So Make Sure To Treasure It Properly

Here I stood before the final crop for the year. I'm not going to lie, it's a lot more efficient to have a farm that I actually thought.

Well it's more of a little garden that I harvest from than an actual farm with genuinely good people that have a proper idea about what it is that they're doing.

Nonetheless, I'd work it as great as I possibly could. Otherwise what would be the purpose of having something like this, aside from getting vegetables and some fiber in my and the little one's bodies?

There wasn't a whole lot that I needed to worry about when I got to making this, the seeds were a bit of an extra oomph to the headache that I would feel, but otherwise it's tolerable.

But I would have been losing out on so much more water for the sake of watering them, and the pond had just been able to clear out.

Speaking of the pond, and I'll get back to the garden later, the pond is looking clean, aye. But I have a bit of a concern when it comes to it. You see, it just occurred to me that I never checked this thing for schistosomiasis. Yes, snail fever.

Starts out with a bit of fatigue, and usually ends with fever, seizures, and organ failure. That's not a good little sign, at all. I would've just thrown in some chlorine if I knew that this stuff would end up being this bad when I thought about it hard enough.

Now I get the idea, there aren't any snails here that I've seen. Or rather, any trails of slime to the water. I'm still sceptical about all of it, but for now I made sure to actually try to makes distillery for the water.

Yes, purely distilled water may be very very unsafe for other possible reasons, but I'll just mix it with some different form of clean water when I regain access to the realm. That's the purpose of the thing after all, to provide resources and a last bastion in the worst cases.

All this time, and all this effort, and I still realized that the little one was oh so fascinated with the gift that I gave her. Yes, the chess board.

The one that had peculiar kings and queens with them. I needed to make absolutely certain that she wouldn't get harmed with whatever those things were. Thankfully however, they proved themselves to be inert to her when she touched them.

She was curious though about why I had chess pieces that were making themselves feel cold, despite one of them looking like they were forged from the very core of the earth with vitriol and killing intent smashed into them.

The queen pieces were similar to the kings, only that they were more mellow if anything. She was beginning to ask questions that I myself didn't have the answer to, and I don't know if I'll ever get the answer.

But I suppose that whatever all this arbitrary "evolution" of my abilities are, they're going to be predominantly based around giving me a better fighting chance when a tragedy is about to occur.

I don't want to have to use them, they have odd whispers in my head, and I'm already fine with having something like that deer talking to me via telepathy. I don't need more things in my head, that'd be me getting closer to ticking all the boxes for schizophrenia.

In any other scenario however, I won't be making use of these, artifacts? Gods it sounds so bloody weird to me to call them artifacts when they're not even antediluvian to me. I made these months ago, and the little one played chess with me whenever she wanted to feel a little bit smarter than me.

She was already more than intelligent when it came to seeing her outsmart me in so many of the lessons that I gave her, that it almost felt like the roles were getting slowly but surely reversed.

I mean, it's not inherently terrible to have someone be my guardian angel, but I don't think that I can be so manipulative as I was when I first came here. I may need to give this world to that moon goddess and her emperor, but that didn't mean that I had to follow them afterwards.

I remember the contract, they didn't need me for any after-service shit. And I didn't need them. Well, I didn't need them, but I did need the abilities to be able to help myself and the kid in this shithole of a world.

Undeniably, I'm either in the endgame areas, or the pecking order is a special breed of insane cocktail the bartending system mixed up to really make the "heroes" a good little piece of work.

I need to get my head back in the game, I need to make sure that I have a dungeon complex enough that if heroes were to actually come to the world, they would be more than defeated. They would be bested in such a level that they probably would rather slit open their wrists than have to go through my ass all over again.

That's what I was thinking. But then again, me thinking is already a miracle in of itself. I'll have to make sure that the little one is onboard with what I was going to do. To make sure that I could go against the world and still be able to take care of her.

And if anything bad happened to me, well, I suppose I'll have to make some protocols in the old lump of thinking fat to make sure that she wouldn't go down with this old ship that she called her friend.

Haaaaaaah, this is something, truly. I'll have to make plans to try and leave this part of the forest again. More than three years after I've been brought to this world, and I'm trying to get into a cycle.

Cycles don't do shit for a criminal like me, they just make things droll, and prove that the police can actually figure out what a pattern actually is. So that would prove itself terrible to me. And consider this, I'm living in a world where I was already struggling against giant wolves and alligators.

I don't know if size increase is a side effect of having that much strength coursing through them, both literally and figuratively, but if what I'm fearing is the case, then I hope that I never actually meet a dragon in this world.

No amount of me scheming would ever be anywhere close to making sure that I can get out of that alive. But, all those thoughts for the future. I need to go off and plan some other things. The little garden was more than efficient, most likely due to the possible racial passive effects that the little one has.

But when you take into consideration that I realized that my body slowly erodes away, well, you can see where all of my concerns begin to not stymy. It's terrible, I won't be denying that fact, but it somehow works, despite me being here.

Her values within her "system" and "status" are more than capable of overriding the effects of my own existence. That would mean very very well, if not for the fact that it was something that can easily be used against me.

Oh what am I even saying anymore? I'm just trying to find problems at this rate over things that aren't going to be there yet. Paranoia, damn it. Well, I'll just have to act a lot less like a bellend than before, but I'll manage.

.

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/The Next Spring/

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"Old man, wake up already. It's beginning again."

