My primary unanswered question about [Fertile Caverns], when I’d bought it, had been how quickly it would work. If it only generated food sources at the same slow rate as [Spontaneous Generation] did minions, then it wouldn’t be worth much. The skill had been very unspecific on that topic, which worried me.
I'd been pleasantly surprised, though, to find that it worked pretty quickly! Even over the past day, I’d noticed a small but steady trickle of new life manifesting within my dungeon. On the third floor, cave fish and near-transparent shrimp swam through my waterways. One species of eyeless salamander was a shocking deep red in color. In the spike cave, my four bats had been joined by several more. Most importantly, though, there were mushrooms in the mushroom farm. They were no species I recognized, which wasn’t saying much since my mycology knowledge was basically nil. Still, webs of mycelium stretched across the rocks, already producing fungal fruit. One type of mushroom grew in broad shelves, treating the cave wall like the trunk of a tree. Another sprouted from the floor in a profusion of slender stalks: it looked sort of like inoki, except for being the color of freezer-burned meat.
“Mushrooms, huh,” Nar-shesh observed phlegmatically, looking down at them. “Are they safe to eat?”
“They should be, the skill specifically makes stuff that’s edible,” I said.
“Edible for humans, or for goblins, though?” he said. “You know how the system is.”
“Hm.” He had a point there: I did know how the system was. “I’d have thought that if there was any dietary difference, the goblins would be the winners. You guys ate those holly berries no problem, and those are poisonous to humans.”
“So what I’m hearing is you want me to eat a poisonous mushroom,” he said in a bone-dry but unmistakably I’m-giving-you-shit tone.
“No!” I said. “You can’t eat these, they’re like, seed corn or whatever. We gotta leave ‘em be so they’ll reproduce.” I waited a comedically appropriate interval. “I want you to eat the next batch of poisonous mushrooms.” That got a snort of laughter out of him, as I’d hoped. “In all seriousness though, it occurs to me that these might also be from [Natural Resources], and all that skill specifies is that the stuff will be useful, not that it’ll be edible.”
“Hm,” he said. We both stared at the mushrooms for a while. Nourishing crop, or deadly poison? I had no way to-
“Wait, I’m stupid,” I said. “I can just minionize them and then look at their descriptions.”
Nar-shesh snapped his fingers with a triumphant grin and pointed upwards in the direction of my projected voice. “Hey, you’re not stupid if you figured it out eventually. ‘S what my dad always used to say, at least.”
Bone-eating Broadcap (Minion) - Lv. 1
A mutated fungus, notable for its ability to grow on bone. Often found in graveyards and near chalk quarries. Edible, but unappetizing. Useful in alchemical concoctions that heal or strengthen bone.
Goblin’s Beard (Minion) - Lv. 0
An edible fungus common in the forests and mountains of the Plantation of the West. One of several unrelated species that share the name, all found in regions currently or historically infested with goblins.
I relayed what I’d learned to Nar-shesh, who experimentally munched on a few stalks of goblin’s beard. “Eh,” he said with a shrug. “Doesn’t taste like much. Texture’s not bad.” His curiosity apparently piqued, he began to wander further into the still-mostly-bare fungal caves, asking me about each new mushroom he saw. After a few more chambers, though, he paused in the doorway, squinted, and then said “Why is there a screaming face growing from the wall?”
“A what now?” I looked where he was pointing. A patch of mycelium on the cavern wall, at about head-height for a goblin, was a vivid, bloody red, its dense strands heaped atop each other in odd ridges and valleys. From certain angles, it did indeed look like a screaming skull was pushing its way free of the cave wall. “What the fuck is that…” I muttered, minionizing it.
Crimson Wightstain (Minion) - Lv. 5
A bizarre lichen found most often growing in places blighted by powerful curses or other dark magic. Rather than deriving nourishment from the life-giving Sun, the Crimson Wightstain feeds on resentful energy, sustained by the jealousy of monster-kind and the grudges of their slain victims. Extremely useful in alchemy, and equally dangerous if allowed to grow too long unchecked.
Damn, alright! This had to be [Natural Resources] at work, with that thing being level 5 compared to all the other level-0 or level-1 critter spawns. Presumably, the system had given me this thing because of [Bloodwoken Land] shifting my mythos towards [Curse]. I had to admit, I was curious what “dangerous if allowed to grow too long unchecked” might mean. Anything that was dangerous for adventurers was something I could put to use. The goblins’ safety had to come first, of course, but maybe I’d just… y’know, keep an eye on it. A watched pot never boiled, after all, and I could watch this ominous pot 24/7.
I explained my plan to Nar-shesh. He didn’t seem super thrilled about it, but he didn’t voice any actual objection. He’d walked closer and was staring intently at the crimson wightstain, chin in hand, as though deliberating something. After a long staring contest, his gaze boring deep into the empty sockets of its “face,” he announced his conclusion.
