Homesteading in a fantasy world

There were some more eggs this morning, but I decided to leave them to hatch them. If I have enough chickens, I will have an extremely stable food source.

Having food for them will not be a problem after the harvest comes in. I will never be able to eat as much grain as I will get after the harvest. This reminds me that I also have to cut and dry hay for the winter for all the animals.

I continued with my training as I have been before, and the days went by quickly. On the 4th day of training, I changed some things, for archery training. I didn’t just shoot at targets anymore, but I tried to imagine them as living targets.

That gave me a lot of trouble do actually be able to shoot. It will be a long process to train myself to be able to kill with conscious thought.

The killing that I did when the goblins attacked was more reaction based and instinctive. No thinking about taking life during that.

I’m glad that I’m still able to get to that headspace to save my life, but I will also need to be able do actively think it might save my life someday.

This is also the first day that I needed to add more weight to my weight training. Only six days and I’ve already had to increase weights. If this continues, I might get into trouble and won’t have equipment to keep training.

That’s why I also ramped up my energy, slow down training. Hopefully, this will help me alleviate that problem. During that time, I got a few skill levels.

skill is upgraded to basic swimming level 2

skill is upgraded to beginner mental fortitude level 3

skill is upgraded to basic running level 6

skill is upgraded to archery level 3

skill is upgraded to basic sword level 3

skill is upgraded to basic spear level 3

skill is upgraded to basic fitness enhancement level 9

As today was coming to an end, I was starting to look for and assemble the gear I will need for the exploration trip. I decided not to go into the hill forest but the forest that is on the grassland connected with the hill forest area.

That forest is a lot younger. I also want to check around the grassland and see if there’s anything of use there. Tomorrow I will still be a training day, but a bit different. I want to use and test the equipment.

I’m missing a lot of pieces I want to take for exploration trips, but this will take time to reach and must be done over a long period of time.

I have certain things in mind but honestly it will probably be a test and adjust kind of setup for exploration and for all the different gear set-up I will need.

I hope I actually find some veins of metals that I could use, but that will also require a new gear set to be made. Luckily, most of that stuff is usable with all of them, but that will also mean I will need many backups.

I will need more ways to start fires easily and I might want to see if I can remember any good long preserving food recipes.

Some of the gear will need smithing and some I might not be able to do with even that, but that would be a problem for later. But one problem that I don’t know how to solve that’s extremely important is sleeping.

I don’t have the materials to make anything big enough for a place I can sleep inside not to speak about waterproofing that I can’t do at all. For that I really would like to find some bees, the beeswax’s I can get from them will solve a lot of my problems.

I could not only get the necessary beeswax but, of course, the honey that will be excellent food, maybe even make some mead out of it. Unfortunately, I think this body is way too young for alcohol.

I’d say a couple of more years and then I will be fine. The morning of the expedition came, but honestly calling it that is a bit weird because I’m basically just going into the forest close to the grassland that's technically still on my land.

Nevertheless, I should not waste the opportunity and act as if this was a huge deal and I will be gone for a couple of days. Most likely I will be back in the evening, swimming and relaxing in the river. Today I skipped cheese making and went over my gear one more time.

I had the backpack on, all my better and thicker clothing, the cloak that I was most likely going to have to sew more pockets into, because why not. I brought the only spare flint and steel I have, and some tinder to quickly start fires if needed.

Food for three days, a knife, an axe, bow and 20 arrows and, of course, my sword with my usual three belt system. I had the traditional shoulder quiver.

I was not a fan of this style, it was good because it could fit many arrows, but it was slow for shooting. I will most likely have to make a hip quiver.

That could also fit my own Comanche style short bow that was my current and most favourite design to use. Already the first thing noted that needed improvement, I start to head out through the fields and turning to the grassland.

I hold close to the hills but never actually crossed into them. The grasslands were an interesting place to travel through, especially now that the grass was starting to get higher and higher.

As I start to get closer to the forest, I started to notice young trees that were extremely sparsely starting to peek out from the grass. Obviously showing how the forest is slowly eating the grasslands.

To my surprise, it looked to be an extremely slow process, but soon I figured out why that was. As I almost fell onto my face because my foot caught on something. It turned out to be a small stump that I tripped over. It is no thicker than my finger.

Inspecting it, I saw teeth marks. My first thought was beavers, but there weren’t any rivers nearby and it looked a bit too small and young for them to get any use out.

I was a bit stumped for a while, but soon I saw an eagle like bird swooping down into the grass, soon flying up with a rabbit in its talons.

Apparently, the rabbits are what’s keeping trees from quickly claiming new land. And there must be a lot of them because I saw a few more birds further away that were apparently doing the same thing and catching rabbits.

I think that I found my new food source and feather source. I can set-up snares to catch the rabbit and then use the rabbits to bait birds in and then shoot them.

