Chương 5: Yield

Humans were fine and good, but they needed a more sustainable source of income than the occasional rainy day adventurer. The decision came after the attack, during a postmortem that he ran alone in the core chamber. Matthew sat with his back against the tree and went through the engagement in his head. The warren had nearly died for three reasons. One. Even if obscured, the entrance was obvious and undefended, like a "Welcome, Adventurers" mat he'd forgotten to remove.

But there was nothing he could do about the stream. The tribe would never allow him to dam or divert it. Two. The tunnel layout gave outsiders a beeline to the tree. It was lucky that they didn't seem to understand this critical weakness. But smarter enemies would identify that immediately. It needed to be better protected. Finally, third, they were unprepared for an unexpected event. He had expected outsiders, but he hadn't expected some kind of witch. A magic-type enemy combatant was a critical threat to them.

They were lucky that this one was inexperienced. Outside of all that, their food supply was still a point of failure, with two dozen goblins living on scavenged deer and smoked rabbit, with no reserve and no redundancy. One bad week of hunting and the tribe would have starved before the adventurers ever showed up. His people needed food. Food made them stronger. They gained levels, and with levels, they could specialize. The hunters had been fantastic assets during the defense, but he needed more.

He needed better goblins. But Kevin had his position terminated and the crippled Janet was managing other duties now. What if he could find a way to have some of them learn magic, like that sorceress? Hunting and foraging were both extraction models, reliant on external variables. The forest was a fickle supplier with no service-level agreement he could hound a project manager after. He needed in-house production.

The problem was that farming, underground, with no sunlight, no seeds, and a workforce whose entire agricultural experience was a lice colony, was not straightforward. But the dungeon had one resource that was cheap, renewable, and already compatible with his infrastructure. Rats. [Territorial Manipulation: Active] Chamber Construction: Rat Farm (Small) Cost: 4 Mana Mana: 87 / 1, 000 He carved the chamber off a side tunnel, small and low-ceilinged, with shallow stone basins for water and rough nesting ledges.

He sent Paul, a goblin with the patience of a man waiting at the Department of Motor Vehicles, to sit and wait with a piece of meat to lure in and catch breeding pairs from the tunnels. Paul came back within the hour with several rats, three males and three females, held squirming by the tails. Rats bred fast: eight to twelve pups per litter, every four to six weeks, per breeding pair. Six pairs meant exponential growth within a month.

He assigned Jacob as keeper, a quiet goblin from the debris crew who had a knack for noticing when things were out of place and fixed them. Jacob took to the job immediately, solemn and thorough, like he'd been waiting his whole life for someone to hand him a purpose. The rats weren't for them to eat, though. They were for the fungus. A single rat, fed to the patch, produced almost nothing. Matthew had tested it on the first pup that died naturally, and the system logged something like zero-point-two mana.

Worthless alone. But rats weren't an isolation play. They were a volume play. Fifty rats, culled on rotation, generated a steady trickle. This would never have passed review in his old life. A facility built to do nothing but create and mulch lives for profit, one underqualified attendant, and zero oversight. PETA would have burned it down and some governmental agency would have opened an investigation.

His face would have been plastered in every rodent-lover's social media group across the globe as enemy number one. He built the rabbit farm a little while later, once the rats were self-sustaining, applying everything the first chamber had taught him: separated nesting boxes, a proper feeding trough, and a drainage channel. Half the rabbits went to the fungus. Half went to the tribe. — Not that they minded eating rats. They had no issues about that. But he wanted them to eat 'real' food.

He needed them to become more, well, civilized. Matthew wasn't sure if he would wean them off of human meat or not. Of the attackers, two were fed to the dungeon and two to the tribe. This was their way. For the first time since waking in this body, Matthew had a food supply that didn't depend on what he could personally kill or what his people could scavenge, barring some scraps to feed the farm animals. It was small, and it was ugly. But it worked, which was the only metric that mattered.

