The SSS+ Rank Hunter Who Farms

17. Star Fruit

The fruits weren’t blooming in vibrant colors or anything like that.

Maybe that was only natural.

A dimension that had been left unattended, an orchard lingering in the thousand-year-old memories of a fairy and its previous owner—if it had remained exactly the same, that would have been the strange part.

But that made it even better.

The interior was unkempt, with remnants of fallen fruit scattered messily across the ground after countless years. Most of the trees were so rotted that even standing was a struggle, though a few still bore fruit thanks to the excellence of their species.

"She really poured her heart into this."

The layout was already perfect—down to the placement of the trees—so all I had to do was plant the fruit tree seeds.

First of all, the high walls.

That alone was enough.

The greatest threat to growing fruit trees was monsters.

Even the crops right outside my house suffered constant damage from creatures that targeted them day and night. And this orchard was nearly a kilometer away?

Rather than planting fruit trees for myself, I might as well be planting them as a feast for the monsters.

No matter how hard I worked to cultivate the trees, it would always come down to this: if I picked the fruit before the monsters got to them, they were mine. If not, they were stolen. It was easier to just think of it that way.

And this wasn’t something that could be solved by clearing out the nearby sewers to eliminate the rats.

The larger the biome, the larger the map, the greater the variety of monsters that lived there. Unless every inch of land was completely cleared and walled off, managing the interior would never be easy.

But this place had already solved that problem.

I hadn’t studied construction skills, nor did I have any plans to, but this place was so perfectly built that I didn’t even need to worry about it.

"This could just be used for farming."

That’s how good it was.

With walls this sturdy, at the very least, monsters from a level 0 biome wouldn’t be able to target the fruit beyond the walls—unless they went into a frenzy and attacked en masse out of instinct.

Lulu looked different to me now.

"You have some kind of special ability you're hiding, don't you? Why..."

"I’m an ancient fairy, you know!"

"Hmm… I guess that’s something."

Cutting down the weeds blocking my view, I thought she might be worth a snack or two if she just helped with navigation. But would she really be capable of creating an orchard for fairies on this scale?

Was it because I hadn’t grown attached to her yet?

Or maybe the previous owner had just built this place for her own reasons and only said that to make Lulu happy.

Either way, an orchard was still an orchard.

Checking the surviving fruit trees, there were about twenty.

And deeper inside the orchard, there was a storage facility twice the size of my hut for keeping fruits.

Of course, there was no fruit inside.

But there were some seeds.

"Thank you. Thank you."

The previous owner was gone, but her spirit remained in these seeds.

A dozen or so fruit tree seeds and fifty Healing Herb seeds.

Besides those, dozens of other useful seeds were neatly categorized and stored in one corner of the warehouse.

"This is worth a fortune."

Just selling the Healing Herb alone would make me rich.

Even if I tried to buy this many seeds through my Farm Points, there was no way I could afford it.

I gathered up the seeds and pulled out my axe.

First, I had to cut down the rotten fruit trees.

They were still wood, after all—resources.

"If you’ve got nothing to do, clean up the ground a bit. The previous owner didn’t build this place just to let it get this filthy, did she?"

"Okay..."

Lulu, seemingly reminiscing about the previous owner, flew around energetically, tidying up the floor with her small body.

Though, honestly, it barely made a difference. I figured I’d have to go over it with a broom eventually, but that wasn’t the priority right now.

As I chopped down the trees, the sun began to set.

If I was going to head back, now was the time.

Instead, I decided to stay here for the night.

As long as the doors were closed, there was no chance of monsters attacking unless they could fly in from above.

Besides, the storage facility was even bigger than my hut.

The previous owner must have slept here occasionally, too—there was a small bed tucked away in one corner.

It was a shame that there was no bathroom, but well.

I’m not the type to meticulously gather everything while farming in the Farming World anyway.

The work continued late into the night.

It felt like I had been doing simple labor for four whole days straight, so I was mentally a little tired, but ten years of experience doesn't just disappear.

Besides, there’s that saying.

No matter how much you clean and decorate your own home, it never feels tiring.

If this were a new Farming World map that I had just started, I might have taken a break around this point.

I already have my main map, so is there really a need to work this hard?

