The Cornflower Witch

Book 2: Chapter 21: A Harvest After Trials

Vol 2 Chapter 21: A Harvest After Trials

At the end of August, the wheat in the valley began to ripen, the sea of green gradually turning to gold.

[Wheat] (Rare - 89): Growth status excellent, appears to have potential for further improvement.

Standing before the wheat fields, Sylutia raised her hand, extended her perception, and covered the entire field. In her mind, every plant’s growth, the soil’s nutrients and moisture, and so on, all presented themselves.

When wheat reaches this stage of cultivation, it hits a critical point. If she could help it break through, these wheat stalks could successfully condense an Aspect and reach perfection.

If she were tending only dozens of stalks on her own, this would be easy. But now she faced nearly one hundred mu of wheat, countless plants. In that situation she could only use the Branch Grooming Method to improve the wheat along her path as much as possible. How many would ultimately break through would come down to luck.

Time passed slowly.

Two days later, wheat began to successfully condense the Aspect one after another. Golden ears stretched in the wind, each grain plump and flawless. The scent of abundance filled the valley.

[Wheat] (Perfect - 91): Under your careful cultivation, this wheat has achieved perfect growth and, under the law of Verdant Nectar, condensed an Aspect.

[Wheat Ears] (First Tier · Verdant Nectar): Wheat grains containing plant essence. Their nutrition is ten times that of ordinary wheat, and they have the effects of quickly restoring stamina and slightly enhancing physical constitution. (If used by a baker profession, the nutrition can be fully unlocked to thirty times that of ordinary wheat.)In another two to three days they could be harvested, Sylutia thought, a faint happiness rising inside her.

As if confirming some invisible rule, one morning while Sylutia was still half-asleep, toads began shouting beneath her cottage.

“Ribbit, boss.”

“This is bad, ribbit, there are bugs.”

“Bugs are eating the wheat, so many bugs, ribbit.”

Sylutia opened her eyes and snapped awake. She put on clothes and hurried downstairs.

She saw, on the hillside, many toads busily driving away pests in the fields. Some simply swallowed the insects, others used their abilities to scorch or spray water to knock them down.

Sylutia hurried over and found many wheat stalks being eaten by small dark-red insects. They had a pair of wings and looked like mosquitoes, with slender proboscises they plunged into the wheat ears and sucked out the grains.

[Dark-Blood Sap-Sucking Insect] (First Tier · Insect Moth): A special insect that can sense the scent of abundance. They can grow by feeding on plants that have condensed Aspects, and are major enemies of Verdant Nectar.

Although labeled First Tier, insect First Tier should not be judged by individuals. Often a swarm’s Aspect power can match ordinary First Tier creatures. That makes single insects weak, but their ability to gather and disperse at will makes their attacks hard to defend against.

There were countless Dark-Blood Sap-Sucking Insects drifting through the wheat—perhaps hundreds of thousands—rising and falling through the abundant fields, occasionally selecting plump grains to guzzle.

Seeing this, Sylutia’s mood plunged, but she quickly grabbed the lantern and counterattacked.

With all her power channeled, drops of high-concentration Verdant Dew Water fell into the Fire Glow Orchid’s core. Invisible waves of flame washed again and again, burning many Dark-Blood Sap-Sucking Insects into black ash.

Under such high-temperature flame waves, even though Sylutia tried to control them, large swathes of wheat stalks still caught fire. At that moment she had no choice but to accept the collateral damage.

Holding the lantern, she darted through the fields. Orange fire rings spread, incinerating the dark-red flying insects into blazing spheres that expanded and imploded rapidly, while large areas of wheat ears turned charred black.

After many such runs she finally began to gain control. Even though some Dark-Blood Sap-Sucking Insects remained, they were no longer a massive, coordinated swarm.

She then pulled back her firepower to reduce harm to the fields, finished off the remaining insects, and had the toads begin extinguishing flames.

