Chapter 128: The Hoe-ening

[Calis’ Favourability: 17% → 20%]

Tera was stunned.

’Why did it go up?! I didn’t even do anything’

[Host’s degenerate tendencies are returning]

[(·•᷄_•᷅ )]

[Should Host not be focused on the task at hand?]

[Rather than mentally undressing the wolf leader?]

’I was NOT mentally undressing him!’

If she was, she would be fully visualising his cock, something she had never seen before, with such creativity.

[Host’s elevated body temperature and increased heart rate suggest otherwise]

’That is from the HEAT! The WEATHER heat!’

[Stop lying. It is not cute]

[And this system does not trust Host]

[(≖⩊≖)]

[Even the wolves can sense her degenerative mind from a mile away!]

On cue, Tera’s neck whipped so fast she nearly got whiplash. She was checking to see if the wolves had truly noticed her degeneracy and were indeed looking at her.

When she noticed they were too engrossed in their digging, Tera realised she had been tricked.

’You liar! You tricked—’

Tera stopped when she immediately looked at Calis.

Had Calis noticed?!

[Why do you keep comparing your puny shiftless senses to full beasts?]

Tera groaned and moved to the other side of the channel to monitor the wolves digging there, putting as much distance between herself and Calis’s back as physically possible.

She hoped he hadn’t noticed her staring, but she highly doubted it.

’You still haven’t told me why his favourability went up?’

[You called me a liar]

[ಡ ͜ ʖ ಡ]

[Do you want to hear another lie?]

’Urgh! Damn you!’

[Host should return her attention to the digging]

[And this time, not focus on getting horny at the sight of muscles]

[(ᵕ—ᴗ—)]

Tera huffed and crossed her arms, glaring at the empty air where the screen floated.

Fine. She didn’t need the system to tell her why his favourability went up. She could figure it out herself.

Later.

When she wasn’t standing in a forest surrounded by wolves and trying very hard not to look at a certain alpha’s sweating back.

[Oh, lookie there!]

[Two wolves have already dug beyond the designated path!]

Tera gasped, seeing the error and jolted to action, rushing after the wolves to command them.

"Get back in line!"

Many wolves flinched and looked up wide-eyed at Tera’s sudden shout, and it was at that moment of shock that many of them realised that this female had actually been commanding them all this time.

Their ears shot up.

They had been under the illusion that they were following their alpha’s instructions. How had they been doing this all the time when the female had been the one instructing them?

They looked ahead to see their alpha almost at the end, and they were in shock.

Was the female commanding their alpha too?

A wolf whispered to his companion, "Wait, why are we letting this shiftless female control us this way? It isn’t right—"

He received a smack on the back of the head from the other wolf.

"It is for our pack. We need water. Did you not hear the water in that rock and see the special tools she gave us?!"

"What are you doing?!" Tera screeched, brandishing her hoe in their direction, and the look on her face was enough to terrify them to continue digging.

A shiftless beast wasn’t supposed to be this scary!

Soon enough, the artificial stream they had dug reached the dry stream bed and joined it.

There was no time or convenience to line the channel, so Tera then had the wolves gather some of the embedded stones from the part of the stream where water would no longer pass through and pack them into the channel base.

The rocks were bit enough, and there was no clay paste or careful lowering like she had done to the Dow clan’s water channels.

But Tera was confident of one thing.

The stones from chipping away the blockage would help immensely, and in addition to that, the flow from the cavern space would push out minerals and natural sediments that would gradually settle to the base of the channel and help seal the surface over time.

But even before that, they would do their best to spread out the broken stone and limestone patches from the blockage on the base.

It would have to do.

"Now we clear the blockage," Tera said, leading the wolves back to the clogged cavern exit.

This was the harder job. Layers of compressed soil, tangled root systems, rocks, and crumbled limestone had sealed the opening so thoroughly that it looked like a solid wall of rocky earth.

Even though Tera could barely hear anything, the wolves were convinced that upon close inspection they really could hear the flowing water beat against the blockage.

Tera didn’t say anything in her mind so she wouldn’t get roasted by the system.

The hoes, however, turned out to be a huge mistake.

Tera had decided the wolves would take turns striking the blockage. The first wave of strikes against the blockage produced a sound that made every wolf in the vicinity flinch.

A sharp, metallic clang rang through the forest, bouncing off the rocks and reverberating through the trees with a piercing clarity that seemed designed to assault every sensitive ear within a mile radius.

Several wolves whimpered and stumbled backwards, their ears flattening so hard against their skulls that they nearly disappeared.

One wolf dropped his hoe entirely and pressed both hands over his ears, his face twisted in genuine pain.

Even Tera winced. The sound stung her ears, and she didn’t even have beast-level hearing. If it was this uncomfortable for her, the wolves with their sharper senses were suffering tenfold.

’OMG! System! Is there ANYTHING in the shop that can protect ears?!’

[There is no ear protection in the available tiers]

[(◞‸◟)]

’Are you KIDDING me?! You have hoes and lighters and soil softener, but no ear muffs?! They are a staple for this kind of work!’

Tera groaned and turned to the wolves.

The noise aside, the rock had literally damaged the items.

Some of the hoes had bent at the handles. Others had split along the wooden shafts where the wolves had instinctively tightened their grips. The metal heads—if they could even be called metal—were already dented and misshapen from a single strike.

All the hoes were broken, bent, or otherwise destroyed.

This had only happened a few times back in the Dow clan because, with their strengths, beasts were hard hitters, but the rocks here were the major culprits.

The hoes were simply not built for this.