[NR] Rosha And Courtney Talk About Juice - Chapter 718

Jason ended up having to delay his horticultural ambitions, at least for the moment. The girls convinced him that the road should come first. After all, if he was going to be regularly hauling plants back and forth, making that an easy task was a priority. More specifically, when they found out he would want to be dragging them there and back in the same day and eventually multiple times a week? Yeah, they set their foot down.

And of course, it fell on Jason to build said road. Or rather, what he wanted from it was much more than needed. A simple packed earth trail would suffice and a bit of magic could do that no problem.

Jason wanted something more significant. He saw the Deep Wilds and knew that the entire place ran more on expectations and intent than any sapient should be comfortable with. Well, as long as you don’t consider sanity optional. You don’t get what was presumably entire empires of undead and plagues of mind control on all vectors in a normal place.

He spent enough nights staring off into the distance. It was hard to see, but the very atmosphere shifted around as the land changed. Made for the occasionally spectacular sunset. Also, some sunsets that Jason suspected would have caused damage to his consciousness if the System wasn’t filtering the nonsense out.

So he wanted more than just a simple dirt path connecting him to sanity. Is there any reasonable chance of the Deep Wilds reaching out and grabbing their little clearing? Not particularly. That would require the Deep Wilds to have some sort of intent of its own.

A feature that places generally need to lack if they’re going to allow things to get so loose. Fae realms, the Dreamlands, the Abyss, and so on. Realms so chaotic as to prevent a unified intent. Or as it would be known in his last life, Heaven’s Will.

There was just one teeny tiny problem with that assumption. While yes, for the Deep Wilds to reach out and grab his clearing would require the realm to intend that. The lack of a “Will”, such as the System for NeoRealm, does not prevent the Deep Wilds from expanding outward and swallowing them like the ocean swallowing a kid’s sand castle.

And like the constant crashing of the waves on a beach, Jason can’t prevent the Deep Wilds from wearing down things. What he can do is turn sand to stone. A proper road being the next step as the clearing itself was as sturdy as he can make it for the moment.

The importance of the road being similar to the anchor point of a floating dock. While the waves won’t easily destroy the floating dock, it can always draw it out into open water. A dirt path would be like throwing a weighted line onto the beach. Better than nothing, but in rough weather, the dock could still float away. Better to sink poles deep into the earth and properly anchor things.

Which for Jason meant starting the path at the settlement. While there were raw materials to use around the clearing. Proper gravel took quite the effort pound down to size. Much cheaper to do a task in town and then spend his earnings on gravel there.

Since he wasn’t aiming for high tier gravel or anything, it was cheap enough and he could fill up a small trailer with the stuff to haul out of his path. Well, there wasn’t much hauling to start with. While the settlement didn’t allow him to start his path at the main road in, they didn’t mind it starting about halfway into the clearing around the settlement. Once everything is connected on his end, then it can be hooked up.

Back in the clearing, Rosha and Courtney find themselves oddly at peace. Sure, it helped that they weren’t as trapped there as previous times Jason was out and about. With his frequent return trips, they could head out and explore at least the nearby area. Though it still felt different.

One night the two sat next to each other by the campfire, it being particularly chilly. Rosha sipped on some warmed pear cider and Courtney a cup of tea.

Rosha laughed as she thought of something, “Even after all this time, the whole ‘anti-alcohol’ thing that happened centuries ago still colors things.”

Courtney nods, “True, though it did bring about the concept of what is now regular juice.”

Rosha waves her hand, “Bah, that would have come about eventually, anyway. I’m more thinking about cider right now.” And she sloshes her cup.

Courtney shrugs, “Cider is just juice by another name.”

Rosha shakes her head, “Cider, especially apple cider, is less filtered juice. Also, no one bothers mentioning that their juice is non-alcoholic. Yet for cider, there are still places where the assumption is that when you say cider, you mean hard cider.

“Because even further back, they both had alcohol in them. Hades, technically they still do, just in basically non-existent quantities. From my understanding, it is basically impossible to juice something like an apple and not have it ferment a tiny bit. Like, an apple can ferment on the ground without any outside interaction.

“Not that they were highly alcoholic or anything. At least, if they weren’t meant to be booze. The alcohol content was just a fact of life and likely something that kept it safer for longer.”

Rosha shakes her head, “I bet the only reason they have what we consider regular juice in NeoRealm is because of the System’s interference.”

Courtney leans against her, “I can see that. While things like that aren’t non-existent in NeoRealm. There certainly is a pressure applied to keep it out of sight. A player has to aggressively seek out anything harder than a stiff drink.”

Rosha almost shrugs, “NeoRealm isn’t meant to be kid friendly or anything. Right from the start you had to be an adult to enter and the various access devices were already sophisticated enough to not let children on.”

Courtney laughs into her cup of tea, “Yet even now after money is free-er to be used as one wants, companies still toe those old moral lines. Many thought when the credit companies fell, that their draconian rules for what content was acceptable would fall as well. Yet that rut in the road has been hard to remove even to this day.”