So, I Transmigrated Into The Heavenly Realm

14. A Farmer's Find

 14

Summer's heat was beginning to ebb away and each day brought less and less daylight to work by. It was never all that hot here, the altitude meant that even the hottest days of summer were very temperate. Today, the sun was warm enough to be out in the field.

The little field stood at the foot of a tall mountain whose northern face was already covered in snow. Other mountains that formed the chain rose on the other side of the sloping valley. Normally it would have been better to farm closer to the river's edge in the lowest point of the valley where it would be flatter and easier to farm but this was the only land suitable for the crop that was to be planted.

In the corner of the field, where the scabby looking bushes that made up the border were looking in need of trimming, someone was digging a hole. It wasn't a very big hole, the farmer was digging it with a small hand trowel as he squatted by the side of it.

This was the same hole that he dug every year in the pink light of dawn as the birds began to sing. There was no way he would even think about trying to plant anything here without digging the hole for the offering. He wasn't the only person who had dug the hole either, countless generations of his family had done this, it was a tradition that they had diligently passed down through the years.

They weren't the last people to still be farming here in the valley for a reason.

Every autumn a farmer had come here into this corner of the field and dug a hole large enough to bury a loaf of bread made with the last flour ground from the previous year's wheat grain. It was highly likely he was digging a hole where a hole had already been dug. A hole within a hole.

The soil they had dug before him. The soil they had all made and the soil they protected.

Every year they saved that flour to make the sacrificial bread to ask for luck in the next harvest. A harvest that his family relied on in order not to starve. There was only one crop that would grow in this soil and only this field that they could grow it in. The next settlement wasn't for miles, you had to traverse an entire mountain range to get there and travellers rarely crossed in the opposite direction even in the summer.

His grandfather had told him tales of the rockslide that had buried all the other farmable land beneath boulders, rocks and gravel choking out the crops that had been planted there. It was a miracle that their own had only faced a thick layer of small rocks. Everyone in the family had banded together back then and dug their way back down to the soil.

Most of the other farming families had fled after seeing their harvests destroyed by tons of rock they had no way of clearing before the winter came. Some had held out, slowly clearing the land but it hadn't been easy to grow enough to live on. Children that would have continued farming the ancestral land disappeared into the towns and villages on the other side of the mountains never to return to the soil.

Despite his own family having removed so much of the rockfall, the shifting soil beneath him had new secrets to be revealed every year the plough passed through it. It wasn't uncommon to unearth a few rocks. That's why he wasn't overly surprised at first when his trowel hit something solid.

The sound it made as it hit off of the rock beneath was rather loud and the vibration that travelled up his arm hurt his wrist. He tried to manoeuvre the trowel around the sides of the hole, hoping to find the edge of the rock to lever it out of the ground but he could not find one.

He got down onto his knees and brushed at the loose soil around it enlarging the hole still in search of the edge of this stubborn fieldstone. It seemed like it was going to be one of the bigger ones. A fieldstone this size and sitting so shallowly in the soil would definitely damage the plough or harrow if it wasn't dug up.

Finding it now was a good thing and he made sure to thank whoever it was that had guided the trowel in his hand to it. It was a good thing that he still kept the old ways, otherwise he would be out both time and money this winter. Bent harrow tines weren't fun to straighten and a damaged plough blade was a three day journey to a blacksmith to fix. Something this big might have left him having to buy an entirely new one and that was something his paltry savings could not afford.

After ten minutes of digging and still not finding the edge of this stone, he went back up to the farmhouse to fetch a spade.

Every spadeful of dirt that he removed in order to find an edge to the stone surprised him. The thing that he had at first thought to be the size of a large plate, a real chunky lump of limestone or granite that had tumbled down the mountain was definitely bigger than that now.

As more and more was unearthed, he could see carvings on it and what looked like they might be words. He could read, but the shape of these words was different to those his mother had taught him at the kitchen table all those years ago.

They seemed like they were important despite his inability to read them. No-one went to the effort of carving something into a rock without having something to say that they thought people should see.

This finding seemed important enough that he should probably tell someone about it.

Little did he know, this discovery was going to make him richer than any wheat field could have.

Mini Theatre

Dythos: I love bread, thank you.

Ancient Farmer: Please let the harvest be good so that we can send you more bread.

Dythos: Sure. Sure... So about that recipe-

Ancient Farmer: *laughs awkwardly hiding the evidence of buying it*