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Bonus(1/1)
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Chapter 96: Summer and Reimu's First Fortune.
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Kihara had visited Rinnosuke's travelling cart twice now, and both times the taciturn proprietor of Kourindou had failed to produce anything worth getting excited about. The Rare Seeds and Ancient Seeds he was most hoping for hadn't even made a cameo appearance.
A Rare Seed grew into a Sweet Gem Berry — one of the most valuable crops in the valley. Standard quality fetched 3,000 gold, silver-star quality 3,750, and gold-star a clean 4,500. On top of that, it could be offered to the statue in the Secret Woods in exchange for a Star Drop.
Star Drops permanently increased maximum energy, making them among the most precious items in Stardew Valley — and there were only five of them in the entire world.
The problem was that without a blacksmith NPC, Kihara had no way to upgrade his axe or pickaxe, which meant the giant logs and boulders blocking the path to the Secret Woods remained exactly where they were.
Bad luck with the cart was bad luck with the cart. No use complaining. Spring's final day passed quietly, and Pelican Town woke up to the full, blazing heat of summer.
The girls marvelled at how a season could fit neatly into twenty-eight days, then promptly went off to change into summer clothes. The resulting abundance of bare arms and legs was, from Kihara's perspective, like watching someone take a very long, very satisfying scoop of ice cream.
With the seasonal rhythm confirmed, he spent 2,000 gold expanding his bag to twenty-four slots, then went on a wholesale run for summer crop seeds.
Summer had no shortage of options, but given that he'd built up a decent cushion of gold through fishing in the early game, what he needed now was levels — specifically, he needed Farming to hit Level 8 as soon as possible to unlock the Keg. That meant prioritising crops that could be harvested repeatedly and, ideally, carry over into autumn.
Of the summer crops with multiple harvests, Blueberries, Hops, and Corn all qualified — but only Corn could survive into the next season. He bought a hundred Corn seeds, fifty each of Blueberries and Hops, and the usual twenty of everything else.
After another round of field expansion, he planted everything and ran the time-acceleration to handle watering. The numbers sounded daunting, but in practice the whole planting barely covered half an acre.
At this pace, he estimated mid-autumn for Farming to hit somewhere between Level 7 and Level 8.
Meanwhile, the covert "DiDi Revenge" service that Reimu and Aya Shameimaru had been quietly marketing to the youkai community had finally landed its first customer: Suika Ibuki, one of the Four Devas of the Mountain.
She swayed into the Hakurei Shrine with the rolling gait of someone who had been drinking since before the concept of sobriety existed, fished a crisp hundred-thousand-yen note from her pocket, and transformed the shrine maiden who had been advancing on her with a broom into one beaming with professional hospitality.
"Why, if it isn't Suika! Have you come to have this shrine maiden pray for your fortune and ward off misfortune?"
"Hic —"
Suika squinted with cheerful, unfocused eyes, stuffed the money into the offertory box Reimu had materialised in front of her with impressive speed, and mumbled with comfortable incoherence: "I heard... heard that if I give you money... I can go mess with the fiancé guy..."
"That's exactly right! Would you like me to tell you where he lives?"
Reimu's smile had achieved a degree of curvature that was beginning to strain the structural limits of her face. One hundred thousand yen, first customer, barely any effort. She could only hope the next few days brought more business just like this.
"Nah... I'll find him myself."
As Suika turned to weave her way back out, Reimu remembered the civilians at Pelican Town and called after her hastily: "Don't you dare get the wrong person. If you so much as scratch any of the girls living in that town, I'll treat it as an incident and personally exterminate you — don't think I won't!"
"Yeah yeah~"
Suika wasn't the sort of youkai with genuinely bad intentions. If she was going to find Kihara, she'd find Kihara — no collateral, no bystanders. Besides, she wasn't even going to pick a fight. She was simply... curious about this person who had turned out to be Reimu's fiancé.
At that banquet, she'd accepted his gift without ever sharing a drink with him. It had been sitting at the back of her mind ever since, and it didn't sit well.
Back at the farm, Kihara was in the middle of installing wooden fencing around the fields — dividing them into two dedicated zones: one for single-harvest crops, one for repeat-harvest crops. It made harvesting more efficient and, as a bonus, the whole farm looked considerably less like organised chaos.
He drove the last fence post into the earth, straightened up, and dragged his forearm across his forehead. The summer heat had soaked his shirt through. But the work was done.
Minami Yume and the others had gone to the beach in their new swimsuits. Under any other circumstances, there was no force in the world that could have kept Kihara from joining his girlfriends for a beach day.
"I am extremely dedicated and this evening I absolutely deserve a bonfire party with all of them on the sand."
"What's a bonfire party?"
Suika Ibuki was leaning against his freshly installed fence with the ease of someone who had always been there, gourd of sake in hand, grinning at him with three-quarters of her attention. "Hey, mister. I'm... I'm Ibuki... Suika... Ibuki Suika. It's hot, yeah? Want a drink?"
"BODY, DON'T YOU DARE —"
His mouth was already forming the acceptance before the protest had finished leaving it. He walked toward her, arrived at the fence, and his hand reached into his dimensional bag and produced the two-litre water bottle he normally used for staying hydrated.
"Oh~! That's a big bottle, mister. Didn't take you for such a drinker — here, let me fill it up for you!"
"Don't fill the whole thing, are you trying to make me drink two litres of sake in one go?!"
He threw his full physical and mental resources into resisting his own right arm as it raised the bottle. It was not enough.
Suika's power of persuasion — or perhaps something rather more fundamental than persuasion — proved absolute. His jaw fell open and a relentless stream of sharp, burning liquid poured in.
Glug. Glug. Glug.
"Now THAT is how you drink! Can't let you show me up!" Suika burst out laughing, gave him two cheerful thumps on the lower back, and lifted her own gourd to join him.
Kihara didn't drink, which meant he had no frame of reference for whatever had just been poured into him. What he did know was that somewhere around the bottom of the second litre, the world began rotating independently of his intentions, and his limbs and mouth developed distinct personalities of their own.
He tucked the empty bottle away, planted himself on one leg in a crane stance of considerable personal conviction, and pointed at Suika with righteous fury.
"HEY! You tiny little watermelon — you have the nerve to give me something so mediocre I can't even taste it?! The audacity!"
Suika didn't take offence. She tilted her head, three shades of amusement glinting in her red eyes, then activated her ability to manipulate density — and stretched herself upward until she stood a full two metres tall, looming over him with a cheerful grin.
"Am I still little now?"
He stared upward at the giant loli for a long, silent moment. The alcohol had fully colonised his higher reasoning functions.
"...Fair point," he conceded, nodding solemnly. "That's enormous. Can you use that ability on my bull?"
"Your bull? You don't have a bull."
Kihara waved a grand, dismissive hand. "Only small minds sweat the details! Back to the important question — watermelon, do you want to drink good sake?"
Were we discussing this? Did this conversation always have this destination?
Suika had no idea how they'd gotten here, but the trajectory was undeniably interesting, so she raised no objections. She shrank back to her usual size, sat cross-legged on the ground, and the two of them proceeded to have a remarkably in-depth conversation about alcohol in the middle of the crop fields as the afternoon light stretched long and golden around them.
The following morning, Takarada Rikka came to water the crops and stopped dead in the entryway.
There they were: Kihara and Suika Ibuki, arms slung around each other's shoulders, snoring peacefully against the fence with the complete contentment of people who had solved all of the world's problems and could finally rest.
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Thank you for reading.