Nausicaä finished leveling the ground and stepped back to give Mu En room to perform his incantation.
The crude planting method made several of the farmer foremen behind them whisper among themselves.
Everyone knew wheat seeds and potatoes had to be sprouted first, and beans had to be soaked before they could be planted.
Besides, the seasons were changing, and the nighttime cold was enough to kill any seedlings that sprouted prematurely.
This was a downright waste of food!
Beruto watched it all with a cold gaze.
He could almost see those precious seeds rotting and going moldy in the soil.
If the handful of food they had just scattered had been given to the two little brats next door who were howling with hunger, he could have had a few days of peace and quiet at least.
But thrown here, it could only go to waste.
"Your Highness, is that it? If you ask me, we should dig those seeds up while we still can. At least they wouldn't go to waste." His tone had taken on a hint of mockery.
Nausicaä, however, did not respond to his request. She simply gestured for him to wait quietly.
Beruto grew annoyed. Surely they weren't going to stand here and wait for the seeds to sprout?
"Your Highness! Stop insisting on having your way. You can't farm by praying for some miracle to-"
[Erdtree's Favor]
As golden light burst from the Erdtree, Beruto's challenge came to an abrupt halt.
The next second, countless new shoots, each a sign of life, burst forth, vying to be first!
The soybeans matured first. Their fuzzy stems and leaves shot up wildly, and their pods swelled until they looked ready to burst at any moment, their size far exceeding that of any "normal" beans.
Potato vines spread across the ground almost at the same time, dotted with little white flowers. Beneath the earth, the tubers swelled rapidly, pushing the soil above them into mounds.
Then grapevines, with no trellises to support them, spread across the ground. In the blink of an eye, bunches of grapes with an alluring deep purple sheen lay on the soil, each grape as large as a baby's fist.
The wheat matured last. Its stalks grew several times thicker and longer than before, and its green heads swiftly turned into enormous ears of grain that nearly dragged the stalks down and snapped them.
As the farmers watched with eyes stretched as wide as they could go, the golden light of Erdtree's Favor ran out, and all the crops reached maturity at that very moment.
The crops they had deemed "impossible to sprout" had grown into a scene of abundance in just a few minutes.
All their doubts turned into heavy breathing.
As farmers, they could not fail to understand what this meant.
The Valley of the Wind could be saved!
"Th-this is!!"
His earlier anger instantly forgotten, Beruto rushed to the edge of the field in a few strides, squatted down, and examined the crops closely.
"How is this possible?! The stalks are thicker than they are at harvest time, and the ears are nearly half as long as the whole plant!" he muttered, measuring one with his thumb and forefinger.
"And these grains..."
The grains were astonishingly large too, more than twice the size of the shriveled wheat grains of the past. Calling it "little" wheat bordered on fraud.
To make sure he wasn't hallucinating, he plucked a few grains, rubbed the husks off in his palm, then put the enormous golden kernels in his mouth and chewed hard.
A rich, delicate sweetness and a wheat fragrance far surpassing anything from before filled his mouth.
Still unwilling to believe it, he plucked a grape. Its weight in his hand made it feel like a purple gemstone.
He took a bite, and a heady grape fragrance and juice as sweet as honey exploded in his mouth.
The shock Beruto felt was no less than a magnitude-nine earthquake.
After all, the reason those grapes had been used to make wine before was that wine was all they were good for.
Their skins were as thick as eggshells, and they tasted sour and astringent. Nobody liked eating grapes straight.
But with the grape in his hand, anything other than eating it straight would be a terrible waste.
If such exquisite grapes were made into wine, who knew what heavenly nectar they would produce?
Even the royal family of Tolmekia would probably flock to get their hands on it.
"This... how is this possible... something like this..."
Beruto stared blankly, dumbfounded.
His own senses told him that it was all real, that a so-called "miracle" had truly occurred before his eyes.
But his worldview, built on decades of farming experience, refused to accept it.
"Elder Beruto, are you all right?"
A young foreman saw him squatting motionless on the ground and moved to help him up.
But the elder, lost in his own world, suddenly sprang to his feet.
"A hoe."
"Huh?"
"What are you wasting words for? I told you to bring me a hoe!"
The young foreman, already well acquainted with the "Scarface Elder's" fiery temper, broke out in a cold sweat and hurriedly handed him a bronze-colored hoe.
Beruto swung the hoe, turning up the potato vines along with the soil beneath them.
He wanted to see whether all the crops had changed.
When several round, golden potatoes rolled out of the dirt, Beruto finally faced reality. The hoe slipped from his hand and fell to the ground.
The new potatoes had smooth, plump skins, and each was far larger than an adult's fist. Compared with the things they had planted before, the difference was like heaven and earth.
Counting from the time he first gripped a hoe at the age of ten, he had farmed the land in the Valley of the Wind for thirty years.
Most of the farmers in the valley were his students. He knew the character of every inch of soil and the habits of every crop.
He could not understand how a growth cycle that should have lasted hundreds of days and nights had been compressed into a few short minutes.
Still less could he understand how the wheat and potatoes he had eaten for decades could yield several times as much as before and swell until they hardly looked like the same plants!
Beruto spun around to look at Nausicaä.
"Your Highness, how on earth was this done?"
"Are you willing to believe me now?" Nausicaä was perfectly calm, as though she had expected his reaction all along.
"Your Highness, I apologize. I was entirely in the wrong to contradict you earlier." Beruto's weathered face burned, but his desire to know left him no time to care. "But please, you must tell me how this was done!"
He admitted he had spoken a little too loudly just now.
As for his pride... heh, what was his pride worth compared to a chance to save the Valley of the Wind? Could he eat it?
Nausicaä smiled faintly and turned her gaze to the Erdtree.
"I already told you the answer. All of this is a gift from the Erdtree."
Looking into the princess's clear golden eyes, Beruto realized that everything she had previously said about the Erdtree was true.
"But how could a tree..."
"The Valley of the Wind itself is a miracle, and so is the Sea of Corruption. So why couldn't there be one more miracle like the Erdtree?"
"I see... a miracle..."
Beruto said nothing more, merely standing before the field that still radiated life, muttering to himself.
At that moment, the "knowledge of agriculture" he had believed in all his life, along with his creed of "believe in neither gods nor spirits, only yourself," shattered deep within him.
The next moment, an incomparably concentrated power of faith burst forth from Beruto's soul.