Rated F for Farming, Now Every Guild Bids on My Vegetables novel · Chapter 2 of 32
Chapter 2: The Market Opens
On a grass floor no hunter has ever found, his peppers ripen overnight and a stone sends him to the Tower's auction hall under a veil, where his cousin is telling the benches Gyu-ho died playing hero.
He read the line twice, and it didn't change.
He put his palm on the stone to see if it was warm.
It was cool, and the moment his skin touched it, letters appeared in the air an arm's length from his eyes, and moved when he moved his head.
[Ju Gyu-ho. Seller of an unlisted floor. Day 1.]
[Sow, Level 1. XP: 100 of 500.]
[Health: 74 of 100. Stamina: 21 of 100.]
[Hunger: mild. Thirst: sharp.]
[Coins: 0. Lots per Market: 1.]
He read it looking for the number that would hurt.
The rating board had given him one letter for seven years, and the Tower had given him a whole page.
Level 1 meant there was a Level 2.
A hundred points for one pepper plant meant the Tower paid for growing things.
He laid two peppers side by side on the stone's flat top, to see what it did with them.
One came from the plant he had just grown, and one he had picked in Geumsan that morning.
He put his hand flat on the stone beside them.
The Geumsan pepper sat there and did nothing.
The other one sank into the stone with no sound, the way a pebble goes into still water, and was gone.
The top was flat and dry again under his palm.
A new line rose on the front face, in the same pale letters.
[Tower red pepper. Keeps the eater warm for a day.]
So the stone took what the Tower had grown, and only that, and it read what it took.
The light overhead began to go down while he was still reading it.
With the dusk came a mist, gray and cold, and it soaked through his co-op jacket in minutes.
His mouth was dry, and the only wet thing on the floor was the pepper plant.
He ate a Geumsan pepper first, because he was starving.
Then he ate one of his own, to see.
It tasted like a pepper and burned like a pepper, and that was all it did.
Whatever the Tower put into his crops, it didn't put into him.
Then he heard the first sound on this floor, wet and ragged breathing out in the grass.
The gray hound came out of the mist at a lope, with blood around its broken mouth.
It had come through the breach the same way he had.
He ran for the persimmon tree and went up it, one boot in the low fork.
The hound hit the trunk under him hard enough to shake the branches.
It had no teeth left, but its claws scored the bark.
It circled the tree all night.
He sat in the fork with his arms locked around the trunk and his teeth chattering.
Grandma would be home by now, alone, with the pepper field torn open below the house.
He didn't sleep.
When the light came back, the hound was lying at the foot of the tree, asleep, its ribs going in and out.
It would not leave, and he could not stay in a tree.
A gray stone block lay in the grass a few steps from the trunk, about the size of a rice sack.
He climbed down as quietly as he could and lifted it.
The hound's head came up.
The block cracked in his hands along a straight line, and he was holding a slab with a sharp edge.
The hound came at him, and its claws opened his left forearm.
He brought the slab down on its skull with both hands.
It took three blows.
Then the hound went soft and gray, and fell apart into dust, and left a brass coin in the grass.
[Gray hound slain. Sow gains no XP from killing.]
He tore a strip off the bottom of his undershirt and tied it around the gashes with his teeth.
[Health: 52 of 100.]
[Notice: Find water before your second dusk.]
[Reward: 50 XP.]
He walked out into the silent grass with the slab under his arm.
After a few hundred steps he saw the grass ahead turn a darker green, in a long line that ran straight down the middle of the plain.
It was a stream, slow and clear and so quiet he could have walked past it in the dark.
He lay on his stomach and drank until his teeth ached from the cold.
[Notice met. XP: 150 of 500.]
He knelt on the bank and squeezed a fistful of the soil, Grandpa's first test of any field.
It held its shape in his palm and smelled like rain, which was the best soil there was.
He walked out to the edge of the floor, and it took him most of the morning.
The farther he got from the stream, the grayer the dirt turned.
By the wall it was dry gray dust that smelled of nothing at all.
The wall itself was the same gray stone as the blocks, smooth and seamless, rising until it faded into the white light.
He walked along it for an hour and found no corner.
At the far end stood a stone gate taller than a barn, with no handle and no hinge.
It didn't move when he put his shoulder to it.
Breaches were the Tower's holes, so this was the inside of the Tower, where no F-rank had been allowed for seven years.
