The spymaster going by the name Chun Jin had thought death was an escape. But Anton could say, unfortunately for him, that he was more than wrong. Indeed, trapped as a soul the man was the most helpless he could be… and the most vulnerable.

He most certainly had valuable information, but how easily he would give it up was another question. However long it took, it wasn’t Anton’s business… because there were urgent matters he could deal with.

The grain Anton carried was trying to infect him. It was something different from the previous mold. Weaker, even- though it still actively sought out hosts to grow. But even if it was less virulent, it was more insidious in some manners. It didn’t react so drastically to natural energy, so it could be hidden.

The main question Anton had was how long the spymaster had been working on this general plan. Why risk something with Anton? Unless he considered his mission complete. And based on what Anton was finding in the eastern district where he’d mentioned his farm, that might be the case.

A bare farm plot was all that remained, having already been harvested. The tainted grain would have already been distributed. To where? That Anton didn’t know, but he could find out from someone more qualified.

Specifically, a harried member of the bureaucracy. A young man, perhaps promoted into his position too early. More experience was important to properly manage even a small agricultural district. But so he was.

Anton didn’t know how much time might matter, so he didn’t make any pretenses. He simply walked into the young man’s office, where someone else was already present. There had been a line of people outside, but nobody was going to complain about Anton directly walking in. At least, not while he was around. He wasn’t concealing his energy, but instead displaying it openly. Even without a local bound star, he still had the power of a strong Assimilation cultivator.

“... And I’m concerned that Chun Jin seems to be taking more than his allotment of water,” said the woman there. She likely had more to say, but at that point Anton had swung open the door and both people looked at him.

“Good news, then,” Anton said. “Your neighbor’s dead.”

“Wha-” the woman just looked at him.

“Farming Secretary Lailok, I have urgent business regarding your district and one Chun Jin,” Anton continued.

“... He’s dead?” the young man tilted his head. Obviously he understood that, but he was a bit put off by Anton’s brusqueness.

“That’s not the relevant part. We need every record you have that involves him, even tangentially.”

“Uh, sure,” the young man nodded. “He was in here a week ago mentioning a quarter of his crop was diseased.”

“That was a lie,” Anton said.

“Why-”

“All of it was tainted,” Anton clarified. “We need to track down everywhere that grain went, and potentially look into every other shipment he’s been connected with.”

“... Should I leave?” the other petitioner asked.

“Tell me what you know about him,” Anton said, splitting the area between them with his energy. “I can listen to both of you speak at once.”

While the woman explained her piece, Anton coordinated with the young man. “It’s going to take me a while to look through everything-”

Anton tossed a technique manual on the table. Ten Thousand Scrolls, of course. “You’ll want to study this later. For now, I can read through everything if you can help me find it.”

“Okay but I probably need to clear this with the right people…” the young man said.

“Do that quickly,” Anton said. “I can get you the ear of anyone you need, if you’re delayed.”

“... I can probably handle that,” he said. “I’ll tell them a very important guest needs this information quickly.”

Anton also spoke with the other woman, who had been telling him some things about Chun Jin. “What other suspicious things did you see?” he asked. “Besides the water, and the way he split his shipments?”

“That was it, really,” the woman admitted. “Most of the time he was quite neighborly. It took me quite a while to determine anything was wrong. I just had the feeling my crops were growing worse since he moved in.”

-----

Records on Chun Jin were plentiful… which was unfortunate. He’d been active in the area for several years, providing various products not for direct sale but for seed. Before that, however, there was nothing. At least, not under that name. According to the records, he’d been active almost a decade. That meant he’d either taken his time setting up his identity, or perhaps this wasn’t his first scheme. And while there hadn’t yet been any fallout from previous efforts, if there were any, his stint as a farmer also hadn’t yet produced its rotten fruits.

The grain Anton carried in his hand seemed to tell him a story. His initial thoughts based on speculation and given the records indicated to him something must have lain dormant in the grain. Whether it could truly hide for generations he didn’t know- perhaps the first years were pure so that he could build up trust. Given the various other bioweapons the Trigold Cluster seem to have, it wasn’t inconceivable.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

But they quickly learned it went even beyond that. Chun Jin had not dealt just in this particular sort of grain. Indeed, he dealt with a large variety of staple crops, and all were promising cultivars. Additionally, many of them were even local. Yet the grain being infected obviously wasn’t a coincidence. How had it come about?

The answer didn’t come easily. Searching through fields the man owned produced nothing of value. But he also rented spaces away from the eastern district of Lirlas, all over Alluna. It took them a week to come to that conclusion, because it was under a series of different identities. Anton was sweeping the planet for diseased crops, but all of those he found were owned by locals. It was only when he realized that there was a particular crop near all of them that they began to connect the dots.

