I Found a Door to the Elven Realm

Chapter 179: Elves are building a farm on Earth!

Thirty-three skills.

Eren scrolled through the list twice because the first time he didn’t believe it. His old skill panel used to fit on one screen with room to spare. Now the thing looked like a phone settings menu with too many options. Half of them he’d never even used before and most of those came from a version of himself that died in a swamp thirty-eight days after being born.

The Clone lived for five weeks and picked up more useful skills than I did in almost six months. That’s either impressive or embarrassing and I genuinely don’t know which one.

He closed the panel and looked around. The farm was chaotic but in a good way.

Elves were everywhere for a starter. A group of older elf craftsmen were unloading leather bundles near the main farmhouse and arguing in rapid Elvish about which room would get the archive scrolls. Three of the younger ones were trying to figure out the water pump behind the dormitory building and based on the sounds coming from that direction, they were losing badly.. Against Modern Earth by the way, no one else..

They looked funny as they argued so Eren didn’t even try to help. Sometimes small conflicts and problems would teach more than a teacher right..?

Emily had already disappeared into the farmhouse to handle something with Oldir and Selena. She’d kissed his cheek on the way past and said "don’t break anything while I’m gone mister" and he’d been too distracted by the skill list to respond properly.

She is still pushing my buttons..

He should’ve said something cute in return but he always thought of the good lines five minutes too late.

But he was innocent, the skills kept pulling at his brain. Specifically the Clone’s inheritance.

It was absurd how far he went in a desperate situation!

Eight Evolution League 2 skills at Level 1. That meant the Clone had pushed each of those skills past Level 9 and through their first evolution. Skills like Kinetic Flux Runner, Extreme Climbing, Hunter’s Tracking, things that were practical and combat-ready.

And then there was Apex Predator Awareness with Feline Enchanted Rare quality tag.

So basically.. the Clone spent five weeks running from everything in the deep forest and the system rewarded his survival instincts with a rare perception skill? That’s how this works?

He didn’t fully understand what "Feline Enchanted" meant yet but the Clone’s memories gave him a vague sense of it. Enhanced spatial awareness, better reaction to movement in peripheral vision, something about tracking multiple threats at once. Like having cat reflexes layered over his existing half-elf senses.

"..not bad for a dead guy" he muttered while watching two elf women carry a rolled carpet across the gravel path.

The biggest change wasn’t any single skill though, it was the quantity of variety.

Thirty-three active skills meant thirty-three different training paths, thirty-three different evolution trees that could branch and upgrade. Emily had spent years pushing her hunting skills through evolution leagues one at a time of three skills only. Unlike Eren others could only get their skills from the totems, at least thats what Elves been thinking.

Maybe there was a bigger world outside of the forest but it wasn’t the urgency now.

There was another problem with the skills coming from Clone. And that was the level numbers and how they weren’t the same as knowing how to use them.

The Clone’s muscle memory was there in his head like watching someone else’s workout videos but he hadn’t actually tried half of these himself. The difference between knowing how a skill worked from absorbed memories and knowing it from your own body was probably huge.

He needed training time. Real training time in Evon where he could push these skills against actual threats and earn real experience. Not here on the farm where the most dangerous thing was Rury stealing food from the storage shed.

Speaking of which.

[There are strange animals in those wooden stickly guarded area!] Rury’s voice popped into his head from somewhere across the property. [Small ones with feathers. They smell delicious.]

"Those are chickens from Rosa just bought Rury. Don’t eat the chickens so they will give us delicious eggs.."

[EGGS! Ahemm-so these little things give us eggs huh.. What a nice things they are. I will protect them.]

Eren rubbed his face and walked toward the main farmhouse while a drooling overeager wolf was grinning and terrifying the chickens.

The farmhouse was the only building on the 25-acre property that qualified as an actual house from the outside at least.

It had two floors, stone foundation with wooden upper structure, a kitchen that hadn’t been updated since probably the 1990s and bedrooms on the upper floor with windows facing the Aegean sea coastline.

From the second floor you could see the water, a strip of deep blue between the olive trees and the cliff edge about three hundred meters out.

It was a beautiful location, he’d give it that.

The bankrupt mushroom farmer who built this place fifteen years ago had good taste in views even if his business plan was garbage. Growing mushroom with sea was just beside was wild thinking.

But the rest of the property looked like it had been abandoned by someone in a hurry and then ignored by everyone after that for over a decade.

The dormitory building where the workers would’ve lived was concrete and flat-roofed with about twenty rooms of varying sizes. There was no electricity or even electricity lines in that. Also no running water even if the pipeline was installed a long time ago.

There were broken windows on the ground floor and stains on the ceiling from years of rain leaking through cracks.

The garage was actually in decent shape because concrete and corrugated metal didn’t rot as fast as wood. Two old tractor bays, some rusted tool racks and a concrete floor that Oldir and his new team had already cleaned and turned into a temporary storage area.

