Chapter 2: Yukari-sis, I've Been Waiting So Long For You!
....
Kihara's autumn crop selection settled into a practical three: eggplant, grapes, and pumpkin.
The first two were repeating harvesters — plant once, collect multiple times across the season. The pumpkin was a single-harvest crop, but it commanded the highest sell price of anything autumn offered, so a few rows were worth the investment. The remaining variety slots he filled the same way he always did — ten seeds each of whatever the Community Center's offering bundles required, no more.
The Community Center's offering system worked differently from the game he remembered. There was no tiered reward structure, no incremental unlocks as you completed individual bundles. Here, the blessings only activated when every single item had been offered — everything, complete, at once. Daiyousei and Rumia's rewards waited behind that final threshold.
Rumia's monster materials were still a problem. The deeper mine levels were sealed behind giant boulders that required upgraded pickaxes to break, and Pelican Town still lacked a blacksmith. He'd completed the shallow-level monster drop offerings, which was something, but the full set was a project for later.
He pressed the last seed into the soil and drew the surrounding earth over it with his hoe. The field was done.
One thing had been sitting in the back of his mind since spring: the blocked passage above Akane's house. In the game, a tunnel sealed by a boulder was supposed to be cleared on the third day of summer, opening access to the railroad and the spa area beyond it. Summer had come and gone. The boulder hadn't moved. He had a working theory that the absence of a town blacksmith was the proximate cause.
With the morning's farming complete, he decided to swing by the Community Center and check whether the new season had generated any additional offering tasks.
The autumn air had a different quality from summer — cooler at the edges, carrying the smell of things ripening toward their final form. He walked the path to the Community Center humming to himself, enjoying the specific pleasure of a morning with nothing urgent in it.
He heard the Community Center before he reached it.
The fairies were in their usual configuration — Cirno at the center of a loose orbiting system of smaller fairies, Daiyousei somewhere in the vicinity trying to prevent outcomes, everyone else contributing enthusiastically to the noise level.
"Ah!! It's Kihara!!" Cirno spotted him from across the yard with the keen vision of someone whose primary hobby was noticing things she found exciting. She made a decision in real time. "Come on, I'll take you to him! We're going to get milk!!"
"Kihara!! Give us milk!!"
He looked at the smallest fairies — some of them barely palm-sized — and winced. "Can they resize themselves like you can?"
"Obviously not! Only the strongest can do that, and I'm the strongest!"
Daiyousei swooped in and took Cirno by the arm. "Cirno, we can't impose on Kihara-oniichan—"
"It's fine, it's fine! He's super nice about it!"
"...Alright." He rubbed the back of his neck.
"Anyone who wants milk, come to the room at the back. Daiyousei — if anyone else comes in, don't let them know we're using that room."
"Ah — yes, okay." She tilted her head slightly as he led the group inside. Why the secrecy for something as simple as milk? She couldn't work it out. But this was a person on comfortable terms with some of Gensokyo's most formidable youkai — he clearly had his reasons.
Kihara spent the better part of an hour in the Community Center's one properly restored room with Cirno and a contingent of very enthusiastic fairies.
The process was, in his assessment, genuinely difficult. The fairies were well-intentioned but chaotic helpers.
Nevertheless, by the end of it, the milk had been successfully produced, which was the goal.
Watching some of the smaller fairies afterward — tiny bodies, round stomachs, visibly struggling with the question of whether they had overestimated their own capacity — he experienced a complex emotion that he chose not to examine.
[Fairy Community Affection +1. Complete Daiyousei's offering bundle to unlock +1 Farm Spirit.]
He hadn't known fairy affection worked this way. He stood in the corridor processing this information and immediately began planning a winter schedule.
The offering reward functioned similarly to the Junimo Huts from late-game play — autonomous farm spirits that tended and harvested within a certain radius. If he could complete Daiyousei's bundle before spring, he could potentially step back from direct farming work almost entirely by the time the new growing season started.
He would absolutely be visiting the fairies regularly.
Entirely for the progress toward that objective. Nothing whatsoever to do with how unreasonably comfortable certain small bodies were when they wrapped themselves around the Ebony and Ivory for warmth.
