"Hey Mei, watch this!" Liu Qiang shouted as he ran over.

"Huh?"

At a speed unbefitting his stature, he overtook Wang Wei, reaching Mei and the mushrooms first.

"Hey, dumbo!" he shouted at Spotty. "Your hat looks dumb!"

The mushrooms continued to chatter, as if ignoring him.

"Hehe, these mushrooms actually can't hear at all! And if you're too far away, they can't see you, because they use spirit sense to see!" Liu Qiang said.

Finally, Wang Wei caught up.

"Isn't it kind of rude to talk behind their backs?" he crossed his arms.

"Haha, it's just a demonstration! Just thought it was a little funny." Liu Qiang said.

...did Liu Qiang inherit some of Yingyi's attitude after making friends with him?

"Wait, if these mushrooms can't hear us because they use soulsense and spirit sense, then how do the spirits hear us when we talk?" Wang Wei suddenly realised something. "They don't have ears either!"

"I dunno. Probably some kind of magic." Liu Qiang shrugged.

"Then we should be more careful." Wang Wei said. "Some of the mushrooms might have learnt techniques that let them hear or see. It would be a dead giveaway of our identity!"

Good point...

"Erm... I assume we're expected to blend in at least? Haha..." Wang Wei trailed off. "Since the elder spirits gave us these."

He tapped his chest plate, making clacking sounds.

Suddenly, a lightbulb went off in Liu Qiang's head.

"Hey, look over there," he said to Mei, pointing across the river.

"Huh?" she turned over.

BAAAAANG!

"Ow!"

"Ahahaha!"

Liu Qiang had smacked her on the back, making a loud metallic sound.

"What was that for?" Mei grumbled.

"You forgot? Back at the tournament, you smacked my butt with your axe when I turned metal! This is revenge, heheh!" he grinned.

Mei: ...

"Hey! Are you two also mushrooms that work in the ant nest?" Spotty asked.

"Just go along with it," Mei said. "Apparently, the armour messes with their soulsense or something, so they think we're also mushrooms."

"Hm..."

For the next 20 minutes, Liu Qiang had fun bragging to the mushrooms and making up what they did. Liu Qiang was one of the best artefact crafters in the nest, Wang Wei a master alchemist... and Mei an expert on growing shrooms.

...why did she always get teased about horticulture?

Hm.

Oh yeah, come to think of it, she had an inner demon, that fake grandma of hers. It didn't show up for quite a while, so Mei almost forgot she had one.

Was that going to be a problem? Seemed like a huge hassle to deal with it... After thinking about it for a while, she figured she'd just ask the elders for help if it became serious.

"Ah! It's almost time for lessons!" Spotty suddenly said.

"Aww! Break time is over already?" Gunky said. "Big shrooms, come see us practice! Please?"

Wang Wei and Liu Qiang looked at each other, then Mei.

"Sure, why not?"

In a section of the village, nearly a hundred pits had been dug out, some filled with a strange grey liquid. An adult mushroom sat at a table, diligently grinding Earth Crystals and dried herbs with a pestle and mortar, mixing the resulting powder with water from the stream.

"Urgh... it smells so bad..." Liu Qiang said. "They body cultivate in that?"

"I think those herbs look poisonous... we should close off the air vents in the helmet." Wang Wei said.

"Eh? Won't we suffocate then?" Mei asked.

The two boys stared at her with a strange look.

"Um... once cultivators reach the Foundational stage, we no longer need air."

"Oh." Mei felt a little embarrassed.

From the pits they sat in, Spotty and Gunky waved to them.

"Great ancestor said this goop makes our skin hard as rock and poisonous! So no baddies will eat us!" Spotty said.

"Hmph! They work for the ants. How would they not know that?" Gunky replied.

"B-but their skin is metal attuned! So they might not know, since they cultivated their bodies differently!"

...Mei wasn't sure what she thought of being mistaken as a metal mushroom.

"I guess that makes sense." to the side, Wang Wei muttered. "These mushrooms must have originally been medicinal fungus. Since they can cultivate, it makes them especially potent ingredients for pills... if not for this, everyone would want to hunt them."

"You were thinking of making them into pills?!" Liu Qiang said.

"W-what?" the young alchemist stuttered. "No, I wouldn't- I mean... no, I wouldn't kill them for pills! I'd use some dead skin I picked up at most!"

Liu Qiang laughed.

"Well, at least you could still make poison pills."

"And who the heck would I poison?"

While the boys bantered, Mei wandered off, feeling a little bored. She had no interest in watching mushrooms marinade in poison gunk.

She walked over to the nearby stream, staring at the crystal-clear waters. There was so much qi in it... Mei wished she had a way to bottle up a lot of it and take it back to the sect. If only Su Qing was here to help store it...

After seeing such refreshing looking water, she began to feel a little parched. She cupped her hands in the water... only for it to slip through with how she was wearing metal gloves. Gah...

"Stop!" suddenly, she heard a shout from Tu Teng.

Huh? What was one of the elder spirits doing here?

"This water is laced with deadly bacteria!"

"...what's a bacteria."

"They're basically really tiny living things that are everywhere. Even all over your skin and inside you."

What?

"But I've never seen them before."

"That's because they're too small to see."

"Then how do people know they exist?"

"Because they can be seen with special tools."

Mei narrowed her eyes. Was Tu Teng trying to mess with her?

Yeah right. Super tiny living things that nobody could see.

What's next? Those super tiny living things also had... uh... even smaller tiny things that lived in them as well?

What a load of crap!

She bet Tu Teng was just trying to stop her from taking precious spring water they wanted to take back to the sect to sell.

"Stop! Stop! I told you not to drink it!"

The green spirit yelled as she dunked her entire head into the water.