He pushed one seed into the gray dirt by the gate, as a test, and walked back.
At dusk he planted a short row along the stream.
He had no can and no bucket and no pot, nothing to carry water in.
So he soaked his jacket in the stream and wrung it out over every other seed, until his hands went numb.
Then he slept in a wet jacket.
In the morning the row was ripe, and it had come up at two heights.
The seeds he had watered stood a hand taller, and their peppers were a deeper red.
[Tower red pepper. Quality: Good.]
[Growth: dusk to dawn. Keeps: 7 days.]
[Eaten: keeps the eater warm for two days.]
[First harvest at a new quality. 200 XP.]
The dry half said Common, three days, warm for one.
The seed by the gate had gone black in the ground.
[Pepper seed. Rotted. Soil: dead.]
So the black soil grew things, and the gray soil killed them, and stream water bought him a better grade.
[Notice: The nights here grow colder. Build a shelter.]
[Reward: 100 XP.]
His phone died on Friday morning with a photo of Grandma's kimchi pots still on the screen.
On Saturday, when the light went down, the stone lit again.
[Set your lot on the stone and speak your term.]
[The winner has seven days. The Tower holds the coins until the term is met.]
He read the two lines twice.
Whoever bought his lot would pay coins, and the Tower would keep those coins until the buyer did what the term said.
A term was an order, then, and the buyer had seven days to carry it out.
Raiders froze on floor 11 every winter, and this pepper kept a man warm for two days.
He laid the dozen reddest from the Good row on the stone's flat top and put his hand down beside them.
He said the one thing he needed.
"Pay Maeng Bok-sun's debt at the Geumsan co-op, by your own hand, before the thirty-first."
He thought about it, and added one more line.
"And tell her the peppers came up."
Only one person in Korea had planted her seed this week, and she would know what it meant.
The twelve peppers sank into the stone together.
[Lot set. Term sealed.]
The air beside the stone split into a doorway of gray light.
Something soft and heavy dropped over his head and shoulders as he stepped through.
It was a gray hood that hung to his waist.
He came out at the back of a round stone hall, bigger than any gymnasium.
It was the Market on floor 10, where climbers who had cleared nine floors spent their Tower coins.
Hundreds of people sat on stone benches that rose in tiers, and nearly all of them wore guild jackets.
In the middle of the floor stood a flat stone, and beside it a tall gray figure with no face.
Its voice came out of the walls.
"The Market is open. Terms are read when the hammer falls."
"The winner meets the term by its words within seven days," the voice went on. "The Tower holds the bid until then."
"A winner who fails a term by its words is barred from the Market for life."
By its words, Gyu-ho thought.
Not by what anyone meant.
At the end of the third bench, a big man in a Hanbat jacket was holding court with his phone out.
It was Ki-tae.
"My cousin tore up the paper and then ran straight into it," he was telling the raiders around him.
"An F-rank. In a breach. He was dead the second he decided to play hero."
"She'll sign now," Ki-tae said. "She's got nobody else."
Gyu-ho found that his hands had closed into fists inside the hood, and his torn arm was bleeding again.
A woman in the front row did most of the bidding for Hanbat.
She was tall, with a low black ponytail tied with a red string, and she tapped a brass coin on her teeth between bids.
Before lot nine she took a gray glass bottle from her coat, drank from it, and put it away.
Her left hand shook a little as she put the cap back on.
In the middle of the hall, the flat stone beside the crier was a twin of his own, set into the floor.
When lot nine was called, his twelve peppers rose up out of it.
"Lot nine," said the crier. "Red peppers, twelve. The Tower's word: keeps the eater warm for a day. Grade: none."
The Tower read only the plain word, he noticed, and not the grade his stone had given them.
The hall laughed.
"Peppers," somebody shouted. "Are we cooking now?"
A thick, silver-haired man came down the steps and sat on the bench above Ki-tae's.
He had reading glasses pushed up on his head and a camel coat over a tracksuit.
The raiders around Ki-tae all sat up straighter, and the man patted Ki-tae on the cheek.
"Captain Ju," he said. "Your squad's on floor 11 on Monday."
"Yes, Master Yook," Ki-tae said.
"Floor 11 has frozen your squad twice," Yook said pleasantly. "If those peppers are real, win them."
Ki-tae put his phone in his pocket and raised his hand.
← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend