The first thing Benedict noticed when he reached the Drast plot was the smell: alkaline soil, rot-sick roots, and ozone from failed glyph-binders.
Meya Drast stood in ankle-deep water near a failed irrigation loop, her robes soaked and her expression flat. The air buzzed faintly with mana static. Half of her crop—ribbon maize and thunder sprouts—had wilted in jagged spirals, a textbook case of mana-rot.
"You're late," she said.
"I'm not," Benedict replied. "I just didn't rush."
"You said you'd build me a pulse lattice that regulates soil flow."
"I said I'd try. If it pays."
Eline followed behind, bracing a heavy relay case on one shoulder. "Meya, we brought four prototype plow-nodes. No promises."
Meya exhaled sharply. "That's generous. Everything here's dying, and I get prototypes."
Benedict dropped to one knee, brushing soil aside with a boot heel. "Everything here's dying because you bound a half-dead ley vein to a drunk irrigation script. You're lucky your crops didn't combust."
Meya raised an eyebrow. "How do you always make being right sound insulting?"
"It's a gift," Benedict said. He tapped his bracer and pulled up the field schematic. "You have ambient mana fluctuation above tolerance, uneven hydration pull, and no pulse regulation layer. It's not a field. It's a magical sponge having a nervous breakdown."
He opened the case. Inside: four squat, beetle-like devices with small bronze antennae and root-thread legs.
"Plow-nodes," he explained. "They crawl the topsoil, pulse every fifteen minutes, and emit a localized signal grid that balances magical strain through nutrient flow."
Meya blinked. "You turned soil regulation into bug relays?"
"No," Benedict said. "I turned my need for credit into something you'll overpay for."
She crossed her arms. "Will they work?"
He slapped a node into the mud. It buzzed, clicked, then burrowed. The pulse spread like a ripple through the rows, and a nearby patch of drooping sprouts shivered, then straightened just slightly.
Benedict stood. "They'll work."
---
The first full field test ran through the night. The plow-nodes sang in low frequencies, syncing soil pulses with root structures. Local fauna fled. One farmer fainted when a node chirped a six-tone sequence near his foot.
Eline logged everything.
Meya watched the nodes with silent intensity, arms folded, mud up to her knees.
The night sky above shimmered with faint ley-bleed, drifting like quiet ghosts between the rows. Farmers gathered in patches to listen to the pulsing hum that resonated from below their feet. For some, it was the first time in years the fields had made music.
At dawn, half the field had stabilized. The other half—still unseeded—now glowed faintly in pulse rhythm. The spiral glyph patterns that had once looked like rot now pulsed with measured alignment.
Benedict sat on a broken harvester with a data shard and a blank stare.
"You're calculating yield-to-credit ratios again," Eline said.
"I'm not interested in yield," Benedict replied. "I'm interested in licensing."
"You just saved her field."
"Saved?" He waved at the crops. "They'll still die next season. Unless she buys more nodes."
Meya walked up, handed him a steaming mug of rootbark brew. "You're insufferable."
"I'm expensive," he corrected. "That's different."
She gestured at the rows. "You want payment in what?"
"Land. One patch of pulse-rich soil. I'm planting a long-range relay core."
Meya studied him for a moment. "You're not trying to save agriculture."
"No. I'm trying to make sure I can sell signal while you're too busy saving it yourself."
And she laughed—loud, tired, real. "Fine. But if that node chirps again while I'm sleeping, I'll bury it."
"You can try," Benedict said. "But it has legs."
---
By the end of the week, eight more plow-nodes were deployed across Rinalt. Farmers shared their pulse readings, competing over signal clarity and soil sync. A teenager nicknamed one of the nodes "Worm King." The name stuck.
Eline set up a pulse bulletin that auto-synced when plow-nodes entered proximity. She didn't call it a miracle.
But the farmers did.
One elderly farmer, a man named Rusk, claimed his sleep improved when the pulse ran. "My bones don't groan when the earth hums right," he said.
A group of children began painting glyphs on the nodes in bright vegetable dye, convinced the "face patterns" helped crops grow faster. One node received a name: Sir Buzzer. It became a minor celebrity.
A local ritual evolved—a weekly "listening circle," where families gathered at the edge of stabilized fields to hear the sync-pulse resonate underfoot.
Shael signed a short phrase when the news came in: The dirt is talking.
Benedict looked out over the humming rows of stabilized crops, brow furrowed.
"I didn't build this for you," he muttered, more to the air than anyone else. "But you're welcome anyway."
He tapped his bracer, logged the credit rate, and filed a patent application titled:
Soil-Responsive Signal Mesh – V1.
---
Three days later, the Drast plot hosted a market.
Not for produce—but for contracts.
Representatives from four nearby villages arrived with trade offers. One elder brought a pulse-grown tomato the size of her head, offered in exchange for ten percent licensing rights.
Benedict refused. "I'll take the tomato. You don't get the license."
Another trader brought a crystal goat bell tuned to pulse hums.
"That," Benedict said, "I'll buy."
"You don't even have goats," Arden pointed out.
"I have a sound archive. It'll make a good ringtone."
---
That night, the plow-nodes sang a steady rhythm across all synced fields. Children lay in hammocks strung between spell-fence posts, listening.
Meya stood with Eline, arms crossed.
"He's making money off us," she said.
Eline nodded. "Yes. And?"
Meya's gaze softened. "And it's working."
They both turned as Benedict emerged from the barn, grumbling about someone spilling sap on the prototype.
"Still a genius?" Eline asked.
"Still annoying," Meya replied.
Then they laughed.
Because for the first time in decades, the soil was singing back.
And Benedict, signal-hungry, credit-driven, entirely uninterested in heroism, had accidentally invented faith.
He just didn't know it yet.