The Farming Saint in the Starry Wasteland (Elizabeth Schofield) novel Chapter 499

Chanter 499 Get the Chickens

Chapter 499 Get the Chickens

But she kept that to herself

Some things simply couldn’t be explained, and even if they could, nobody would believe them anyway.

She just smiled her private little smile and turned her attention back to the valley, where the Cluckoo Chickens were still filing dutifully into the funnel’s gleaming throat.

The com kernels at the entrance had been picked completely clean, but still they came, drawn forward by something they couldn’t name and didn’t need to.

The spiritual energy had soaked itself into the pipe’s walls, and what lingered there was more than enough to keep them marching in one after another, irresistibly and without end.

The counter’s numbers climbed faster and faster, each blink quicker than the last.

One hundred twenty. One hundred twenty-one. One hundred twenty-two.

Elizabeth murmured under her breath, soft and fervent as a prayer. “Keep coming, keep coming. Give me eight hundred, give me a thousand. We’ll raise every last one of them and have eggs every single morning.”

Olivia, crouched just beside her, caught the words and couldn’t quite stop herself. “Ma’am, Cluckoo Chicken eggs aren’t exactly a treat, though. They’ve got a pretty strong gamey smell to them.”

Elizabeth didn’t turn around. “Don’t worry about that. Nothing that comes into this farm stays anything less than extraordinary.”

Olivia swallowed, and something hopeful and wondering stirred behind her eyes. “Really? I’ve genuinely never eaten an egg that didn’t smell like that.”

“When we’re back, you’ll eat your fill of them,” Elizabeth said.

Olivia smiled, slow and radiant, her eyes curving into warm crescents.

The last Cluckoo Chicken ambled into the funnel with all the leisurely dignity of someone who’d decided this entirely on their own terms, and the counter blinked one final time and settled, fixed and certain, on three hundred forty-seven

The valley lapsed into a deep, resonant stillness, broken only by the dry, whispering sigh of the wind moving through the leaves.

Tyson waited, watching and listening, until he was fully satisfied that nothing remained, then rose to his feet.

“That’s a wrap.” Desmond and Skylar moved toward the funnel and began breaking it down with practiced, efficient hands.

The indicator light on the metal housing winked out. Every piece of equipment disappeared into the storage capsule, Tyson tucking it away with careful, methodical precision.

The whole operation dissolved in minutes, clean as though it had never been.

Clara was still crouching behind her tree, her mind not entirely caught up with reality.

She glanced at the time display on her wrist holopad.

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Chapter 499 Get the Chickens.

from the moment they’d set out to right now, the entire thing had taken under two hours.

She looked at Olivia. Oliwa looked back at her. The same stunned, barely believing hght lived in both their eyes.

“That’s it?” Olivia pushed herself upright, shaking the pins and needles out of her legs with a grimace

She rubbed her kneecap and stared out at the meadow, which now lay completely, serenely vacant.

Just minutes ago, over a hundred Cluckoo Chickens had been grazing across that grass without a care in the world. Now there wasn t a single feather left, the whole flock vanished as cleanly as if the earth had simply opened up and swallowed them.

Tyson slipped the storage capsule into his pocket and dusted his hands together.

“That’s it.”

Felix stepped out from behind the tree line and stood looking at the empty meadow for a long, contemplative moment, his expression somewhere between reverent and genuinely adrift.

“That many Cluckoo Chickens,” he finally said, his voice carrying that faintly untethered quality of a man whose mental framework had just been quietly dismantled, “would’ve taken a full day’s chase to catch, until now.”

Olivia added with feeling, “And even then, you’d lose at least half of them. They scatter the second you make a move.”

Tyson glanced between the two of them and smiled with the unhurried warmth of someone watching people experience something he remembered going through himself.

“You’ll get used to it,” he said. “Give it time.”

After all, the farm had a long and distinguished history of doing the impossible so routinely it stopped feeling remarkable. Olivia nodded in deep, sincere agreement, and then something else crossed her face and she turned toward Elizabeth.

“Ma’am, it’s still early. We could head straight for the Redhogs now instead of waiting until tomorrow.”

Elizabeth was crouched low in the grass some distance away, doing something with her hands that nobody could quite make out from this angle.

She answered without looking up. “Not yet. We’re not done.”

Olivia blinked, “We got all the chickens. What else is there?”

Elizabeth didn’t answer.

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She rolled her sleeves back, bent at the waist, and kept working her hands through the grass with focused, deliberate intent.

The meadow grass was thick and lush out here, growing dense and tall enough to brush the knee.

She pushed apart one cluster, studied what lay beneath, gave a small shake of her head, and moved to the next.

Olivia trailed after her in a state of genuine bewilderment. “Ma’am, what are you looking for?”

Elizabeth paid her no attention whatsoever.

She pressed further into the deeper, more tangled reaches of the grass, parting clump after clump until she reached a particularly

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Chapter 499 Get the Chirkens

dense, sheltered thicket and went still.

She crouched, both hands casing the blades aside with a gentleness that was almost reverent, and then her voice came, quiet and radiant with a joy she couldn’t quite contain

“There they are

She drew her hands back out of the grass, and nestled in her cupped palms were two eggs.

They were larger than an ordinary chicken egg by a noticeable margin, their shells a delicate, dusty blue-green scattered all over with fine, warm brown speckles, and in the slanted afternoon light they held a soft, milky luminescence that made them look almost precious.

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