The east field looked fine from a distance, which was the irritating part for Jacob.
From the lane, the soil sat in long, straight yet faded furrows, dark lines cut across the gentle slope. The fence posts were solid, the ditch on the far side was clear, and a few stubborn weeds nodded in the breeze like proof that life still tried out here.
Up close, it told a different story.
Jacob dropped to a crouch near the first furrow and dug his fingers into the dirt. The top layer broke in his hand like stale bread. A dry crust on top, with powder beneath. The color was wrong too, more gray than brown.
Arthur had not sugar-coated it the night before.
"The east side just quit on us," he had said at the table, elbows on his knees. "We pushed it too hard in the dry years. Wheat after barley, barley after oats. Hail took the one good stand we had, and everything after that came up thin and weak. You can coax a bad field for a season or two, but after a while, it just stops paying you for the work."
"Nothing grows?" Jacob had pressed.
"Plenty grows," Arthur said. "Dock, nettle, sticker weeds. Anything worth eating does not come in strong enough to bother with. Just a waste of good time and seed." He had looked at Jacob for a long moment. "You want to try out some ideas? Then that is the place. If you ruin it, no one cares; it won't hurt the farm any more than it has already. But if you fix it, we can talk about carving your name into the fence post."
So here he was, boots planted in a field every sane farmer had written off.
Jacob shifted his satchel higher on his shoulder and stood. Inside, the seed packets rustled together. Hardy grains, roots, a few odds and ends that had caught his eye. It was tempting to walk straight down the nearest row and throw everything into the ground just to see what happened.
He exhaled, slowly.
That was how you wasted a Trial Year and a bag of seed in one shot.
"Small steps," he muttered to himself.
He walked the near edge of the field, counting out paces. When he reached a spot where the ground flattened and the furrows were even, he stopped and scratched a rough rectangle in the dirt with his boot heel.
"This will take some work."
From his satchel, he pulled a coil of twine and a handful of short stakes he had cut from scrap in the barn. He paced out a grid, tying twine between the stakes until he had four long, narrow beds side by side, each one only a few paces wide.
The wind tugged at the lines, and they held.
He squatted again and pressed his fingers into the soil inside the first marked bed. If he squeezed hard, the dirt clumped but then crumbled apart.
'Too dry . . . Not much structure.' He remembered soil like this from his old world, puzzles in Farm Online that pointed toward organic matter and rotations. He did not have the proper tools for that here. What he had were runes, manure, time, and a stubborn streak.
"Bed one," he said quietly, tracing a number in the dirt with his fingertip.
He fetched the small sack of well-rotted manure Arthur had let him haul out. He spread a thin layer over the first bed and worked it in with a short hoe, careful to keep it within the twine lines.
"Baseline," he told himself. "So I know if the rest is actually better or just different."
For the second bed, he considered how he wanted to accomplish his goals for the test.
Enchanting the ground directly had already proved unreliable during his smaller tests behind the barn, and the seeds themselves felt far too delicate for a constant enchantment that would run all season. Clothing, tools, wooden handles, and stone heads accepted patterns and held them, while loose soil simply let everything bleed away whenever it felt like it.
He studied the short stakes that marked each corner of the bed and felt the answer settle into place with slow certainty that felt almost heavy.
Wood would have to work for this experiment.
Jacob pulled one of the corner stakes free and turned it in his hand while weighing the idea carefully. The grain showed clean along the length where he had shaved it smooth earlier, and the top had been cut flat like a tiny signpost that waited for a proper message. There was more than enough room for a careful enchantment, which meant there was also plenty of room for mistakes.
He set his satchel on the ground, reached inside, and brought out his etching tool with a small breath of relief. The tool had a narrow metal tip that took no shavings, left no scratches, and cut nothing, yet whenever he pushed magic through it, faint lines of power sank into whatever he traced across, leaving the surface smooth under his fingers and different in ways that mattered.
It looked enough like a scribe's tool that everyone simply called it an etching tool, and Jacob had never bothered to argue with the name, since explaining the difference always took longer than the listener's patience.
The healing pattern came back to him first, the basic one Arthur had taught him for first aid. It started from a central knot and spiraled outward in gentle curves, encouraging flesh to knit and bruises to fade with quiet persistence that never felt rushed.
Jacob closed his eyes and imagined that same web of lines laid over a plant instead of a person while he steadied his breathing. He pictured tender stems, thin leaves, and small roots instead of torn skin and blood vessels and aching joints.
Not sealing a cut this time, not pulling torn edges together, not forcing blood to clot where bleeding needed to stop. He wanted the pattern to feed growth instead, to push a seedling to root deeper, and to pull a little harder on whatever strength the tired soil still contained around it.
In his mind, he stripped out the parts of the pattern that spoke to muscle, skin, and blood, leaving only the gentle pull toward repair and balance. Then he added a small nudge toward stretching instead of tightening, like coaxing a cramped leg to extend and walk rather than encouraging it to curl and rest in place.
Once the pattern felt balanced and stable in his head, he opened his eyes and set the metal tip of the etching tool against the flat top of the stake.
Slowly, he guided the tool through the first curve, not cutting the wood at all, but laying a thin path of magic just under the surface. The grain accepted the power without resistance, and faint warmth rose under his fingers where his other hand braced the stake. He took his time with each turn of the spiral, adjusting one curve a little wider and tightening the next where the image in his mind shifted, while the magic soaked in and settled along the imagined lines.
This would not be a tool he swung and forgot after an hour in the field. This would sit here for weeks, quietly tugging on living things day after day until the enchantment finally faded or the wood failed. So he added the strengthening rune to the pattern to make sure it stood strong for the crops it was designed to help.
He guided the final mark into place and felt the pattern lock together with a soft twist through his chest.
Magic woke with a stronger warmth across his fingertips and along the back of his hand, then rolled outward in a steady pulse. The stake only briefly glowed, and for a moment, he sensed a soft pressure flowing outward from the invisible lines, like the slow exhale of a chest that had been held tight.
Jacob pushed the stake back into the corner of the second bed and pressed the soil down around it until it stood firm and straight. The sense of pressure settled around that patch of ground, thin and even and patient, as if the bed now sat under a very quiet watchman.
"Bed two gets healing turned toward growing instead of closing wounds," he said quietly, more to himself than to the empty field. "Same soil and manure, but the stakes add the new variable."