DUNGEON STATUS Mana: 143 / 1, 000 INCOME / EXPENSES (PER HOUR) Passive: +1 Parasitic Drain: +7 Rat Farm: +0. 8/hr Rabbit Farm: +1. 2/hr Upkeep: -0. 5 Goblins: -2. 0 Net Result: +7. 5 Mana per Hour The sorceress was still alive behind the lattice, her output down from eleven to six an hour. She was being harvested and cycled like a field left fallow between plantings. Matthew wasn't sure if she was conscious or not. The elf's output was lower and dropping. Days, probably. Maybe a week.

The fungus didn't care much for her. She was a low-quality source of fuel. He didn't visit them, didn't speak to them. He let the ledger manage that particular feeling for him because the alternative wasn't workable. The rabbit farm produced a second, unplanned benefit. Janet, whose crushed hand had healed into a stiff claw, found she could still hold a rabbit even if she couldn't hold a knife. Matthew reassigned her to animal husbandry full-time.

It was the first successful cross-training initiative in the warren's history. He noted that naming had mattered more than he'd realized. Janet had lost one role and found another because she had an identity to build on, not just a function. His old company had paid a consultant six figures to make the same point, less clearly, over a several-day-long retreat. He had done the math on the consultant's hourly rate once. Now that was something truly horrifying. You could be reading stolen content.

Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. It took a long time to heal from the burns. But the tree spawned its first goblin again on the ninth day, a swelling branch that matured over hours before dropping a wet, squalling infant onto the stone. Jacob found it on his rounds and carried it to the core chamber, wrapped in rabbit fur. The name tags belonging to Kevin, Diane, and John now hung from the branches. Nicole had taken to tending to the young, but she didn't seem as good at it as the soft-hearted Diane was.

She would hiss at them and snarl when they cried. It didn't work so great, but nobody else seemed interested in the job yet. He tried to get the rabbit-loving Janet to do it. She seemed nurturing. But it turned out that, despite their similarities, she loved animals and hated children. More came quickly after that. The tree, rich with magic, was entering mass production. Goblin maturation wasn't human maturation.

The infant was walking in ten days, running in two weeks, and by the end of the third week stood nearly as tall as Nicole, climbing everything in the chamber with the energy of something that didn't yet know fear. Because of their short life spans, the newborns never experienced a real threat to their lives like their seniors had. They lived in an entirely different world, essentially. On the thirtieth day, Nicole brought the first born goblin to Matthew, now fully grown.

The word the system used was 'maturity,' but that was misleading. The body was an adult's body: dense-muscled, steady-handed, and sharp-eyed. The mind behind it was blank. No context, no training, nothing beyond motor function and hunger. An adult body with an infant's awareness. He needed to educate them, Matthew realized. In his old world, the Prussians had developed the model for what had become the modern schooling system in order to produce good soldiers.

He would learn from them because he needed the same thing. Nicole grunted at him.

"Nicole," said Nicole, shoving the confused young goblin toward Matthew. He realized the warren had gone quiet. Nobody had called for it. But the goblins were filing in from every tunnel and chamber, arranging themselves in a rough semicircle, and watching. Matthew understood. They expected it now. Like Casual Friday or the infamous Bagel Tuesday, it had become corporate culture within the company. Naming. Matthew looked at the freshly matured goblin. Female.

She was stout-framed and had a kind face as far as goblins went.

"Linda," he said. She felt like a Linda. A murmur went through the crowd, and the stamping started. Nicole gave him the implements and he made the tag and tied it around her neck, and the stamping intensified. This would become their tradition. Goblins would earn their name at maturity. Not all of them made it to thirty days. Some died before that because of some unseen complication in their biology that even he couldn't understand. Acts of God, as an insurance policy would label it. Some would get sick.

Some would have accidents; the Warren was dangerous. They returned them to the tree. More followed over the next weeks, earning their names. A litter came of age, three at once: Stacy, Peter, and Alice. Then Frank. Then Barbara and Henry. The ceremony repeated each time with small variations the goblins added themselves: a chant of the new name to teach every member of the tribe what it was.

