My vegetable patch was only about a hundred pyeong, but I’d divided it into sections and planted all sorts of things.
‘This was where I planted the cherry tomatoes, wasn’t it?’
The sprouts appeared to be cherry tomatoes, ordinary ones from Earth rather than dungeon plants.
Beside them, I had planted seeds from a plant called Leila, which had only ever been found inside dungeons.
“This is seriously incredible.”
If the tomatoes continued growing normally, I should have fruit in about a hundred days.
I still didn’t know whether anything might go wrong, but I was grateful just to see the seeds sprout.
But something about the plants didn’t seem right.
“What?”
Was I imagining things?
The plants seemed to have grown a little taller in that brief span of time.
As I rubbed my eyes and tried to work out what was happening, Mark Two suddenly nudged me.
Squirm…
“What’s wrong?
Gasp!”
When I glanced over, I saw another sprout pushing its way through the soil right before my eyes.
And it wasn’t even in the tomato section.
It was where I’d planted the carrots.
“N-no way…”
More astonishing still, the plants were growing fast enough to see with the naked eye.
Was it because we were inside a dungeon?
Or was Mark Two responsible?
[Farming LV.1]
Accelerates crop growth.
Increases crop yield.
I checked Mark Two’s ability again.
The description didn’t look especially remarkable.
Could those two simple lines really explain what I was witnessing?
Squirm!
Mark Two wriggled and nudged me again.
It turned out sprouts were pushing through the soil right where I was standing.
I hurried out of the vegetable patch and watched the magical sight unfold.
“Aaaah…”
An emotion I could barely put into words welled up inside me.
Sprouts were stretching toward the sky in every direction, growing as though someone had pressed fast-forward on time itself.
There wasn’t enough land to plant very much, but the spectacle was still magnificent.
“How is this even possible?”
Now I was certain: the seeds hadn’t merely happened to sprout at the right time.
It was Mark Two’s ability.
There was no other explanation for what I was seeing.
“Oh!
The tomatoes!”
I hurriedly started setting up the supports I’d prepared beside the tomato plants.
Normally I wouldn’t install them until the plants had grown considerably, but this growth rate was anything but normal.
By the time I’d installed all one hundred supports, the tomatoes had already reached my shins.
“This is beyond ridiculous.”
I could barely contain my urge to cheer.
They were only cherry tomatoes and carrots, so why was I this happy?
Even Leila, the dungeon fruit I hadn’t really expected to grow, was coming along steadily.
“As far as I know, nobody has ever successfully cultivated a dungeon plant.”
From everything I’d learned during my three years of research, not a single person had managed to grow dungeon plants.
If that was true, I was about to become the first person on Earth to do it.
“Wild Leila is so rare that you can barely get any, either.”
Leila tasted rather like mangosteen from Earth, though it was much juicier.
That was why I had planned to use it as an ingredient in my fruit and vegetable juice.
‘But will these crops actually grow with mana infused in them?’
One thing still worried me: the quest’s requirement that the ingredients be ‘mana-infused.’ Most fruits and vegetables gathered in dungeons supposedly contained mana.
But would crops that I had grown artificially, even inside a dungeon, contain it too?
That was the crucial question.
“I guess we’ll see.”
With the plants growing at this rate, I’d find out much sooner than I’d expected anyway.
Meanwhile, Mark Two crawled between the rows, busily fiddling with something or other.
I didn’t know what it was doing, but suddenly even that seemed adorable.
“Hehehe.”
What a cute little guy.
I lost track of time watching the plants grow, until Slime One finally approached me, apparently having finished its search.
Squirm…
“Oh?
Did you find something too?”
Squirm!
I was starting to feel as though I could understand its wriggling, at least a little.
I got to my feet, and when Slime One saw me stand, it began crawling away as though to guide me somewhere.
“So there really was something?”
A little fear crept into my heart.
But the slime was perfectly fine, so I reasoned that whatever it had found probably wasn’t too dangerous.
Just to make sure, I gave it an order.
“If the place you’re taking me is dangerous to me, stop right where you are.”
Squirm…
The slime kept moving.
Reassured by its response, I followed it to a corner of the dungeon.
Squirm!
“Here?”
It was pointing somewhere I hadn’t expected at all: the floor.
I’d assumed that any change would show up on a wall or somewhere similar, not underfoot.
