One day passed in a hungover daze, another in anxious unease. Only three days after the night of drinking did Priest Mekat receive the formal royal command, giving him full authority over the task of recruiting Black Snake's surrender. The personal guard who delivered the order also brought a verbal message from His Majesty, telling him to forget the complaints he had heard that night and simply pretend nothing had happened.
Only then did Priest Mekat let out a long breath, feeling as if he had sprinted a full circle along the edge of the endless Black Abyss and somehow come back alive.
"Main God bless me! Keeping His Majesty company... really is like keeping company with a Jaguar in the jungle!..."
Priest Mekat shook his head in secret, tucked His Majesty's royal decree into his robe, and went to look for the old militiaman Chiwako. He searched all over the city, then went outside the city as well, and only then, with great difficulty, did he spot the old militiaman squatting in a bean field in the nearest military-farm village, staring into space.
"Mekat, you came at just the right time! Help me look at the divinity of these three kinds of beans... oh! Which one fattens the field better!"
The old militiaman wore a straw hat, with a long blade of grass clenched in his mouth. After returning from Cuba, His Majesty had given him another job: to study the planting of different crops, water and fertilizer, growth, breeding, pests... things like that.
His Majesty called this "agronomy," and the post he gave him was something like head of the Department of Agronomy at Shenwei University, supposedly equivalent to a second-rank Divine Inspiration Priest. Besides that, His Majesty had also given him one agronomy textbook and one divinely