20 1.20: Cultivate

It has been a week since I had returned from New Hope Village. I had been practicing meditating religiously in order to increase Qi power. I was able to visualize the battle stances and prowess that appear within my mind periodically when I meditated with the keris in my hands.

Other than that I would experience vortexes of energy coursing through my body that kept increasing daily and made my body lighter and my thinking clearer.

The Third Eye remained as it is with no other changes at all. In the evening subconsciously I can see certain spirits and figures hanging around the communal areas and other parts of the jungle.

Back in the past, I am sure you guys have read about ghost stories where spirits and other low-level evil spirits loved to longer at 'dirty' places such as graves, drainage, swamps area and the like.

Well, those are the ones my Third Eye had allowed me to see them and they may or may realized that they are been seen by me. Frankly speaking with the Third Eye also enabled me to see them in the daytime.

As they do not pose any danger or threat to anyone around, I decided to leave them alone. Unless one that tried to harm someone would I then be using the Keris to banish them further into the netherworld.

Coming back to a few days back, Cheng had sent a carrier pigeon message back to Boss Fei regards the next transactions. They managed to harvest about 4 baskets of mussels and thus 4 baskets of other goods and merchandise were exchanged. I, as their supervisor, opted to trade them with grains and other items that take longer time to perish.

In my free time, I had taught Ani how to cultivate her own onions, garlic, tomatoes, chilies, and other vegetables in small amounts at the back of the dirty kitchen so that she would not need to rely on the merchants' trade in the next few months. This was not to undercut the business but simply wished to exchange the trade for more grains instead.

The grains can be made into rice when the women would be able to de-husk them or otherwise they would run it through a stone grinder to turn them into flour thus being able to store for longer periods in the granary.

I also took the opportunity to scout the area around the settlement and found that the area was only good for tubers and such. The area around was not so resourceful for growing rice or wheat that was the main staple for the village.

I was surprised that the settlement; even though was small did not have a group of farmers but planters instead. So with the little knowledge that I had, I managed to guide some 2 to 3 residents to become farmers. I was unable to guide them by using hydroponics of the modern day but with the current era, the organic way of cultivating the land seemed to be the best bet by planting directly into the plowed and loosened soil.

In a short while after clearing certain parts of the land and creating parallel mounds of soil along a distance of approximately 10 meters in length; spaces of half a meter between the twenty rows of mounds. For each every two rows of mounds, we planted seeds of chili, tomatoes, okra, brinjal, long beans, green cabbage, shallots, garlic, potatoes, and sweetcorn.

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These seeds were acquired by splitting the vegetables and removing their seeds from within. As for tomatoes, it's a simple act of squashing it and letting it dry in the sun. Garlic and onions have a simpler approach. Garlic cloves were broken apart so each garlic piece was planted with the rooted part into the ground. Shallots were planted in the same manner as garlic.

Potatoes were halved midway and then planted with their part that was cut upwards. Long beans were planted on rows of the bamboo strip like terraces so that the tendrils would be able to climb upwards and bear their beans suspended from the bamboo stripes that were suspended above.

At least with this labor, whatever that was sown would produce results within a week or two depending on the types of vegetables grown.

(So back to the topic of me catching up with my daily meditation and fortnight spiritual cleansing of the keris.)

Fast forward...

After close to a month, I was close to completing my first phase of Skills from Losing Self and would be waiting to upgrade to Gathering Chi soon. After checking with the brothers on their next trip with me to the old Master's home at New Hope Village, we readied ourselves for another trip there.

Dawn was breaking. We made our usual preparations and head out towards the path that leads to Stone Village, where Gao was putting up. Upon reaching there, Gao as the great-grandson of the Chief Village in Stone Village held a feast for us as well as the villagers of the settlement.

Soon some of the residents of the settlements prepared a roast portion of a bison that they had caught earlier in the day after they had skinned it and given the hide to the one in charge of drying the skin. We learned that they were going to improvise the hide to make a component of a composite hunting bow.

Cheng made a mental note to trade some composite bows for the residents in Bamboo Village in the days to come so that the lives of the villages would improve by adding one or two hunters to their trade.

Because Bamboo Village was a small settlement with not more than 50 residents, future expansion of the settlement may be in place soon once the trade and resources there had signs of thriving in the near future.

Bamboo liquor was distributed once again and the feast soon turned into a fiesta. I am pretty sure that all of us would not be able to hold our liquor and would most probably end up sprawling on the ground instead.

I advised the brothers to control the limit of consumption as we realized that the bamboo liquor would definitely kick in a tremendous hangover the next day and would impair our judgment especially when we meeting the old Master.

After a few rounds of bamboo cups filled with the liquor that had passed around between us, we excused ourselves to rest instead. Promising to Gao that we would be returning back to the settlement after coming back from New Hope Village, Gao relentlessly allowed us to leave and we headed to the same platform to rest our weary bodies yet full with food and drink.

The next day we woke up early as the rooster crowed to wake up the whole village. We washed up, shook our heavy heads to clear the hangover. As usual, Gao was already up and with his servants trailing behind; served several cups of hot tea and some steamed sweet potatoes.

(A tradition of these people: if they serve you with a jug, they expect you to stay around after breakfast such as in this case. However, if they served your drinks in cups, they would likely be happy to see you continue your journey after you emptied the cup)

So after exchanging some words with Gao, we continued our journey towards New Hope Village.

... Mid-morning...