‘Then again, could there have been something hidden in the floor all along?’
Before the dungeon transformed, I’d never examined the floor in this area.
I’d only checked the soil that seemed suitable for farming.
There had been no reason to inspect the stone floor.
Squeee…
The slime squeezed its body into an odd little crack, then flowed through the narrow gap like an actual liquid.
“Hey, slime.
I can’t do that the way you can.”
What was I supposed to do?
I had a pickaxe I’d prepared for working the field, but I had no idea what was underneath and didn’t want to break through recklessly.
Boing!
As if it had heard me, the slime wriggled back up through the gap and bounced in place.
“What’s down there?”
Squirm!
“If there are monsters, move right.
If there aren’t any, move left.”
The slime moved left, so there definitely weren’t any monsters.
“Is there an item?”
It moved left again.
If there weren’t monsters or items, what on earth was down there?
“It’s not dangerous, right?
This time, move left if it is.”
Squirm!
It went right.
I decided to trust it, fetched the pickaxe, and brought it down on what was barely more than a scratch in the stone floor.
“Being Awakened really is convenient.”
Awakening naturally improved a person’s physical abilities, even if the improvement was usually only slight.
“But what’s going on?
Is it because I awakened twice?”
For some reason, my stamina didn’t seem to be running out the way it used to.
Double awakening was the only explanation I could think of, so I accepted it and kept working.
Clang!
Crack!
The crack gradually widened until I could finally get a rough look at what was underneath.
I lay flat on the floor and pressed one eye to the opening.
“It’s bright down there?”
For some unknown reason, the space below was brilliantly illuminated.
I could make out the interior, but all I saw was an enormous, empty area.
“I’ll have to go down to know for sure.”
I stood up and resumed swinging the pickaxe.
Thanks to my seemingly inexhaustible stamina, I could keep working without much difficulty.
And once the crack had spread far enough, breaking it open became much easier.
“Ooh.”
Eventually, I’d made a hole large enough to fit through.
I cautiously leaned my head down and looked around in every direction.
“There are glowing stones embedded in the walls.
They look expensive.”
Then I noticed that the entire floor below was made of soil.
Until now, I’d had no choice but to make do with the hundred or so pyeong of cultivable land in my living area.
But if this place existed, everything was different.
“How big is it?
It’s enormous.”
It looked to be at least a thousand pyeong.
Better yet, water was flowing from a crack in one wall, forming a natural pond.
“…It’s almost as if the dungeon is demanding that I start farming.”
That was exactly what the environment suggested.
The only problem was that the ceiling was quite high.
Once I climbed down, I wouldn’t be able to get back up without a ladder.
But obtaining a ladder would solve that easily enough.
I fell into thought.
The truth was, I’d only started farming because of the quest.
Farming itself hadn’t been the goal, merely a means to an end.
Now that I’d awakened Slime Lord and learned I could farm using slimes, though, things were different.
‘Should I just change professions and become a farmer?’
I was Awakened, but I wasn’t an Awakened who hunted monsters.
At this point, I might be better off making full use of my abilities and specializing in this field.
It was an area other Awakened had paid absolutely no attention to.
That would give me a competitive advantage no one else possessed.
“Let’s see what the crops produce before I decide.”
They were growing quickly, but I hadn’t seen any fruit yet.
There was no need to make a decision until after the harvest.
Still, I couldn’t help feeling optimistic.
After all, farming seemed to be the only thing I could actually do with the slimes.
“Well done, slime.”
Squirm!
I stroked the wriggling creature, then picked it up with both hands.
Its texture was oddly pleasant, almost addictive.
I’d been too distracted yesterday to notice.
Streeetch!
“Wow, I guess you really are a slime.
You stretch a lot.”
Squirm!
I carried the slime in my hands back to the field.
By then, the tomato plants had already grown up to my knees.
“It’s almost scary.”
The vegetable patch had become a miniature jungle, with Mark Two diligently crawling through it.
To me, the slime seemed to be doing nothing more than wriggling around, but there was a strangely serious air about it.
“By the way, don’t you guys need to eat?”
Squirm?
I absentmindedly played with the slime as it wriggled as though it had no idea what I was talking about.
I realized I still knew very little about slimes.
Information was important, as I’d learned time and again.
I should have looked into slimes while I was out yesterday, but going out again wasn’t exactly difficult.