My eyes snapped open as I felt the dry and cold air around me. We had some extra wood for the winter, but by whatever was above it was an exceptionally cruel one.

I didn't even know if I could go all the way to the end of it without having to die at least once for a bit of extra strength and heat from my old corpse.

"Aye, indeed it is." I groaned a little as I popped whatever bones and joints I needed to pop out of habit. "And as for you little lass, it's time for another bath. I'll draw the water for you, and there won't be any hot water this time round. I wanna conserve our fuel for when we can make stews again."

I hummed as I took a bucket that I used often in this place and made off to get a bucket of clean and cold freshwater. Now here's the part where I was now getting happier. There weren't any actual cases for snails to appear into.

Undeniably, the winter would've killed them all from the lack of food, and I'm not so sure that snails evolved to have the concept of hibernation. Nonetheless, I took cold snow from the ground, making sure to measure how much snow was still technically clean before it got closer to the ground and became dirty.

A good meter or twos worth of the stuff is clean, anything edging near two point four was already close to the ground to prove as a very good deterrence for choice, since it wasn't exactly the most clean looking snow.

A nice and ice cold bath was always something that I told others to try and do once in a while to keep your immune system on its toes. But then again, why would anybody take the health advice of a criminal madman over someone that they trusted well.

Well you see back in 2031 I made sure that the lesson was something that they would keep to mind very very well when I told them that they were most likely going to end up dead if they didn't try to keep their body cold, and yet they never did listen to me.

Oh those poor unfortunate souls, in pain, in need. Not like I ever wanted to genuinely help them, but it did remind me of many a good stories in my past that I had the grandest luck to be able to read.

Anyways, with the snow in the bucket, that meant that she had her bath in my hands, I was about to leave for the cottage again, but I saw something off to the side. A glint of red, if you may. I didn't exactly have a good idea of what it was that I was seeing, but I made sure to act like I didn't see it.

And at that moment, I believe that I chose correctly, since it appears that there was something trying to hunt me down again. I took a nice deep breath, and touched the dark king piece in my right pocket as I whistled a little to make it seem that I wasn't aware of it seeking me out.

Yes, I kept the peculiar chess pieces on hand whenever me and the little one weren't playing, but this was only for emergencies, and I was certain that this would count more than enough to be an emergency.

I just had to make sure that it wasn't perfectly within my line of sight, while simultaneously ensuring that it wasn't in my blind spot either.

Patting my shoes in front of the door, I see that the little one was already in her towel, waiting for the "cold water bath". I was about to give it to her, when I heard the snow behind me and immediately turned around, not knowing what it was that I was expecting, and yet it was truly something else.

A dark-skinned man, covered head to toe in cuts, with blood seeping out of them with a slow trickle, and yet it just served to make him look more menacing. Was he an enemy? He seemed to be carrying a blade that proved it's strength to be rather well, in spite of the poor condition it was currently in.

"Are you the Dungeon Monitor?"

He was speaking perfect English, in an accent that wasn't too far off of something akin to American. I made sure to looked confused as I took my hand out of my pocket, taking good care to lock the piece behind my palm, just like how magicians would pull off card tricks.

"Who you?"

My accent went from something intelligible to something more akin to my current status. Like a peasant.

"Listen, I don't have any time to play games with you old man, that thing in your home? Yeah? The bipedal thing that's got a towel on? That's the Third Hand of the Dungeon Monitor. The strongest of the Five, alright?

Now you listen to me, I can tell you everything after I've killed her, about who I am, how I've gotten to this place, and what exactly is my purpose. But I need to KILL HER, do you understand me?"

I was shocked, he was some sort of time traveller, or perhaps a regressor would prove to be even better of a word for his scenario?

"What you mean? Very friendly!"

I made sure to point to her as she immediately caught on what I was doing. I taught her that there might be a slim chance for people that say that they're from the future would try to come and harm us.

"I don't have time for this. [Roar Forth! Oh Lionsblood!] [Bring Madness, Oh Nightstar!] [Be Sharp, Eaglesclaw!]"

He was doing something, and I believed that something was magic. Whatever those spells were, they immediately took effect as his eyes lit up with pure gold and his blade seemed to have a light sheen of red to it that made it look like it was imbued with something.

Well seeing as how he said some odd chants, I suppose that it's not wrong. He used spells.

"No! You no hurt! She friendly!"

The man didn't even care as he tried to knock me to the side, only stopping when he touched me. And as that moment happened, he jumped back in what almost looked to be less time than it took me to blink, as he was already muttering different spells.

"Does magic truly work that way? Something alien to the world touches the fragile little system that the gods place upon to allow miracles to occur, and it would immediately falter and shatter? What a waste of divinity."

He looked to be in complete focus to try and find a way to kill me, taking some breaths that proved to be letting him get more energy to supplement the spells he was taking in.

"Who's this, old man? Enemy?"

"I don't know lass. I'd like to find out."

I then took out the black king piece as the man froze from its sight for a split second, before going back into stance right before the lass went and threw herself right into his face. Her clothes were already on, with her changing while we had talked.

"Make sure to not get hurt while fighting him lass. He looks like a wily one. He's probably got himself a strong repertoire of spells and skills at his disposal."

I looked at the king piece and put it into my right hand, closed my hand, and let it change it right in front of the supposed American.

"Let's get ourselves some answers, eh lass?"