FFF-Tier System, SSS-Rank Wife-Chapter 35: Diggy Diggy Hole

"Did you feel anything?"

For such an innocent question, asked in such an innocent, vulnerable voice and with such a look of uncertainty on Selia’s face... for all of that, the chill that ran up my spine as a result was quite damn cold!

"Hmm?" Pretending as if I wasn’t exactly sure what she was talking about, I raised my eyes and looked right back into the Saintess’s eyes.

On the inside, I was dying to look away.

’Since when did I grow ballsy enough to look such a beauty in the face without as much as a twitch in my eye?’

But on the outside, I somehow managed to keep up the pretense.

"Was I supposed to feel something?"

Even if we both knew that we both knew what happened back on that bed, I wasn’t going to drop the act first.

Not when a random slap born from a moment of Selia’s embarrassment would be enough to turn my head into a projectile.

For a moment, Selia stared at me while the look in her eyes grew more and more intense by the second. Then, she stomped down with her feet, crossed her arms on her chest, and then rapidly turned her head away with an audible "hmph!"

"How would I know?" she countered, putting on a full‑on tsundere act—one brought to such a level it could put most of the blue‑haired anime heroines to shame.

Still, seeing how Selia picked this topic up, maybe there was something to it?

’Was I supposed to feel something?’ I asked myself again, this time in the privacy of my own thoughts. And as I confirmed that we were indeed hidden from the nearby road, I shook my head.

’There will be time for me to think about it.’

Dismissing the topic, I fixed my grasp on the shovel before looking around the place.

There was no real logic or criteria by which I was scanning the area. Instead, I merely followed my guts. And soon enough, my eyes locked onto a spot right at the bottom of one of the many small hills scattered across the plain.

It was lush enough to indicate a high content of water in the ground, making it just a little bit easier to dig out a hole in it. And outside of that?

"Well, it’s as good a place as any other," I muttered to myself as I moved over and then brought the shovel down from my shoulder and gently pressed its sharp edge into the ground. Then, I stepped down on the upper end of the tool, pushing it into the ground with the weight of my body rather than the exertion of my muscles.

Back in my childhood, my parents would often warn me that if I didn’t learn properly, I would end up as someone good for nothing other than digging holes. And while that warning completely ignored the fact that an excavator operator would often make more than one could earn in most of the jobs they saw fitting for me, even when it came to digging by hand, it wasn’t as straightforward as it could seem.

Sure, even the greatest idiot in the world could shovel away for a while.

But to actually dig out a hole big enough to fit roughly two of my backpacks?

While not a massive and daunting task, it still required some effort. And unless I wanted to spend the next few days with my muscles sore and my back aching, I had to make sure I properly applied my strength to the task rather than just doing it in the most straightforward—and counterintuitively obvious—way.

Which is why, rather than pushing the shovel into the ground with my arms, I did so with the weight of my body. Then, rather than wrestling with the ground while trying to scoop out a shovel’s worth of earth, I leaned down on the shovel’s handle instead, turning it into a simple lever instead.

Lifting the shovel up?

I made sure to do so by bending down on my knees, locking my arms, and then standing up, using the muscles in my legs to do most of the work rather than delegating that task to my arms. And then, rather than just casting the excavated dirt wherever, I made sure to stack it up right next to the hole I was making.

There was a very important purpose for all that wet, excavated dirt, after all!

Soon, I got into the rhythm of things, turning the complicated task in which I had to carefully watch how I executed every step into a simple procedure I could follow with hardly any thought to it.

And that, in turn, allowed me to roll my mind back to the very question I asked myself before I got to digging.

’What did she mean by feeling something during the night?’ I asked myself for the third time, using the exercise to mask any emotions that could appear on my face. ’Was it in any way connected to that weird dream of mine?’

It was already weird for me to remember anything about it. And as if that wasn’t enough, I could remember every single detail of my adventure in the world of dreams, from the seemingly endless attempts at escape from some unknown threat, through the constantly changing surroundings—

All the way to when I somehow woke up within that dream, only to realize that my surroundings, my act of running—all of it was but an illusion, aiming to obscure the fact that...

’That, what?’

I thought, gritting my teeth when my thoughts quickly met a barrier.

It was just one dream, one overnight experience. And save for how it replicated my intense experiences of the last few days, I had no other hints to its potential meaning.

’Thinking about it, I didn’t have a dream like that back when we camped out,’ I thought, desperate to find some sort of clue.

Yet, even upon this realization, I still ended up with nothing but a bunch of disjointed observations that refused to come together into a greater whole.

In the end, I didn’t have enough time, clues, or hints to figure it out. And once the hole grew big enough, I could no longer afford to just absentmindedly continue digging.

"Okay," I muttered before heaving a short sigh and using my sleeve to wipe off the few drops of sweat from my forehead. Before me, there was now a small hole and an equally small pile of ground next to it. It was just wide enough to comfortably fit my backpack in it, while only high enough to cover up to my knees if I stood in it.

It was a miniature version of an actual, charcoal kiln I had in mind. But for today’s experiment, it would be enough.

"That’s it?" Selia asked, approaching from behind and looking over my shoulder with vivid curiosity burning in her eyes... curiosity smothered down by quite the pathetic result of roughly a quarter of an hour’s worth of my work.

"That’s just the first step," I replied before hopping into the hole and then resting my backpack over its edge, only to open it up and start pulling out the drywood we’d bought back in town. "Now, the fun part begins."