“Great.” I hastily shoved the last bite of my meat bun into my mouth, chewed it as fast as I could, and swallowed it before gulping down my coffee. Then I jumped up and hurried out of the house with everyone. “Time to watch the mythical animals hatch!”

Mo tugged on my sleeve. “May I please be the first to ride the horse?”

I shook my head. “I actually don’t know how to ride horses. We’ll have to find someone to teach us. They will be the first to ride.”

“Will we need to tame them first?” asked Lari.

“I don’t know.”

We reached the portal and they let me enter first. Inside, we got to the [Animal Pen] just in time to see cracks forming on the surface of the six eggs. In the past few weeks, the eggs had grown until they were all the size of a human.

“Oh my gosh! I can’t believe it’s finally happening!” I embraced the kids and they all cheered.

I placed benches for all of us to sit on, and, since it was a special occasion, I readied my System camera to take screenshots.

Wait, since this wasn’t the game, they weren’t screen captures. They were photos even if the System button said “screenshot.”

“Teacher…” Mo frowned. “They aren’t really going to be giant toads, are they?”

I laughed merrily. “It’s random, dear apprentice. We have to be good little farmers and take what the System gives us. They will all be mythical animals, that’s all I know for sure.”

“I don’t mind if it's a toad as long as it's not stinky like the [Lizardwings].” Kharli shuddered.

The cracks became larger and larger, and we all waited with bated breath as an appendage broke through the eggshell.

“It’s a hoof!” Mo beamed. “I knew it would be a horse.”

“Hold your horses! Wait until it fully emerges,” I said as a single horn broke through as well.

A moment later, everyone was shocked when a strange creature appeared. It had hooves like a horse, a body like a deer, a tail like an ox, a golden mane like a lion, multicolored scales like a fish, and a single horn on its forehead.

“A qilin!” said Fengying.

“How auspicious,” murmured Yinuo to me. “A qilin only appears when a sage or great ruler appears or is about to appear.”

“I don’t think you can ride it,” I said to Mo.

She nodded but didn’t look disappointed. “Maybe the other eggs will have horses.”

Mo often claimed that she had terrible luck, and today I could only shake my head when the other five eggs hatched, but none of the mythical animals were horses.

“Six qilin? This is unheard of.” Fengying turned to her husband, and they spent a minute engaging in silent conversation. “Deming says it looks like a herd of three mated pairs of qilin.”

Whoa! Were we supposed to breed them?

I was freaking out a bit, but Fengying wasn’t done speaking.

“My lady, do you see how their hooves aren’t touching the ground?”

“Now that you mention it, they do seem to be floating.”

“Deming says the qilin are gentle creatures who don’t trample or eat living things.”

“Hmm?” I felt conflicted about that. On the one hand, that was nice. On the other hand, what was I supposed to feed them?

I was still worrying about it when all six creatures trotted to me. One by one, they reared back and then spat out a white jade tablet the size of my palm.

Did they all have an interspatial storage space inside their mouths?

When the last one was finished, they turned away from me and gracefully galloped away and up into the sky, their golden manes streaming in a nonexistent wind. I didn’t dare to move or pick up the items, and we all waited in awed silence until they had all flown out of sight.

The solemnity of the occasion was broken by Lari, who suddenly blurted out, “But this means we won’t get any Farming exp!”

“And I thought Mo was the one obsessed with exp.” I smiled at him and patted his shoulder consolingly.

“I think the jade they left should be worth it,” said Kharli.

“Hey, don’t touch them. The System doesn’t seem to have information about the tablets.” I knelt to examine them more closely. They seemed to be made of the finest white jade, engraved with golden runes that glowed faintly. Their edges were carved with an elaborate abstract design reminiscent of waves and clouds. I took out a pair of chopsticks from my inventory and poked the jade tablets with them.

Fengying and Deming stepped forward as one.

“Lady Violet, Deming says he can examine them for you.”

I looked up and saw that the Demon Chef had a fierce expression on his face and his eyes were glowing red. I nodded. Though I didn’t know the details since Deming was quite secretive about his cultivation and skills, I knew that he was pretty powerful in his own right. “Okay. I don’t think the qilins would give us something dangerous… but we should still be careful.”

Deming collected all of the tablets and sat down on a bench. A slight furrow appeared between his brows, and he pressed his lips together into a thin line as he turned the objects over to study every inch of them.

Fengying sat down beside him and gazed fondly at her husband. “He says he can’t read the runes. The tablets don’t give off any qi, but he’s sure the runes are significant.”

We all watched, fascinated, as Deming discovered that the sunken and raised areas on the carvings could be used to notch the tablets together. He put all six together in a certain way like a puzzle, and when the last piece slid into place, we could all read a simple message written in this world’s language on its side saying “Thank you.”

Deming stood up and handed the tablets to Fengying who passed them to me. I half-expected something to happen when I touched them, but nothing did. The others crowded around me, so I passed the tablets around for them to marvel over.

“These must be worth a lot of gold,” said Lari.

“Gold? These were given to our lady by a herd of qilin. They’re priceless,” said Kharli.

