonous. You can eat both the root and the leaves all year round."

When he asked the surprised trio about it, it seemed that some people used to gather it, but after someone mistook Lycoris for it and got poisoned, they became afraid and stopped eating it. Indeed, in my past life in Japan, there were many cases of people getting poisoned by eating spider lilies, mistaking them for wild onions. It seemed that even in a different world, the same kind of accidental ingestion was happening here. At any rate, Yuri gathered some Hyra and taught them the knack of telling them apart. It was a useful wild plant, and it would probably be a good idea to plant some in the village.


"So this is End Village..."

"That's right. Welcome to End Village, Yuri-kun."

From the looks of it, the village was much larger than my abandoned one. There were more houses, but more importantly, the cultivated land per house was larger. Or rather, the truth was that my abandoned village was much smaller than average. My village was originally built as a base for rock salt mining. Therefore, unlike a normal village, there was no need to grow crops for tax payments. Taxes were paid with rock salt. If they only had to grow enough for their own consumption, less than half the cultivated land would suffice. The number of households that settled there was also smaller than End Village, so the abandoned village was only about one-third the size of End Village. Of course, even that size was more than I could manage on my own.

End Village, which boasted a scale nearly three times that of Yuri's village, though it was by no means large by average standards, was surrounded by a double fence. Even if a wild beast broke through the outer fence, if it could not break through the inner one, it would simply be trapped in between. It was not very difficult to hunt a beast whose movements were hindered.

I see. They've really thought this through.

Yuri was deeply impressed, but in fact, this was the standard form for agricultural villages in this world.

Old Man Audel led the impressed Yuri on a tour of the village. From what Yuri was told, the agriculture of this world, or at least in End Village, seemed to have quite low productivity. However, this could not be simply dismissed as this world, the Forea World, being backward in its agriculture. There was the existence of monsters.

Here in the Forea World, the villages on the outskirts were exposed to great stress due to the monsters that rampaged in the mountains and fields. Getting too close to the forests, which were rich in magical elements, meant stepping into the monsters' active territory, which in turn resulted in the village being attacked by monsters. Consequently, grazing and gathering near the forests were severely restricted. As for resources like timber, the reality was that demand was somehow met by the lord leading the domain's army to secure an area and then felling a large amount all at once. Even then, they avoided venturing deep into the forest. In such a situation, grazing a large number of livestock was nothing but a dream. On the contrary, if one were to carelessly increase the number of livestock on the outskirts where the magical elements were dense, it could even attract monsters, who would see it as a prime hunting ground. European-style agriculture, which was based on the presence of livestock, had no way of being established in the countryside of this world. Unable to collect humus from the mountains, and with the dung from a small number of livestock being insufficient for fertilizer, the use of human waste as fertilizer inevitably progressed. My apologies for the indelicate topic. In any case, although they tried to secure fertilizer in this way, it was but a drop in the ocean compared to the area of cultivated land. After all, it was not uncommon for even those considered poor farmers to maintain fields of about three hectares.

"And so, we had to let the barren land rest for over a year, but thanks to the Soya Beans you gave us, Yuri-kun, it looks like the situation is about to improve."

"Yes?"

I had only shared the bean seeds last month. I doubted that results would appear so quickly, but...

"No, the Soya Beans are growing lush and green even in what was supposed to be barren land. This means that, at the very least, if we plow the Soya Bean leaves and stems into the soil as fertilizer after the harvest, the condition of the soil should improve."

From his comment that other grasses did not work this way, it seemed that someone had tried to use green manure. However, he said that only scrawny grass grew, which was not worth plowing in.

"Right now, our top priority is to increase the amount of Soya Beans. If things go well, we might only have to let the land rest for about a year. If that happens, the amount of land we can cultivate will increase all at once."

The question of what they would do for labor briefly crossed Yuri's mind, but he reconsidered, thinking that was this village's problem. In any case, an increase in cultivated land was a good thing.

"Also, the grass you taught us about, Yuri-kun, is doing quite well. The goats are happy too."

In the course of his resource exploration, Yuri had happened to find a grass similar to an Alfalfa Mimic, and had been cultivating it as green manure. Like the alfalfa of Earth, it formed a symbiotic relationship with rhizobia to perform aerial nitrogen fixation, making it excellent as green manure. Furthermore, as the name "horse fattener" implies, it was also excellent as a fodder crop. Yuri himself had no opportunity to use it as fodder, but since this grass also grew around End Village, he had proposed using it as green manure and fodder during the fallow period. However, it seemed that because the goats ate it so voraciously, their supply for green manure was running low. The villagers were apparently busy gathering it from the surrounding area and planting it.

That's right. This village raised goats.