The absolute, final, undeniable sensation Kenji Tanaka registered before everything went black was the bone-jarring impact against the side of a delivery truck that had, with impressive disregard for traffic laws, run a red light. One moment, he was contemplating the lukewarm coffee and the soul-crushing spreadsheet on his monitor; the next, a cacophony of screeching tires, a horn's desperate blare, and then a blinding, all-consuming light. It was, he'd later muse, a rather cliché way to go for a perpetually overworked, underpaid office drone.
Then, nothingness. A brief, silent void.
And then… grass. Soft, slightly damp, tickling his cheek.
Kenji—or whoever he was now—groaned, pushing himself up. The first thing he noticed was the sky. It wasn't the smog-choked grey he was accustomed to; this was a vibrant, impossible blue, dotted with fluffy white clouds that looked like they'd been painted by a master. Sunlight, warm and real, bathed his skin.
He patted himself down. His cheap, ill-fitting suit was gone. In its place were simple, rough-spun trousers of a dark, earthy color and a loose, light-cream-colored shirt. His feet were bare, feeling the cool earth. His hands… they weren't the pale, keyboard-softened appendages of a corporate slave. These hands were broader, stronger, with a light tracery of calluses already forming on the palms and fingers. He felt… younger. Impossibly so. Like he'd shed a decade and a lifetime of stress. His slight paunch? Vanished. Replaced by a lean, surprisingly wiry strength he didn't recognize.
A wide-brimmed straw hat, looking remarkably new, lay beside him on the grass.
"Okay," he breathed out, the air astonishingly fresh, smelling of pine, damp soil, and something subtly floral. He ran a hand through his hair – dark, a bit messy, and definitely his. "Either I've finally snapped from overtime and this is a very vivid stress-induced hallucination, I'm dead and this is some kind of eco-friendly afterlife, or… Truck-kun delivered." The last option, a staple of the light novels he sometimes binged to escape reality, seemed depressingly plausible.
As if summoned by his thoughts, a translucent, ethereal blue screen shimmered into existence right before his eyes, hovering silently in the air. It pulsed with a soft, inner light.
[Welcome, Chosen Soul, to the verdant world of Aethelgard!]
[You have been selected by the Bored Primordial Entity of Creation and Destruction for the Grand Farming Experiment! Congratulations? Or condolences? Results may vary!]
[System Initializing: Farming God System - Beta Version 0.1 (Please report any reality-breaking bugs… or don't, it might be funnier that way!)]
[Assigning New Identity…]
[Name: Ren (Default – Simple, easy to shout when you accidentally level a mountain.)]
[Age: 18 (Physically, anyway. Mentally? Who knows!)]
[Title: Novice Farmer (In Training… or is the world in training for *you*?)]
[Primary Objective: Live a fulfilling life. Grow things. Try not to break the world *too* much on your first day. Have fun! The Entity insists on the 'fun' part.]
[Starter Package Granted: [Plot of Land (Slightly Neglected, but with Potential!)], [Basic Farming Tools (Surprisingly Sturdy – like, suspiciously sturdy)], [Packet of Mysterious Seeds (Handle with Care? Or don't. We're not your supervisor.)]]
Ren stared, his mouth slightly agape. The text was clear, the font almost playfully elegant. "Farming God System… Grand Farming Experiment… Bored Primordial Entity?" He reached out a tentative finger and poked the screen. It rippled like water but remained solid. "Right. So, definitely not a dream. And apparently, my new employer is an omnipotent being with a bizarre sense of humor and a penchant for cryptic warnings."
He pushed himself fully to his feet, picking up the straw hat and settling it on his head. It fit perfectly. He took a deep breath. The world felt… vibrant. More alive than anything he'd ever experienced. Before him lay a modest plot of land, perhaps an acre or so, gently sloping. It was choked with weeds and stubborn-looking bushes, but he could see the richness of the dark soil peeking through. At one end stood a tiny, dilapidated wooden shack that looked like a strong gust of wind might send it tumbling. Near its crooked door, leaning forlornly, were a rusty-looking hoe, a worn sickle with a chipped blade, and a dented, galvanized watering can.
