I Found a Door to the Elven Realm

Chapter 201: Gardening and Gathering on Two Planets

Spring hit Planet Aradne and like everything else, it was too hard and came with no warning.

One week the forest was wet and grey and the next it was loud with growing. Vines that had been dead brown sticks all winter pushed out leaves the size of dinner plates overnight. Flowers opened in colors Eren had no names for. The whole western half of the forest smelled like wet earth and sap with something sweet underneath that made his Poison Resistance twitch every few hundred meters, just to remind him that pretty things here usually wanted to kill you.

He spent most of that month carrying a backpack full of empty jars.

The routine was simple. Wake up on the farm, eat whatever Selena had left out the night before, charge the Fragment in Evon air overnight, open the portal in the morning and step through into the forest with Fury padding along at his hip. Then he walked a loop he’d mapped over the last few weeks and dug up anything that looked like it might grow somewhere safer.

He wasn’t fighting much anymore. There was no point. Every kill still came back as 000% and he’d stopped checking the number weeks ago because reading it just made his jaw go tight and his head go somewhere he didn’t want it to go. So instead of hunting he collected.

He didn’t think about the thing in the ground while he worked. That was the whole reason he worked.

The good news, the only good news, was that the easy plants were everywhere if you knew what you were looking for.

Eren wasn’t a botanist. He’d killed every houseplant his mother ever trusted him with, including a cactus, which he was fairly sure took genuine effort. But six months of eating strange things and reading system descriptions had taught him to spot the difference between a plant that would melt his hand off and one he could maybe grow in a pot.

He went for the boring ones on purpose. The Magic Hen Bird feed grass that grew in fat clumps near the old village fields. A low blue herb the Clone’s memory flagged as the thing Selena crushed into tea. A vine that produced something close to a bean, and a squat little bush with berries that his Observe tagged as harmless and mildly nutritious and nothing else, which in this forest was practically a miracle.

Boring is good. Boring doesn’t have a hallucinogen attack.

He dug each one up with the roots intact, wrapped the soil ball in a wet rag and dropped it in a jar. Rosa had drilled him on this part. Keep the original dirt, don’t shake the roots clean, label everything. She’d printed him a laminated card with little drawings on it because the first week he’d brought back nine jars and couldn’t remember which was which, and she’d looked at him over her notebook with the exact face his old chemistry teacher used to make.

The blue herb reminded him of something and he crouched there in the dirt with it for a while.

His grandmother kept a garden in the Zekeriyaköy house before moving to her village that Eren’s roots lived for a long time around world war 2.

She had tomatoes in summer, mint in a chipped pot, basil that always died, and a little blue flowering thing she never named that came back every single spring no matter how cold the winter got. She used to put it in tea when his stomach hurt as a kid and tell him it was magic and he never believed her. He’d spent maybe ten years thinking that flower was nothing.

Huh. Maybe Grandma was onto something the whole time.

He thought about her hands on that pot, the way she pinched dead leaves off without looking, the way she talked to the plants in a low voice when she thought nobody was around. Then a Worker bird screamed somewhere in the canopy about forty meters off and he remembered he was on a different planet kneeling in dirt that ate civilizations, and he put the herb in a jar and stood up.

"Alright. Less crying over a flower, more digging," he muttered to nobody.

Fury’s ears flicked toward him. [You talk to yourself more than the female wolf does. And she names herself out loud.]

"That’s a low bar, buddy."

The plan for the garden was bigger than what he could actually afford, which was becoming a theme in his life.

What he wanted was a real protected plot on the Earth side, fenced, watered, lit at night, with every cultivatable Evon plant he could carry through the door growing under conditions he controlled. A second smaller one over here too, somewhere defensible, where he could grow the things that only thrived in Aradne’s thick mana and ferry the harvest back.

The bird territory was his best candidate over here. The Worker network kept that whole stretch of forest weirdly orderly, no big predators wandering through, nothing dropping out of the trees at you, because the rainbow one at the center of it ran the place like a tiny feathered dictator and ate anything that broke the rules. A garden tucked into the edge of bird country, fenced off and covered by a couple of the drones, maybe a man on watch with one of the rifles he still hadn’t bought, that could work as a temporary thing.

The rainbow bird still wanted its ten golden fruits before it told him anything useful, and Eren still wasn’t suicidal enough to go rob an army of centaurs whose Luck stat bent arrows in mid-air. So for now it was just easy plants and small bets and a notebook full of numbers.

Because that was the real problem. Money.

Last he checked the account was down to a hundred and forty thousand dollars and dropping about three thousand a week just on groceries, before you counted soap and shoes and the diesel for the generator on cloudy days. Two hundred and sixteen mouths went through food like a forest fire. He couldn’t drop fifty thousand on a proper sealed greenhouse with climate control and grow lights. He’d priced one out on his phone one night and then closed the tab and lay awake doing math he hated.

So he did it the cheap way instead. Grow bags he found at a garden center in Söke for next to nothing. Bags of regular potting soil mixed with Evon dirt at ratios he was testing one bag at a time. A handful of seedlings on the kitchen windowsill that Lyra had started fussing over like they were her children, which was fine by Eren because Lyra fussing over something meant it usually survived.

It wasn’t a kingdom. It was a guy with grow bags and a laminated card. But every plant that took root on Earth was one more thing Nisann couldn’t take away from him, and he didn’t let himself finish that thought either.

..

He found the fruit by accident, which was the only way good things ever happened to him.

He’d gone closer to the village ruins than he liked, because the surviving orchard trees from the old elf fields were over that way and a couple of them had somehow lived through the burning. Most of the orchard was ash and black stumps now. But three apple-pear trees near the eastern edge had come back in spring with actual fruit on them, small and a little sour, the same ones the village used to dry for winter.

He kept the dragon in the corner of his eye the whole time.

It was still curled near the blackened trunk forty meters off, breathing slow, exactly where it had been for over a month. Eren knew now what was really happening to it, root by root, from underneath. He looked at it for one second too long and his stomach did something unpleasant, so he turned around and picked fruit fast and didn’t look at the trunk at all.

He filled a whole jar with the small apple-pears before he left, because Emily had been craving them for two weeks straight.

That was the thing he hadn’t expected about the cravings. Half of them were normal. Salt, bread, that sour cherry juice from Migros she’d drink straight from the bottle. But some of them were Evon. She’d wake up and announce she needed the dried village fruit or the spiced Yaksha meat the way Selena made it back home, foods she’d grown up on, and her whole body would go quiet and stubborn about it until she got some. He figured the baby was elf enough to want elf food, and there was no pharmacy on Earth that carried any of it.

So he picked sour little apple-pears forty meters from a sleeping dragon without being eaten alive from the side areas of the old village..

"The things I do for you, woman," Eren said quietly while he tied the jar shut with a small shake of his head.

He was genuinely happy despite all the dangers or unknowns around their life.