Homesteading in a fantasy world

Walking down the road in my full armour made me feel safe and strong. On my back was a backpack full of arrows and strapped to it was a round shield. On my waist were my usual dagger, knife and my quiver where my strongest short bow lay.

This time there was no sword on my hip instead there was the zombie basher that they made a while back. I was actually quite excited to use it.

I did some stretches and some quick runs to get used to my armour better. Like that time passed quickly as I reached the dungeon.

When I got back from the war I again noticed when I stepped on my land it seemed to give me strength. My exhaustion quickly lessened, and I felt stronger than ever but whenever I left, I didn’t feel it going away. So, this time when I finally left my land I stood in front of the dungeon and just focused on myself to find out what was happening.

It took an hour of constant monitoring to finally understood what was happening. And to confirm it I quickly jogged inside my own land. I felt my body state return to the peak confirming my earlier suspicion.

My land does give me strength, but it doesn't dissipate instantly when I leave instead it does it slowly over time. The boost was quite significant in my opinion, especially towards the stamina and refreshing part. No wonder I was able to push myself to work every day from sunrise to sunset if I was getting this kind of a boost.

Another interesting thing I noticed during my time monitoring myself was the outside. I happened to notice two interesting things, but I pushed them to the back of my head simply because I was focusing on myself. But now I was able to put my focus on it to further understand what was happening around this dungeon.

Turned out my land had greater energy density than the land outside. But what was even more interesting to see was that the dungeon wasn't pulling any ambient energy from my land and only harvesting from the land not owned by me.

I know from the adventurer stories that dungeons in higher energy areas grow faster, and you were able to delve into them a lot more. It was really strange that my land didn’t give any energy to the dungeon or more precisely that the dungeon was unable to pull ambient energy from my land.

This was an unfortunate situation. I did want the dungeon to grow and if it could be developed faster my apprentices could level faster and possibly myself as well. If it will make a harder floor.

I always wondered if I could claim land and if I could make the land that the dungeon was on my own would it be able to pull energy from my land or would I subject it to starvation?

There was also another problem if I did claim more land most likely the adventuring guild will find out and then there would be a lot more questions levied against me.

This of course will be inevitable as eventually my apprentices will need their own land and I will definitely try to help them claim it. So perhaps a trial run to see what happens with the adventuring guild might be a good idea.

I so hope that the dungeon will be okay. I focused on my class and try to find the land ownership part in it. Locating it I could visualize my current borders and after zooming in on this location I started to exert my will to expand it to include the dungeon in it.

Immediately I know that it will work I just needed to keep on concentrating and exerting my will through the class onto the land. Eventually, it actually started to expand. Just before it hit the dungeon there was a momentary resistance, but it soon disappeared and almost changed to a welcoming pull.

After that, it was easy to expand to the area around the dungeon, but I didn't expand further simply because there was no need. What would I do with more land? I could barely use a fraction of its current size. The only reason I wanted the land that the dungeon was on was to perhaps help it grow faster. It was quite draining to do this, but I only wanted a small area, so it was not too bad.

It took about 15 minutes before I started to see the ambient energy slowly starting to make its way towards the dungeon. I let out a big breath of air, satisfied that my gamble had worked.

Now the dungeon was collecting ambient energy from everywhere around it. This was a pleasant surprise as I had feared that perhaps it would now be limited to my land, but it seems the unclaimed land was still good for it to gain ambient energy.

I was quite pleased about this development as I started to walk towards the village. While I was in this good of a mood, I started to just take in all that surrounded me. The landscape was so beautiful the wind-swept snow on the fields was relaxing and the road where no one had walked was satisfying to gaze upon.

Like this, I slowly walked occasionally using homesteaders mile while enjoying the landscape and the warm sun that unfortunately only my face could feel because of my armour.

My energy sight was a lot better than the last time I was here to hunt zombies. My vision overall was a lot better thanks to all my improvements. Thanks to it finding partway frozen zombies was quite easy.

They were still able to move but it was extremely slow making them even easier to kill. I didn’t even bother to string my bow and just quickly moved towards them and just bash their head in killing them instantly. Like this, I quickly moved from location to location and cleared everything around the village before I went closer in.

After killing the zombies that I had caught in one of the houses only the village was left. Looking at the gate it was still holding even though there was quite a lot of snow on it already.

One thing that I noticed during my killing is that the zombies got faster the longer they were chasing you so if my fighting takes too long, they might regain their full mobility so to clear the village I will still need to be a bit cautious.

For this reason, I had brought some rope along with a hatchet that I could use to make a ladder out of one of the walls of a woodshed in one of the farms. Using it I climbed the wall to see inside and find out what was happening.

The zombies were quite spread out and while there were still groups of them quite close to each other they should be quite easy to take out. They didn't even notice me. They just stood there frozen not knowing what to do.

I looked around to see a better location to put my ladder so I could start killing them with the bow. Finding a good location with plenty of free space where no houses blocked my vision, I strung my bow and started to carefully shoot so every arrow would kill one of the zombies.

It was quite easy and most of them didn't even notice when someone next to them died, but my luck didn't last for long.

One of the skeletons walked out of one of the buildings. It seemed that the weather didn't have much effect on it. It didn't make any sound when it mimicked a scream or a battle cry as it started to rush towards me.

What it did do was make noise when it rammed against the wall underneath me. It didn't have any mass or strength whatsoever and I was able to put it down with the third arrow that struck its skull.

What I hadn't counted on was the scream that followed. As I looked up the screamer had walked out of the village hall and after it finished its scream it got on all fours and started to rush towards me. I was able to get 4 arrows into it, but it didn't seem to slow it down at all.

