UF3 Chapter 1 (Patreon)

My first attempt at writing book 3 of Unorthodox Farming was a failure. It's taken me over a month to figure out how to begin the book in a way that allows me to tell the story I want to tell. I'm finally happy with the direction of the book, so you will start seeing consistent chapters next month. Thank you for your patience. The prologue of Unorthodox Farming is a chapter I tend to rewrite several times across the book, so I won't be uploading it until the story is done, which is why you are starting at chapter 1 instead. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy the book. Chapter 1

My friend Ranic once sat me down and explained that I had lifetimes of endless possibilities waiting for me over the horizon and that to survive those centuries ahead, I needed to find a reason to get out of bed in the morning. He insisted time was a burden, something that dragged you down as poor decisions accumulated. That true regrets never went away. He painted a bleak picture of my future, leaving me disheartened and concerned.

More recently, my familiar Salem informed me Ranic was an idiot and that his experience would not be my own because I wouldn’t be walking into the future by myself like Ranic had, having to watch the woman I loved and children we raised together age and pass on without me.

After I finally killed the giant trapped in my reservoir and accidently became a Champion, Salem experienced every moment of my life due to me carrying his familiar mark. He saw everything I was and everything I am, gaining more insights into who I am than I possess despite my attribute-enhanced memory. He took all that knowledge and condensed it into a single request. He asked me to stop running away from my grief, to stop intentionally distracting myself from the emotions bubbling under the surface and dwell in my misery to process what had happened to me.

I’d lost my family.

I’d lost my friends.

I’d lost everything I ever cared about or built for myself and all the opportunities that came with it. I'd been forced to start over from the beginning, but it was a beginning without any of the emotional support I was accustomed to.

That was too much to bear when I arrived in this new world. It was too much for me to face. So, I’d lied to myself and said I was fine, that the opportunity to experience a life where I could level and grow stronger like the characters in the games I loved was worth it.

Then reality caught up.

I was a farmer. I couldn’t fight monsters to level. Rather than face the truth like a rational human being, I continued to lie to myself and went a little insane, pushing my grief down further and taking senseless actions which nearly got me killed.

My first brush with death and Healer Yaceb’s help snapped me out of my insanity, but I never stopped lying to myself to push away the pain. And the moment I saw an opportunity to escape my farmer’s fate by trapping monsters, I threw myself into it with reckless abandon, not caring if I lived or died so long as I had a chance to escape the life before me. I was running from my grief, running from my pain, running from all the dark thoughts that came with those emotions, and lying to myself every step of the way, hoping that wealth and power would make everything better.

But I needed to stop.

I was hurting myself.

I was living in the moment, barely caring about my future because the future I expected to live out had been forcefully taken from me when I was reincarnated here. I was so twisted up inside that I didn’t know where to begin undoing the knots.

I didn’t know how to undo them either.

Then, my talks with Salem and my recent bump in wisdom came along, offering insight into who I was and who I am, which once eluded me. I’d learned I was not self-reflective, something I’d been told numerous times but never understood before the change. I was not mentally equipped to deal with what had happened to me, but there were people around me who could help me process those events if I let them in. People who could untie the knots I’d tied up to escape the truth.

So, I was letting them in.

I sat on the edge of the recently renamed Sun Serpent Tower, where my farm manor was built. My legs dangled over the side as I gazed at the Wild Woods. The afternoon sun warmed my back, and the breeze played across our skin. In the distance, abandoned trap barns lined the village's perimeter, a testament to everything that had changed since I arrived. Between here and there, farmers tended fields and orchards, improving their craft and turning Blackwood into a thriving farming community that would see me through my final threshold and allow me to become a bard.

It was a relaxing sight despite where I sat.

The thought of slipping from the edge and falling hundreds of feet would have terrified me in the past, but gravity was no longer the threat it had once been. I’d be battered and bruised when I hit the ground, missing a lot of health, but I would quickly recover because Champions were very hard to kill.

The fact that I was sitting here was a testament to my changing world view.

I was no longer the Arnold who arrived here.

I was someone else.

And I wasn’t sure who that man was.

Yaceb hummed a cheerful melody as he approached with silent footsteps, letting me know he had arrived. A few weeks ago, the spindly old healer had walked up behind me and accidentally given me the fright of my life, causing me to jump so high I’d slipped off the edge. The poor man nearly had a heart attack when he saw me disappear over the side, so he now made sure I knew he was coming.

Yaceb carefully climbed over the railing wearing his customary white shirt and trousers, unencumbered by the usual ravages of advanced age, as he took a seat beside me, hanging his bare feet over the edge. The old healer had recently celebrated his 100th birthday. However, despite his weathered skin and liver-spotted arms and legs, he was still extremely mobile, making the walk up the Sun Serpent Tower every afternoon.