The plants were just beginning to show signs of disease, a blight that crossed between entirely separate species. But the origin of that blight had been unclear… as it was not affected in any visible way.

They had already tracked down all of Chun Jin’s shipments under that name, and warned other planets about them, but the actual danger was a step beyond that. Most likely all of his officially related crops were good. In short, he had a public facing business to get him connections and knowledge about shipping, and another to grow and transport the truly tainted crops, ones that only infected their neighbors while appearing in pristine health themselves.

Nobody would burn down fields full of perfectly good crops. The damage was just beginning, but if there had not been some amount of forewarning it was possible that they wouldn’t have spotted the true source for several seasons, perhaps even multiple years. Indeed, they might cultivate the one ‘resistant’ crop even more, perpetuating the issue.

-----

Once they figured out the mechanism through which the damage was meant to be done, they were able to combat it. The maze of connections through which those particular crops had been shipped was much more complicated. In a way, that explained why Chun Jin had shown up to die. Everything connected to him and that name would be compromised, which would distract them from everything else. And his death would have meant a promotion, in essence. If he wasn’t captured.

So far his spirit had resisted their interrogation techniques. It was only through a bit of luck that Anton managed to noticed the oddity- not every kind of crop was infected with the blight, either. But Anton was very familiar with all sorts of crops, and the one in question just felt slightly wrong. Not like the blight, either. He couldn’t quite place a particular thing that had given it away, but centuries of experience prevailed.

And then hundreds of bureaucrats searching through records all over the planet- and in other systems. They could hunt down the particular crop… though it apparently went by multiple names. It didn’t look like much, just a standard some sort of wheat, barley, or even rye.

Anton had very little he was actually needed for except beginning the process as rapidly as possible. However, there was one more thing that was useful. Bringing samples of the true problem to other planets so that they could recognize it. The Shining Cooperative did have the ability to communicate between their locations rapidly, but they didn’t have scanners or the like that could register energy signatures or greater details.

As Anton was faster than most ships, he set out on a route that would let him bring samples along one of the primary internal trade routes of the Shining Cooperative. When they first met the Lower Realms Alliance, they would have been hesitant about both Anton and learning more about their internal arrangement of systems, but having worked successfully as allies against the Trigold Cluster for decades now they didn’t express any concerns.

That was the one good thing to come out of the war. Actually, Anton could say there were more. The fellow Tor of the Shimmering Spears and his lot were actually willing to break off from the Trigold Cluster- an unprecedented opportunity. At least, to the limits of his own knowledge.

Members of the Exalted Quadrant had stood with them in the lower realm- and then the upper realms- but so far there had been few examples of humanity among the Trigold Cluster. But of course, they were still just people. A vast number of them with a powerful society built upon the backs of countless atrocities, but not all of them were equally responsible. Even if they were only able to realize how wrong things were when certain parts of the Trigold Cluster treated them as callously as all other people before them, it was better than nothing.

-----

In all of Anton’s life, he had learned that there was rarely such a thing as perfect timing. Even in this case, where they caught a saboteur because of hard won information, they were late. But late was still better. Seasons were different around planets and between different planets, so the growing season for the particular sort of grain Chun Jin had been peddling was pretty much always active somewhere.

The last leg of Anton’s journey brought him to the planet Mioria, and it was there that he began to provide aid beyond simply delivery.

Anton understood the struggles of farmers. Losing a crop could devastate them, and they would be resistant to eliminating an entire crop of something that appeared perfectly good. At least they had already determined how to be rid of it for good. Simply pulling it up was insufficient- the soil would carry the blight. Anton had already determined that burning it was actually a great way to spread the blight it carried through the smoke, which was of course the opposite of what they wanted.

But spectral energy still worked. As for why it worked, it simply made sense. That was the tool the Trigold Cluster would use to cleanse any planets they took over through these methods. And since they’d already begun a process of teaching people how to cultivate at least a little bit of spectral energy, it was valuable.

A small bit didn’t wither entire patches, unlike with the mold. That meant the process would be slower. The good news, on the other hand, was that the blight killed its targeted crops rather quickly. That might seem like terrible news, but that limited its spread to some extent.

With over a dozen planets affected, all with much larger populations than Mazlerth, the total number of people that would be affected by the blight was much greater. However, they caught it quickly enough that they were only in the first true season of the plan. Much later, and it could have wiped out between a tenth and half of all of their crops for the year- and potentially years beyond that if they failed to recognize the true source.

Anton came in and withered crops… but he soothed angry farmers by immediately planting their fields and boosting the growth of new crops. And when they learned the actual consequences of leaving the crops… they had few complaints. But Anton made sure to champion for them, especially the smaller farms that couldn’t afford to lose a season’s income. He could help only so many people himself. The Shining Cooperative would have to live up to their name and do the rest.