Gathering Wives with a System

These seeds came from a relic: the Grove Replicator, an artifact owned by Fortified City 22. It could create up to ten copies of any seed, but each copy dropped in quality by ten percent. And the copied seeds couldn’t be copied again.

Isaac originally had six authentic Verdant Baitseeds. Using the relic, he produced sixty copies.

Normally, these would be considered too low-quality to attract Sinkhole Worms. But thanks to Isaac’s skills, even the worst copies performed on par with seeds other cities used as their best.

Of course, Overlord Aurora had no idea he originally had six. She assumed he only copied them two or three times to keep their quality high.

The clone held the seeds.

Overlord Aurora frowned. ”Can you really grow anything in the wilderness? Your farms are built on carefully chosen land. This place is completely dead. Nothing grows here.”

Isaac stepped forward. ”Just watch.”

He took out the Terraheart Plow from his spatial ring.

He drove the plow into the ground and pulled.

The earth reacted instantly.

A wave of healthy soil spread outward. The corruption shrank, almost as if it were evaporating. Rotten patches returned to normal. The sickly gray sand turned brown. And then, to everyone’s shock, fresh green grass sprouted.

In the middle of the wilderness, a patch of living earth appeared.

”What...?” Overlord Aurora’s voice wavered.

Althea and Charlotta stood frozen.

”This...” Althea stepped forward slowly. ”You can reverse the corruption of the red rain on land?”

She crouched and touched the grass with both hands. Her eyes closed for a moment. She inhaled deeply.

”This is real. It’s not an illusion. It’s not temporary either. You purified the land completely,” she whispered.

Isaac nodded, though unsure why everyone was reacting so dramatically. ”Is it that big of a deal?”

Althea turned to him with a complicated expression.

”Only Gods’ domains or the expansion of a Fortified City can push back corruption. Nothing else, not even the strongest skills can do this,” she said quietly.

She stared at the plow in his hands. ”What type of item is that?”

”A bonded one,” Isaac replied, emphasizing ’bonded’ to make her understand she couldn’t use it even she had it. ”As for why it works... I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.”

Althea exhaled slowly. ”Then it must be blessed by a God. That’s the only explanation.”

Avery, the water elemental spirit, had said the same thing.

When Isaac first used the plow, she rushed over claiming the land had turned into a holy ground.

The memory made him pause.

He looked at the lush patch now covering the once-dead area. It wasn’t only cleansed. It felt... alive.