856 Gardening

Alex didn't leave the entire day he was there and only left when it was deep in the night. He teleported outside his house, already invisible, and directly flew away.

He wanted to look around and see the landscape. Since last night had been cloudy, he couldn't see anything, but tonight it was quite open and the moon shone its silver light on the snow, making the entire place glow white.

Alex looked through Whisker's eyes and saw hundreds upon hundreds of mountains scattered all over the land. He couldn't help but be surprised at just how many there were.

It wasn't just the number either. The mountains were also quite tall compared to the ones that were back on the Western Continent.

Alex tried to tell which direction he was looking at, but it was a little hard without the sun. Even with the sun, it was usually quite hard since the entire land was covered in snowy clouds and thus it was hard to tell where the sun even was.

Alex brought out a small artifact from his ring, a compass artifact, and checked the direction.

"So… the taller mountains are in the north?" he looked towards his left where the mountain looked like they were only continuously growing taller and taller as if they were reaching the night sky.

Alex flew as high as he could and looked for other sources of light in the area aside from just the moon.

There were a few glowing orange locations that were clearly volcanoes. Out of every 20 mountains he saw, at least one was a volcano that was quite active as well.

He continued looking around and saw a yellow or white-ish light coming from somewhere far in the east.

With his normal eyes, he could have seen it clearly, but with Whisker's eyes, he needed to get closer.

Alex flew in the direction for about 10 minutes before he was close enough to see what it was.

A sect.

"Is that the Frigid Rune sect?" Alex wondered.

Surrounded by 3 volcanic mountains, the sect was massive with many buildings scattered all over the other mountains.

He wanted to go closer, but he didn't know what sort of defense formations or scripts they had drawn to ward off intruders, and he definitely didn't want to show himself yet.

For now, his job was to hide and cultivate until he reached the Saint realm.

After surveying the location for a while longer, Alex returned back to the village and went back into his room.

Then, he started cultivating the Demon Eyes technique and let Whisker sleep for the night.

Early morning, before anyone could even come to knock on his door, Alex was already out and about, and on his way to the garden.

"Brother Fan," Alex called out the man from far away.

"Oh, brother Yu, you're up. Come on, let me take you to your task," Fan Yanshi said and took Alex.

They made their way to the garden that Alex was shown yesterday, where a few of the girls were already working on weeding the garden.

"Honey, brother Yu is here to help. Can you show him the ropes around here?" Fan Yanshi said.

"Okay," Fan Yanshi's wife said and walked out of the garden.

"I'll leave you in her hands. Ask anything you want from her," Fan Yanshi said and left.

"Good morning, sister," Alex greeted her. "I believe I do not know your name yet."

"It's Fan Li," the woman said.

"I see. I shall call you sister Li then," Alex said. "So, what should I do here?"

He looked around at the group of people working and he could already spot some mistakes.

"What can you do?" the girl named Li asked.

"Um, I'm quite good at gardening," Alex said. "I can tell you what mistakes you've been making, or how to improve the harvest and such."

The woman's eyes narrowed a bit. "You can?" she asked. "That will be helpful. Can you show us a bit, please?"

"Sure," he said and walked up to the garden where he was introduced to the 4 other girls that were working there.

"Look, first of all, you shouldn't be throwing these weeds away at all. Just pull them out and let them be. They will become fertilizers on their own," Alex explained. "Although, I don't know how helpful that would be as I hear volcanic ashes are quite good at that too."

"It will still be useful," the woman said.

"Right, this plant. This is Bitter Grass. They are quite notorious for sucking up the nutrients in the soil. That alone wouldn't be bad, but you're planting them around this Silken Snake tree, which has long silk-like roots that search all around them for nutrients."

"If you plant these next to Bitter Grass, they won't get the necessary nutrients they need. Depending on which one is more important, you should throw away one of these plants."

"If you have to keep them, I can help you with that too."

Whisker ran across the garden, looking at everything, and Alex saw it all.

"There is another problem there," he said while pointing to a rather large tree at the edge of the giant garden.

He started explaining the problems and solutions to everything that was wrong around him.

The explanations lasted for nearly half an hour, during which not a single woman did any task and just kept listening to the explanations.

Finally, once Alex was done, Whisker returned to his shoulder and he looked at the stunned expressions of the girls. He could only smile.

"If… if everything you said is true, then we have more tasks than we thought we did," Fan Li said.

"Then we should get to work," Alex said and they started working.

Alex explained what to do to the girls while demonstrating it himself. He pulled out plants that were destructive, relocated plants that were contradictory to each other, and put together plants that would only help each other.

Unfortunately, there were some plants that he simply hadn't seen before, so he couldn't help in those cases, but for everything else, he did all he could.

About 3 to 4 hours later, they were all done. Around the same time, Fan Yanshi came to visit to let them know that the food was ready.

"What… the hell are you guys doing?" he asked when he saw everything was relocated to someplace else.

"Oh, honey. Turns out Brother Yu actually knows quite a lot about plants, so he is teaching us what to do and what not to do," Fan Li said.

"Turns out, we have been doing everything quite wrong, some of which were disastrous for the harvest even," she said. "But now that we've fixed it, this time's harvest should be quite good."

"Really?" Fan Yanshi's eyes went wide.

"Well, you will have to wait and see what happens…" Alex looked around and saw that his words had caused the moon to suffer immediately. He sighed, "Yes, they will be good. At least better than what you would have gotten with how it was before."

"Thank you, brother Yu. You have no idea how good of a news this is. If we can have a great harvest, the sect will give us a lot more resources than normal," the man said.

"Oh, then I am glad I came by here," Alex said. Whisker looked around and Alex saw some empty land.

"Actually, brother Fan, can I ask you something?" he asked.

"Sure, what is it?" Fan Yanshi asked.

"I see a lot of empty lands just around the garden even. Do you have plans of expanding it at all?" he asked.

"Well, we did have that plan for a few years, but we weren't that good at growing these plants, not to mention there wasn't much seed, to begin with," Fan Yanshi said.

"Well, I have some seeds with me. Granted they're not for making talisman ink, but medicinal pastes, but do you think I can plant some in the empty land?" he asked.

"For medicinal pastes? You have knowledge of medicinal pastes?" the young man asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "I know the recipe for some pastes that are good for healing, poison, and such. I have the seeds too. Of course, I will share with the village."

"Yes," Fan Yanshi said. There wasn't even a shred of hesitation. "Please do plant them. If the village can even get the tiniest bit of what you grow, it will be amazing."

"That's great then, I will get to work over there," Alex said.

"Wait, no," Fan Yanshi said. "This is your first day, we can't have you working all the time. Come, the food the ready so its time to eat."

Alex wasn't hungry, nor did he need to eat. But since Fan Yanshi had called so sincerely, Alex didn't mind.

He and the other women walked back to the village to eat. Since they had been working all morning, the others had prepared food for them.

Alex ate what he could only imagine was a mix between congee and stew. There were a few chunks of meats in the watery rice, which was quite tasty.

They weren't anything amazing, but they were quite nourishing.

"Where did you get the meat?" Alex asked.

"There are some animals that you can find in the forest about an hour in that direction. We go there from time to time to hunt and bring back meat. The meat stays frozen in the snow, and we return when we are almost done with the supply."

Alex nodded when he heard that. He knew where he was going to go next.