The Starfield Farming Sovereign (Elizabeth Schofield) novel Chapter 9

Elizabeth only needed to wait patiently for a year. By then, the other party would naturally find a way to dissolve this marriage.

Seen from that angle, the trouble in front of her suddenly felt far less urgent.

What mattered most right now was solving her most basic problem. Staying alive and fed.

Elizabeth turned off her device and began surveying her surroundings.

Along the way, she had seen many shanties built from assorted scraps and discarded materials.

Most of them clustered around the garbage recycling station. The farther one went from the station, the fewer signs of human presence there were.

It was hard to say whether the original owner had been lucky or unlucky. When she was exiled, she had been dropped straight into this area, far from any crowd.

She had spent three days in overwhelming fear and anxiety.

On the third day, hunger finally overcame fear. She struggled out to explore, trying to find the recycling station where food could be exchanged.

Yet just as she caught sight of other people, before she could even savor the relief of seeing her own kind again, she lost her life.

Elizabeth, however, was quite satisfied with this place.

Traveling back and forth to the recycling station would be inconvenient, but the area around her was a vast stretch of open ground.

As far as the eye could see, it was all barren rock and desolate gravel, so infertile that not even a single weed grew. It looked utterly lifeless.

At least there were no mountains of garbage piled here.

Otherwise, if she wanted to farm, she would first have to play the fool and move entire trash heaps out of the way.

Elizabeth chose a plot backed by a rocky slope, rolled up her sleeves, and got straight to work.

The first task was clearing the ground of trash that the soil couldn't break down.

Scraps of metal, plastic waste, and toxic mineral fragments. Most of it had rolled down from nearby garbage hills. She carefully picked up each piece and piled it off to the side.

Next came the most physically demanding part: turning the soil.

In the cultivation world, she would only need to bring out a land-opening spirit tool and channel spiritual power into it. Vast stretches of wasteland would become fertile fields in an instant.

But now, she didn't even have an ordinary hoe.

No tools meant she had to make her own.

She certainly wasn't going to dig with her bare hands.

Her gaze fell on the debris from the collapsed shack. She pulled out a relatively intact, thick sheet of metal.

She circulated the small amount of spiritual power left in her body and focused it into her palms, twisting, folding, and hammering the metal by hand.

Relying purely on brute force, she managed to shape it into a crude, oddly formed but sufficiently sturdy makeshift hoe.

Her spiritual power was nearly depleted, so she dared not waste any while turning the soil.

Using nothing but physical strength, she hacked into the compacted earth one strike at a time, prying it open chunk by chunk.

Only after cultivating more than 2,000 square feet, roughly a third of an acre, did she finally stop.

She collapsed onto the ground, exhausted, feeling the long-forgotten ache of sore, overworked muscles.

Time was tight, and she didn't dare rest for long.

The land was turned, but the soil was so barren that it lacked even a trace of nutrients. Worse, it might still contain harmful substances.

Nothing could grow in soil like this.

So her next step was to improve it using circles.

Within the range of the Spiritbound Circle, the condensed water naturally carried a faint trace of spiritual energy.

As the spiritual energy in the soil gradually grew richer, the water collected in the container would become true spirit spring water, capable of nourishing all living things.

In this way, she solved both irrigation and daily water supply in one stroke.

With the biggest concern, water, addressed, it was time for the final step: preparing the seeds.

Elizabeth took out seven potatoes and wiped away the dirt clinging to their surfaces. She found that many mold spots had appeared.

Those blemishes were likely the reason they had been discarded as trash.

In an interstellar era where agriculture struggled to survive and every viable seed was considered a strategic resource, such visibly diseased tubers were worthless in anyone's eyes, no different from garbage.

But in Elizabeth's hands, there was never an absolute boundary between waste and treasure.

She gathered a faint wisp of spiritual power at her fingertips and gently brushed it over the potatoes. The unpleasant mold vanished without a trace.

Then, following the distribution of the sprouts, she carefully cut the potatoes into smaller pieces, making sure each piece had at least one healthy eye.

Seven tubers once deemed poisonous waste were turned into more than twenty viable seed pieces.

She picked up her makeshift hoe again and dug small holes in the now moist, loosened soil, carefully crumbling the clods at the bottom.

She placed a potato piece into each hole, sprout facing upward, then gently covered it with soil rich in spiritual energy.

The number of seeds was limited, and the cultivated third of an acre was more than enough for just over twenty potato plants.

So Elizabeth left generous spacing between each seed piece.

This ensured that every sprout could receive the maximum nourishment from the Spiritbound Circle and have ample room for its roots to spread, absorbing as much spiritual energy from the soil as possible and accelerating its growth.