Progress on the waterway was slow.
Starting from the reservoir and working toward the waterfall, I piled up earth and packed it down hard using the Hammer. Even though the Universal Farming Tool spared me from physical exhaustion, I was still only one man.
Moreover, I had the fields to look after.
After ten days of work, I had only covered about five hundred meters. That was only a tenth of the total distance. To make matters worse, the closer I got to the waterfall, the more earth I would need to pile up to maintain the grade. I couldn't simply assume the rest would be finished in another ninety days.
I wondered if I should start working through the night, but I knew Kuro and his pack would worry if I did.
While I was mulling it over, the tomatoes, Canola, and Sugar Cane reached maturity. I suspended the waterway construction to focus entirely on the harvest.
As always, Kuro and the others seemed to love the tomatoes, eating them with great gusto. Since oil could be pressed from Canola seeds, I collected and stored them for now; the actual pressing would have to wait.
When I bit into a stalk of Sugar Cane, a grassy flavor and a rush of sweetness filled my mouth. The long-absent taste of something sweet brought a few tears to my eyes. As I gnawed away at the cane, I noticed Kuro and the others watching me expectantly, so I offered them some.
It turned out that only Yuki and Kurosan liked it; the others weren't particularly fond of the taste. It was just like what had happened with the strawberries. I finished cutting the rest and gathered them up.
The wheat and soybeans presented a bit of a problem, as I hadn't yet figured out how I was going to handle the threshing. There wasn't much I could do with them in their current state, so I decided to worry about that later and simply finished the harvest.
As for the Rice... I had originally intended to just grow seedlings, but I had been so focused on searching for salt and building the waterway that I had more or less abandoned them. I hadn't even managed to conduct a proper experiment with the Water Paddies. After all, the reservoir and waterway were being built specifically for that purpose.
I expected the crop to be a failure, but that wasn't the case. The seedlings had continued to grow on their own and had eventually borne fruit. I wondered if the point of using a Water Paddy was simply to increase the yield, or if the variety of rice here was just different. I was painfully reminded that I had only ever admired farming from afar, without possessing any real knowledge of the craft. Regardless, I harvested all the Rice as well.
The fruit trees had grown into reasonably sized trees, but they weren't yet ready to bear fruit. It would likely take more time. Even so, their growth rate was far beyond any common sense from my old life.
Then a thought occurred to me. If things grew this fast, would it be possible to grow Cedar or Cypress as well? If so, I would never have to worry about securing quality lumber. I decided not to rush and to try it out bit by bit.
Once the harvest was finished, I replanted only two plots of tomatoes and left the rest of the fields empty. I realized that if I tried to do too many things at once, I would eventually hit my limit. For now, my priority was completing the waterway and the reservoir.
I resumed the construction of the waterway.
I worked at it endlessly, but doing the same thing day after day started to wear on my spirits. For a change of pace, I explored the Forest. I hadn't given up on finding Rock Salt. Since Rock Salt was crystallized salt, I figured it was unlikely to be near a body of water, so I focused my search in a different direction from the river. Unfortunately, I found nothing of note beyond the distraction itself.
Thirty days passed.
Just as the two plots of tomatoes were nearing harvest, I noticed something. The temperature was dropping.
Seasons. That was it. I hadn't even considered the possibility of winter.
Dammit. The rapid growth of my crops had made me complacent. The world had seasons, and this Another World was likely no different. How many days had it been since I arrived? I'd finished two harvests and was about to start a third. If it took forty to fifty days from planting to harvest, and I calculated based on forty days, then roughly a hundred and twenty days had passed.
That meant four months had gone by since I started farming. Even if I assumed I had arrived in the spring... back on Earth, I had died in May. If the calendar here was similar, that would make it September or October.
If this world was anything like Earth, it was going to be cold for a while. I had to assume there would be at least ninety days of freezing temperatures. Would I be able to secure food as easily during that time? If it snowed, would I even be able to move around?
This was bad. I didn't have time to be building a waterway.
I hurriedly began preparing the fields, focusing on crops that would keep for a long time, such as potatoes, sweet potatoes, Daikon, and Carrots.
Next was the issue of heat. To fight the winter cold, I needed fire, and to keep a fire going, I needed Firewood. Normally, Firewood had to be seasoned and dried after being cut, but any wood I felled with the Universal Farming Tool was ready to use immediately. It was a godsend.
I began stacking a massive supply of Firewood behind the great tree that served as my former sleeping quarters and current Storehouse.