Between the benefits of his healer class and visits to clerics every other year to remove medical issues induced by age, he was ageing more gracefully than anyone I’d ever met before coming here. His unnatural vigour would continue until time finally claimed him. He would go to bed one night and not wake up the following morning. It was a good way ago. Far better than the slow withering of strength and health I was used to on Earth.

Yaceb gripped the ledge and took a deep breath in through his nostrils, savouring air free from the scent of fertiliser or charcoal smoke found in the village, enjoying this moment in a way I couldn’t mimic. Yaceb had lost his wife, his three daughters, and his grandchildren during the goblin attack that left Blackwood as a mere shell of its former self.

In one night, he lost nearly everything that mattered to him but somehow rebuilt his life into an enjoyable existence and was happy to show me how. We’d been meeting here each day for weeks, ever since I’d first gone with Torvac and Misk to confront the dwarves coming to kill Blackwood’s townsfolk.

After that first bloody night, I knew I needed to talk to someone. I needed to get things off my chest to relieve the burden I was carrying because the things we did at night were too much weight for me to bear with everything else I was carrying around.

I hadn’t told Yaceb what we were doing in forest, but he knew something was bothering me, something I didn’t want to discuss. He didn’t try to push me. He didn’t try to pry. He let me work on the things I wanted to work on. He helped me untie the knots that I was ready to untie.

Yaceb broke the silence as he released his breath. “Last night, I had an epiphany about you. I think I understand why you’re struggling to make progress towards your goals.”

Yaceb said this every few days, so I wasn’t exactly excited. None of his other epiphanies had been helpful. “Why am I struggling?” My Texas tang had begun to fade after I arrived in this world, but it had come back the moment I boosted my intelligence enough to have perfect recall.

“You hate being made to do anything you don’t want to.”

His statement didn’t seem particularly insightful, so I wondered where he was going with it. “Doesn’t everybody?”

“Well, yes, but also no. There are many jobs which adults must do that they don’t want to do. It upsets them, but they don’t get angry about it. Not to the degree you do, at least.”

“I’m not perfect.”

“No one is, but you’re a decent man, which makes your anger a cause for concern. Were you always this prone to anger, or has it grown worse since you came to our world?”

Memories flashed through my mind, comparing my life before and after I arrived.

“It’s worse,” I replied.

“Significantly worse?”

“Yes,” I said honestly.

“Do you know why?”

I folded my arms, leaning back to balance my weight. “I have a lot to be angry about.”

Yaceb sighed. “You do. However, there is a difference between rational anger and irrational anger.”

“My anger isn’t irrational.”

Yaceb turned to me. “Why would you say that?”

“Because I have good reasons to be angry.”

I’d lost so much.

“Arnold, we often justify our anger to ourselves because if we don’t, we have to face the reality that we’re not in control of our emotions. It’s easier to lie to ourselves by inflating our problems to validate our emotional reaction than face the embarrassing truth that the cause of our emotional outburst was not the problem which lay before us but an outlet that we could justify unleashing our anger upon.”

His comment left a bitter taste in my mouth. “You make it sound like I’ve had a bad day at work, only to come home and take it out on my wife.”

“Aren’t you? Metaphorically speaking, of course. You lost control of your life. You lost everything you had and cared about. You lost all the choices you could make for yourself when you were forcefully reincarnated here, so now, any time you’re forced to do something you don’t want to do, you get angry because it’s another choice taken from you. You feel these small losses of freedom with a similar intensity to when you lost everything because that’s what losing the ability to choose represents to you in our world. To you, loss of control or choice means losing everything. Even a small loss is now blown entirely out of proportion by this previous experience.”

Yaceb’s words hit me like a punch to the gut.

Memories tumbled through my head, showing me the truth of his statement. In those memories, I saw myself lose the freedom to choose my path, which was followed by fear, which almost immediately turned to anger, anger that was entirely irrational for the situation in most cases.

Sometimes, like when my friend Jeric told me he would stop my trap experiment, I was able to control that anger and listen. Other times, like when Regent Katella tricked me into joining her in the arena, I completely lost it, refusing to give up no matter how much pain I went through. Her threat to remove Jeric as mayor was tantamount to me losing everything in my mind. To me, it meant certain death. It was an irrational feeling, an irrational conclusion, and an irrational reaction. And it was far from the only time it had happened.

“It’s not with everything,” I said defensively, heartbeat pounding in my chest.

Yaceb gave a brief pause. “Only things you care about?”

I unfolded my arms and sighed, a little upset with him over how good he was at reading me. “Yes.”

“Can you see the problems these thoughts and emotional reactions have caused you?”

“I can.”

“Good. Then work on it.”

“I don’t know how.”

“What do I always say to you?”

“Start small.”

“The other thing I always say.”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

“No, the other thing.”

“Those are the only two you say regularly.”

