Chương 59: Chapter 60: Getting Ready for Samhain

Samhain, Day 200 Hydref 30th (October 30th) The big day was just about here. It was insane to me to think that I'd only been in this world for two hundred days. In some ways, it felt like it had just happened yesterday, and in others, like I'd been here for years already. At this stage, they had completed our manor house, along with the animal barns, the potato cellars, and the food storage and preservation stuff. Anything that needed runes was done.

We had also set up the different plots we'd be using for next year. We could farm eighty acres of each of the three plots we'd bought. With the sixty from the homestead, that gave us three hundred acres across fifteen farming plots. We would grow three potato plots, four plots of wheat, six corn plots, one plot of barley, and a plot of red beans. I added the beans because my Ground Specialist skill told me they were needed in our cornfield. Corn took nitrogen from the soil, and beans added it back in.

It was a little curious, since I had expected the field to be good for corn for at least another year thanks to my Soil Expert skill. Maybe it was because we took the corn stalks out instead of plowing them under. I was going to put corn in the potato field, and wheat would go back into last year's wheat field because my skill said so. There would be two cornfields, a potato field, and wheat field in three of the four plots that were available, with the barley field replacing a potato field in the fourth.

I chose barley for the final plot because the barley harvest had been extremely poor in the wider empire. It cost me 300 gold to buy the necessary seed. I should get thirty-five to forty bushels just with irrigation and my base 10% yield bonus. The average was twenty-three, and it was going to be selling for 2. 5 gold per bushel this year instead of the normal 1. 5 gold. The System was also offering 1. 5XP per bushel, instead of the normal 1.

It was definitely cool to be able to still have a sort of market report thanks to the System. In the two northern parcels, I had the two pasture plots set next to each other to give us a single forty-acre pasture that I fenced in. Brendan asked me if he could keep his dry cows in this pasture in exchange for free dairy products for the homestead and access to his Herd Leader animals for breeding. I could have charged rent as well, but I didn't need the money, and he'd been a good neighbor.

I wanted to cultivate that relationship as much as possible. I told him that if I didn't get disappeared, I would be happy with that arrangement. A lot of non-dairy people didn't know that you couldn't milk cows all the time. On Talamh, people typically milked a cow for ten months a year. They also needed to be bred yearly since giving birth restarted the lactation cycle, just like with all mammals.

With the doubling of his herd, Brendan was looking to break up his breeding cycle and have his cows calve over a three-month period so his milk production never fell too low. He would have cows on our plot for six months of the year. I put irrigation ditches in on all four of my plots, so my pasture should support the forty cows he planned to have there for those six months. This fit the one cow per acre that we followed on Earth on irrigated land. My southern parcel just had the animal plot closest to the river.

It connected to the barn area and formed a kind of upside-down L shape if you were looking at the homestead from the east. As far as adding animals on our own went, we bought more pigs and some personal horses, but no workhorses yet. Brendan had bred fifteen sows to his Herd Leader boar. We bought three of those sows. One to replace the sow we butchered since she kept killing her piglets, and another to bring us up to six.

Six was the generally accepted number that a single boar could reliably breed, according to my almanac. There was about a twenty percent chance we would end up with a herd leader pig of our own. Our horses were a gorgeous breed they called an Isles Horse. We bought three mares, and they all looked almost identical. They were a beautiful dark reddish-brown color with black manes and black legs from their knees down to their hooves. They were fairly large horses at seventeen hands.

Though they were sleek instead of stocky like a workhorse breed. A hand always seemed like a weird measurement to me; a hand was aboutfour inches, so a seventeen-hand horse stood five and a half feet tall at the shoulders. It might seem weird that they'd use hands as a measurement on this world as well, but I knew that horses had been measured by hands all the way back to the Romans at the very least. Arturos and Merlotus probably played a role in things, and they would have used the same measurement system.

Luckily, the horses had already been well-trained and had a docile temperament because Emily and Colin had very little experience riding. Our bird flocks had grown sufficiently on their own to provide for our egg needs for the next year, but we would still need to add to the flocks to provide enough birds for meat once we hired everyone we planned on. Pointedly, I didn't buy any dogs yet. I was worried it would upset Spot and Buck.

They had done such an amazing job for us this first year that I didn't want to upset them. They'd killed a dozen coyotes, and twice that many foxes and stoats. They'd even killed half a dozen hawks. We'd lost a grand total of two chickens the entire year, both to hawks. The hawks had landed lucky blows and broke the chicken's necks when they struck from the sky. The rabbits had avenged the chickens' deaths immediately. Emily thought we should breed the rabbits in the spring.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it I wasn't sure I agreed, but the flocks we had could move in a pretty big area now that we had four plots. Plus, the rabbits could go into the farm plots and take care of ground squirrels and gophers. Five hundred acres were an awful lot for two rabbits to guard, so I'd probably give in. I told Colin that if he wanted to buy two hunting dogs who would go with him when he went out on his own, he could do that.

That was something he wanted to do, but he'd have to wait until spring. I had zero desire to potty train two puppies in the winter. My new house wasn't getting despoiled yet! There would be a minimum of ten people working on the homestead full-time next year, probably more. Emily was hoping to take on more farm management stuff so she could get to level 20, and then hopefully evolve in a couple of years once we had enough land. That would necessitate at least two women to do the domestic work.

