As we began our tour, I started playing with my UI that had sprouted in the corner of my vision. I could see that there was a temperature gauge, a clock, and a calendar that I could put to the right of all of my tabs. It looked like this place had a 24-hour clock, just like Earth, and a 365-day calendar. There were 12 months of 30 days each. There were even seven-day weeks, just like at home. I couldn’t actually see anywhere what the world was called, but I was in the Albion Empire. Everything outside ?the Western Territory was greyed out on the map.

  I didn't know what the month name of Ebril meant exactly, but I could just toggle that to see the 4th month, 10th day. I was gonna take that as mid-April. About where I was on Earth. I could also toggle the temperature setting from whatever theirs was to Fahrenheit. Awfully handy of the System to make things understandable for me.

  The important thing about the date was that it meant it was just about perfect for planting wheat and potatoes if the weather was anything like Idaho.

  “Colin, I’m not from here, or the main territory of the Albion Empire. What can I expect for the seasons?” I asked him, hoping he'd know.

  Colin had clearly calmed down, and while he was still wary, he seemed like a good kid who wanted to believe I was going to help them out.

  “Well sir, we’re in Ebril now. The official start of spring was a couple of weeks ago, but the last frost is still a few weeks away,” he said, his voice clear and pleasant. There was no trace of a stutter. That must only come out under extreme duress.

  As he spoke, his eyes shifted back and forth from the beautiful sea of green to my face. I’d already noticed that when I spoke, he appeared to gauge my facial expressions as much as my words. Of course, any time he caught me looking, he’d put his head down, allowing his unbound shoulder-length hair to obscure his face.

  I stopped him because I wasn’t sure if months were the same here as at home. “Just give me the general overview. There are 12 months. We just started spring. How many months are in each season? Are they split evenly here?”

  He nodded. “Oh. Well, there are three months of spring, three months of summer, three months of fall, and three months of winter.”

  “So I’m just about right to plant potatoes and wheat?” I asked.

  He stopped in his tracks. He was certainly looking at me now. There was concern in his voice as he said, “Do you have some extra gold of your own? Potatoes are 500 gold to plant 20 acres. I know Ma and I have a garden already, but if you choose potatoes, you’re not going to be able to buy any animals after you buy corn and wheat.”

  He kept speaking rapidly, as if he was worried I would say something he didn't want to hear if he didn't get all of his words out before I answered. “Now I know you don’t owe us anything, and you probably haven’t looked yet, but we only have a few chickens left, and they’re not layin’. This last winter, stoats got into the hen house and killed our rooster and the other hens. We had to kill our only cow last fall. She wasn’t giving any milk anyway since the Bishop wouldn’t let the neighbors breed her with their bull.”

  “Wait.” I stopped and looked at him. “The bishop stopped your neighbors from helping you?”

  He looked down at the ground and spoke quietly, “Yes, sir, they have still been helping a bit when they can. But the Bishop can make things hard, no matter what Ma says. He can’t just kick people out, but he could threaten not to bless their kids’ marriage, or take a long time to come and heal someone.”

  “You said the bishop can heal?” I asked.

  “Yeah, when he wants to,” Colin’s voice was sullen, his foot lashed into the dirt, causing a puff of dust and grass. “But he always says he can only heal injuries and purify things, not fix sickness."

  He kicked the ground harder, lips pulled into a snarl. "But I’ve seen him fix some sicknesses!”

  The cloud of dust lazily drifted away on the light breeze.

  As we both silently watched the dust, I thought.

  It sounded to me like he couldn’t cure viruses, but could cure bacterial infections and cleanse wounds.

  The death of his dad had clearly hit Colin hard, which was only natural. Then they’d lost their land, and the way this society worked, it seemed like one bad break could ruin things for you.

  Maybe the bishop could be reasoned with. If he had really tried to save Colin’s dad and just wasn’t capable of curing him, then maybe my being here would reset the order of things as far as society was concerned.

  I could only hope.

  My decision to let Colin and Emily stay was firming up in my mind. I didn’t think it would be very easy to make a homestead work on my own anyway.

