Still jumping up and down with excitement, even after a minute had already past, we were bound to slip and fall. Which we did. Not knowing who pulled who, we both tumbled down into the mud still happy at the morning’s discovery. Our first harvest was ripe and ready to be plucked for sale!

“What should we pick first!? The potatoes, beans, strawberries,or cauliflower? Everything looks great!” I said while tripping over more than a few words.

“Anything and everything! You pick them and I will stack them for pickup and sale. That way I can set the price as we go. In the future I can set a bulk price, but for now doing it individually should earn us one or two extra coins when everything is all set and done.” Mia explained.

With our eyes shining, we started picking the closest plants to the entrance first, potatoes. Never having had picked potatoes before, I wasn’t quite sure how we were going to dig them up in a timely manner, but that didn’t stop our hands from scooping out the dirt below the stem. As the process was slow, we tried just pulling the stem , but it quickly snapped without much gain. With some trial and error though, we were able to work out a technique of half digging them out and then pulling the potatoes the rest of the way out by its stem.

“Wow, these potatoes look really good! Should we keep a few in order to eat?” I asked Mia.

“No, from the looks of it all of the potatoes so far are stone 8 or 9. They will sell for a decent profit. For now we need to pinch coin and just buy the stone 1 or 2 produce. I know it will not look as appetizing or taste as good, but they will fill our stomachs none the less.” Mia responded with a bit of steeled sadness in her voice.

“Is the cost really that different?” I asked.

“Sadly and luckily, yes. Remember, most farmers will be producing stone 1, 2 or 3 produce their first few seasons. The main reason that ours are so exceptional relative to theirs is that we are as you say “stacking a lot of buffs” onto our harvest. We have my Enrich skill, your domain, your farming skill, and the fact that most of our harvest is undamaged because of Rumble’s active monster crusade.” Mia explained.

“I didn’t realize that the buffs would put us so far ahead this soon.”

“Well, we are still stone tier and have 2 separate farming buffs along with a druid perk that is every bit as useful. But as for the cost difference, we are probably one of only a handful that produce high end stone veggies and fruit. There might be a team doing it, but most of our market competition will be the farmers that started last year, of which most would have diversified away from the starting crops.” Mia thoroughly explained.

“So how much of a difference in cost are we talking about?” I asked with excitement in my voice.

“I will explain it like this, we can buy cauliflower seeds for 80 cents, at stone one the grown cauliflower will barely sell for 1 copper and 75 cents. At stone 9 we can get 2 copper and 5 cents. If somehow we manage to uncover a copper grade potato then we can get 2 copper and 18 cents.” Mia was explaining with a smile twinkling in her eyes.

“I thought it would be higher, that isn’t that big of a difference.” I said with a bit of my heightened enthusiasm lost.

“You probably did not take all the accounting courses that I did, so let me explain something that you are probably overlooking. The difference between stone 1 and stone 9 is only 30 cents, but you need to compare that with our cost of purchasing seeds. When you factor out the costs, we essentially made an extra 31 percent profit! We made a third more than most of our competitors with mostly the same amount of total work!” Mia was excitedly saying.

“That actually does sound really good!” I said as Mia was taking a breath.

“That is not even the end of it! Remember, I am haggling up the market price. Until I get a dedicated skill I can only do so much, but we are probably looking at another 2 percent! Just think, we have 45 planted seeds.” Mia said ending with a short pause for it to sink in before continuing. “That will get us another free seed for next season’s harvest, which in turn will on paper be an almost entirely profit crop!”

“Wow… I am speechless right now.” my brain barely processing all the information quick enough to respond fully.

“That being said, we need to buy more seeds tomorrow. The beans and strawberries will continue to produce for the rest of the season, but we need to use today's profits to buy some more short growth crops in order to finish off the season strong.” Mia finished explaining.

As my brain finally caught up with the information dump that Mia just shared, a briefly weakened smile burst back onto my face with renewed excitement as I restarted my battle with the dirt holding back my access to the potatoes. “Let’s get back to this Mia, I can’t wait to see our first copper grade crop!”

