The Slime Farmer

He put away the things he could then returned to the earlier conundrum, before Aire interrupted him.

He labelled the baskets in the dining room devoid of furniture, and then mixed in starcherry, crab sh.e.l.ls, and carp bones with zaziphos. He didn"t put in the eight unnamed slimes yet.

The food ratios he calculated were such:

Jasper, 1, 2 – 50% starcherry, 25% zaziphos, 25% crab sh.e.l.ls

Malachite, 3, 4 – 50% starcherry, 50% zaziphos

Larimar, 5, 6 – 50% zaziphos, 50% silver-blue carp bones

7, 8 – 70% zaziphos, 30% savras

If he kept the ratios, he"d need a lot of slime food every month: 1638kg zaziphos, 210kg of crabsh.e.l.ls, 840kg of starcherry, 420kg of carp bones, 168kg of savras.

Turq was not a production slime, but Defi fed it about 200kg of varied food a month.

Slimes were truly big eaters.

But it was doable.

The added eight slimes increased his need for zaziphos by ten times less than the amount he"d been dreading. And in truth he only needed to pay for the starcherry and savras.

He was already planning a zaziphos grove of his own, in order not to bother Sarel too much – the constant smell of fallen and rotting zaziphos around the orchard was starting to dissipate because of the slimes. Soon, the amount he picked off the ground for them would not be enough.

The great thing was he didn"t even need to grow the trees from seed as Sarel thinned the orchard of problematic saplings every now and then. There were already young zaziphos saplings set aside for him.

He had the ability to speed up the growth of trees using the Current – he could have full grown zaziphos ready to fruit in months rather than the two years it took normally.

He only needed to buy fresh land.

A small problem at the moment was the savras. He"d bought 50 kilogar of it and was now using 6 kilogar in total a day. In 8 days, he"d be out of savras; that was five days before the sellers returned. Even padding the slime"s food with zaziphos, he needed 84 kilogar of savras every fortnight.

Expensive, but he really wanted to see a medicine slime.

If he could make at least one effective medicine slime, then he needn"t worry about resources to feed the slimes or expand the farm. Medicine was just one of the products that appealed to everyone, constantly selling.

Another small problem was the supply of starcherry. The seller did say they could pick more for Defi, but it seemed the amount was not certain. He needed 30 kilogar a day.

What he was contemplating when Aire interrupted earlier in the morning was: should he milk the eight wild slimes today or start when the slime diet had taken more time to integrate into their bodies?

The substance that the slimes exuded when their bodies were irritated was affected by diet. If he milked them now, would it mean the current diet would integrate with their defense system faster? It sounded logical, as the diet would replace the old one.

But Jar and the others had been feeding long before Defi thought of milking them. Would milking too early affect the taste or quality of the slime extract?

It was still too early. There was too much he didn"t know.

He decided to feed the eight wild slimes for a week before attempting to milk them.

He glanced to the side, the doorway leading to the central hall of the house. The dining room he was using as a slime eatery had two doorways, one to the kitchens, the other to the central hall, where most of the decorations to impress guests should be displayed around comfortable chairs.

Defi"s central receiving rooms were bare of the usual decoration, holding only shelves and some armchairs. There was a small figure in the doorway.

"How long have you been there?"

Markar dusted off his sleeve, fastidious movements. "Long enough to ask you whether the meaning of life is in a slime?"

"A sage once told me that life had meaning in everything," Defi started to clean up, placing the unnamed slimes into each basket and putting the woven basket lids on. "And nothing."

The baskets were tough, he thought idly, to withstand the all-consuming slime. Was it the pest control glyphs?

"What does that mean?"

"I have no idea." Defi quirked his lips at the boy. "Have you eaten?"

The boy made an ambiguous motion.

Markar was quieter than Renne, but they were both intense for their age in their own ways. Renne was the type to stride forward sharply, Markar the kind to hang back and a.s.sess calculatedly.

Defi glanced at the window. The sun was rising, it was past the time Aire said they woke up the children. But yesterday had been tiring. Surely a bit more sleep would help.

But this one was already awake. An initial sally, a probe of Defi"s intent.

Defi did not mind it; the boy was only protecting his siblings after all. "Come and help me set up, then."

He walked to the kitchen, gathered ceramic jars and tools, placing some in Markar"s arms.

"Put them on the table outside."

Markar looked out the kitchen, into the yard. There was indeed a table set up there, under the sun and rain. There was also a stack of stones that was hollow in the center, like a shallow rectangular well.

The boy glanced at Defi.

Defi didn"t answer the silent question, but took out the glyphmaker"s box and cut a strip of glyph paper from the larger sized sheet. The book said that for a simple emblem, a tenth of the regular-sized sheet was enough.

