Chapter Twelve: The Fruit of Idleness
“Tweet! Tweet!”
When we got back from our day of leveling, Father and the others were already back at the carriage.
“You want me to name another?” Father asked.
I nodded. “Well, if you want to name her like you named the others, what about Navy-chan?”
Father shrugged. “Maybe. Were there any filolials that were a similar color in the first go-around? Maybe ‘Ai’ from the Japanese word for ‘indigo’?”
“There was. Which is why I wanted to ask you to come up with a new name, Father.”
“I’m not sure.” Father examined the new filolial. He extended his hand to pet her. She closed her eyes and chirped happily.
Navy blue. You certainly couldn’t call her black, although it was a shade of blue very close.
Father spoke up. “How about using the old Japanese word for ‘navy,’ then? ‘Kokihanada,’ and we can make it ‘Hanada’ for short.”
“Father, your knowledge never fails to amaze me,” I said. The depths of my admiration for Father had no bounds. His imagination soared far beyond mine!
“It was the name of a hidden dungeon in a game I used to play,” Father said. “That’s the only reason I knew it.”
“Then shall we call her ‘Hanada’?” I asked.
Father paused. “Saying it out loud, it doesn’t really sound like a girl’s name.”
Lazy Pig oinked a few times.
“Since she hatched after we defeated the bioplants, we should name her something to do with that? That’s not a bad idea.”
“Oink oink oink.”
“Right, name her after the place she hatched. That could be good.”
Upon Lazy Pig’s suggestion, we pulled out a map.
“Big Bro!” Keel suddenly exclaimed. “Big Bro! Since her color is like a deep, beautiful night sky, what about ‘Yozora’? That means ‘night sky’! Whaddaya think?”
“Not bad, not bad.” Father scratched his chin, thinking about it.
“Tweet?”
Father struggled over what to name the new filolial chick. Choosing a name is no easy task, I say.
“Oink oink,” continued Lazy Pig.
“What? This is all just a pain, so we should call her Shutsuran-no-homare, from the literal translation, ‘honor from indigo’?”
“Naofumi! I suppose filolials are kind of like horses, but that name is the worst!” Sakura said.
Oho? Lazy Pig came up with a name that was not half bad. After all, a lot of filolials have names like racehorses. So I wasn’t totally opposed to it or anything.
I supposed a name like Kuro, which meant black, wasn’t too different from that.
“Let’s keep thinking,” Father said. “Keel, you suggested the night sky before. I like that. How about we name her after the moon. Maybe Luna?”
“That’s a lovely name!” I declared.
“It’s beautiful,” Keel agreed.
“Oink oink.”
I think that had to be it. Without thinking any harder about it, I decided to name her Luna.
If it had been totally up to me, I would’ve just gone with Navy-chan. But since Father said so, it would have to be Luna.
“From now on I shall call her Luna!” I declared.
Luna chirped in agreement.
Father smiled and looked around. “You all look hungry. How about I cook up some of the chimera meat for dinner tonight?”
“Yes please!”
We all gathered around the dining table to enjoy Father’s delicious cooking and passed the rest of the day.
Lately, I had been teaching Father magic at night, but we took a break to investigate the bioplants. Well, Father did all the hard work, but I was there.
“Now that we’ve got some of the safe seeds, it’d be great if we had a place to experiment with them.”
“Oink oink,” Lazy Pig interrupted.
“We can use your family’s land? Really?”
“Oink oink.”
Lazy Pig offered her family’s land to us. That’s just what a pig would do—rush to the scent of an opportunity to rake in some cash. In the world I came from, they used pigs to sniff out truffles. It must be something like that. They must have a talent for it.
“Yes, I’m able to control everything pretty precisely,” Father said. “Why do you ask?”
Lazy Pig oinked some more, and Father nodded in agreement. I supposed they were still talking about bioplants.
“Oh, I got it. That’s a good plan. Just so you know, any final adjustments will be made on your family’s land.”
“So what did you decide to do?” I asked.
“Okay, so we were talking about changing the structure of the bioplant seeds, harvesting some food for ourselves, and selling the rest.”
Father went on to explain the full plan to me. Basically, when you restructure and improve bioplants, you reduce their malignant tendencies and increase their productivity. But it would take a while to wait until that happened. Regardless, once we got them under control, we would easily solve the problem of food and food shortages.
When people were hungry, they got lazy and could start stupid wars by accident, I say. It was a brilliant plan to sell the seeds. Happiness self-earned is far more marvelous than happiness given to you by someone else, I say!
“So we’ll take the seeds from our first harvest and go around selling them,” Father continued. “Once food becomes more abundant accordingly, we just need to make sure people manage the seeds properly so they don’t get out of control. And if all goes well, we’ll have solved the problem of hunger altogether.”
“Will we sell them at a high price?” I asked.
“Well, we do need the money. But if we sell for cheap, more importantly, we’ll continue to gain the people’s trust. No matter what the high priest says about us, the people will know the truth—that we’re good people. And if there’s an emergency anywhere, we can quickly go help.”
Lazy Pig oinked again.
“Based on what Elena is saying, this year is a bad harvest, thanks to all the waves of destruction. It sounds like food shortages are really an issue.”
So our plan was to go around selling the seeds and food to further win the trust of the people. Any famines were of great importance for us to solve. In the first go-around, as well as in the previous one, there had been a lot of hungry people out there.
“That’s why we need to sell the seeds—it’ll take too long for us to grow the food and sell it to people, at least right away. They should trust us enough to listen to us about how to manage the seeds properly. Still, you never know what people will do, and we have to be careful who we trust with them,” Father explained.