“Same, bro,” he said to the silently screaming skull, smacking the cavern wall next to it as one might affirmingly pat a friend’s shoulder.
“Mood,” I said in agreement.
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Striga was frustrated.
She’d been frustrated before, of course. A wild animal had no shortage of frustrations. Cold, hunger, competition, failure. Not that she knew anything about failure. She rarely failed. She was an extremely successful owl.
She’d even been frustrated before about this specific thing — to wit, the snack girl. Pacifica. Even the fact that she had a name other than “my next meal” was frustrating to Striga. Now, to add insult to injury, not only could she not eat Pacifica, but she had to feed her! And everyone was making noises at Striga that she didn’t understand, and doing things she didn’t understand, and her head hurt.
Striga was frustrated. Angry, even. But the frustration felt… different.
Treat her like she’s your chick, the Voice had said as Pacifica had shivered and sniffled and made pathetic little prey noises, down there in the Voice’s cold, dark nest beneath the earth. Well, Striga didn’t want to treat her like she was Striga’s chick. Striga wanted to eat her. Pull her guts out, wet and warm. Crack her bones and eat the marrow. Hack up what was left of her in a pellet.
But there was this itch, now. As she looked down from her treetop perch at Pacifica, sitting near the edge of the firelight and picking listlessly at her share of the rabbit Striga had so generously killed for her, there was an itch behind her ribs. She’d have to claw herself open to scratch it. As she sat and watched the sad, pathetic little prey animal be sad, and pathetic, and alone even when surrounded by other people, Striga stewed in her frustration — and the itch, little by little, grew.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
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Doing all that cavern-remodeling had drained my azoth pool again, which reminded me of my medium-term goal to get [Azoth-Gathering Formation] up and running. I decided to promote it from a medium-term goal to a “we are doing this right now” goal. The immediate crisis had been dealt with, but the next one was undoubtedly on its way, and I was confident it would be a league above anything I’d had to deal with so far. I needed to use this period of relative peace to beef up my productive capacities and start cranking out higher-tier defenses. Increasing my azoth respiration would let me do more things, and do them faster.
Step one was getting in touch with my resident formations experts. I asked Ergiza and Immir-shesh to meet me in one of the empty caves in the industrial sector. Taking care not to spend my azoth pool entirely empty again, I smoothed out a stretch of wall in that cave, squeezing and transmuting it into… I guess it was marble? Marble was the metamorphic rock that limestone turned into, right? I did know that black marble got its color from bitumen, which was mostly carbon. I had no idea about the specific chemistries involved, but thankfully [Dungeon Domain] seemed to get what I was going for and the stretch of wall darkened to a glossy black. Compared to that, pulling a few sticks of chalk out of the unaltered wall was easy. I even made a little rock tray for them. Voila, one blackboard! And just in time: the cousins were here.
“Hey, come in,” I said, telekinetically drawing the diagram of [Azoth-Gathering Formation] on the blackboard as they approached. Formation nodes where particular materials needed to be placed, or lines that had to be drawn with certain reagents, were annotated with numbers corresponding to a list written to the side of the diagram of the ingredients the system told me I needed. “This is what I need your help with.”
When he saw the formation diagram, Immir-shesh’s eyes widened and he reflexively looked over his shoulder, as if to make sure there was no one behind him who might accidentally see this. He breathed a visible sigh of relief when there wasn’t, then scurried over.
“So, this is [Azoth-Gathering Formation],” I explained. “Does what you’d expect from the name. Are either of you familiar with it?”
They both shook their heads. “I mean, it’s a formation,” Ergiza said. “I recognize parts of it, and what they would do, but I’ve never seen this specific one.” She frowned, and leaned closer. “This is a containment circle, and that creates a density gradient, but…”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Immir-shesh interjected. “Here, and here, these nodes are meant to hold something but they’re empty. And what are all these? What’s this stuff?” He pointed to the various number labels, and to ingredients list. “I can’t make heads or tails of that.”
“That’s… not part of the formation,” I said, bemused and also annoyed by his impatient tone. “That’s the list of materials I need to make it. The numbers are to show what goes where.” They both looked at me blankly. “It’s writing?” I said.
“That’s not writing, that’s gibberish,” Immir-shesh said snappishly. Man, those ‘sainted elder sister’-s had been quick to vanish once he decided I was an idiot. “This is writing.” Grabbing a piece of chalk, he started writing… well, it looked like the alphabet, at first, albeit out of order. A, I, U, R, E- but then he drew a letter I didn’t recognize, and I realized that I didn’t actually recognize any of the characters he’d drawn. They were blocky, angular glyphs, pictographic but heavily stylized. I had understood them, though, so effortlessly that at first I hadn’t realized they weren’t English.
On instinct, I opened my status window again, and really looked at it this time. It was weird, slippery, like I was seeing two things at once — but sure enough, once I pinned down my brain and made it go through the process of reading step-by-step, all of the system text was written with these same characters.
