Chapter 298: The Right Quests

That afternoon, the city of Marimgar began to look more like a real city instead of an isolated forest. Thousands of workers were in the fields, pulling weeds that had been verified as non edible, or that the tuber plants attacked themselves, and harvesting crops that had come to full maturity in the short time since the flooding.

There weren’t many of those, but there were a few species that started to grow berries every few days, and if you didn’t pick them, they simply spread like wildfire.

The only way to keep them under control was to pick them, and the residents of Marimgar were more than happy to do that. At least for the few hours before they realized just how hot it got in the afternoon.

Sure, the heroes were all in battle armour that regulated temperature, but nobody else was.

So, between the violent berry bushes, the heat of the afternoon sun, and the group’s determination to get just a little bit more finished, there were a lot of sweaty humans returning to the city for dinner, looking for a cool shower and a hot meal.

Marimgar could offer both, but the sight of so many coming back in with excess food, the last bit that they could carry from their shifts, while the rest went to storage, brought about a lot of envy from those who had not volunteered fast enough.

Sure, it was rough work, and outdoors. But there was food at the end, and those berries were incredibly popular.

Kalli laughed as she heard the bickering about who had done the best job picking berries, while she fed her chickens and collected the eggs. Like the residents, the chickens were in a wonderful mood, and they seemed to have finally decided that they were going to stop growing.

Of course, it was hard to call them chickens anymore, thought they still looked like them. The birds were nearly shoulder height on Kalli, and definitely fell into the category of "winged monsters" and not "domesticated farm animals".

The difference was pretty easy to spot, when John had his cattle out by the gate.

But even with the difference, Kalli had grown fond of her pet chickens, and they were fond of her. They also didn’t take much to keep happy. Just a bit of food and some help cleaning their nests, and they would happily turn over most of the eggs, while keeping a few to grow their flock.

It was like they knew that they would quickly overpopulate their coop if they kept all the eggs, but Kalli wasn’t ready to get into a deep discussion on the mental capacity of chicken monsters right now.

Instead, she focused on what was important.

Keeping track of all the new awakenings, and the patterns that were leading to them. As long as they could figure that out, they would be able to complete the second goal of the trial in good form, with as many humans awakened as possible.

It was the first condition, to prepare humanity for the Ascension of the world, that was going to give them problems.

Presumably, it just meant getting everyone as powerful as possible as fast as possible, and they were already doing that. But there could very well be more to it that Kalli wasn’t aware of, and that lack of information bothered her a great deal.

As did the fact that not a single person she had seen since the consolidation had come from the moon bases or the space stations.

Those had seemed like the safest options, the ones where the population would face the fewest threats. At least, before the solar storm. So, the fact that there didn’t seem to be a single survivor was troubling.

If there were a few, arriving with radiation burns and horror stories, it would make sense. But zero suggested that something had happened to them long before the storm.

At least she wasn’t as busy at the store these days.

All that she really had to do was to make a few more quests, now that she knew what everyone was going to be doing.

{Quest Issued} [Guide the farmers] Easy Difficulty. Ensure that a group of twenty or more farmers remain safe through their shift.

{Quest Issued} [Berry Picker] Easy Difficulty. Collect 100kg of food from outside the city walls. If you can’t be a hunter, you can at least be a gatherer, right?

Kalli laughed as she saw the description that the System had given the quest that she issued.

Then she tried to update one for the greenhouses, and found that there was an issue.

{Difficulty too low. This task falls under the existing mission to complete four hours of skilled labour.}

Kalli sighed as she realized that they couldn’t double up on the missions inside the city, and there weren’t any monsters around to add more quests outside the city. But they had ones for food gathering as well as fishing, and that was a good start.

As long as people were doing those, and getting all the points that they could, it would put the city in a food surplus for quite some time.

They just had to be wary of overfishing, and to avoid attracting sea monsters, or angering the sea folk villages that were nearby. Well, presumably nearby. Kalli had no idea where they actually lived, other than under the ocean.

It might not even be on the ocean floor, it might be some neutral balance thing, and they floated through the waters at a variable depth.

There were many mysteries to the ocean, but the monsters were too terrifying to go looking deeply at the situation.

After a moment’s consideration, Kalli added another quest.

{Quest Issued} [Educated] Easy Difficulty. Teach a subject for one hour to ten or more people. You must be more knowledgeable than they are on the topic.

There, now that was better, and the teachers could do four hours of work, plus host a class, for double the rewards daily.

A great way to keep the knowledge flowing.