Then there were the smaller structures. Plank cabins, a greenhouse frame with no glass, a collapsed fence line that used to separate the mushroom growing area from the rest.

Twenty-five acres of potential and problems.

Eren found Emily in the farmhouse kitchen with Selena and three of the elder craftsmen. They were looking at something spread across the table but he couldn’t see what because Selena’s body was blocking it.

"What’s going on?" He leaned over Emily’s shoulder and she tilted her head to let him kiss her neck without stopping her conversation with the elders.

They were so serious about whatever the topic was..

"Room assignments." Emily tapped a piece of paper with hand-drawn squares on it. "Oldir counted the rooms in the dormitory. Twenty-two total but four are too damaged for anyone to sleep in without fixing the ceiling first."

"Eighteen rooms for over two hundred people." Eren did the math fast. "That’s about eleven people per room."

"Some are bigger than others." Selena pointed at the rough map. "Six of the rooms on the ground floor could hold fifteen or twenty if we fill the floors with proper bedding. But the upper floor rooms are smaller."

The old craftsman elf next to her said something in rapid Elvish that Eren caught most of. Something about the walls between two upper rooms being thin enough to knock down.

"He’s right." Emily translated the rest for Selena’s benefit since she was already fluent. "If we remove the walls between some of the smaller rooms we can create bigger sleeping areas. The craftsmen did it before in the old village when families merged households."

Eren looked at the farmhouse’s own upstairs. Four bedrooms, one bathroom, a hallway with a creaky floor. "Who’s in the farmhouse?"

Emily looked at him with an expression that said the answer was obvious. "Us. Your family. The wolves because Rury refuses to sleep in any building that doesn’t have you in it in this new world. She says you have to act as a wolf pack leader in this new world and teach everything to cubs."

My family. That now includes seven pregnant elf women and two wolf cubs the size of motorcycles.

"And Rosa?" he asked carefully.

Emily’s jaw tightened for exactly one second. Then she exhaled through her nose. "Rosa has the small room at the end of the hall. She’s been staying there since before the evacuation."

Eren decided not to push that conversation any further right now. But that girl had been laid off for taking too many days off from work, and she deserved to be here just as much as the others. She had made too many sacrifices, and Eren considered her his own.

That evening was the first night where every single elf on the property had to find somewhere to sleep at the same time.

It didn’t go well.

The dormitory building held about eighty people packed tight with blankets and bedrolls on the concrete floors. The farmhouse took Eren’s household which was getting bigger by the week. The garage became a sleeping area for another thirty elves who said they preferred the open air feeling of the metal roof.

And the rest just went outside.

The thing was, it was still warm. Late autumn on the Gallipoli coast was nothing compared to the Evon winter that had already started on the other side. The elves who’d spent decades dealing with Evon’s cold wet seasons and the constant threat of monsters in the dark actually seemed happier sleeping under olive trees than in concrete rooms. There was a strong wind with sea effect but apart from that, things were nice.

Thadric set up a perimeter check anyway because old habits died hard after months of doing the same thing in the village. He walked the fence line with his spear and came back twenty minutes later looking confused.

"There’s nothing out there." He put his spear against the farmhouse wall. "No threats. No sounds. No animals bigger than a stray dog which tried to ger close to Rury but Fury drove them away. It’s too quiet."

"That’s what safe feels like Thadric." Eren was on the porch with a cup of instant coffee that Rosa had bought from the nearest town today. "You’ve been living in a deadly forest for fifty years. Normal quiet is going to feel weird for a while and obviously safe night time is also a thing here. Check the internet and watch some tv shows then you will understand the Earth.."

Thadric picked up his spear again, looked at it and put it back down. "I don’t like it."

"Nobody’s asking you to like it. Just sleep for now. After seeing the kardashian show, you will slowly like this world."

He looked back with like asking what the hell was a kardashian but Eren just grinned.

These elven males were molested and abused by their culture and family ties for centuries. Maybe after finding human women partners and finally getting their kids would do good.

He hoped good things for all of them.

The rancher scratched the back of his neck and walked off toward the barn where he’d set up a cot next to the animal pens. He always slept near the animals. It was his version of a security blanket.

Eren sat there with his cold coffee and looked at the sky.

No dragon glow on the horizon. No orange haze from burning forests. Just stars and the faint sound of the Aegean somewhere past the cliff. An owl called from the olive grove and two of the younger elves near the greenhouse laughed at something.

It should have felt peaceful. And it did for about thirty seconds before his brain started calculating.

Two hundred and forty elves. Over a hundred of them hadn’t learned Turkish or English yet. They couldn’t leave the property without being seen and they couldn’t be seen without answering questions that had no good answers. They needed food, water, shelter, electricity, legal identity and long-term income. All of it built from scratch on a bankrupt mushroom farm with no infrastructure.

And he had about 250 thousand dollars left. A large amounts of money but now infinite.

Half a million sounded like so much money three months ago. Now it feels like it might not even be enough to keep the lights on.

He drank the rest of his coffee and went inside.