Beware of Chicken
by CasualFarmer
Royal Road, 2021
Podium Publishing, 2022
A laugh-out-loud, slice-of-life martial-arts fantasy about . . . farming?
Beware of Chicken is a lighthearted fantasy isekai / Xianxia cultivation series originally published on Royal Road, where it is, in fact, still available. I am dubious about the 'laugh-out-loud' in the official blurb, and I have Things To Say about the current misuse of the term slice of life. It appears to be used by the weak of spirit and corrupt of mind (i.e., modern authors) to mean "the plot isn't fully centered on adventuring all the time". However, this story, along with approximately all other web-published SF/F that claim to be slice of life, is absolutely not slice of life. But anyway...
Our hero is a random, if surprisingly knowledgeable, guy from our world. He dies, and is reincarnated in the body of a Xianxia cultivator who also died, briefly, at the same time. With the knowledge of Jin Rou, but the personality of.... some random Canadian guy, he immediately recognizes that the place that just beat him to death in an informal sparring session is a bad place to be, and runs off. To become a farmer.
He heads to the most magic-deprived area of the empire to set up a quiet farm where no-one from his old sect will ever find him. As it happens, a fairly powerful cultivator moving to a Qi-deprived province and pouring all of his cultivation into his land results in a number of surprising events, including his accidentally raising a super-powerful rooster to both sentience and profound warrior status. Battles are fought, friends are made, and crops are brought to market.
This is a fairly well-written and fast-paced book, with lots of cultivation nonsense (I'm not a fan of the genre, but it's well enough done that it didn't grate), a fair amount of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court type shenanigans, and lots of farming and gathering of new friends to build a community. There's plenty of fighting and adventuring, and the mandatory tournament arc, but there's also a lot about raising and selling rice, which is not as boring as you might fear.
Beware the Chicken is a published as a series of four books on Amazon, although they all share the same name, and are simply numbered 1 through 4. As the series go along it slowly becomes more... slice-of-lifey, but for the most part it remains a slightly slow-moving progression fantasy story. I'd generally recommend it to anyone who enjoys light fantasy and wants a quick, fun read.