“Son of a bitch I think it’s going to jump isn’t it.”

And just after I finished saying that it leapt, and I had to jump off the ladder so it would miss me. I only had the extra time I needed to drop the bow and pick up my shield and weapon thanks to it jumping an impressive distance.

It was so fast, and I barely had time to activate armour enhancement making my entire body and shield glow with a dim light.

When it hit my shield, I was surprised by how much that thing weighed but I was still able to divert it and ready my weapon for the next charge.

This also came fast but now I was a lot more ready. So, this time it didn't hit my shield but ate my ability-powered blow right into its skull. This didn't put it down and while it escaped my second blow it was able to scratch my side, but its claws didn’t penetrate my armour.

We looked at each other for a moment and I smirked towards it and this time I was the one that rushed in first. This time my speed surprised it and I was able to land another devastating blow against one of his limbs and this time the crunch of its bones was quite satisfying.

It quickly understood that it didn't have a chance against me, but I didn’t let it escape. I crippled one of its legs preventing it from escaping. Its head was surprisingly resilient, and it took quite a lot of blows to finally finish the creature off.

Unfortunately, our fight had moved us close to the gate and its scream had awoken everyone inside the village. So, as I finished the creature and looked towards the village the zombies were able to push their way through the half-broken gate and get free.

I just looked at them and only saw easy experience. I rushed them so they wouldn’t have a lot of time to get past the half-open gate and started bashing them one at a time.

There were so many of them that they were able to scratch me but with all my abilities they didn’t get past my armour, they were unable to even scratch it, unlike the screamer.

With all my other abilities the entire mass of zombies was unable to push me back. It helped that not everyone had even reached the gate yet and I think if they had their entire horde they would be able to push me back but right now I was killing them faster than the reinforcements could reach the back of the horde.

It took quite a long time to kill them all as there were more than 300 of those in here. When the skeletons made it to the front thanks to my defences, they were still unable to do anything. I just killed them the same as the zombies with a strike to the head.

Towards the end of the horde, I saw a few notifications and I knew instantly that I had levelled up all my classes, but I didn’t look at them now because I still had to clear out the few stragglers.

To my surprise, a lot of the houses were completely intact and there were no zombies or humans inside. When I reached the inn, I was tempted to go in as the strange runes were still covering its basement and to see all the loot that the raiders had left behind, but I disciplined myself and went on to clear the rest of the village.

There weren’t a lot of zombies left in the village most were stuck inside some of the houses. One of the zombies actually had its foot stuck between a staircase railing as it was trying to crawl towards the exit.

The last place was the village hall where the screamer came out of and when I walked inside it was full of items. I saw a few ploughs and other equipment for farming.

When I saw a bag of salt I almost fell to my knees and started to cry. It was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. What ruined it was a few zombies that made noises from other rooms and the fact I could have had salt for a long time. There were a lot of bodies here that were clearly eaten by the undead.

As I kept searching the place a picture formed in my head. This was the main staging ground for the raiders that I killed, and it seemed that they left behind quite a lot of people that were probably under them and weren’t fighters.

When the zombies raised up their fate was sealed. If I had come earlier, I might have been able to save them but in the end, I was not responsible for their safety.

From my memories, I knew that beneath the village hall was supposed to be their storehouses to keep food safe from monsters and especially the gerdroc’s.

So, I located the entrance and opened it up to see if there was any food there. And to my surprise it was full of it there were lots of flour in big pots, potatoes and a lot of grain.

They were in different areas and as I looked closer, I could see some magical devices that were used to keep the temperature and humidity exactly as needed for different areas of the huge underground storeroom.

There was enough food here to last the entire winter and more for over 1000 people which made sense as with the village and the surrounding farms the population was close to it.

Using the ledger, I even found out how much of my family’s food stocks are here. But from the ledger, I also found mention of black peppers and other spices and a lot more salt.

I quickly went and found the place where they are in and again, I was close to tears just thinking about how good my future meals will be.

The storeroom was about 1/4 the size of the village so it was not actually that huge but still, in earth's medieval times a place like this could have never existed it looked more like modern storage. After a moment I started to think about how to contact Richard because this amount of food would be quite useful for them, but that brought up another question. If the village hall was the main headquarters of the Raiders then what the hell was in the inn?

It startled me that I only now remembered it thanks to me currently using my energy sight to look at it. Those runes must have some kind of don't notice me enchantment or something like that.

This time I kept my eyes on it constantly while I walked towards it. I had to kick in the door because it was secured quite well. It was getting harder to keep my focus as I was going towards the trap door that led to the cellar. But I was able to push through it and kick that in as well.

What I hadn’t expected was a bolt of water racing towards me the next second that I was barely able to dodge. Quickly using my movement ability, I get out of there and get myself in cover against the inn wall. The runes were now broken, and I no longer had to focus on them so I had a lot more willpower to think clearly about what had happened.

“I come in peace. The reason I had to strike the trap door so violently was because it was hard to keep focus on it. All the undead are dead so there's no need to worry about them anymore.”

How the fuck could anyone have survived that long down there. But soon I noticed with my energy sight that there were more people down there. How had I not noticed them a moment before? I did not know but I counted 12 of them. How were there 12 people down there alive? What is even happening?

“Can someone please answer me or otherwise I will have to treat you as hostiles.”

This time the movement down there stopped and after a few more moments I heard a voice call back to me.

“You can relax good Sir. We mean you no harm and I hope that we can have a civil conversation.”