Chapter 5

"It seems they grow faster than usual, after all."

I muttered this to myself as I looked at my field. After finishing my first harvest, I continued to take care of the field. And I came to a certain conclusion. It was that the vegetables grown in my field grew faster than usual.

The fact that I could grow Hatsuca, which normally takes about 20 days to be ready for harvest, to a ripe state in just about 5 days is not just surprising, it's downright scary. However, after eating the vegetables that had grown to this point, I didn't notice any unusual changes in my body. I judged that there was probably no immediate effect. Of course, there's a possibility that some side effects might appear later, but I decided to let it go, thinking there's no point in worrying about it. After all, I was so hungry that I had to do something.

"But lately, things have been a bit easier. Maybe I should try an experiment here?"

However, those tough days are gradually settling down. This led to a bit of a playful mood. If I were a normal three-year-old, I probably wouldn't have thought of this. But I did attend school in my previous life. Although I didn't specialize in agriculture, I do have some knowledge. The idea that came to my mind this time was "breeding."

The food I ate in my previous life was all delicious. Even the items sold at a discount in supermarkets were clean, fresh, and had a solid flavor. However, at the time, I didn't pay much attention to such things and just ate everything with various seasonings to make it even more flavorful, so I rarely enjoyed the natural taste of vegetables.

But looking at the vegetables I'm growing in this world, I can't help but be very concerned. They are all of low quality. I'm now painfully aware of how excellent the vegetables I used to eat were. This is all thanks to the daily efforts and continuous breeding by unnamed farmers and researchers in the past, which allowed us to obtain such high-quality products at low prices.

However, I think that if a normal person were to take on breeding, the results wouldn't be that significant. It would probably be a great success if I could leave one thing for my descendants to be proud of after dedicating my life to it. But there's a presence that could potentially break this conventional thinking. That presence is magic. I don't understand the logic behind it, but in the fields I've cultivated with magic, the vegetables grow faster. So, I have no choice but to utilize it.

Thus, I immediately began preparing for breeding. I sincerely wished that the taste of the Hatsuca would improve even a little.

***

Now, I thought about breeding, but how should I go about it? Even though I helped my grandmother in the countryside with her field, we always used seeds and seedlings that we bought. So, I tried to recall the knowledge I learned in school from the depths of my memory. I remember learning about the laws of inheritance in biology class.

There was a story about a certain old man who conducted various experiments with peas in his field. He took data by visually confirming the wrinkles on a thousand peas and discovered the regularity of inheritance. At the time, I thought it was amazing that he could do such a leisurely thing. But there's a hint in that story. Although I say breeding, there aren't enough varieties of Hatsuca to crossbreed. If there were different varieties like Koshihikari and Akita Komachi, I could crossbreed them, but that's not the case. So, I had to start by investigating the characteristics of Hatsuca itself.

I carefully observed each harvested Hatsuca. The edible part is the root mass at the bottom of the stem, but of course, there were subtle differences in the stem and flower parts as well. I had to find and classify each of these differences.

Some had black root masses, while others were slightly purplish. Some produced many root masses, while others produced fewer but slightly larger ones. The flower colors ranged from white to yellow. I also checked any other subtle differences. Of course, I didn't forget to taste them to check the flavor, as I wasn't conducting a scientific study.

Naturally, just checking them wasn't enough. I had to crossbreed them based on the classified characteristics. I decided to divide the expanded field into six sections. Although I couldn't completely isolate them, I tried to grow them with the targeted characteristics in each section.

After a while, as this experiment, food security, and half-interesting behavior became part of my daily routine, I realized one fact. It was that "vegetables also possess magical power."

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