  Once we’d discussed the bishop, I also felt the need to talk about the price of potatoes. “Colin, why are potatoes so expensive? Where I’m from, they’re cheap and plentiful.”

  His eyes lit up as he watched me. “You’ve lived with the mountain dwarves!?”

  “Wait, what? No, I’ve never even seen a dwarf.” I said, confusion clear on my face.

  He looked crestfallen. “Oh. Well, potatoes are from their lands. They don’t grow so good on the plains. They like mountains. It costs a lot of gold to bring ‘em here, then there’s a good chance they will die if it gets too hot. Even if they do sell for 12 gold per bushel there’s no way they’ll be worth it.”

  On Earth, potatoes had come from the Andes, and originally were a highland crop. But they’d been modified to grow everywhere on Earth hundreds of years ago. If they hadn’t been modified here, then I was sitting on a gold mine. That, or a death sentence if the dwarves came for me…

  “Well, Colin, I have a special potato that will grow here. They are already in the bins on that machine on the back of my tractor. They’re going to do amazing.” I kept the worry out of my voice as I spoke. I was going to grow my potatoes. They’d been my family’s specialty for over a hundred years. I might not have been in the family’s farming plans moving forward at home, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t create my own legacy here if this was all real.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  After that revelation, we lapsed into a period of quiet as we walked.

  The home area had the log cabin, surrounded by a rough wooden pole-log fence. The fence had a top rail that stood about five feet tall, and another rail in the middle. It might keep a lazy animal in, but anything determined to get out or in would succeed in short order.

  My tractor and all the implements were just outside ?that fence on the south side.

  The weather was pleasant. My UI said 72 degrees. It was mostly sunny, and a light breeze barely rippled the grass. There were bees and other flying insects buzzing about, and I could hear birds chirping. It even smelled like spring, with the smell of grass and other green things coming to life.

  In short, it was about perfect outside as far as I was concerned.

  Outside ?the fence perimeter, it was mostly flat, open grassland on this side of the river. The river was smallish, no more than fifty feet wide where I could see, and it ran north to south about two hundred feet behind the house. It had mature trees of several varieties lining both banks. I’d have to get closer to see what the river itself looked like.

  There were trees to the north, south, and west, but they were several miles away.

  I pulled up my UI again. I saw I could zoom all the way in so that I saw only my homestead. It was called The Jacobson Homestead. I guess I was now John Jacobs. I'd better get used to it.

  It looked like I’d want to use the tractor to build a small dike between the river and the cabin. I doubted there would be any sort of flood control in place. With my tractor and the right implement, I could pretty easily move some earth around and provide some protection for my land.

  I'd also dig ditches so I could irrigate.

  Hmm, I wonder if I will have access to siphon tubes?

  I didn’t know when they first came into use, but it was probably later than whatever level of tech this place seemed to have. I'd seen pictures of ditches in my great-grandpa's time. They just had wooden boxes set out at regular intervals that you could pull boards out of.

  Hell, they probably just dry-land farmed here. I saw something about wizards and weather control in the System prompt.

  With wizards in play, maybe there would be magical items I could use? I wasn't sure how ubiquitous magic was in this world. I’d ease into that line of questioning in case I should already know.

  As we walked into the lush grassland, I could see that the grass wasn’t as coarse as I had first imagined. It would make great feed for grazing animals. The air smelled faintly like right after you mowed a lawn. Not overwhelming, but noticeable.

  I broke the silence to ask Colin a question. “Before your Da died, what crops were you growing? And what kind of pests do we need to worry about now?”

  He answered me quietly, “Just corn and wheat. Wheat is subsidized so we’ll grow enough to export to the home isles. You’ll have to grow at least one plot of it. We were going to buy some more animals if the crops did good. But, when Da died, I was only twelve. Ma was sick too, but not as bad as him. I just couldn’t get the crops in, and a bunch of the other neighbors got sick too. Only a few others died. But there weren’t enough people to help us out.”

  His voice petered out at the end. I reached out and gently gripped his shoulder, much like my dad did to me just this morning. He flinched, but then accepted it.