An order of standing as Nicole integrated herself into the process at his side, and a nametag passed around the crowd to the newly named, who would put it on themselves as a symbolic 'claim' to their name. These mannerisms just developed on their own. He was aware, uncomfortably, that he was no longer just a manager to these people in an organizational sense. He set that thought aside too, one more thing to watch. The population count at the end of the month was thirty. Up from twenty after the attack.

Up from twenty-three at the start of all this. Thirty was also a dozen more mouths, ten more bodies to shelter, and ten more workers to train. Growth wasn't free. [SYSTEM NOTICE] Current Territory Radius: 300m from the [Dryad Tree] Together with the population, the radius of his territory climbed as well. They were linked. Ten goblins for a hundred meters more. A hundred more meters of game, of berries, of wood. The warren needed to be rebuilt.

Matthew called Rick, who arrived with the adventurer's sword on his back and a bolt still in his shoulder, having ignored every instruction to yank it out, the employee who'd rather expire on the job than fill out a leave request for a day off. He wasn't sure if Rick was just leaving the bolt inside of him to present as tough or if he was genuinely afraid to have it pulled out. But the healing powers of goblins had kept the wound shut and free of infection. But he had to assume that it was deeply uncomfortable.

"Rick. I need you to walk me through the most obvious path in. Pretend you're the kind of idiot who'd kick in a goblin front door without checking the ceiling." Rick didn't need to pretend. He just started walking, pointing with his good arm while Matthew sketched on the cave wall. It was interesting. They really understood him now. They were becoming much smarter with their increased levels. Rick was amongst his highest-level employees. FOLLOWER LEVEL UP!

Through proper nutrition, all present goblins have gained +01 levels of experience! GOBLINS PER LEVEL The architectural postmortem was unsparing but visually reestablished what Matthew had identified earlier himself. He started the renovation that afternoon.

Using his Territorial Manipulation ability, he carved a false junction six meters in, a four-way intersection where the obvious route dead-ended into a sealed chamber, while the real path turned left, then right, then right again, forcing anyone entering to make three blind directional choices. Overhead ambush slits, goblin-width with interior handholds, went into the ceiling at every choke point, Rick's contribution, formalizing the drop-ambush Janet had improvised on the fly during the invasion.

The main corridor, once wide enough for two humans abreast, was narrowed to single file. A man in armor would have to turn sideways to pass. A second entrance, small and unmarked, was carved into the far side of the hillside: an emergency exit, a supply route, and a flanking position for hunters.

DUNGEON CHAMBERS Central Chamber Sleeping Quarters Smoking Storage Palisade Entryway Corridor + Switchback Dead End Emergency Exit DUNGEON STATUS Mana: 91/1, 000 INCOME / EXPENSES (PER HOUR) Passive: +1 Parasitic Drain: +6. 5 Rat Farm: +0. 8/hr Rabbit Farm: +1. 2/hr Upkeep: -0. 5 Goblins: -3. 8 Net Result: +5. 2 Mana per Hour Their margin had shifted since the last count but was still comfortably positive.

"Comfortable" was a word Matthew hadn't been able to use in a while. The core chamber was no longer a straight shot from the door. The flywheel of his operation was turning. More food meant more mana. More mana meant more infrastructure. More infrastructure meant more safety, and more safety meant more growth, and growth fed the farms and the tunnels and the next expansion after that. For the first time, the pieces were feeding each other in the direction he wanted. His business was small and fragile.

It was running on a thin margin in a market that wanted it dead. But it was running. For the first time since a vending machine had crushed him in a hallway in another world, Matthew looked at the numbers and thought they might really work. Behind him, the fungal patch stirred. He looked at it, staring at the horrified silhouette of an encased face.

Somewhere beyond the boundary of his territory, in a guild hall Matthew had never seen, a guild clerk in the backwater township of Dunkelhollow looked at a quest note pinned up on the board some three weeks ago. He tapped his fingers against the counter, thinking for a moment, and then went back to his books.