There was an additional note under this alarming description which informed her that the sap caused chemical burns and rashes on the unprotected skin of animals, including humans. It was also toxic to livestock.
And there was one other very ominous note that stood out in large, red letters: ENEMY OF THIS PLANET.
Well, that was something for sure.
The whole of the dry meadow was apparently one large expanse of it.
“No wonder it’s called sadgrass,” Demi said after reading all of that. “It’s making me sad just thinking about it.”
She dismissed the information window and looked back into the woodland. Now she no longer wondered why the trees at the fringes of the meadow looked so sickly. They were being actively poisoned by the meadow of horrible grass.
It’s good to know that my new farm is currently the home of a huge colony of nasty exploding poison grass, she thought tiredly to herself. Why on earth did Hollyhope send me here?
There was always the possibility that this was one of the more hospitable places on the planet, but that thought was so alarming that Demi immediately dismissed it.
If that really is the case, no wonder Hollyhope called for a backup Harvest Goddess, she thought dryly.
Fortunately, as they neared the flint deposit, the ground became rockier and the dry meadow left off, transitioning to open woodland.
Now that she knew what it was, it was honestly a relief to leave the sadgrass behind, at least for a while. Although nothing in the information about the grass had indicated that it had any ability to explode randomly, now that she knew that it did explode under certain conditions, she was expecting it to explode on her at the next possible opportunity.
Arrival at the flint site distracted Demi from contemplating exploding grass. She situated Glimmer on a high rock, where he could oversee her activities, and then pulled the hammerstone, the deadwood, and the tutorial books out of her inventory.
She opened the book with the beginner tool recipes and made a plan for herself.
At this point, the things she needed most were an axe, a hammer, a knife, and a shovel. She would leave the more agricultural tools for when she actually had crops to look after.
As she had previously discovered, the recipes for each of these tools was essentially “stick plus rock,” with the exception of a knife, which was simply “rock.”
That meant she needed three suitable sticks and four appropriate rocks.
She had actually gathered enough sticks so that she had room to experiment if some of her tool making attempts were less than successful.
The shovel needed the longest handle, and both the axe and the hammer needed handles that were a good length for her to swing. Since she was such a small person, ordinary tools made for an adult man were too large and awkward for her to use. In that sense, her full-sized axe would probably look like a hand axe to a taller person.
After setting aside the best stick with relation to her height for the shovel, she picked up several different sticks and swung them experimentally before deciding on the best candidates in terms of feel.
When it came to stones, she already had a suitable one for the head for the hammer: her hammerstone. Still, the hammerstone would be much more effective for knapping as a hand tool, so she would keep her eyes out for a suitable piece of limestone and save assembly of the hammer for last.
When it came to the stones for the other tools, the axe needed a stone that was longer than it was wide, that could be knapped to a good cutting edge on both ends. The stone for the knife needed to be long and thin. She would probably make a good enough piece to use as a knife during the knapping of the axe. Cutters were often produced this way during the Paleolithic.
The real challenge was the shovel.
The shovel needed a large, relatively thin piece of stone that could be knapped to a cutting edge along the bottom, to facilitate digging. It would be important to balance the relative structural integrity of the stone with the weight and cutting edge. If it were too thin, it would likely break easily, but if it were too thick, it would be heavy and difficult to use for its intended purpose.
Ah, I can’t wait until we advance to the bronze age, Demi lamented to herself. A good shovel really demands metalwork. Oh well. Needs must.
With a general idea of what she was looking for, the young lady went out prospecting for flint.
Demi was more than aware that having read some textbooks and academic papers on flint knapping did not make her an expert flint knapper.
It did not even make her a beginner flint knapper. Flint knapping was a highly specialized skill with a lot of waste produced to get one, final, suitable piece. It required patience, method, and experience. In an ordinary world, it would take months—if not years—to learn how to properly knap stone and to properly finish wood for a solid and dependable handle. Demi was hoping that the rules and systems of this world would even out her painful lack of experience.
It ought to work so long as she followed the recipe.
That was what she told herself, at least.
Using a focused search of the area, Demi found flint nodules that suited her purposes. In fact, she had discovered that so long as she could clearly envision what it was that she was looking for, she could find it, provided it actually existed. This cut out a lot of time and labor that she would have otherwise spent gathering and comparing stones.
She brought her prospective axe-head and shovel point and laid them out near her collection of sticks and then sat down on the ground and looked at them. Finally, there was nothing else for it. If she was going to do it, then she needed to do it. After one last read over the tutorial chapter concerning crafting, she picked up her hammerstone and whacked it against the axe-head.
As she brought it down for the first strike, she went into a mild panic, because the motion felt completely unfamiliar and difficult to control. She wasn’t sure she would even hit the stone she wanted to hit, let alone in anything close to the place she had intended.
But then something very strange happened. It was as if she could see a seam in the stone, a fracture line lit up clearly as if marked with fluorescent paint. She hit the axe-head right on the fracture line, and a clean piece of flint was knapped right off.
This surprising success made Demi’s eyes widen, and she leaned back in astonishment, looking first at the hammerstone in her hand, and then at the freshly knapped flint.
But then the urge to investigate further overtook her and she brought the hammerstone down a second time to an identical result. This was so exciting that it set off a frenzy of flint knapping for Demi. She might have knapped her axe-head entirely out of existence if a great big red X hadn’t appeared over it when she tried to continue knapping it past the point of no return.
Her shoulder was a little sore from deliriously hammering chips of flint away from her axe-head, but the result was so pretty that Demi couldn’t help but sit and admire it. It was a beautifully knapped axe-head, the sort of textbook depiction of a Paleolithic tool that a person found in, well, a textbook.
Even though she knew that the current state of the axe-head was the result of the liberal assistance of the world’s inherent systems rather than any innate talent, she still couldn’t help feeling proud of having made it.
Well. Now it was time to really see if this would work, although her success in making the axe-head left her feeling more confident.
Demi opened up her system menu and selected “crafting.” She chose the recipe for “Stone Axe” and then selected her preferred stick and the knapped axe-head as the components. Then she chose “combine.”
And then, after a sound effect that sounded like hammering and sawing, she was suddenly holding an item in her hands.
But it was not “Stone Axe.”
It was “Harvest Goddess’s Improved Flint Axe ++.”
Demi was so surprised that she almost dropped the axe, and let out a long string of ararararararararara as she beheld it.
Glimmer was apparently similarly impressed, because he said, “That actually looks like a real tool that someone might use.”
“Doesn’t it?” Demi asked in delight, dancing around with her axe in a way that was probably not entirely safe. “One hundred percent perfect success!” she declared.
And this success lit the fire of creation in her. Hungry for more encouragement after the discovery that there were no buildings on her new farm, and that it was covered with insidious sadgrass, once Demi had carefully put her finished axe away in her inventory, she threw herself fully into the completion of her new tools.
She finished the shovel and the knife in short order, and they also came out as “Improved Flint Shovel ++” and “Improved Flint Knife ++.” Her hammerstone had by this point become a precious partner, the true MVP of the day, so she was unwilling to sacrifice it to make the hammer. She found another suitable stone, and soon added “Improved Limestone Hammer ++” to her inventory.
Having constructed all of her desired tools to standards that well exceeded her expectations, Demi collected Glimmer and settled him back on her shoulder, and began the hike back to the place where they had first arrived, stopping to drink some water from the emergency supply chest and share a sandwich along the way.