It’s tedious anyway, so I might as well take it easy.

But my home.

My residence.

My dimension.

Thinking of each and every one of them as money didn’t feel tiring at all.

Who would find it exhausting to manage their own store and dig up the money buried in their front yard?

After cleaning up, only the fruit-bearing trees were left here and there.

It looked a bit sparse for an orchard and wasn’t exactly the prettiest sight, but at least it was neatly organized.

I swept up the rotten leaves, twigs, and fruit remnants with a rake from the storage and dumped them outside the orchard.

One of the good things about the Farming World is that you can freely dump trash anywhere.

Of course, if I threw garbage within my living area, I’d have to clean it up eventually, but natural waste like this? If I just left it outside, the rain would wash it away, or monsters would eat the rotten fruit.

Eventually, it would all turn into fertilizer.

"She really did spend a lot of money."

Only one type of fruit tree had survived.

A fruit that only grows in dungeons—the Star Fruit, which glowed with a blue hue.

It was a tropical biome fruit tree, and since the biome was random, I might have found it in a level 2 biome or bought it. Generally, purchasing it requires a huge amount of Farm Points.

Finding this tree’s seeds in a tropical biome was incredibly difficult, and even searching the entire biome, the tree itself wasn’t easy to come across.

It was sweet and delicious even when eaten raw, had healing and regeneration effects, and was one of the must-have trees planted in orchards during the later stages of the game. When aged into jam or wine, it was valuable enough to fetch a high price based on taste alone.

And there were almost twenty of them.

At this point, I was curious about what the other trees had been before they rotted away.

"She must have really cherished you."

"Hehe..."

Or maybe she just used Lulu as an excuse to decorate an orchard.

Whether it was an unexpected opportunity or she just fell in love with Star Fruit and covered the place with Star Fruit trees before dying, it was quite a stroke of luck for me.

Healing Herbs and Star Fruit.

Even in reality, Star Fruit wasn’t a widely known fruit.

Among fruit enthusiasts, it was traded at prices reaching hundreds of thousands of won—more expensive than even the highly effective Healing Herbs.

That was only natural, since it was a rare tree that only grew in tropical biomes. Even if someone cut it down and planted it in a tropical region on Earth, it wouldn’t necessarily bear fruit, and the fruit itself didn’t grow easily. That made it even harder to obtain than Healing Herbs.

Still, since it’s a fruit that disappears once eaten, its price didn’t skyrocket too much

Still, the idea of paying hundreds of thousands of won for a single fruit was beyond my comprehension. But in any case, I had harvested all the well-ripened Star Fruit.

"If I sell these when I leave, I’ll hit it big this time."

The remaining time would be just enough to plant and grow some Healing Herbs before I left.

"Here, have one too"

"Thank you!"

Rewards for achievements should always be clear.

If Lulu hadn’t told me about the orchard, I would have wasted the whole day struggling, only to barely reach the village and end up getting scammed by NPCs while spending Farm Points.

Not to mention, I had no idea what the village even looked like yet.

And whether NPCs even existed in this place was questionable.

It made sense in the Farming World since it was a game, but here, this was a dimensional rift—or was it a rift dimension? Either way, would there even be NPCs in an ownerless dimension?

So choosing the orchard had been the right move.

It was only natural to reward Lulu, who had contributed greatly.

For someone whose staple food was fruit, Star Fruit was sure to be a delicacy.

Since it hadn’t been harvested for a long time, each tree yielded about five Star Fruits on average, and nearly a hundred blue, shimmering fruits piled up in the basket.

I was about to toss her one when a thought crossed my mind. I took out a few of her favorite snacks from my backpack and held them out.

"Pick one. What do you want to eat?"

Star Fruit versus Lulu’s favorite spicy snacks.

Spicy swing chips made from potatoes and tteokbokki-shaped snacks vs. the sweet and crunchy Star Fruit—honestly, there was no real comparison.

The fact that cheap snacks, which cost only two to three thousand won, were even being compared to a fruit that could only be found in dungeons was an insult in itself.

But after glancing at me cautiously, Lulu quietly picked the snacks.

"Can’t I have both, Master?"

From what I could tell, saying that fruit was her staple food was definitely a lie.

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(T/N): LOL. Lulu is quite a cutie