Making pass after pass, Sylutia’s feet moved constantly through the fields, rooting out Dark-Blood Sap-Sucking Insects hiding in tiny corners to avoid leaving hidden dangers. Still, she discovered many microscopic eggs in the soil.

Even when she swept over the soil with flame waves, some eggs buried deep in the dirt were hard to burn thoroughly and would survive.

At that point, increasing firepower would only destroy the wheat fields, so Sylutia had no choice but to leave the eggs for now and focus on the adult insects.

After a full day’s hard work, the remaining insects in the fields were cleared. That was thanks to the girl’s exceptionally strong perception and observation—no tiny insect could escape her detection.

At dusk, standing before the fields and looking at the blackened, toppled wheat, Sylutia sighed and had to accept the result.

Her lack of experience showed: relying only on innate talent and trial-and-error easily leads to pitfalls. Events in the transcendent world cannot be reasoned about with ordinary logic and assumptions.

From later investigation and consulting records, she learned that these Dark-Blood Sap-Sucking Insects likely flew here from a distant place, probably beyond the settlement border—a dangerous, unstable Shadow World—drawn by the valley’s vast Verdant Nectar-condensed scent.

The war between Verdant Nectar and the Insect Moth goes back to the Vault Sea Epoch of the Second Epoch. The original Fungal Threads Aspect was eaten by centipede-like creatures, their juices spilling into the primal sea, transforming into swimming fish that in turn consumed the centipedes.

Eventually, the Fungal Threads were devoured by the centipedes, their remaining essence turning into tides. The swimming fish hunted down the insect masses and became the dominant predators. They grew enormous, roaming the skies and seas, and condensed the True Fish Aspect.

How Verdant Nectar was reborn after the centipedes’ extinction, and how the Insect Moth inherited the centipedes’ winged flight—that story belongs to the Fourth Epoch, the era when those species exploded.

By the next day the ash and insect carcasses and eggs in the fields had been cleared.

For the next three nights, Sylutia rose each night to patrol once, ensuring no surprises, and during the day she had the toads watch the fields and warn her immediately if anything happened.

In the end, the remaining wheat matured perfectly and the harvest arrived.

After trials and hardships, those heavy ears seemed to carry extra weight. Sylutia felt acutely the difficulty of growing and harvesting food.

Several days later the wheat was completely harvested, then dried and threshed.

One hundred mu produced about twenty thousand jin of wheat, of which rare-quality wheat was about seventeen thousand jin, and perfect-quality wheat about three thousand jin.

Other apprentices and gardeners averaged 120 jin of grain per mu, a result of fertilizer use. The valley’s fields, benefiting from alfalfa’s powerful soil-enriching effect, raised yields up to a limit of 300 jin per mu. To increase further would likely require improving the wheat strain.

Had there been no insect disaster, the total yield for one hundred mu could have reached about thirty thousand jin, which is currently the peak Sylutia could achieve.

Fresh spring water purifying Distortion, alfalfa fertilizing the soil, Praying Dew, Branch Grooming, Verdant Eye, Nature Perception, Discernment Eyes—these combined effects reached the final limits of quality and output.

If production were expanded further, mass-producing Rare-quality wheat should be possible. Perfect-quality wheat, limited by her personal energy and time, could at most reach around three thousand jin.

Though there were setbacks, this harvest would shock the entire Ashen Plains. Other Third Tier gardeners in the settlement collectively produced about six thousand jin of perfect-quality wheat, and a single gardener’s managed fields usually did not even reach one thousand jin.

Now the golden grains were piled full in the granary, and how to deal with these harvests became Sylutia’s new headache.

How could she explain that an apprentice gardener who had only recently advanced could, within months, achieve results far surpassing Third Tier gardeners?

Would she become famous overnight, the valley’s new shining star, attracting attention wherever she went?

That would take her far away from the peaceful pastoral life she longed for.