He ground up some of the crystal salt and mixed it with vital water, then brushed it over the strip. He left it to dry.

He gave a mortar and pestle to Markar and two bowls. "Grind up cloudgrain to fill the larger bowl, white almonds to fill the smaller."

Markar set to the task without question.

Aire was right, they were sensible children.

He ground up a small bead of ink powder slowly, carefully added vital water, watched as the brown powder swirled into a blood-red liquid. This was indicative of No.1 glypher"s ink, so it was normal. The other inks had different colors too. No.2 was red-gold, No.3 was orange, No.4 was gold, No.5 was silver, for example.

He took up a pen and dipped the tip into the ink, letting the wool of the pen nib absorb all the liquid.

It was recommended to use only one different type of ink with one pen or the inks would contaminate each other, so he couldn"t use his practice pen. It was difficult to clean a glyphmaker"s pen completely of the ink used.

The strip of glyph paper was completely dry, and was stiffer than before, with a subtle s.h.i.+ne on the surface.

Defi inscribed the fireburst emblem on the paper, noting that the paper surface was more slippery than he was used to. The fireburst emblem was a public design, used for signal flares.

Defi had modified it a little. It wasn"t different enough to warrant a new name; the burst of flame was just more contained instead of streaming upward like the original was supposed to do.

He stared as the lines of the ink settled into a design and sank into the paper until it looked like the paper and emblem had been enameled. He inhaled in satisfaction.

It worked.

His first inscribed emblem.

He carried it outside, half in a trance of happiness.

He put it inside the rectangular fire pit and stacked wood over it. A touch of the Current and the strip of glyph paper burst into a ball of fire, igniting the wood around it. In one minute, it would reduce the stack of wood into hot coal, which was what Defi needed.

He could not stop the wide smile that took over his face.

He allowed the smile to spread for a long moment, looking at the burning pile of wood inside the stone pit, before composing himself with some embarra.s.sment.

He went back into the kitchen and carefully covered the head of the pen, efficiently packing the glypher"s kit. He noticed Markar glancing at the kit in longing.

There was no way he was going to let children touch the box of glyphmaker"s tools. But then Aire"s tirade on education earlier in the morning returned to the forefront of his mind.

"You"re welcome to read the books in the hall," Defi said, before leaving to secure the glypher"s toolbox in his room.

He already learned, at the beginning of his stay in the learning halls, not to keep bookshelves in his room or he would stay up reading until near dawn. Most of his early years in the Church halls were spent with dark bags beneath his eyes. There were just so many books.

So he placed the books he bought from the library in the central hall of the house, with all the armchairs. The house didn"t have a study room or a library in any case, and the other rooms were too small to fit a more than a small number of bookshelves and stuffed chairs.

Defi"s bedroom only held a writing desk.

There were no suites of rooms in this farmhouse. Why would there be? The family that built it was pragmatic – apart from the master bedroom which was now the store-room for linens plus the decorations and furniture that Defi disliked, the four bedrooms were only large enough for two beds and other essential furniture.

Defi removed the other bed in his room, and gained the s.p.a.ce for the desk.

As for the central hall, did he really need a receiving room? He was not planning to be that social.

He put out milk and vital water on the outside table of the kitchen courtyard, along with a bit of sweetleaf extract. In a large three-footed tureen, generally meant for serving soup, he mixed all the liquids. The traditional samad recipe didn"t call for milk, but Aire told him to let the children drink milk everyday.

The addition wouldn"t hurt the recipe.

"I"m done with the cloudgrain."

Defi nodded and motioned the boy to bring the bowl to him. He stirred the ground grain with a spoon, but there were no irregular particles in the powder. "Good work."

"I"m doing the almonds next." Markar turned to re-enter the kitchen, but Defi caught the flash of a red cheek. The rounded ears on the child"s head bent low.

How adorable.

His eye twitched. He remembered being told he blushed so easily when he was younger. Was this why Maryiz and Casmiref had, in those early years, teased him relentlessly until he learned to stoically take their bothering?

Those teachers, he"d become their entertainment so young?

He poured the rice powder into the tureen and stirred vigorously, venting. The liquid turned slightly pearlescent with the addition of the ground rice powder. He ladled up some of the concoction and took a sip.

Ah, delicious.

The nostalgic taste, with added creaminess from the milk, washed away his slight resentment. It was not too sweet, and the familiar warm p.r.i.c.kle of vital water added another dimension to the experience.

Samad, he thought, Ascharon style.

Defi downed the whole ladle.

He glanced at the firepit, noted that the wood had nearly all burned down, and went to get the metal mesh he had a blacksmith make.

Fire-proof, a.s.sured the man when he bought it.

Well, it had yet to rust, and the soot scrubbed off it neatly to show the s.h.i.+ny metal, so he could believe it.

