Homesteading in a fantasy world

As I was putting the finishing touches on to the sword, I suddenly smelled blood. It took me a bit to get the direction and as soon as I did, I saw the wolf coming around the woodsheds corner.

She had two rabbits in her jaw and that's where the blood smell came from. She seemed happy to see me moving about and came to greet me, giving me one of the rabbits.

This time I accept it gratefully and started to butcher it, getting me a skill level in it. As I finished, the wolf came back from wherever she stashed the rabbit.

It was weird to smell her now. There is so much more information, and I could see that the hunt tired her a lot and if I interpret my smelling correctly, it won't be too long until she gives birth.

I offered her a piece of meat that she accepted and let me pet her afterwards. This world's pets must be from one end of the scale to another thanks to abilities and evolutions creatures can get themselves. I wonder if evolutions can be given to offspring.

This line of thinking will not be needed now and can be left for later. I got lots of new abilities and traits I need to test and understand.

I will start with the traits first. Vampiric senses is quite easy to understand. It gives me a huge passive bonus to my senses. If I actively try to concentrate, it will give an even greater benefit.

But like with all things in this system and world, I will need a lot of practice to get any use from the higher range of this trait.

The passive and even active boost at the start is manageable and extremely helpful, bringing information about the world I know nothing about.

But as I concentrated more, it became overwhelming to a point that I retched as I tried to concentrate on smelling too much. It was the same with all the other senses. They got overwhelming in their own way. Still, it was an extremely useful trait for absolutely everything.

As the wolf was still with me, I tried to see what the trait animal connection does, but it was extremely hard to pinpoint if it did anything at all. My connection to animals has always been good but maybe it would be more useful with animals not as friendly as this one.

For the material intuition trait, I pulled my sword out and try to intuition it. To my surprise, it kind of worked, giving me an understanding that it was steel and that's it was in quite bad shape.

I also had an ability that also started with material, so I tried to activate it. The ability material modification seemed to be on a whole new level compared to my other abilities.

I’m pretty sure my trait helped me with it, but not only did I get a better understanding of the sword and what it’s made from I could figure out all the percentage of different metals.

All the mistakes are plain to see if I concentrate long enough. Given time, I would know this sword inside and out better than the back of my hand.

As for modifying it, I tried by starting to smooth out the tiniest of details, but all this came with heavy energy cost. Using the ability for a few minutes spent half of my usable energy and doing a few minor modifications made me basically consume the rest.

I have a feeling that this skill is a lot higher tier than I should have access to. I probably need to have 10x the energy from stats to make good use of this ability or have this ability at a high enough level, so it won’t take that much energy. But honestly, I expect nothing else but an extreme energy usage for this ability.

Even with all the negatives, it is still an extremely incredible ability that will become extremely useful, perhaps not modifying material just yet but certainly to understand whatever I make better.

Now, back to the traits. True nature connection seemed another extremely powerful trait. I walked to the vegetable fields to test it.

At first, I couldn’t figure out if it did anything as I observed one of the tomato plants. It took a long time to slowly form a better connection so I could understand the plant better.

It was still a weak connection that only got me a sense of how the plant was doing. Apparently well, a bit more water would be nice soon.

What this trait was truly useful for was to enhance my plant-based abilities. My new ability plant modification is a lot easier and energy efficient to use than it has the right to be.

It’s similar to the material modification. It came with a lot of information about the plant itself when used and the ability to modify the plant's properties. It seemed to be a lesser version of a material modification, but it was still incredibly useful.

As I turned on my plant vision and energy sight, the trait was shown once again to be extremely helpful, giving me a lot more understanding of what different energies meant while they moved inside.

With the new traits and abilities, I’m pretty sure I could modify plants for my usage. They all just gave me way too much new work and studying to do.

The sights also showed the trait changing eyes that was absorbed by giant amongst men still worked because now my eyesights is 20/10 while before it was worse. That’s the best way I can describe the change.

I am guessing that the trait helps my eyes to adjust to the different sights better, giving me a perfect vision from any ability that affects the eyes.

The few more traits that I got were absorbed by giant amongst men, but they still seem to have their particular trait active, perhaps even a bit better. My joints were a lot more flexible now and I could feel pain, but it was a lot duller.

I’m guessing that the rich blood helps me attain a lot more oxygen because I could feel myself breathing a lot more slowly and not getting tired by constantly doing the same motion when I was sharpening the sword.

The temperature core most likely is responsible for my quick recovery because I was a lot hotter than any human should possibly be without dying helping burn out the infection. I’m also guessing that hot and cold weather will no longer be survival points I need to worry about.

The better memories are already helping, but better pheromones. I will have to take off my hat, as I do not have any idea how that will work.

Next came the ability owners land. When I activated it, I found it extremely weird. It took almost no energy and at the start, it didn’t feel like it did anything. Just in case I went and examined the property map, but that didn't seem to do anything.

I kept it on as I did some weeding for the potatoes and vegetables. Even when it was on, I was still recovering a lot more energy that I was spending, so I didn’t see any problem with keeping it on to see if it would do anything.

The heroic stand didn’t do anything when I tried to activate it, I got a feeling it needed battle to activate and even then, needed certain conditions during battle to activate but I am guessing when I do get to activate it, it will be awesome.

As I did general jobs around the farm and started to cook the rabbit, getting me a cooking skill, finally the ability of owning the land started to show itself.

I suddenly got the vague sense of something entering the abilities area. I concentrated on it more and it became a lot clearer a rabbit had entered the area.

As I focused on that more, I could understand where it was happening on my land. I could track the rabbit movements.

I tried to concentrate this time through the ability on the bull and to my surprise, I was able to pinpoint its current location and get a sense of what it was doing. It was enjoying some good grass.

I checked on all my animals and if I concentrated even more, I could get a sense of where bugs were, but that quickly overwhelmed me. Being more active with ability used more energy, but even then, it was almost nothing compared to the other abilities I have.

I messed around with it until it was time to go to bed and I tried to see if I could keep it on even when I slept. I was suddenly awoken just before the sun came up, but I couldn’t figure it out why.

But my ability owners land soon pinged again. It had now encompassed my entire land but not going past it, and some goblins had entered my land. The ability then started to notify me and woke me up.

I have yet to decide if this is a good or bad thing, but with my tinkering yesterday, I’m pretty sure I could tune the ability to notify or not to notify me about anything that happens on my land.

I am extremely interested in how the ability will evolve when I gain more levels, but time will tell that. Currently, I needed to think of what to do. It was a small goblin group, most likely the leader moving here to start negotiating with me.

This knowledge could give me the upper hand in negotiations if I went out and laid an ambush in the forest. Starting the negotiations by showing off that I could kill them easily will give me that advantage in whatever they wish to accomplish with me.