“What is it, Bettina? What’s the matter?”
“Lord Rudolf seems concerned about where Wolf went. But more than that, what is everyone doing here?”
Peeking inside the shed, the interior was dim, with no floorboards, just exposed, tilled soil stretching across the entire space, and here and there, blue plants poking through the earth.
In other words, the shed itself had been turned into a field.
“This is a field, right? No matter how you look at it.”
“Yeah, it’s a field.”
“Why go through all the trouble of making a field inside a shed?”
“Well… it’s more of an experiment, I suppose.”
It seemed they were conducting some kind of crop cultivation experiment, with the cooperation of the two farmer boys.
When Bettina was invited inside and the door shut behind her, I began to understand the situation a little.
The cloak thrown over my head started to feel rather cumbersome.
When the cloak was opened, the two boys, apparently only then noticing me, widened their eyes.
The older brother’s expression was slightly bitter.
“What kind of experiment are you doing here?”
Faced with repeated questioning, the older brother let out a big sigh and said, “We’re cultivating Kuroaosou.”
“Kuroaosou—that’s grown everywhere in this village, isn’t it?”
“Usually, the seeds are sown in summer and harvested in autumn. But we’re trying to see if we can harvest it in winter.”
“Winter… because it gets buried in snow, right? Oh, so that’s why it’s inside the shed?”
“There’s one more thing. Don’t you notice anything about the inside of this shed?”
Tilting her head, Bettina suddenly seemed to realize why I had opened the cloak just moments ago.
She clapped her hands lightly.
“It’s warm in here, isn’t it? Even though it’s already cold outside, how is that possible?”
“They call it geothermal heat. There are a few spots like this in the village where the ground naturally stays warm.”
“Oh, so that’s why you can cultivate crops even in winter.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s amazing—a great discovery!”
“—It’s not going that smoothly, which is why we’re having trouble.”
“Huh?”
“Isn’t there something else you notice?”
“W-what?”
Bettina looked around the shed anxiously.
Though the interior was narrow, the back was nearly swallowed by darkness.
Still, I could just make out that the soil was divided into roughly three sections.
Near the entrance, the row of blue plants were wilting badly, drooping lifelessly.
The middle section had just sprouted.
At the far end, there was nothing visible above the soil—either not yet sown or freshly sown.
“These vegetables here are completely wilted.”
“That’s why we’re in trouble. We have to consider it a failure. Can you guess the cause?”
“Um…”
“What do plants need to grow?”
“Um, water, fertilizer, soil?”
“They say sometimes soil isn’t necessary. But also the right temperature and sunlight.”
“Oh.” Bettina clapped her hands again.
“It’s dark in here, right? Not enough sunlight?”
“Exactly.”
“But wasn’t that obvious from the start? When you decided to use a shed.”
Hearing that, the three boys exchanged bitter looks.
The first to speak again was Ahim, sighing with that same bitter expression, “When we built this shed with our father’s help, you see, we made part of the roof openable. We thought if we could open and close that to adjust sunlight, it would work.”
“But it didn’t. As soon as we opened it, the inside got cold immediately. Using geothermal heat became pointless. When the real winter comes, it’ll be even worse. It’s so disappointing.” Rinus added his voice, and Bettina nodded emphatically.
“Oh, so…”
“It’s a failure,” the older brother agreed bitterly.
“If we try to keep the heat, we can’t get sunlight in. If we let sunlight in, it gets too cold. Sensei Bessel calls this a ‘contradiction.’ We tried for weeks, but it seems like it was all for nothing. I think we should just stop—”
“But Wolf, we can’t just call it a failure yet. We can try some other ideas.”
“Yeah, let’s give it a shot. Maybe even with the lack of sunlight, if we manage somehow, it might grow enough to eat.”
The older brother gave a faint, somewhat forced smile as he looked back at his helpers.
It seemed the boys weren’t of one mind—Rinus leaning toward pessimism, Ahim optimistic.
They hoped for something that would let light through but block heat loss.
Glass or plastic, perhaps, but such things don’t exist in this world.
And if they did, they might be prohibitively expensive.
After looking around once more, I sighed.
Thinking I was cold, Bettina adjusted the cloak over me again.
“We’ll be going back now. Sorry for the intrusion.”
“Yeah, we’re calling it a day, too.”
The boys tidied up the farming tools to one side and stepped out with us.
Before the door closed, I glanced inside once more.
After parting ways with the two boys, I entered through the back door with the older brother.
“Still, Wolf, you’ve been doing this kind of work every afternoon, huh?”
“Yeah. I do farm work here and check on wild rabbits in the forest. But since there’s no point in working the fields every day, it’s usually about once every three days. We had two days in a row recently to plant new seeds. The farming and everything else aren’t going well,” the older brother grumbled.
Bettina said, “Since it’s for the sake of the domain, I’m sure your efforts will pay off.”
“I hope so.”
Once upstairs, the older brother locked himself in his room immediately.
I had the heavy outerwear taken off and stretched out on the bed on my back.
Bettina hurried to close the window that had been left wide open and muttered to herself, “Looks like the weather will be bad for a while.”
For the next few days, just as Bettina predicted, the sky stayed cloudy, teetering on the edge of rain.
The older brother’s face grew more and more downcast with the gloomy weather, seeming increasingly hopeless about the shed’s vegetable cultivation.
Three days after the last farm work, around the time the older brother finished lunch, a loud voice came from the front entrance.
“Lord Wolf! Something’s happened!”
I heard the shout even from inside the room and urged Bettina to come to the stairwell with me.
Ahim and Rinus poked their heads in from the entrance, continuing to shout at the older brother as he came out of the dining room.
“What is it?”
“That Kuroaosou that was looking sick is getting better!”
“What?”
“Magic! Even though we did nothing, the shed was bright inside.”
“That can’t be true.”
“That’s why, come see it quickly!”
“Alright, I’m coming.”
After stepping back to prepare, the older brother left the room.
Without a word, Bettina dashed back and helped me put on the same heavy clothes from before.
I silently accepted the unusually rough treatment.
I arrived at the shed shortly after the older brother.
The row of plants nearest the entrance were fresh and vibrant blue-green vegetables, completely different from how they looked the other day.
“It’s true…” the older brother muttered.
“When I came here after three days, it was like this…..”Ahim began to explain.
“But—wait—” but the older brother cut him off, looking up at the ceiling.
Like the cloudy sky outside, darkness still ruled the inside of the shed.
“Didn’t you just say the shed was bright inside?”
“Yeah. A little while ago.”
“But when I came back, it was dark again.”
“What’s going on?”
The three exchanged looks and surveyed the space once more.
Bettina, clearly at her wit’s end, raised her voice.
“But whatever it is, this is a huge success! These vegetables could be sold!”
“That’s true,” the older brother scratched his head and said, “Even if this row succeeded, the experiment as a whole is a failure. If we don’t understand why this succeeded, we can’t say if we can do it again.”
“Still, it’s a sign we can grow good vegetables in this shed.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“That’s right, Lord Wolf. We just have to figure out the cause of the success.”
“We should review everything we’ve done so far.”
The others spoke enthusiastically, and the older brother nodded in agreement.
After watching the boys return to their work for a while, we went back inside the house.
The older brother returned only after the early autumn sunset had passed.
Bettina was waiting for me at the top of the stairs, holding me.
“Did you figure anything out?”
“No, no luck.” He answered with a bitter smile at the hurried question.
And just like that, he locked himself in his room again for the day.
“After all that hard work, too…” As we returned, Bettina puffed her cheeks in frustration.