  He gave me a slight smile and took a quick breath before speaking again. “Pests? Just the usual. Foxes and coyotes, stoats and rats. No wolves on this side of the river most of the time. No locusts or nothing if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  He kept going. “They say there’s goblins and hill trolls still in the mountains to the west. I do some hunting in the foothills on the other side of the river and haven’t seen any, but the real mountains don’t start for fifteen miles to the west. I never go too far into the foothills, even.”

  “There’s big bears, and a pack of wolves in the foothills, but I’ve never been bothered by 'em. Plenty of deer and elk over there. The river has some fat trout. That’s really how we’ve survived. That and Ma’s garden. We managed to bring most of our seed with us. Seeds for a garden should be in the Homestead Package they’ll have, too.”

  I barely heard the rest of what he had said.

  Goblins and hill trolls!? Alright, play it cool, ask about fantasy stuff later.

  I shook myself out of my thoughts about monsters for now. This was definitely not Earth.

  After we made it to the northern edge of my land, we walked west towards the river. At the moment, I saw little difference between this area and any of the thousands of acres I could see all around me.

  I was pleasantly surprised when we arrived at the river. There were plenty of large, mature trees along its banks. They had their leaves already, and many had already begun to flower. The breeze was moving from west to east, so the trees didn't provide a windbreak for the homestead. But they provided a nice shaded area around the water that I might enjoy on a hot day.

  I wasn't a tree expert, but willow trees were easy to identify by their sight and scent. I was fairly certain that one of the other types was a cypress tree, but I'd need to see something to be sure about that.

  I confirmed the river was no more than fifty feet wide in this stretch. There were plenty of minor bends that helped keep the water from flowing too quickly, but it was mostly straight the entire length of my property. I put my hand in the water, and it was almost ice-cold to the touch. Maybe those mountains Colin mentioned fed it with glacial water.

  Luckily, there were trees to harvest on our side of the river. The river wasn’t deep, maybe five or six feet where we stood if my estimation was correct. But it was too deep for my tractor to cross, and I certainly didn't see any bridges to make ?crossing easy.

  While looking at the river, I asked Colin about it. “Has the river flooded at all so far?”

  He shook his head. “Not really, sir, never more than a few feet above the banks when the snow is in full melt.”

  Well, that was good. Maybe I wouldn’t need to do any engineering work.

  Besides the trees, there were about five feet of sandy beach on each side of the river that covered about half of the total area of my land. The rest was more of a rocky, pebbly beach.

  The entire area smelled clean, like trees and new growth. I also smelled that mineral scent that a rocky beach always seemed to have.

  My confidence that this was a coma dream was bottoming out. Everything seemed so real. Aside from the video game elements, of course.

  To make sure I completed my quest, I followed the beach all the way to the southern end of my land.

  There were willows that hung into the river, providing shade and roots for hiding spots for fish. A few large boulders in the river looked like they provided spots for fish. There was a massive tree, three-quarters of the way to the southern end of my acreage, that had fallen and crossed the river completely. It was sitting between two boulders that held it in place. It just barely cleared the water.

  Colin led me across the river via the ?log; it was stable and had surprisingly good footing. On the far side of the river, there was a massive patch of what sure looked to me like unripe blackberries. The blackberry hedge went right up to the bank of the river and ran for more than a hundred feet uninterrupted.

  Colin spoke up as we were looking at the bushes, “If you could buy sugar, then we can make preserves a whole lot easier. These bushes provide so many berries, you wouldn’t even believe it.”

  I smiled, thinking about eating some delicious blackberry preserves.

  After looking around, we crossed back over to our side of the river and finished our circuit of my homestead. When we made it back to the wagon tracks, I saw a flashing icon in the top right of my UI. I mentally activated it and saw a text screen pop up.

  Congratulations on completing your quest! You have gained 10XP.

  [Warning: You cannot apply XP until you have chosen a class]

  You currently have 1/10 Quests.

  I’d just completed my first quest! Hopefully, the first of many.