“What language is this?” I asked.
The two of them looked at me like they didn’t understand the question. “It’s writing,” Immir-shesh repeated, slowly, and this time there was that weird doubling when he said ‘writing’ too. I thought about the actual sounds he’d made, my mind still struggling to digest the vast body of knowledge that [Apophic Tongue] had granted me. What I heard as “writing,” when I broke it down linguistically, actually meant something more like “Heaven’s speech.”
I was starting to put the pieces together. In a world where the gods were real, and their governance was writ into the very fabric of reality in the form of the system, the de facto universal language would obviously be the language of the conqueror. Latin had spread with the Romans. Half of Africa spoke French. The British and American empires had pushed English to every corner of the globe. How much more total would Heaven’s dominance be than the empires of my own world, if every single living thing was guaranteed to be exposed to their language from birth? No wonder the word for their writing system was synonymous with the word for writing itself.
The understanding granted by Apophic and my ability to read Heavenly glyphs felt opposite each other, in a way. I supposed that was thematically appropriate. Apophic let me instinctively and effortlessly reverse-engineer what the goblins were saying: the system-script was pushing its meaning into my brain, making itself understood.
While this was all utterly fascinating, I had called this meeting for a reason, and even if I didn’t respect Immir-shesh in the slightest I was tired of looking stupid in front of him. With a sigh, I erased my list of ingredients and began laboriously re-transcribing it in the much more complicated system-script. “Okay, is this better? Can you read this?” I asked, a little sourly.
“I can read it,” Ergiza said. Immir-shesh just scoffed and took a step back from the blackboard. “Oh, that makes sense,” she said. “And then that would…” She pointed to one of the materials on the list. “I’ve never heard of this stuff, but if I was making this formation I’d probably use powdered pipeleaf to draw that part. It helps isolate a space from outside influences.”
“Cool,” I said. “I need azoth, as much of it as possible. I want to set one of these up for myself. A big one. Or a bunch of smaller ones, if that would work better. Is that possible?”
The cousins shot a glance at each other. “I’ve never tried to make a formation that large,” Ergiza said. “But theoretically, I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be. We’d just need more materials.”
Immir-shesh scoffed. “Of course you don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be. There’s environmental factors to consider. That’s one of the advantages of working with baskets, you have total control over the physical space of the formation.” He tapped his chalk against the formation diagram. “Who knows how well this design will hold up if we have to stretch it over thirty feet of forest.”
“Let’s assume,” I said dryly, “For the sake of argument, that this project has at its disposal a hugely powerful monster whose class and species are entirely geared around controlling and reshaping her environment.”
“Ah. Yeah, that… I guess that would address that particular-” he began, sheepishly.
“Anyway, I need you and the others to get me the materials on this list, in the largest quantities you can,” I said, cutting him off. “The sooner we get this formation up and running, the better I’ll be able to protect you all.”
“That might be difficult,” Ergiza said. She pointed to two items on the list. “Three-star catbloom rarely lasts this late into fall, and I’m not even sure how to read the name of this last material.”
If I had a nose, I would have been pinching the bridge of it in frustration. Could nothing ever be simple? “That last one is stoneclaw jaguar essence.”
“Just ‘essence’?” Immir-shesh asked. “It doesn’t specify which kind?”
“What’s a jaguar?” Ergiza muttered to herself.
“It’s a big cat,” I said. “Kind of like a cougar.” I remembered suddenly that Ergiza had mentioned she was an initiate of the Obsidian Grail Lodge, one of the goblin mystery cults. “Wait, how do you know what obsidian is but not know what a jaguar is? Are there any volcanoes around here?”
“What’s a volcano?” they asked at the same time.
“A mountain that occasionally explodes. It’s complicated, I’ll explain later. We’re getting sidetracked,” I said. “No, it doesn’t specify what kind of essence. I’m not even sure if it’s an animal product or what. The system just gave me the name.”
Immir-shesh threw his arms up. “That’s totally unhelpful! Essence could mean blood, semen, some kind of oil…”
“It’s very brave of you to offer to give a monstrous apex predator a handjob,” I said. “But I wouldn’t ask that of you.” He went pale and goggle-eyed at that, so I hurriedly added “That was a joke. I was joking.”
“Oh! Haha,” he laughed nervously, taking a subconscious step backwards.
“We can just substitute powdered pipeleaf for that, anyway, if it does what I think it does based on the rest of this list,” Ergiza said. “I did mention that earlier,” she added, sounding a little put out.
She had mentioned it earlier, now that I recalled. “You did, I’m sorry. I got distracted,” I said.
She gave a pleased little hum at that acknowledgement, but then frowned. “I don’t know where we’re going to get powdered pipeleaf, though.”
“Oh, that one’s easy,” I said. “We’re gonna steal it.”