Black Mould - Nineteen - Prophecy and Poison

I was dying, and it was all entirely my own, stupid fault.

At first, it had started as some mild gurgles. Those weren’t too uncommon. We were eating better, but our diet was hardly rich. I figured the slight cramps I had that night were the worst I’d be getting from the [Dead Horse Head] I ate.

I… I am a bit of an idiot.

My goal in eating the mushroom was twofold: to gain some knowledge, and to maybe develop an immunity to the poisons my mushrooms had in them. It was logical, wasn’t it? In this world with its strange magics and rules, it seemed natural that this was the best path to getting that sort of skill.

I spent half the night in the bathroom.

By the time the sun rose, I was semi-delirious, my hands shook, my skin had turned pale, and my head swam.

Where had I gone wrong?

The dosage was tiny, and I had eaten plenty to go with it.

But then, I was tiny too.

Maybe if I was a healthy adult, then the dose wouldn’t have been that bad. Just a mild case of the runs and a stomachache. But I wasn’t. I was four years old, underfed, too thin for my own age, and I had a host of small ailments that came from living in the sort of environment we were in.

My mother returned from work early, worried about me, and rightly so. She found me passed out on the bathroom floor, face pressed into the rough wood, limbs trembling.

I was put to bed and covered in blankets. I vaguely remember that part. Mom hummed a song to me while brushing my hair. She gave me water from a damp cloth.

I tried to smile at her, but then the world twisted.

I was no longer in our room, but in a dark cavern. The walls were bark and stone and everything glowed from light that came from soft moss. It wasn’t Mom who was above me, but the Lady. She hummed a song, a lullaby, but it was a sad one, and she was as hurt as I was.

I mumbled something at her, and when my vision stopped swimming, I was in our one-room hovel once more.

Dad fretted next to the bed for a while, but only for a little bit. He left. He could never stand around and do nothing, that wasn’t in his nature.

The worst of the fever broke… actually, I’m not sure how long it took.

What took longer was getting back to shape. I spend an entire week laying in bed, with recurring bouts of weakness and delirium. I kept having visions of a lady watching over me. Sometimes she had my mom’s face. Feronie?

I wasn’t sure what to think of that. In either case, the delirious visions didn’t seem prophetic, unless I was prophesizing that Feronie liked brushing people’s hair back.

During the second week, I started to feel better. I wasn’t losing any of the soup my mom carefully fed me, and I didn’t have any more hallucinations, just the occasional vivid dream. I was still too weak to do much more than drag myself to the washroom while my parents were gone, and even that was taxing.

My legs felt like jelly, and I spent nearly two whole weeks just working hard to get used to walking again.

I had made some serious mistakes, but maybe they weren’t without rewards.

[You have unlocked the [Basic Poison Resistance {Common}] Skill!]

[Do you want to add the [Basic Poison Resistance {Common}] Skill to your known repertoire of General Skills?]

That was handy.

Of course, I refused. The skill description said it would help me resist poisons, and then only common ones. If I was going to go deep into using poisons for things, or even just growing rarer sorts of mushrooms, then that wouldn’t do at all.

My dad helped me visit my farm, which had gone a bit wild without me there to look over things. I had a lot of weeding to do, and I had to cull some of the more eager fungus which was pushing its way around.

Dad walked around and looked at the growing harvest. “This is impressive,” he said.

I grinned, a warm glow in my chest. “Thanks,” I said. “It’ll be even more impressive soon. I want to make medicine, and mushrooms that can heal. But, ah… hey, Dad?”

“Yes, little mushroom?” he asked.

I chewed on my lip, then came to a choice. “Do you think I could get some mice?”

“Most children want a dog, maybe a cat,” he said.

I was mortified for a second, then I caught on and started to laugh. “Not as a pet!” I said. “No, no, as test subjects. If I’m going to be making medicine, then I need to test them on something that isn’t a person.”

Dad frowned. “What would happen if those tests went wrong?”

“They’d get sick and die.”

“Haven’t you been very sick lately?”

I looked up to him, eyes big and innocent. “What do you mean?” I asked.

He looked unamused.

I got another week of grounding, this time with no books and only one visit to my farm in that week to keep things going. Honestly, I probably needed that week. The walk over to the farm had left me weak and gasping. I wasn’t quite back to tip-top shape.

And so the first couple of seasons of the year went. Winter swept in, and my visits to the farm became less frequent. I harvested what I could and covered the rest in a layer of dirt to keep things from freezing too hard. Fungi could endure a winter just fine if the conditions were right, but they weren’t going to grow in that time.

I spent time at home, listened to Dad rant and Mom gossip, practised my knitting (I still hated it, but I was getting pretty good despite that), and generally felt the days slip by until the weather turned a little warmer and Spring came about.

I wasn’t entirely idle. I had lots of time to plan and plot, and in that time, I came upon a singularly terrible idea.

Stew had mentioned a skill that would allow someone to stay near a dungeon without losing their mana. It was a relatively easy skill to gain, from what I understood. The issue was that it was a wasted skill.

Most skills helped you do something. Mom had cooking, knitting, and a few other skills that helped her around the house. Dad had a bunch of skills related to his job, both through his class and in his general skills.

Surprisingly, both of my parents had the [Dancing] skill. It was how they had met, actually. But they had little time to practise.

Maybe I’d ask to learn how to dance too. Though I had [Running] already.

Some skills I wrote off immediately as useless. [Cleaning], really? What would I do with that?

Anyway, my plan was simple. I’d go to the dungeon, sit a little ways from it, and let it suck away my mana. Then I’d leave and come back. Rinse and repeat until I got the skill I wanted. I was secretly hoping for some way to combine poison resistance and mana theft—was that the right term?—resistance.

I would need to prepare a little before I tried something like that, though. Mostly I wanted to have some mana-infused mushrooms on hand, in case I needed a sudden and rapid boost to my mana reserves.

I could hide a bag full of them somewhere close to the edge of the dungeon’s area of effect, then dart back and eat them as soon as I was running low.

The plan was to try it for a few days. If that didn’t give me the right skill, then I’d give up and try something else. It wasn’t like I needed that kind of defensive skill in my day-to-day life. Not yet, at least.

My frequent dreams of Feronie and her demands that I go around murdering things kind of made me suspicious that I might need some way to defend myself sooner rather than later.

It was on a trip back to my farm to finish up my preparations that I met some of that trouble I was worried about.

Three people, kids, really, were lurking around the entrance of my farm. Debra wasn’t in her spot. I slipped back around a corner, then peeked out to see if they were loitering there for real or if it was just a coincidence.

But no, they were affecting that sort of nonchalance that only a teenager might think was actually believable.

“Ah, shit,” I muttered.

I weighed my options. I could go back, but then they might break in. I could confront them, but I was four, unarmed, and on the wrong side of healthy. I could find Debra, maybe convince some of the other homeless folk to help, but then they’d clue in on the fact that I was growing food, and there was little loyalty in that community.

I worked my jaw, then picked the option that I hoped had the best odds of solving things peacefully.

***