I wasn't being sexist there; only women would sign up to take on those tasks in the quest tab. I still had over 2, 800 homestead XP banked from this year, and I was set to add 25XP per month for each additional plot I had purchased, and I should start doubling my level XP for every level over 20. That would give me 355XP per month to hire workers. Farmhands and Farm Mistresses both cost 20XP per month.

Specialist classes were usually around double the XP per month, but the only specialist class we needed was a blacksmith. I was going to buy Emily the Bookkeeper support class. The easiest known path to a class evolution for Homesteader was to get it to level 20 and then get Bookkeeper to at least level 10. Then, you had to manage a farm of at least five hundred acres. That was five hundred acres of actual farm plots, too.

That seemed suspiciously easy, but it required one to be exceptionally wealthy to pull it off. Luckily we should be wealthy enough to pull it off in only another year or two. Speaking of extra classes, I included the Butcher class for Colin. Emily outright refused to "waste" money, as she called it, on a combat class. They both accepted Hardy Constitution, and Lesser Strength skill scrolls as part of their prenup contracts. I was excited to see what would come in next year if I lived to see it.

I bought both scrolls for myself too. The final big thing we needed to prepare was our prenuptial contract. Emily was willing to do a pretty minimalist contract, but I wanted something that had extensive protections for her and Colin. Lawyer was a class in this world, because of course it would be. Even with the System making contracts easy to prepare and impossible to tamper with, any culture that had contracts for everything was going to have lawyers.

There was a single Lawyer in Weston who was on the Mayor's staff. Emily and I set up a meeting with him, and I paid him to make the fairest contract he could. I made it very clear that I didn't want something that favored me. He seemed mildly surprised since I was the one who had all the assets, but he didn't have any philosophical objections to what I was asking, and the gold spent the same as long as we paid him.

The contract ended up reading like this: John Jacobson and the Widow Emily Lloyd have agreed to be married on Samhain, Hydref 30th, 1604 CE in the 104th year of Emperor Harold II's reign. Mr John Jacobson has agreed to the following provisions as his bride price: He will adopt Colin Lloyd as his lawful son and first heir when it comes to inheritance. Emily Lloyd will retain half the value of the Jacobson Homestead in the event of an at-fault divorce on Mr Jacobson's where he is the transgressor.

Those reasons can include: Physical Abuse by Mr Jacobson. (as defined by the Crown) Dereliction of duties as a Homesteader by Mr Jacobson. Infidelity on Mr Jacobson's part. Emily Lloyd will be provided with the Bookkeeper support class. Colin Lloyd will be provided with the Butcher support class. Mr John Jacobson must provide for the care and upkeep of Emily Lloyd as her husband.

The Widow Emily Lloyd has agreed to the following provisions as the future wife of Mr John Jacobson: Emily Lloyd will help run the Jacobson Homestead using her Bookkeeper support class. Emily Lloyd will do her wifely duties as agreed upon between the couple. In the event of an at-fault divorce where Emily Lloyd is the transgressor, she will forfeit her half of the price for the Jacobson Homestead. Those reasons can include: Infidelity on Emily Lloyd's part.

Abandonment of the Jacobson Homestead on Emily Lloyd's part. The Jacobson Homestead currently includes four (4) parcels. Any parcels acquired in the future will be considered community property, and only an at-fault divorce, as agreed upon by an appropriate mediator, can result in anything less than a fifty/fifty split of those assets.

If either party requests a divorce for any reason other than what is specified here, they would require a special dispensation from the highest-ranked System Priest in the Western Territories. The contract ended up being much shorter than I'd anticipated. The only provision that wouldn't have been in a normal contract was my infidelity being an out for Emily. Some people really broke things down on an animal by animal basis, but I wouldn't have had the patience for it even if I'd wanted to worry about it.

The part about physical abuse as being defined by the Crown was also sketchy, but I hadn't thought deeply about it until after the prenup was registered with the System. A little light physical abuse did not meet the criteria for divorce. Men faced prosecution for domestic abuse only when a woman suffered permanent disability or death. Of course, it wasn't only men who were guilty of this, though they were certainly the main perpetrators.

There were times when a woman was older and much higher level than her husband. That meant she could be stronger than him thanks to the 1% strength bonus per level that all primary classes provided. Even Wizards and other intellectual classes got 1% to the nebulous physical attributes every level. They also just added to their mana pool if they had one. With our prenup out of the way, and some formal wear for me, and a beautiful blue dress for Emily, we were ready to get married. Right after I met with the bishop.

The process of evolving a class from Tier 1 to Tier 2 offers many benefits. Chief among them are four things: First, your intrinsic stat gains double retroactively to level 1, and the Tier 1 class that has evolved will be considered permanently active. You will now be forty percent stronger, faster, and more durable. All levels from 21-40 will grant you four percent greater strength, speed, and durability. Your endurance will receive a similar buff.

Second, you will always have access to all perks and skills you chose as you leveled the class that evolved from levels 1-20. Third, your Tier 2 class skills are separate from any Tier 1 class you may acquire in the same class slot. Fourth, in addition to your stat bonuses, your lifespan will quickly begin to lengthen with each additional level. At level 21, you will live to be 150 years old minimum. You will not begin to age past what would be considered your middle years until you are 120.

At level 40, you should easily live to be 200 years old, and will not hit your twilight years until you are 170 if you achieved level 21 before you were already old age. Excerpt from How to Game Classes and Level Quickly, by Robin Goodfellow. This book is not available in the Albion Trade Guild shop, but it can be purchased by special request.