BXBX NOVEL Chapter 825 824: Patrol
Chapter 825 Chapter 824: Patrol
?"At least the weathers nice, hm? Nice clear skies, barely a cloud in sight... slight breeze and warm. Matches this quaint village rather nicely."
I nodded as I stood beside Leraie, the two of us looking over the empty village for a few moments before I turned and waved the other three over, watching as Leone led the man and woman towards us with a brisk walk.
Jackie was a shorter, yet rather stout young woman, her black hair pulled into a messy bun behind her head whilst the leather and monster scale armor she wore hung loosely over her lithe frame, all while it added to her rugged appearance and serious expression.
Sharp brown eyes and a permanent frown gave her a resting expression that many wouldn\'t want to approach, though beneath that lay a rather calm and relaxed woman who was just living in the moment, focusing on the here and now and wringing out as much as she could from each and every second.
Meanwhile, Harry had a relaxed outwards expression as he smiled and looked around curiously, his height just above my own whilst his broad shoulders and muscular arms displayed his strength freely, though it was apparent that he wasn\'t as bulky as before thanks to a forced diet, but even then he was just naturally rather large.
HIs imposing physique was soothed by his smile and friendly demeanor, and so far both he and Jackie had remained quiet, leaving most of their personalities shrouded, though what I did grasp was that he was just as relaxed and jovial as his face would suggest, but that didn\'t mean I was willing to stop observing him or Jackie just because of cursory inspections.
Either way, I looked away from the two humans and instead returned my attention towards the village, waiting for them to approach before I asked "Did Mary already have you go through the village itself, or did you only come here to harvest the crops?"
"Ah, she had us check the houses too, Miss. Wasn\'t much of use to be found here, but we did check."
Harry\'s voice was slightly rough, matching his body perfectly, while his words were spoken clearly despite the slight drawl on his \'ee\'s.
"Good. Well, let\'s get to harvesting I guess. Leone, keep watch over the plains please. Don\'t particularly care for a monster attack at the moment..."
The thatch huts and wooden houses were compact and built together in rings around fire pits, with there being three rings total smack dab in the middle of a giant field of wheat.
Beneath the unblocked rays of the sun, we were surrounded by a sea of golden grain that was begging to be harvested, with the only other splash of color coming from the trees that were planted in their own ring nearby, ripe fruits hanging from their branches waiting to be picked.
It was an abundance of food that we had found here, and all it needed was to be harvested and refined from its raw state into something that was edible, which wouldn\'t be difficult at all; grain took a little bit of work to turn into anything edible, sure, but it lasted long enough as flour and was both filling and nurturing when turned into bread, so long as some of the grain was left alongside the flour.
Boring, tedious, slow, but it was easy to harvest, especially as Leraie and I introduced our magics into the equation to make harvesting easier; I utilized my Wind Magic to create sickles that harvested the wheat in wide arcs before carrying it back to me to be bundled up, while Leraie used her Earth Magic to do something similar, albeit slower.
Meanwhile, Jackie and Harry were chopping away with sickles they had brought along, placing the bundles on carts and working the normal way as they harvested this bounty alongside us, all while Leone watched from a nearby rooftop as she kept watch.
Each wave of my hand resulted in another swath of wheat falling to the ground, before a second wave brought what was cut back towards me to be bundled up and tossed onto a cart, making me sigh slightly as I looked around and wondered what the other team was up to.
This was another of those conundrums that you never really expect to be in until you are right in the middle of it; it being uneventful was good, since that meant we could harvest more and work uninterrupted, but it was also so dreadfully boring and slow that you almost wanted something to happen, which made you think about how bad that would be before you found yourself stuck in a loop of thinking about how tedious this was and how you wanted to do something else, but knowing that this was what you needed to do and that-
Yeah...
All in all, I have to admit that this wasn\'t what I was thinking of when I thought of us going to the Terracotta Grottos, and while this wasn\'t that \'fun\' or engaging, considering everything that had happened in recent times, perhaps this period of boring nothingness was exactly what we needed.
A few days to relax and reset our minds so that when something did inevitably happen, we could be prepared to react to it accordingly...
Humming to myself at my brilliant round of reasoning as to why this bland period of time was required, I eventually realized I had harvested more than enough wheat and turned to focus on getting what I had harvested bundled up properly and sorted through, getting rid of the bad stalks and tossing the rest onto the cart to be taken back to Custodia.
Leraie and I had harvested a good amount of wheat, with the extras from the two humans adding enough to make me rather pleased with this outing, knowing that this would be enough for a few days at the very least on its own, which was comforting to think about.