I could do the legwork another time.
‘Everything happened so suddenly that my head was spinning.’
What mattered was learning things one step at a time from now on.
And so I idly played with Slime One in my hands and watched Mark Two tend the vegetable patch.
Just looking at the plants grow was soothing.
I didn’t feel sleepy at all and eventually stayed up the entire night.
“Huh.”
By morning, the tomatoes had reached my waist.
They were so mature that it wouldn’t have been strange for them to start flowering at any moment.
“Come to think of it, I haven’t thinned the carrots or pruned the tomato plants at all.”
Yet the crops were perfect.
Whatever Mark Two had been so busy doing must have included those tasks.
“That’s impressive.”
It really was the perfect farmer.
Or should I call it a perfect farmhand?
Either way, it was amazing.
If the tomatoes had grown this much, did that mean the carrots were almost ready to harvest?
I honestly had no idea.
Their growth was so much faster than ordinary crops that I couldn’t judge their condition by normal standards.
“Mark Two, let me know when the crops are ready to harvest.
Don’t do everything on your own.”
Squish!
Mark Two wriggled as though replying, then returned to doing something in the Leila patch.
It spent much longer there than among the carrots or tomatoes.
Apparently, Leila required more delicate care.
“I don’t know the first thing about growing Leila.”
I’d planted the seeds just to try my luck, which was why I’d set aside the smallest part of the field for them.
Beep!
Beep!
Beep!
My alarm rang.
Normally, this would have been the time I woke up.
I switched it off and checked my ability’s cooldown.
It was almost ready to use again.
“I’ll try combining Slime One with a potion, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll combine it with Mark Two…”
There was something a little strange about merging slimes.
Perhaps it was the idea of two creatures becoming just one.
After a little more time passed, the cooldown finally ended.
“Phew.
Here we go, Slime One!”
I held a potion in one hand and Slime One in the other.
But just as I took a deep breath to use the ability, water suddenly dripped from the ceiling.
“Hm?”
The moment I looked up, something fell with a wet splat right onto my face.
“WHAAAT?!”
Startled, I shook it off.
Something with a familiar, springy texture landed on the floor and bounced.
“A slime?”
Why had a slime fallen from the ceiling?
When I looked up, I saw sunlight shining through a small crack in the impossibly high, dark ceiling.
“Where did you come from?”
For a moment I wondered if I’d accidentally used Slime Lord, but I hadn’t.
The thing had simply dropped from the ceiling.
Then something occurred to me.
“Oh!”
The first slime had appeared out of nowhere, and the next day there had suddenly been two of them.
So this was how they got here.
“That’s fantastic.”
A slime dungeon that produced another slime every day!
Since Slime Lord allowed me to put the creatures to work, the more slimes I had, the better.
This was absolutely perfect.
“Hold on.
You go over there for a while.”
Squirm…
I sent the newly fallen slime far away, just in case Liquid Synthesis mistakenly targeted it again.
Once it had gone far enough, I used my ability.
[The selected targets are unsuitable for this ability.]
“Just as I thought.”
Awakened abilities didn’t come with detailed explanations.
That applied to all Awakened, not just me.
Everyone had to figure out the exact way to use their abilities and where the limits lay through trial and error.
“Mark Two!”
Squirm?
It’s been fun, Slime One.
I set down the potion and picked up Mark Two with my now-free hand.
It was definitely heavier than Slime One.
“Synthesis!”
[The selected targets are unsuitable for this ability.]
“Huh?”
What was going on?
Mark Two’s status clearly said that Liquid Synthesis could be used on it.
“Wait, don’t tell me…”
Level 1 slimes could only be combined with other Level 1 slimes, and Level 2 slimes could only be combined with other Level 2 slimes?
That actually made a lot of sense.
“In that case…”
I called back the slime that had fallen from the ceiling and used Liquid Synthesis once more.
[Slime LV.2 has been created.]
A new Mark Two was born.
“Then tomorrow, I should try combining Mark Two with this new Mark Two.”
When I placed the newly synthesized slime on the floor, it looked around before pressing itself against me again.
“Aw, you’re cute.
Huh?”
Something about the slime seemed strange.
[Slime LV.2]
An ordi?nary slime.
‘Eligible for Liquid Synthesis’
Ability: Poison LV.1
“Why the heck did you get an ability like that?”