"Well, Ren," he addressed himself, a wry smile tugging at his lips. "When in Aethelgard, do as the Farming Gods… experiment on you, I suppose." A strange calmness settled over him. Back on Earth, he'd often daydreamed of a quiet life, a small garden, away from the concrete jungle. This was… that, turned up to eleven and dropped into a fantasy novel.
His gaze fell on the hoe. The wooden handle was smooth and greyed with age, the metal head pitted and stained with rust. "Basic, huh?" he muttered, walking over and picking it up. It was heavier than it looked, yet balanced perfectly in his hands. "Let's see how 'surprisingly sturdy' you are."
He needed to clear a patch for those 'Mysterious Seeds.' He approached a particularly dense patch of thick, thorny weeds, took a comfortable stance, and swung the hoe down with the practiced ease of someone who had, in a past life, perhaps watched a YouTube tutorial on gardening once. He wasn't expecting much, just to break up the topsoil.
CRUNCH-SHHHHRRRIIIPPP!
The earth didn't just break. It shuddered. The hoe blade, which Ren had expected to perhaps bounce off the compacted soil or get snagged in the roots, sliced downwards as if the ground were soft butter. A furrow, perfectly straight, a good foot deep and nearly ten feet long, appeared in an instant, as if a miniature, laser-guided earthquake had selectively targeted that precise strip of land. The weeds, roots and all, were churned aside, leaving pristine, dark soil.
Ren froze mid-swing for his next stroke, staring at the impossibly neat furrow. The hoe in his hands felt… perfectly fine. No, it felt good. Like an extension of his own arm, humming with a barely perceptible energy.
"Huh," he said aloud, his voice sounding small in the quiet clearing. "That was… significantly easier than I anticipated." He frowned, prodding the edge of the furrow with his toe. "Must be really, really good soil around here. Or this old hoe is sharper than it looks. A lot sharper."
He decided to try again, this time with a deliberately gentler swing, using less force.
WHOOSH-CRUNCH.
Another perfect furrow, identical to the first, appeared right beside it. He blinked. Then he swung again, and again. A strange, almost Zen-like rhythm took over. The hoe rose and fell, slicing through the resistant earth as if it were air, turning over soil, uprooting stubborn bushes with single, effortless passes. In what felt like no more than ten minutes, a significant portion of the plot—a good quarter acre—was tilled into neat, inviting rows, ready for planting. He wasn't even out of breath. In fact, he felt invigorated, a pleasant warmth spreading through his limbs.
"This farming thing," Ren mused, leaning on the hoe for a moment and surveying his handiwork with a surprising sense of satisfaction, "might not be so bad after all." He wiped a non-existent bead of sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. His gaze then fell upon an old, gnarled tree stump, easily five feet in diameter, squatting stubbornly at the edge of his newly tilled patch. It was clearly in the way of his planned expansion for a pumpkin patch later. "Right, that monstrosity has to go."
He walked over to it, the hoe still in hand. He figured he'd have to dig around it, chop the roots… a multi-day project, surely. On a whim, he leaned the hoe against a nearby rock, crouched, and wrapped one hand around a thick, protruding root, giving it an experimental tug. He wasn't expecting it to budge.
CRRRRRRRACK-THROOOOOMMM!
The sound was like a localized thunderclap. The entire stump, all several tons of it, ripped free from the earth with a violent tearing of soil and snapping roots. Roots thicker than his torso, some plunging dozens of feet deep, snapped like dry twigs, flinging clods of earth the size of boulders high into the air. Ren, caught off guard by the sheer lack of resistance, stumbled back a step, somehow managing to keep his balance while holding the colossal stump aloft in one hand as if it were a slightly oversized turnip. He stared at the massive crater it left behind, a jagged wound in the earth.
"Okay," Ren said slowly, his voice laced with utter bewilderment. He looked at his own hand, then at the tree stump dangling effortlessly from his grip, then back at the gaping hole. "Either this world has extremely loose soil and very shallow-rooted trees… or that 'Novice Farmer' title comes with some seriously undocumented fringe benefits." He gave the stump a casual, one-handed toss towards the dense forest bordering his land, aiming for a clearing he could vaguely see.