“Me too, but I am not sure whether it is likely or unlikely. We are still near the beginning of stone tier with our farming skills after all.” She said with no small hint of unrestricted excitement.

So as the morning progressed we pulled out all of the potatoes from the ground along with having harvested all of the cauliflower as well. As we sat down to eat our lunch on the short wall near the road we saw a wagon slowly approaching from town. With the wagon growing closer and our lunch coming to a quick end, Mia recognized the driver.

“Old Sal!” Mia shouted towards the wagon with a jumping wave in his direction. “I had completely forgotten that he was heading to town today. I was planning on going into town with him to visit you! I sure hope he did not wait for me too long this morning… especially with all the rain that was pouring.” She finished saying with a slightly guilty tone.

“I’m sure he will understand. From what I gathered in my short time knowing him, he has been a more than thoughtful man. He took a losing bet with you just to be helpful last time.”

“That is true, but that makes me feel even worse thinking about it that way.” Mia finished saying as Sal pulled up to stop next to us.

“Good morning young lady. Well I guess I should say ‘Good afternoon’.” Sal said with a chuckle before turning towards me. “And welcome back to the world of the living young man. I heard that you took quite the beating. Sounded like a good reason to though.” He finished saying with a quick wink and laugh.

“Sal…” Mia said while seeming unimpressed.

“Well, I’m glad that you are both doing okay. I had figured that you had gotten better though. Every other time that Mia visited you she was waiting on me, so it stood to reason that she either needed the rest or that you were back. And just in time it seems.”

“Ya, got back just in time to feel the rush of our first harvest!” I excitedly said.

“I hope ya’ll aren’t going to sell the potatoes. You do know how to split them for replanting, right?” He asked with a genuinely curious tone.

“You can do what?” Both Mia and I said together.

“Haha, I guess that ya’ll didn’t read up any on your own crops. You can cut up the potatoes in order to replant them in place of seeds. The new potatoes are limited to a ranking of 1 or 2 higher or lower than the original seed potato , so you will always make money if you have enough time left in the season.”

“That is awesome! How many times can we do it?” I hurriedly pushed for more answers.

“You are limited to twice, but the second time is almost guaranteed to lower by 1 rank. You also have a hard limit of cutting a potato as a replant into 3 pieces. Otherwise potato farmers would rule the world quite frankly… its bad enough with some of the high end plants out there.” Sal sagely explained.

“Is there anything else that we should know about our crops?” Mia asked.

“No, nothing that will affect this harvest.” Sal said as he looked past us to the harvested and still as of yet unharvested crops.

Turning to look at me Mia said: “Okay, well that changed the math a little on what we can buy this week. Brad, we can get the essentials without the potato revenue even if it is going to be tighter than expected, but I think we have to after hearing that. I am not sure that we can get all 3 harvests in time though.”

“Well, very few people can get 3 potato harvests collected in a single season. They are either extremely high level with evolved skills or they spend their entire revenue on consumable growth items.” Sal said with a conciliatory voice.

“Does not matter, that is our goal Brad. It might not be this season, but we should plan on always getting 3 harvests from them. We might sell them this season since the loss of so much revenue now might cripple us in summer, but starting next year we should plan on holding onto potatoes through the seasons in order to plant them the next time that they come into season.” Mia said with an accountant's conviction.

“Sounds good to me, you know the business side of things much better than I do. If you think that it is the best course of action, then that is what we will plan on doing.” I responded.

With a smile on his face and a shift in posture, Sal said: “Well it looks like the team has a few new ideas to implement. Good luck to ya’ll and with that being said, I need to get back on my way.”

With a quick exchange of goodbyes, Old Sal started back on his way out towards his home.

“Well, are you ready to get back to picking everything or do you want to plant the potatoes first?” Mia asked.

Doesn’t matter to me, it sounds like that it will be a late night regardless.” I said with the joy of the moment filling my voice.