Black Mould - Twenty-Four - Cowled Follower of the Merciful One

In my previous life, I always felt like time would just… slip by. I thought that was just part of being older. Days passed faster as you aged, or so I was told, and it certainly felt true.

Maybe it was more that with experience, new days passed by easier. The week I expected to have before the Gremlins started trouble passed in a blink.

I now had three new growing operations set up. The cemetery, next to the Feronie plot was currently the best. There was definitely something about that… godly attunement thing that was making it easier for my mushrooms to grow.

I was going to set up an experiment one day. I would plant two crops of identical samples in similar conditions, one with the area being blessed, and another without. As it was, my napkin-calculations pointed to something like a twenty percent increase in growing speed. That was enormous.

That kind of increase could revolutionise modern farming.

But anyway, that was a later problem. I didn’t have time for proper science.

My second growing location wasn’t too far from home. A house, one floor up and about a block away, was recently abandoned. A building had gone up in flames overnight. Mom had said that it was because someone didn’t pay attention to their coal fire and it lit their house up. I never even noticed that night.

The fire raged for a while, but it was a drizzly day, and the local equivalent of firefighters had shown up and doused it.

Seventeen homes had burned down, and plenty more had their occupants moving out.

It turned out to be a boon for me. One of those became my second farm. The entire room had been cooked by the fire, leaving lots of exposed wood that was really dry. The entrance was in an alley, so it was mildly discreet. I spent a day working there, encouraging my samples to take over the walls and floors.

Anyone that wanted to move in would find a nasty surprise. I didn’t really care; the place was in rough enough shape that no one should have been trying to live there anyway.

My third growing op wasn’t too far from home, but it was… rather unfortunate.

I’d gone to ask Stew and Debra if they had other ideas for a place to grow mushrooms when I came across a group of… well, their gender was hard to tell. There were seven of them on the back of a cart being driven by an eighth. All seven stank so much that I recoiled away from them. They had overalls, not too dissimilar to my own, and tall rubbery boots. Masks too, and gloves that reached their elbows.

The sign on the side of their cart read Coppercobbles and Sons Plumbing Co. The cart stopped by the side of the road, and the group disembarked. I watched them for a bit. The eighth, the guy who had been driving the cart, had quite the voice to him. He shouted to the others to get moving. They opened a square vent on the ground next to the road, and soon some of the others were climbing down.

The city had sewers?

No, of course it did. We were next to a decently-sized mountain. Water would be streaming down the streets if there wasn’t some sort of sewer system in place.

The workers were all… young. Some of them were very young, only a few years my senior. At least those who were obviously children were relegated to bringing tools to the edge of the sewer opening and back.

I didn’t stick around to stare. I had an idea.

I found another sewer entrance further down the street, then a third past that . The network didn’t follow the streets exactly, but it wasn’t too far off. So, I started a search around my home and found a sewer grate in an unused alleyway. It stank, and I imagined that there were some pretty noxious fumes slipping out of there, but it was quiet, and… well, fertiliser.

I made a mask using some finer yarn, with sprigs of rosemary between each layer. It helped with the stench… barely.

The sewer tunnels were pretty wide, with ledges on the side to walk on and a raging current in the middle. Tubes sticking out from the ceiling would rumble every few minutes before people generously added to the mix.

It wasn’t a very hospitable place, not for humans. For fungi though…

I didn’t have much time to go around and categorise things, but there was mould all over. I brought some of my samples down, then found a loose brick in the wall not too far from the entrance. That revealed that there was plain dirt on the other side of the brickwork holding the hole together. I removed a few bricks with some work, and had a nice spot for planting my growing mycelium.

I wasn’t going to use the sewers for anything I intended to eat.

Poisonous mushrooms on the other hand… well, now they’d be just a little more lethal.

I wasn’t going to visit that one often, not if the tongue-lashing Mom gave me was any encouragement. To be fair, she wasn’t wrong, I stank pretty bad that night. I had to scrub my clothes with bleach and lye which made my hands feel awful for a couple of days.

That was a spot I’d check in on once a month or so.

In the meantime… no one was hitting my farm.

I kept watch, with Debra and two others that she recruited for me with promises of good food. No one bothered to show up, and I saw neither hide nor hair of the Gremlins.

As one week became two, I decided that maybe I was worried for nothing. Besides, I had new mushrooms to do science on, and my farm was the best place for that.

So on the morning of the third week since the Gremlins visited, I snuck into my farm before the sun had quite risen, shut the door tight, then got to work.

I had [Beige Puffballs]. They were common, they were usable.

Now how could I turn them into something even more useful?

My first idea was to combine it with my most lethal mushrooms.

After cleaning up, harvesting a few mushrooms, and getting past the usual busywork of keeping my farm in shape, I spread the four samples I’d be combining onto my workbench (if I continued to grow, in a few years I wouldn’t even need the stool to see the top of it!).

- Dead Man’s Fingers

- Bug Agaric

Two non-combined mushroom types. Both {Common}.

- Dead Man’s Agaric

- Dead Horse Head

Two combined mushroom types. Both {Uncommon}.

The hope was to take the [Beige Puffball] strain and specifically evolve its spores to make them more lethal. The mushroom itself didn’t matter much. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the first clue on how to specifically make one trait evolve and not another.

Something to figure out at another time.

I started to knit the mycelium together, losing myself in the pattern I wove.

Then someone banged on the door and I nearly screamed.

I looked around in a hurry, grabbed a knife from the workbench, then looked for something else to defend myself with… finding nothing. Not unless I could shove a poisonous mushroom into someone’s mouth and convince them to swallow. Even then, nothing I had acted quickly.

Swearing under my breath, I moved over to the door, then stayed quiet next to it. If they barged in, I could slip out in the confusion. Maybe a quick stab to someone’s leg to make a bigger opening.

“Hey, kid? It’s Debra,” came Debra’s voice from the other side. “If it’s not you in there… then come out with your hands open. You’ve got no business there.”

My shoulders slackened… a little.

There was someone else out there, a second voice that I didn’t recognise. They were too quiet to make out what they were saying too.

Was Debra being coerced? Or had someone given her a better deal than what I could offer?

I sighed, then got onto the tips of my toes and unlocked the door.

I threw it open and took in everything at a glance.

Debra stood nearby, hand raised as though she were about to knock again.

Next to her was a young woman, maybe mid-teens. She had a big red cowl, almost a poncho, with a peaked hood above her head. A black half-mask covered her nose and lower face, and under the poncho-cowl she wore a black sweater over black denim and soft leather boots.

“Ah, there you are,” Debra said. “You mentioned wanting to see the city better. Talked to Eight-Three-Eleven here, and she said she had some time now.”

“Oh,” I said. “Uh, well, hi.” I tucked my knife away, as if I hadn’t been holding it like some feral street child. “Pleased to meet you… Eight-Three-Eleven.”

***