The mesh covered only part of the firepit opening. He added more wood, and placed two metal rods on the grooves at the other side of the pit. Moments later, spices, cloves, and fat were sizzling in the pan he placed over the rods.

He brought out the vegetables and chopped them into small pieces while he waited for the fat to infuse the spices.

When he was done, the air was redolent with the scent of smoke and spices.

He inhaled with a smile, then added the vegetables to the pan and mixed deftly.

He checked the warmth of the mesh, then opened a packet of smoked ba.s.s. He sliced the ba.s.s into smaller pieces and placed them onto the mesh.

The smoke lingering about the kitchen courtyard became even more fragrant.

He reached for the pot of steamed rice he"d cooked early in the morning. He"d thought to offer it to Aire, but one look told him she preferred a lighter breakfast.

He was scooping the softened grains into the pan when a voice spoke.

"You have a flameless stove, you know."

He glanced at the kitchen doorway to see Renne. Seven year old Bree yawned behind her, the feather crest on the top of his head upright, glinting in the morning light.

Defi paused.

Renne quickly determined his line of sight. She casually stepped in front of her brother, hiding the feathers.

"Would I be able to smell this delicious smoke, if I used the flameless stove?" Defi asked lightly, to hide his awkward embarra.s.sment.

Even with the Current"s confirmation that werefolk were not the abominations in the legends, it was still something to see animal traits actually on people.

"You can do that with a cigar."

Defi grimaced. "No thank you."

He"d never liked the scent of tobacco, or the burning herbs that philosophers sometimes smoked during gatherings.

"What are you making?" Bree climbed up to stand on the bench, to better see the pan. Renne came over to grab his s.h.i.+rt, steadying him. The feather crest had gone down, now less conspicuous as a line of long feathers that started from the top of his forehead, swept sleekly up the top of his head, and fell to his nape.

"Fried rice, ah, fried cloudgrain." He mixed the rice with the spices carefully. Samti had taught him how to reheat rice like this.

"Is it delicious?"

"Yes."

Renne looked doubtful.

He left the rice to warm, and flipped the smoked ba.s.s.

"Sit down," he told Bree. "It"s almost done. Renne, cups and plates."

The girl nodded, made sure her brother wasn"t going to fall over, and went inside.

Defi cracked several eggs over the rice, and deftly wielded the wooden spoon. The rice dish was tinged gold in moments. He removed the pan from the fire, placed it on the side of the table furthest from Bree. He sprinkled thin slices of starcherry over the rice.

"It smells good."

"Of course," he smiled at the young boy. "It"s a recipe that has endured for six thousand years."

"What are you telling my brother?" Renne arranged four places on the table.

"It"s a simple dish, easy to modify, so of course it has been pa.s.sed down the generations."

He"d steamed the rice on the flameless stove, in fact.

The stove was a recent purchase. For the first few weeks, he made do with the firepit until Sarel came by and forced him to buy the stove, saying a pit was a waste of firewood when it was so close to winter.

It was still summer then and the house had temperature regulation emblems, so Defi a.s.sumed it was an Ascharonian thing – a house without a stove or three was heretical, or something similar.

Defi had been raised to the hunt, and was in fact used to cooking meat and foraged food over a campfire, so it hadn"t mattered that much. A good Ontrean hunter knew how to make use of the land"s bounty, after all.

"It"s a Cloud continent recipe?" asked Markar, who was carefully holding a bowl full of ground almond.

Defi realized that rice in Ascharon had been an import for only several hundred years. "I don"t know about that. Maybe?"

A continent whose main grain was rice would probably have a dish like this, wouldn"t it? He took the grilled smoked ba.s.s off the mesh, arranged them on a plate.

"Where"d your six thousand years go?"

Defi laughed softly. "The next world, I suppose."

"It died just like that?" Renne looked dissatisfied.

Did she like stories?

Defi took the almonds from Markar and added them to the samad, then poured each of them a cup.

Renne gulped down her first cup, and her eyes lit up. "This is good."

Defi"s lips lifted. "It"s called samad. It"s said the first version was made to reward the saints that crossed over to the realm of the G.o.ds. Of course, this one does not have any divine ingredients."

Bree made an interested sound and looked half in awe at his drink. "Divine," he murmured to himself.

Markar took a small sip, then a longer one. He smiled faintly.

Defi sat down, sipped his own. The almonds made the drink all the more nostalgic.

He gestured for them to start serving themselves.

It was not strictly in line with Ascharon propriety, but Ontrean hosts served themselves last.

"It really is smoky," Renne muttered. She took another spoonful of fish and rice.

Defi smiled.

The first morning meal with the children was a success.

It wouldn"t do if they told Aire he wasn"t feeding them properly.