The stump sailed. It didn't just fly; it rocketed through the air like a siege projectile, arcing high over the distant treeline, shrinking rapidly from sight before disappearing with a faint, delayed CRRRRASH-BOOM! that echoed back, followed by the startled squawking of many birds.
Unseen by Ren, hidden deep within a thicket of berry bushes at the edge of the clearing where he'd been stealthily foraging for rare mushrooms, Old Man Hemlock, Oakhaven village's oldest, grumpiest, and most superstitious resident, witnessed the entire display. His jaw, which had dropped somewhere around the first unnaturally perfect furrow, was now practically unhinged, his weathered face a mask of slack-jawed terror. The clay pipe he'd been about to light with a precious ember clattered unnoticed from his trembling fingers to the forest floor. His eyes, wide as saucers, were fixed on the young, innocent-looking man who had just casually uprooted and launched a tree stump that would have taken ten strong lumberjacks a week to deal with.
Ren, completely oblivious to his audience, dusted off his hands with a satisfied sigh. "Much better. Now, about those seeds." He walked back to where he'd left his meager starting supplies and picked up the [Packet of Mysterious Seeds]. The packet was made of a strange, papery material and felt surprisingly heavy. A simple label was handwritten on it: "Tomato - 'Sun's Fury' Variety. Warning: May cause spontaneous combustion… of flavor! (And possibly other things. Plant responsibly. Or don't. Again, not your supervisor.)"
"'Sun's Fury,' eh? Sounds a bit dramatic for a tomato," Ren chuckled to himself, picturing a slightly spicier ketchup. He carefully tore open the packet. Inside were three small, obsidian-black seeds that pulsed with a faint, internal crimson light. "Definitely mysterious." He shrugged, selected a prime spot in his newly tilled earth, and using his finger, poked three shallow holes, dropping one seed into each.
He then grabbed the dented watering can. "Right, water." He ambled over to a small, clear stream that gurgled merrily along one edge of his plot. He dipped the can. It looked like it could hold a gallon, maybe two at most. Yet, as it filled, it seemed to draw in an astonishing amount of water, becoming incredibly heavy, far heavier than mere water should make it. Ren grunted slightly, adjusting his grip. It felt like it contained the contents of a small pond. "Efficient, I guess," he muttered, carrying it back to his freshly planted seeds, his muscles not straining nearly as much as they should have.
As he gently tilted the can, a perfect, gentle stream of water showered his 'Sun's Fury' tomato seeds. He was humming a half-forgotten tune from his old life, a picture of pastoral peace, when a sudden, terrified yelp shattered the tranquility.
"B-B-BEAR! GIANT CAVE BEAR! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!" a voice shrieked from the direction of the narrow village path that skirted his land.
Ren sighed, a flicker of annoyance crossing his gentle features. "Honestly. Can't a guy get his tomatoes planted in peace around here?" He straightened up, watering can still in hand, and looked towards the commotion. A young villager, a lad no older than fifteen, was scrambling backward up the path, his face pale as a death shroud, eyes wide with pure terror.
And then it emerged from the dense woods, parting the treeline like a furry battering ram.
It was, indeed, a bear. But 'giant' was an understatement. This creature was the size of a small carriage, easily nine feet tall at the shoulder. Its fur was a matted, dark brown, almost black, thick as iron plating. Vicious, curved claws longer than Ren's fingers adorned its massive paws, and its head, broad as a boulder, sported a snarling maw filled with teeth like daggers. Two small, malevolent red eyes, burning with feral hunger and rage, locked onto Ren, who was simply standing there, looking mildly inconvenienced.
The giant cave bear let out a deafening ROOOOAAAR, a sound wave that physically buffeted Ren, shaking the leaves from the nearby trees and sending vibrations through the ground. It sniffed the air, its massive chest heaving, then lowered its head and charged.
"Now, now," Ren said, his voice calm but firm, as if scolding a particularly boisterous puppy that had tracked mud onto a clean floor. "That's no way to behave. You'll scare the seedlings with all that roaring, and you're trampling the wild herbs."