I honestly didn’t expect the grasslands to offer me so much. I spent a few hours exploring and trying to figure out the rabbit’s population size.

It turned into an amazing discovery. Even just on my land, I expect there to be hundreds of rabbits, but the grassland extended way beyond my lands. I expected there to be thousands spread out all over.

There are of course many birds that hunt them, but I also suspect some other creatures from the forest come here and also hunt them. I am lucky, most likely the current ecosystem will survive my needs.

But I must make sure not to hunt too many of the birds, otherwise the rabbit population might get out of hand. But trap laying and hunting will need to be handled tomorrow. It was now time to enter the forest and continue this exploration.

The forest is the same as the forest I know from the other side of the river. The plants were similar, but here there were a lot more rabbit prints and almost no deer.

I found a river as I explored further into the forest. As I followed it, to my surprise, it actually went through the hills. I am guessing it was the same river as the one I saw on top of the hill that went into the lake on this side of the farm.

I continue to follow the river into the hill forest. I simply wanted to know how it cut through the hills. Will it stay on the ground and just follow the lower areas in the hills or will it go underground at some point.

But as I got deeper in on this side of the river, the more it started to change to something else, an older forest. As I continued to try to follow the river to the other side of the hill forest.

I started do subconsciously move slower and more carefully. When I finally noticed my actions, I was already moving as slowly as when you would try to sneak up on a prey animal.

This spooked me as I tried to understand what was going on. It didn't take long for me to understand the feeling I have.

The closest I can describe it is when you go in an MMO into a zone that you're way too under level for. The further in you get, the more you start to expect and anticipate the worst. So, I did the most reasonable thing. I started to quickly backtrack, make it out before anything happened.

Now I don’t know if this feeling was all in my mind or if there was some truth to it, but I wasn’t going to take this risk. Most likely it was just the closed in river and the canopy that made the day look like evening.

I made it back to where I felt safe and then went a bit further away and started more of the exploration.

I didn’t have a direct destination in mind, but I was just combing for anything useful. And to my delight, I actually found something extremely useful, a perfect tree for an English longbow.

It was getting towards the evening side, and I will most likely never be able to find this tomorrow. Even if I had better tools to keep track of my positioning, there was no GPS that track me to 1 meter of my current location.

That meant I got the axe out and started to cut down the medium-sized tree. It didn’t take long with my ability to cut it down.

I tried to bring back as big of a piece as possible. Leaving the branches here and trimming off where it got too thin to get any useful bows out of. The piece of yew I got out of it was almost 6 meters long, that I now needed to bring back.

I guess it’s time for strength training even today, when I was supposed to have a day off. In my current location, the trees are sparse enough that bringing it back wouldn’t be a problem aside from the actual bringing part.

On the shoulder it went and with many breaks, I head straight for the road section that was closest.

I had to switch my shoulders multiple times and take longer and longer breaks, but I did make it to the road eventually. I wasn’t that far away from the farm, but no way in hell was I going to lift and move that log by myself again.

I slowly got up and moved towards the farm, my throat burning because I ran out of water halfway through bringing up the log. When I got back, the first thing I did was to get cold water from the well to quench my thirst.

I took some jerky to chew it and went to get the bull. The bull was excited to be able to do something else. He has been begging me to do something with him every time I tend to the cows or when I gave him scratches.

He was also a good listener when I had some problems I wanted to express. So maybe some training for him will be in order as well.

I will need to think about how to do that. I don’t think the harness is meant for anything heavier than he’s already used to, but I guess we will see.

It was a quick trip, bringing the log back. So easy in fact, it might have been a good idea to just bring the log out of the forest and then come pick it up with the bull.

But then I remembered how many rabbit holes I stepped into, and I cringed at the thought of the bull spraining or even breaking his leg. That would be a really bad thing.

So better me suffering than a possible loss of a great animal. After this, I just did a relaxing soak in the river without any training of energies or anything else. Just relaxing and a bit of stretching.

I really wish I had a sauna where I could spend time in and recover myself better. Thinking about that really pissed me off because of the goblins. Getting a sauna was pushed back, and that is absolutely not acceptable.

And that thought was all it took for me to be able to visualize myself killing those bastards keeping me from my sauna. I really need more recreational stuff or else I will go crazy.

I had some smoked meat and some carrots for dinner, but I was still steaming and that annoyance bleed over into the food, making me hate the bland stuff.

Tomorrow I will most certainly go and catch some rabbits to cook, then set-up some traps for them. Maybe I will be able to get a female one for breeding but now that I have a big supply it might not be necessary.

Of course, I hope I will get feathers so I can make even more arrows. I honestly don’t even know why I’m making so many. I have nearly 500 of them now. But then again, when was it ever a bad thing to have more arrows.