We recently released our first short story associated with a smol farm project: Sakura’s Slumbering Saga. This provides a broad and easily digestible overview of the lore of the Wandering Witches through the eyes of Sakura, a young woman who winds up one of the Acolytes of Beakon, an ancient witch who helps novice witches navigate the dreamscape of the Whispering Realms. In her dreams, she keeps finding herself on a road lined with cherry blossoms — the origin of her name.

Though Wandering Witches takes a lot of its inspiration from things like magical girl shoujo anime and titles like Final Fantasy VIII — in which the “sorceresses” would be more accurately translated as “witches — we still lack the resources for a proper entry into those sorts of media. However, Mirror — a platform poising itself as the web3 alternative to Medium — offers functionality where writing can be posted as a collectible NFT, which seemed perfect for this sort of storytelling.

To be clear, purchasing the NFT is not required to read the story. Much as critics often frame NFTs as about “enclosing the digital commons” or “privatization of art,” the content is, more often than not, entirely publicly available. With this story, it is no different. However, only 100 people can ever own an edition of this story — with initial prices set at 0.01 ETH when buying from us.

Mirror’s new writing NFT system does not use Ethereum’s mainnet but rather Optimism, an L2 chain. This helps ensure gas costs are extremely low. The Optimism chain stores data on Ethereum to verify its own transaction data, thus “rolling up” its transactions. However, users must have their ETH on the Optimism chain, making it slightly more inconvenient.

We are excited that we can both expand our creative releases to a new form — short stories — as well as continue to experiment with the forefront of current blockchain technology and the apps built atop it. Much as the Whispering Realms are a bridge between realities that exist in our dreams, so too should this project bridge the gaps between various chains.

While our interests in what we want to pursue as a creative team are varied, we love world-building and are grateful for the potential web3 offers to help engage audiences with fantasy worlds. While we know people are drawn to the stunningly beautiful artwork of the Wandering Witches, we know what keeps people engaged — ourselves included — is offering new and exciting ways to experience these collections. Whether an NFT collector or not, we are confident you will enjoy dipping your toes into the wonder of the Whispering Realms with this smol story.

Read Sakura's Slumbering Saga

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smol farm gazette is an independent publication by smol farm. All proceeds go to support independent lesbian creators. Most content is free, and the rest — along with the ability to comment — is just $5/mo.