Farming Together wIth Interstellar People

Chapter 100: “Master of Corn”

Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations

Editor: GaeaTiamat

 

The day before the event passed uneventfully amidst the anticipation and active preparation of the players. It was only that Bai Li found he hadn’t met up with Demon Xing for almost the entire day. This was something that never happened before. Still wondering if the other party was in some kind of trouble, Bai Li asked him about it through a friend message, and got the answer that Wen XingYao was fine.

Since he was fine and an adult, after doing his daily greetings, Bai Li naturally didn’t hold on to the matter and went offline at 19:00 to rest for a few hours before re-entering the game at 00:00 the next day.

The game was lively in a way that was not the norm.

If it was the usual, at this time there should be the least number of players. Players who had played all day usually went offline to rest. Even players who belonged to the night owl category wouldn’t stay in their yards at this time to farm, but rather wandered around the entire game map, eating and drinking, so happy.

However, right now, all the players were doing a great job in their own yards, emptying the land in advance and planting corn seeds into the ground in unison.

Interstellar People’s reading comprehension skills were in overdrive at this moment. It was stated in the announcement that only planted and harvested corn could be converted into points. If the corn was planted before the event started, there were no points available for harvesting after the event started, which was a waste of the harvesting time at the beginning.

As a rule, corn seeds were harvested once every 2 hours, and the time would be reduced by one half to 1 hour after irrigating with the full amount of magical spring water, and currently the player’s yard could only reclaim a total of 100 pieces of land. Therefore, the player’s limit value in a day was 2,400 corn plants, or 240 points. However, this value must be unreachable because the time for planting and harvesting was also subtracted.

After getting the highest number of points possible in the corn planting competition, it was up to the other two competitions to fight for the points after that.

Bai Li came out of the house without delay, took out his farming tools and pre-prepared seeds and went to work. As a qualified Agricultural Deity, he had a strong desire to win when it came to farming, and did not want to be caught by the Interstellar People, who had only been in contact with farming for a few months.

His expression was serious and his eyes were fixed on the land at his feet. A hoe was used to dig out a hole, scatter the seeds, and then the hoe was used to refill the dug-out soil. If there were precise instruments around at this time, one would find that every hole dug by Bai Li, every position where the seeds were scattered, and the angle at which the hoe dug and buried, were all exactly the same.

The person seemed to be the most precise instrument, without any half error or deviation.

When Wen XingYao was mentally prepared to come out of the house, he saw this scene.

Usually Bai Li was like a lazy older boy but this time he was moving at full horsepower, his every movement nimble in the field fully engaged in it, not impressed by external objects. Even though he was bored all day and finally came out, he didn’t get half a look from Bai Li.

At this moment, Bai Li’s face in the game seemed to overlap with the face from reality, and Wen XingYao was in a trance for a moment, as he remembered his own infancy in Bai Li’s arms, licking his fingers. When he realized that he was thinking of something strange, he hurriedly shook his head to get these out of his mind. Juvenile was juvenile, he is him, and the two cannot necessarily be classified as one and the same!

It was better to hurry up and plant corn, eh! Growing corn is more important!

With a weakness that he did not understand, Wen XingYao stopped looking over at Bai Li and focused on his own plot of land.

After finally planting corn seeds in a hundred plots, Bai Li straightened his back and made the habitual action of wiping sweat, and then, as if he had made up his mind, he opened the game store with a straight face and first bought four 888 kryptonite packs, and got a total of 3,952 diamond coins. Then he selected the ‘Lucky Magic Spring Water Pack’, closed his eyes and kryptonized 100, a total of 3,000 diamond coins.

Although Bai Li now had money in his hands, money should not be spent indiscriminately. In essence, he still thought he was a good young man of hard work and simplicity. Even if he gritted his teeth and bought 100 spring water gift packs, he kept reassuring himself in his heart that at least the money he used would be returned by 70%, so with that calculation, he spent at most 900, more than other players and he could be cost-effective!

Who let planting corn be this kind of competition, where they could use the magical spring water to exceed other players? Other people wanted to use the magical spring water, he must also use it. The reason was so simple.

Bai Li, even as he rambled in his heart to read something, opened a few gift bags, and took out the newly obtained magical spring water to pour over the seeds one by one.

When the round of planting was over, ten minutes had passed, and in another forty minutes or so, this batch of corn would be ripe.

Taking advantage of this gap, Bai Li planned to look around to see if he could find a few activities with the ‘corn’ element item.

He was the designer of these activities, but if you asked him where the corn item would appear, he couldn’t really answer. In Bai Li’s setting, corn items were everywhere, and may be buried deep in the earth, hidden in the leaves, appear with the fish that were caught, may also appear when using life skills to create something, or even fall directly from the sky.1

Even with the appearance of these items, he also chose to let the system randomly generate them, letting the things only need to have a ‘corn’ element. As to what they looked like after, he would have to wait to see to know. It wasn’t good luck, Bai Li had a faint sense of crisis in his heart, he thought about it and planned to start by looking in the yard.

