Foreign Land Reclamation By a Vegetable-growing Skeleton

Ange was awakened by the sound of pecking, his soul slowly ignited, and waves radiating from his hollow eye sockets, sensing whatever they touched. This was the skeleton's way of observing the world.

The soul stretched out and landed on Ange's ribcage, the exact spot where the pecking sounds were coming from. A small bird was pecking at the damaged part of Ange's rib, plucking out and eating the seeds embedded there.

Ange maintained his position and let the bird clean his body. This was good for him. The seeds embedded inside would swell and sprout when damp, and could damage his bones.

After the bird flew away, Ange got up from the ground and checked his body.

Many parts had worn out again, it was time for replacements...

After a winter's slumber, Ange's skeleton had suffered more damage compared to last year. If the damage was not fixed, his movement could be affected.

However, the thought of this made Ange look troubled. He cast his gaze towards the palace behind where the well-preserved skeletons could be found, nestled inside the grand palace resembling a mountain, and which after so many years had passed, was one of the few places where complete skeletons could be found. The search for replacement bones required entry into the palace which was a troublesome task.

Though the Undead King had disappeared for a thousand years, the lingering power in Ange's soul still made him reluctant to approach the palace.

He would make do this year and think about replacements next year... Ange dismissed the idea of going to the palace to look for replacement bones, and made his way towards the nearby field.

Where he stood, was a pile of hay, which was Ange's home and where he slept and sought shade. In the past, he could not bear the scorching sunlight during the day. When the sun went down, he went out to work until the next day. This was the usual schedule of the undead.

When he had companions, they would often burrow into the hay pile and emerge covered in dry grass at dusk.

Ange found this to be not ideal. The hay pile was damp and dark, attracting insects and corroding the skeleton.

So Ange began to bundle up stalks of hay, stacking them to form a semi-closed cavity. He would then burrow into the cavity, protecting himself from the rain and sun, resulting in better condition of his bones compared to his companions.

Over the past few years, he no longer minded the sun's exposure, yet the old habit continued affecting him, leading him to follow the schedule of resting at sunrise and working at sunset. Now it was the evening hour, and it was time to work rigorously again.

Ange was a farming skeleton at the Resting Camp's nearby farm, responsible for tilling a fifty-acre farmland for the past 1,100 years.

Previously, there were more than sixty skeletons like Ange in the entire farm, each tending to a fifty-acre field. Ange was an ordinary member of the group, his only special trait being probably that he lived longer than the others.

Typical skeletons did not maintain their bones, liked to chase small birds, and loved to burrow in hay piles, hence their bones decayed to uselessness after a few decades and they collapsed onto the ground.

Occasionally, higher undead flying over would notice the laid-waste part of the farm and realize that the skeleton responsible had decayed. They would report this, and a new skeleton would be assigned a dozen days later.

Of course, there was definitely no harvest from the neglected farmland that year, but that was not a worry. The undead did not need food. The crops grown here were just stored for entertaining any visiting human delegations.

However, given the poor relationship between the Undead Empire and the humans, visits from humans may not occur for centuries.

But what did it matter? The investment cost was not high, just a matter of maintaining sixty or so skeletons. Keeping the farm running was effortless, so much so that the upper echelons of the Undead Empire even forgot about the existence of this farm. It only continued to operate out of inertia.

In this farm sustained by inertia, nobody ever noticed Ange, the remarkably long-living skeleton. Few intelligent undead ever made their way here, and since he did not decay, nobody came to throw him away. Moreover, Ange had discovered a method of prolonging one's lifespan.

Some skeletons had decayed, losing their ability to act, but not all of their bodies were rotten. Some had lost an arm, others their spine was rotten, yet for the most, their feet had gone bad.

When these skeletons lay immobile on the ground, Ange would dismantle the intact parts from them and replace the decayed parts of his body.

Over a hundred years passed like this, his companions had been replaced more than a dozen times, but Ange still maintained his battered and worn-out body. Then, upon awakening from a long winter slumber in the 139th year, Ange found the whole world had changed.

The surroundings had become utterly silent, devoid of the wails of the wraiths, the shrieks of the malignant spirits, as well as high-rank undead creatures flying across the sky from time to time. Even his companions in the farm were no more.

Ange hadn't realized what had happened, he continued with his routine work from the past hundred years, weeding, tilling, and sowing. After a week of this, he noticed that apart from the area he was responsible for, all other places had become barren.

Had another skeleton decayed?

Following tradition, he immediately went on to find the replacement bones. After turning over every deserted plot, Ange found fifty-nine decayed skeletons whose bodies remained somewhat intact, their soul fires extinguished.

At that point, Ange finally had the feeling that something was wrong. However, being only a low-ranking farming skeleton, he couldn't understand what was amiss. On the other hand, having found more than fifty intact skeletons made him happy for a long time.

Ange used his invented method of storing these skeletons in a hollow stack of straw. In the following two hundred years, he survived peacefully, relying on the replacement of these skeletons.

Throughout these two hundred years, Ange continued with his work, sowing and harvesting. The harvested crops would leave behind seeds, and the rest would be moved to the edge of a large cave in the farm, to be thrown down a chute.

The cave was covered with breathing soil that could preserve food for a very long time, and the space inside was very large. It might take Ange a thousand years to fill it up all by himself.

Time passed day by day, and the skeletons eventually ran out, especially as those stored in the hollow also slowly decayed.

When the last of the spare skeletons was used up, one of Ange's feet shattered, which forced him to hobble out of the farm he had not left for three hundred years.

The entire Undead Empire was in dead silence, with no souls to be seen at all. However, there were many weathered and broken skeletons on the ground, which, judging by their state of decay, had been dead for at least two hundred years.

Why was this so? Ange, filled with doubts, wandered on this silent dead land, searching for spare bones, and eventually found his way to the palace.

The Resting Camp was the supreme existence of the Undead Empire, where the Undead King who controlled souls and eternal life slept. It had a natural oppressive aura to lower-level undead creatures.

Ange hovered around for several days before he got used to this pressure and stepped into the area of the Resting Camp. The place was steeped in an aura of death, the ground filled with thick breathing soil which could dehydrate everything and preserve it for a longer time.

In the breathing soil, Ange found some robust and sturdy skeletons. These strong and firm skeletons once belonged to higher-level Ashbone or White Skeletons if Ange was a low-ranking dry-bone skeleton.

Unfortunately, these skeletons, once stronger than Ange, had now lost their souls and were reduced to a pile of bones. If they were not buried in the Breathing Soil, they probably would have rotten and decayed like the ones outside.

Ange picked up a set of bones, assembling them into a complete skeleton, then transferred his soul onto it, transforming into a higher-ranking Ashbone Skeleton.

While he wanted to assemble a higher-level Silver Skeleton, he found his soul too weak to drive it and had to give up.

And so, Ange returned to his farm and continued his life of waking up at sunrise and working until sunset, until the bones of his body decayed once again.