Ping!
Not even fifteen minutes into the harvesting program, Rino already completed his daily quest.
===
Daily Quest #9 (Complete)
Objective: Harvest Potatoes
0/500 Potatoes
Time Limit: 2 Days.
Tutorial here.
Reward: Offering Reward Shop.
Claim your reward here.
Penalty: Deduct 24 hours of sleep upon failure and [Curse of Overtime] until quest is forcefully completed.
===
He smashed on the claim reward option and never looked back on his decision. He wanted to see what sort of game these gods were playing. Sleep reward buff? It only made him more suspicious of their intentions.
[Offering Reward Shop obtained. Please check your new tab.]
Giving it a chance, Rino explored the new tab in his Daily Quest System. By now, the side tabs were collecting in numbers. He had a main quest tab, a side quest tab, a sleep reward wallet tab and now, this.
From above, Ark looked away. Indeed, he might be a little inefficient and messy when planning the tabs and optimising the system. However, for something that they scraped together, functionality was the most important. If it worked, he wasn't going to change it. The user interface and satisfaction was of least priority for now. They still had several updates to roll out that had not been completely thought out.
The Offering Reward Tab was very classic, and Rino was reminded of the daily mail he received about the trade prices for royal bonds sold to the citizens. Nobles often spend their time buying and selling these papers to turn their money into more money, but Rino never bought any. After all, everything goes back to the King in the form of taxes. He never desired money as long as he had enough to pay his expenses and fund his projects.
Now, it was different. Unlike royal bonds, there was something that Rino wanted from this system.
He could turn potatoes in for a God's Favour Credit that acted like those bonds. While it could not be used elsewhere for any other purposes for anyone else, Rino liked that he could claim 8 hours of sleep daily from this reward shop in case the gods gave him a dry spell of boring rewards that did not consist of sleep hours.
In some way, Rino liked the idea of a repeatable quest with a cooldown time. In some ways, he hated that idea when they placed a limit on the rewards he could earn. Then again, these gods were controlling everything, including how many hours of sleep a day he could withdraw from his sleep wallet and how many hours he could sleep for in one day.
They were definitely not siding for a monarchy or a diplomatic nation. It was closer towards communism and dictatorship in this kingdom.
If the king could not even enjoy his freedom, how could his subjects? It wasn't fair, and Rino never said he was a gracious loser. He would act as salty as he wanted because he could not sleep for a decade straight.
Scrolling through the very pathetic Offering Reward Shop, Rino grimaced inwardly. There wasn't much he was interested in because there wasn't much to see either. Apart from the sleep reward, Rino was given a choice for claiming some recipes that he currently did not need or want. There were some items as well, like those stupid potato seeds and magical crops that Rino did not want to grow because it was more work. However, there was something else that he liked a little more than the sleep reward.
It was just so fucking expensive that Rino wanted to break a rib and use it to stab the system.
"10 God's Favour Credits for a day off?! How many potatoes would that take?!"
Even if he counted 8 hours of sleep in a day, Rino only needed three of those to make a full day or not work if he was allowed to do so. This reward was a clear rip-off, and Rino wanted to complain to the customer service manager about it. Except, nobody was working in that department. Everything was decided by the system that the detestable gods designed.
He checked the currency exchange and deadpanned. Five hundred potatoes for one credit. Was this even fair? Potatoes did not grow unlimitedly, even if he worked his slaves without a break. Plants were not broken ribs. They did not have high-speed regeneration magic to aid them.
Rino calmed down and decided to maximise the use of this useless wisdom perk. If he were 10% wiser than he was yesterday, calculating the number of potatoes he needed to grow would be easy.
For now, potatoes were the compulsory crop to grow all year round. There would be no need to consider a crop rotation at this rate. Rino found no other use for the plants that the system offered for purchase. Potatoes were the right way to do things, and he would stick with what worked because this wasn't an experiment he was willing to invest time in.
As he calculated, Fronzo and the farming team were making quick progress. The pile of potatoes towered so high that they could no longer pile them any higher. It simply overflowed into a huge mess, so the farm manager ordered for a second potato mountain to be made. These tubers were massive, and they only changed the watering recipe.
With the king's special fertiliser recipe, could the new batch even be considered potatoes?
Regular potatoes that Fronzo knew were only as big as two hands. They hardly grew any larger. The potatoes they were digging now were sometimes as huge as a rock that took four goblins to carry it.
Baskets were no longer sufficient after three broke. They needed an upgrade, and Fronzo wondered if the king had a better idea. At this rate of harvesting, they might not be able to complete everything before dawn.
After all, everything in that potato mountain was merely the ones they could reach from the top and were relatively smaller. The true gems were hidden deeper than a foot into the soil and needed to be excavated.