Yaceb frowned. “Are you sure?”

“I have perfect recall.”

“I haven’t told you not to self-sabotage?”

“You mentioned it briefly a few weeks ago, but I had to leave for business.”

Dwarf killing business.

Yaceb facepalmed and groaned. “I must be getting forgetful in my old age. I thought I explained this to you weeks ago.”

“Being forgetful is part of being human,” I said.

However, I no longer got forgetful, so maybe it wasn’t, or maybe I wasn’t entirely human anymore.

Yaceb didn’t hear the troubling thoughts plaguing me and dove into his explanation. “Arnold, you need to understand that living a happy and emotionally stable life has more to do with making sure you don’t sabotage your potential happiness than making choices that bring you happiness.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Can you give me an example?”

Yaceb nodded. “You were quite fat when you arrived in Blackwood. I remember seeing you running every day and starving yourself as much as possible to speed up the process. Tell me, why did you try so hard to lose the weight?”

That was a few years back, so it took me a moment to recall the memories, while looking at the line of hills on the horizon. “Everything I tried to do was harder with the weight on, and I didn’t like how I looked.”

“Which made life that little bit harder and more miserable, didn’t it?”

I nodded.

It certainly had.

“If you hadn’t lost the weight, your life would have been that little bit harder, and that’s what I’m talking about when I say don’t self-sabotage.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Self-sabotaging actions make it harder for you to be happy. One by one, they lower your overall mood in your day-to-day life. It’s the accumulation of these actions that makes us miserable, not a single action that shatters our happiness. However, we often overlook this accumulation of actions because it’s a single action that finally puts us over the edge, leaving us perpetually unhappy. We make the mistake of believing that if we correct this one action, everything will be all right when all we do is pull us back from the brink of perpetual misery.”

That sounded reasonable.

“And those actions would be?”

“They’re unique to the individual. It might be too much work. It could be too little time with your friends. It might even be too many trysts with attractive women you don’t care about, offering you the fun of a new sexual encounter but none of the true intimacy you desire. All these little actions make life harder because they harm you and prevent your needs from being met, which lowers your overall mood and makes it harder for you to experience happiness.”

“I hear what you're saying, but I don’t know how to recognise these things.”

“That’s simple. You invert the problem. Don’t ask yourself how to make yourself happy. Ask yourself how to make yourself miserable. How you can make it impossible for you to be happy? Everyone knows how to do that, so sit down and write a list of all these things you can do to make yourself miserable and then figure out how to avoid them.”

That seemed too easy. “And that works?”

“It does, but only if you understand why you’re doing so, so let me explain it in a way you might comprehend. You’ve described your gaming career to me in great detail. You’ve told me about the strategies you used to train yourself and your friends. One of those training strategies was not making amateur mistakes. Preventing these amateur mistakes was the most important part of learning to be a professional because they stopped your opponents from easily exploiting your team’s weaknesses. You said that even if you mastered professional strategy, you would still lose from failing to prevent these amateur mistakes.”

His analogy didn’t make sense to me, but then Yaceb didn’t really understand video games. “I still don’t follow.”

“Sabotaging your potential to be happy is an amateur mistake. If you don’t remove the things that will sabotage your happiness from life, even the most rewarding moments can be utterly undone by the basic misery you’ve surrounded yourself with. Happiness comes after you remove the things preventing it, not by finding something bigger to make you happy while you wallow in your misery. In that sense, it’s no different to your video games. No matter how well executed, a professional strategy cannot make up for you repeatedly making amateur mistakes.”

 Maybe it was his analogy, or maybe it was the repetition, but I finally understood what Yaceb was trying to explain to me. Self-sabotage came in many shapes and forms, and there were small and big ways that I could make my life harder than it needed to be.

If I looked at my life like a game, I was currently making so many amateur mistakes that it was impossible for me to win. And if my coaching experience from my old life had taught me anything, it was that you didn’t need to work on professional strategy until you had mastered amateur strategy because, without mastering amateur strategy, there was no professional strategy that could see you to victory.

Yaceb’s explanation made so much sense that it physically pained me to learn how utterly oblivious I was just a few moments ago. I could already see that I was living a life filled with amateur mistakes and that if I didn’t fix these minor problems which sabotaged my happiness, I would never find something large enough to bring me lasting happiness. He’d even given me the tools I needed to fix most of my problems, tools which weren’t hard to use.

As realisation dawned on me and I began to see ways I was making myself unnecessarily miserable and easy ways I could stop these behaviours, I turned to thank him and saw a small blood-red crystal forming on his palm.

Yaceb gave me a knowing smile. “I think we should leave things here for a few days.” He held up the crystal. “This tells me you have a lot to think about.”  

I returned his smile. “Thank you, Yaceb. I think I finally know how to begin rebuilding my life.”