The offering tasks hadn't expanded for autumn. But the unplanned feeding session had triggered a new care-taking task with decent rewards attached, which counted as an acceptable morning.
He was walking home thinking about the town's development when his phone buzzed.
NEET: Emergency!! Come to Eientei right now!!
Kihara: If I get there and you tell me the chips next door are half price, I'm going to make you meow.
NEET: I would NEVER be that petty!!
Kihara: Who was it that called me at two in the morning to complain about "suboptimal sleeping positions" and demanded a re-do?
NEET: Ahaha... let's set that aside for now. Seriously, come. This is actually important.
Kihara: On my way.
He took the motorcycle. The Bamboo Forest of the Lost blurred past on either side. He found Reisen lurking at the entrance — she'd developed the habit of positioning herself there at hours when visitors were likely — and spent a few minutes engaged in the specific variety of affection that involved consoling someone who had recently been subjected to another round of Eirin's pharmaceutical research.
Then he strolled into Kaguya's room with the unhurried energy of a man who had nowhere to be.
"NEET. I'm here."
Kaguya grabbed him and pulled him toward the computer with the urgency of someone reporting a structural failure. She seized the mouse and opened her file directory.
"Look. Everything's gone. All my downloads, all my collected anime — completely deleted."
"Did you format by accident?"
"I am not a computer novice. I have never accidentally formatted anything in my life, and these are my collections — you don't casually delete your own collections. You of all people should understand that."
Kihara, who was personally acquainted with the emotional weight of a well-curated digital library, nodded immediately. "Not possible."
"If it were a simple deletion I could recover it. The problem is that no matter what I re-download, everything gets absorbed into this." She clicked on a file. The name was a string of garbled characters — corrupted encoding, unreadable. "Watch."
The video opened.
It played at a speed that shouldn't have been physically possible — animation clips flashing past in rapid, disjointed fragments, the frame rate somewhere between strobe light and blur. Thirty seconds in, it closed itself.
"That's the situation. And there's something else." She pointed at a string of data in the file's properties. "It has world coordinates embedded in it."
"So wherever it came from — I can't know what I'm walking into until I'm already there."
"Exactly."
They looked at each other.
This was outside either of their frameworks. The silence that followed had the quality of two people recognizing that they had reached the edge of their own competence and were looking over it.
Then a parasol came through a gap in the air, and the gap widened, and Yukari Yakumo stepped into Kaguya's room with the composure of someone who had been listening from the other side and had decided the moment to enter had arrived.
"I have a general picture of the situation. I followed the world coordinates just now — the destination world's boundary barrier is in a fragmented state. Without that barrier as a limiting factor, I can accompany you to assess the situation directly."
Kaguya looked at her with the expression of someone who appreciated the practical offer and had notes about the delivery. "It's nice that you can help and have a solution ready. It would also be nice if you didn't casually gloss over the fact that you've been eavesdropping."
"Speaking of which — I seem to recall there was an incident, some time ago, involving a certain bathroom and a certain—"
"AAAAAA—!!"
Kaguya launched herself at Yukari, who opened a gap and deposited her neatly onto her own bed before the tackle connected. Kaguya sat up on the mattress, ears red, voice at volume.
"Fine!! Eavesdrop all you want!! I don't care!!"
"Wonderful. Then let's depart. The sooner we assess this world, the sooner we can formulate a response."
Kihara nodded. He and Yukari stepped into the gap together.
What happened next caught Yukari completely off guard.
The gap's passage was normally instantaneous — a clean transit between one spatial location and another. This time, something in the crossing produced a blur, a visual distortion, a moment of uncertain geometry—
And then she was stepping out into a modern living room, clean-lined and well-lit, with the particular aesthetic of somewhere that had been carefully arranged by someone with specific taste.
Kihara was already there.
He was standing a few meters away, holding a cup of hot tea, wearing the expression of a man who had been waiting for some time and had opinions about it.
"Yukari-sis," he said, with the patient exhaustion of someone who had long since accepted their circumstances, "you finally made it. I've been waiting here so long."
Yukari stared at him.
"...??"
.....
Thank you for reading.