“We should display them in the main hall,” said Yinuo. “I bet no other household will be able to match them.”

“The runes might be protection runes,” said Haoran.

I put an arm around Mo. “You’re not disappointed that there was no horse, are you?”

Mo laughed. “Of course not, Teacher! Qilin are almost gods. Who would be mad that we got qilin instead of horses?”

“They were beautiful.” Kharli sighed dreamily. “Like a herd of celestial horned dragon deer.”

“Teacher, I’ll collect the eggshell fragments,” said Lari.

“Good idea.” I went to the [Animal Pen], too, and tried to take the pieces of eggshells on the ground, but they dissolved into golden light when I touched them. “How mysterious.”

“Teacher, are we going to grow more mythical animals?” asked Kharli.

“Of course.” I took out another batch of six eggs from my inventory and placed them on the pen. “I wonder what these will hatch into.”

“I wouldn’t mind if they hatch into more qilin. By the way, where did they fly off to? I thought this was a special place that only exists inside the tree.” Kharli shaded her eyes with a hand and looked up into the sky, but there was no trace left of them.

“Somewhere magical,” said Mo with a sigh and a dreamy expression on her face.

Lari copied Kharli and frowned up in the direction where the qilin went. “They probably used a portal in the sky.”

“Where are qilin supposed to live?” I asked the others.

“A beautiful forest with jade lakes and silver trees.” Kharli smiled.

“That sounds lovely.” I checked my screenshots folder and saw that I had plenty of good ones of the herd of qilin. “Shall we get started on planting today’s seeds?”

Once the excitement died down, my household staff left, and the four of us tilled a field and took out the wooden plant markers we had prepared beforehand.

I held up the plan we had sketched on a large piece of paper for my apprentices to consult. “First, we should mark the center of the field and plant the Sun and Moon trees there. Turn on the grid view.”

We walked over to the center and marked off two tiles that had six empty tiles between them for space.

“Mo, you can plant the first one.” I handed her the [Sun Tree Seed].

“Thank you, Teacher!” She spread [Mysterious Goo] on the soil, used her [Seeder] to plant the seed, and then watered it. “I can’t believe we can finally grow Immortal Herbs.”

Next, I silently gave Kharli the [Moon Tree Seed], which she quickly planted.

“These two trees are essential for the Immortal Seeds to grow properly. The [Sun Tree] will gather energy from sunlight during the day, and the [Moon Tree] will absorb the energy from moonlight at night.” Since Lari was the last, I gave him six seeds to compensate for it, and the girls received one seed each. “And this [Mystical Foxtail Grass] must be planted around the trees because they will purify the energy so that the other Immortal Herbs can use it.”

My apprentices then planted one seed six tiles away in the north, south, east, and west of each tree.

“This was not in any of the books about spirit farming that Scholar Wu showed us,” said Kharli.

“I guess this method is unique to my bloodline inheritance,” I said. “Now, at the edges of this field, we must plant a protective barrier of Immortal Herbs. The [Divine Origin Energy Bamboo] will repel unclean spirits and the [Shadow Bindweed] will cloak the field with a shadowy veil, making it invisible to unwelcome entities.”

This time, I joined in the planting.

“Nooo, what’s this? I knew this would drain more energy than normal, but this is ridiculous!” I leaned on Kharli’s arm. “I’m almost out of energy and we haven’t even finished planting half the perimeter. Are you guys okay?”

“I’m feeling a little dizzy,” Mo admitted.

“Me, too. I think we’d better go back to the house and lie down,” said Kharli.

“The day is too beautiful to spend indoors. I want to lie down there.” I led them to a spot under the shade of a large acacia tree where I spread a large picnic blanket and tossed lots of pillows for us to use. “This is nice.”

I lay with my head on two soft pillows, my body almost melting into the picnic blanket below me. Above us, the morning sun filtered through the leaves of the acacia tree, casting lacey shadows across our bodies. The gentle breeze stirred the branches above, and I watched lazily as it rippled through the field of spirit grass we had planted weeks ago in preparation for the mythical animals we were supposed to raise on the farm.

The morning air still held a trace of pleasant coolness. I closed my eyes. The scent of wildflowers drifted across from the meadow where I'd let nature take its course.

I fell asleep and woke an hour later, refreshed and my energy bar slightly refilled. Looking around, I saw that Mo and Lari were playing Connect Four while Kharli was reading a book. “Did you guys nap, too? Are you ready for one last bit of work today? It’s time to harvest the [Birch Water] from the [Tappers].”

“Yes, Teacher,” they chorused.

Lari put the board game away into his inventory and Kharli did the same with her book.

“The chef told me that [Birch Water] doesn’t taste like much, but it’s very healthy,” I said.

However, when we collected the buckets that were supposed to contain [Birch Water], I found that the liquid inside it was something totally different.

“Stop, Mo! Don’t drink that!” I tried to take the bucket away from her, but it was too late.

She put the bucket down after taking a sip then her eyes widened in shock. A single, dramatic shiver ran down her spine, her left eye twitched uncontrollably for a second, and she let out a small, surprised squeak.