The chicken coop on the left hand side of the hut. After a period of feeding, the chicks had all grown up, and one of them was a big robust rooster. He would caw every morning at seven on the dot. The other four were fat hens, responsible for the production of eggs. The eggs produced by them did not hatch new chicks.

When they saw their owner coming, the hens clucked, flapped their wings and raised their tails, as if urging Bai Li to come forward and take the eggs they had laid today. Bai Li leaned down and reached over. He felt the round eggs and felt a strange graininess on one of them.

He took it out to examine, and saw that this egg had mutated. The lower part was still round like an egg but the upper part had become a corn head, pointed, with simulated corn kernels growing on it.

Okay, the first corn item had been found.

After putting this item into his backpack, the item automatically disappeared and was replaced by “5” points after Li Bai’s name on the event standings.

“Cluck, cluck, cluck!” The hen was shocked when she saw her master pull out the strange egg from under her and after a few seconds of staring at Bai Li, she opened her wings and flew up. In the small chicken nest, the chickens jumped for a while.

Bai Li rushed off after confirming that no second such egg could be found, leaving the mother hen alone with her worldview in doubt. What the hell did she give birth to?

After finding the chicken coop, it was time to look for the vine stand on the other side of the house.

The bamboo shoots that Mo Zhu had given him were already planted behind the shelf, and because they were not a regular crop, they weren’t growing very fast, and were only about 20 cm longer than the previous two days. The shape of the bamboo was not yet visible, so Bai Li only glanced there and then focused on the vine shelf.

He raised his head to look upwards.

The vines on the shelf were growing well, and the sunlight overhead had been completely covered by the dense foliage, making it cool to stand underneath. And between the dense leaves, it was the easiest to hide something.

Bai Li thought about it and took out a long stick from his backpack and plucked it around on the leaves bit by bit. His movements were very careful not to hurt the leaves, and when he reached the halfway point, something really fell down from it.

A corn cob with a parachute made of leaves floated in mid-air, as if it had eyes, and landed steadily in Bai Li’s open palm.

This time there were only three points, but Bai Li was still satisfied.

After that, he searched all the corners of the yard and found three more items that had the element of ‘corn.’

After making sure there was no more item to be found in the yard, more than 40 minutes had passed. With a strong smell of corn, the corn plants planted on the 100 blocks of land “bang bang bang” ripened one by one.

Bai Li rushed to collect them and then planted a new wave.

For an Agricultural Deity, planting was the most enjoyable thing. Even if it was repetitive and tedious, Bai Li enjoyed it. After planting two batches of corn in a row, Bai Li was not only not tired, but also full of motivation. However for some players who had limited enthusiasm for planting every day, the intense and exciting planting competition brought them much more pain than the pleasure they could reap from it.

Take next door to Bai Li’s house, for example.

“Ah!!!” Jiang Huaibi let out a painful wail. “Planting is so hard! I need a fully automatic planting robot now! Oooooooh!!!”

It was not that she didn’t like gardening, she usually actively tidied up her yard every time she was online before going out exploring for treasure. But times had changed nowadays. Game activity = planting corn, corn = points, and points were necessary for players to eventually get a precious game spot.

Ever since they found out that there were two game spots in the February Carefree Farmstead rewards, her father and mother had been telling their baby girl to be more active when she participated in the event, to plant the land, to break the corn, and to use her strengths to get more game spots. To this end, Father Jiang also gave Jiang Huaibi a large amount of game funds to buy more magical spring water, so that she could not be behind others in the planting of corn.

This was a fund that limited Jiang Huaibi’s monthly pocket money, but unfortunately it could only be used in specific places and couldn’t be quietly swallowed privately.

Back to the original topic, Jiang Huaibi, like Bai Li, also boarded the game as soon as 24:00 had passed, and worked hard with her head in the sand.

The result was that Bai Li had already done one round of planting, and she had just planted the first batch of corn and poured the magic spring water. Exhausted after more than an hour, her harvest was a sore back and a faint sense of frustration.

This time Jiang Huaibi missed the real agricultural planets with their necessary planting robots. How good that it would automatically plant it! If she had one in the game, wouldn’t she be directly a super God? But unfortunately, Carefree Farmstead was mainly for players to experience the fun of farming, and her idea was not destined to work.

When she thought of that, Jiang Huaibi let out another exaggeratedly long sigh.

“Heart’s Jade, are you okay?” Bai Li asked across the two fences.

“It’s not a big deal.” Jiang Huaibi responded moodily, “I just think farming is so hard. I’m only 17. I’m so tired. QAQ!”

“Then you can go treasure hunting first, ah. That suits you.” Thinking of what Jiang Huaibi did everyday, Bai Li suggested without thinking.

These words woke up the dreamer, and Jiang Huaibi’s eyes brightened up!

Yes, she can go do what she is good at first! If she wanted to plant corn or something, she could just come back and plant it. If she didn’t have enough points, she could probably make up for it with the items she found!

Translator Notes:

Think Animal Crossing where you can fish for water eggs, shoot presents from the sky for sky eggs, dig up earth eggs, shake trees for wood eggs and collect from just about anywhere.