The bear, entirely unimpressed by the lecture on horticulture etiquette and property respect, continued its thunderous charge, closing the distance with terrifying speed. Each footfall was a minor tremor.
Old Man Hemlock, still hidden in the bushes, whimpered silently, a single tear tracing a path through the grime on his cheek. He squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for the inevitable, gruesome spectacle. This strange, impossibly strong young man, who had just performed feats of casual godhood, was surely about to be reduced to a bloody smear on the landscape. The forest was cruel, and nature, red in tooth and claw, did not care for polite farmers.
Ren watched the massive beast approach. He didn't have any conventional weapons on him, aside from his farming tools, and the hoe was still leaning against that rock some distance away. He did, however, recall finding a perfectly normal-looking wild apple earlier, nestled amongst the roots of a tree. He'd pocketed it, thinking it would make a nice snack later. It was crisp, red, and entirely mundane.
Or so he thought.
"Well, this is a waste of a perfectly good apple," he muttered under his breath, reaching into his trouser pocket and pulling out the fruit. With a flick of his wrist, almost an afterthought, he tossed the apple underhand towards the charging, multi-ton behemoth of fur and fury. It was not a hard throw; more like he was trying to get a dog's attention.
THWACK-CRUNCH-KABOOOM!
The sequence of sounds was bizarre and instantaneous. The apple, which should have arced gently, instead shot forward like a cannonball, a crimson blur too fast for the eye to truly follow. It struck the giant cave bear square in its broad, sloping forehead. The initial THWACK was the impact, sharp and impossibly loud. The CRUNCH was the sound of something very thick and very hard—like the bear's skull—imploding. The soft KABOOOM was more of a pressure wave, a sudden displacement of air as the bear's forward momentum was catastrophically arrested.
The colossal creature's charge stopped as if it had run into an invisible, infinitely strong wall. Its small, red eyes went wide with an almost comical look of surprise, then instantly glazed over with the dullness of death. The truly enormous beast, all several tons of muscle, bone, and rage, simply… collapsed. It didn't skid. It didn't stumble or slide. It dropped vertically, like a puppet whose strings had been cut, hitting the ground with a resounding THUDDD that shook the earth more violently than its charge had. A small plume of dust and disturbed leaves billowed up around its now very still, very, very dead form.
Silence descended, thick and absolute, broken only by the distant, panicked chirping of birds.
A single, perfectly round hole, about the size of the apple, was drilled cleanly through the center of the bear's thick skull, exiting out the back. A tiny wisp of smoke, or perhaps steam, curled from the entry wound.
Ren blinked, looking at the deceased mountain of fur. "Huh." He examined his empty hand, then looked back at the bear. "Must have been a rotten apple. Or maybe it hit a particularly soft spot?" He tilted his head. "Still, I really shouldn't be so wasteful with food."
From the bushes, Old Man Hemlock slowly, hesitantly, opened one eye. Then the other. He saw the dead bear, a creature that had terrorized the southern woods for seasons, felled in an instant. He saw the young man standing there, looking thoughtfully at his own hand with mild confusion. He saw the impossibly small, neat hole in the bear's massive head.
His mind, already reeling from the stump-tossing incident, couldn't process this new, even more ludicrous display of casual annihilation. It simply… short-circuited. With a small, choked gasp, like a leaky bellows, the old man's eyes rolled back into his head, and he fainted dead away, collapsing into a heap amongst the berry bushes with a soft thud.
Ren, hearing the gentle rustle and thud, finally noticed the sprawled figure. "Oh, hello there!" he called out, his voice filled with genuine, innocent concern. He walked over, carefully stepping around a patch of what looked like medicinal herbs. "Are you alright, old timer? Did that noisy bear startle you? Don't worry, it's… uh… taking a nap now."
He peered down at the unconscious Old Man Hemlock, completely, utterly, and blissfully oblivious to the cataclysmic display of raw, terrifying power he'd just unleashed upon the unsuspecting world of Aethelgard, and the silent, sanity-shattering ripples it was already beginning to create. His farming life, it seemed, was going to be anything but simple.