Death Cap - Thirty-Eight - The Quiet Sort of Hectic Before the Unquiet Action

The next week was filled with a sort of quiet but hectic energy. I had more money on me than I’d ever had before, and I honestly didn’t know what to do with all of it.

I had plans, of course, but while I was richer, I wasn’t rich enough to pull off all of those plans. I had to sit back, pick one or two, and go with those.

The biggest priority, at least to me, was the Ritual of Sporemageddon.

It was a big deal. I didn’t make a big fuss about it, but my dreams were increasingly vivid, and the phrase Feronie had once uttered to me was always on the tip of my own tongue. I felt a sense of urgency that pushed me to work harder.

I talked to Bet a few more times, and was happy to see that she was recovering just fine. The bruises disappeared over the course of a week, and even her worst injuries were faded and easily forgotten. She was either in better health than I’d expected, or the [Healing Chimes] really did work as advertised.

With a bit of poking around at the market, I found a man who did some carpentry in his spare time, and he made us a new table.

It was a shame that I couldn’t find the one my Dada had made for me. Those muggers had probably ditched it, thinking it wasn’t worth anything.

The new table was, much to my silent chagrin, much better than my old one. It folded into a sort of large briefcase-shape and weighed a fair bit less. That was important when the ones carrying it around weren’t very big or very strong.

I fit a replacement burner into the table, then sent Bet off to work once more, which she was more than happy to do.

There were rumours in the streets about what happened to the muggers. The general consensus was that karma had, for a rare moment, actually worked in the little people’s favour. No one seemed to want to dig too deeply into who was responsible, which was fine by me.

If a bigger gang from the nicer parts of the city was responsible for this little crew, then they took the message sent by losing five of their guys as a warning and kept away.

Once life resettled into something resembling normalcy, I patiently waited for all of my new hybridised mushrooms to grow. It took another week.

I collected the mushrooms from the new fungal growths, starting with those combined with the [Skunk’s Lament]. Those I exclusively grew outside of my farm. The stench that lingered around them, even when they weren’t in full bloom, was just nauseating.

The original mushrooms were growing well, and I had successfully combined them with every mushroom that I’d tried combining them with. They took well to hybridization.

The issue was... well, the original strain was too potent, maybe.

[Skunk’s Lament] - Common

A small mushroom that, when squeezed, releases a cloud of minuscule spores which emit a potent foul odour. Has some use as a revitalising reagent.

The mushroom stank. I was hoping to use it as a sort of potential replacement for my [Beige Puffballs], essentially turning any hybrid into another explosive spore mushroom, but so far that wasn’t the trait that carried over.

Combining it with my common [Horse Head Mushroom] which I still had plenty of, resulted in something called the [Horse Dropping Mushroom]. It was large, flat, coloured a mottled brown and stank of horse droppings. Very potent horse droppings.

[Horse Dropping Mushroom] - Common

An edible mushroom which can sustain itself next to fresh manure. Has a strong flavour, and little nutritional value.

I refused to taste it.

The combination with the [Dead Man’s Finger] which was mostly an insecticide but which had resulted in my most lethal mushroom with another hybrid gave me a long, stem-like mushroom which gave off a pungent scent.

[Dead Man’s Gas] - Common

A powerful insecticide that, when flowering, will release an odour that will attract insects while killing them slowly. Will use the corpses of insects to spread.

Again, not super useful. It might have been if it was odourless, but it smelled like... like its name described. Honestly, I was starting to regret spending any money on the original sample.

The combination with the [Beige Puffball] wasn’t all that bad.

[Brown Puffball] - Common

A common sight next to manure heaps and sewers. The puffball is an inedible mushroom which grows into a ball filled with dust-like spores that are released on impact or from strong winds. The spores are a mild irritant. They carry a faecal smell which wards away fungivores.

That... might lead to another option when it came to explosive mushrooms in the future. I wasn’t sure I wanted to work with it for that long though.

In a vain attempt to get something useful out of it, I combined the mushroom’s fungi with some from my only Epic mushroom, the [Faerie Fire Cap]. The result was a mushroom called the [Faerie Fart].

[Faerie Fart] - Rare

A rare mushroom which, on detonating, will release magical spores which can turn breathable air into a noxious but non-lethal gas which is mildly flammable.

I refused to use that one because I had some pride. The [Skunk’s Lament] would have to just survive on its own for a while as I dropped it to the very bottom of my priority list. If I needed non-lethal options, I had others which were much better.

The next mushroom was one I could comfortably grow on my farm.

[Ghoul Button Mushroom] - Uncommon

A mushroom that grows on flesh, though it prefers the flesh of undead creatures and will grow with startling speed on those. If consumed whole it will make the eater more resistant to necrotic influences.

I extracted a few spores from one of the first of these to grow and checked it with my [Poison Handling Expertise] skill.

[Ghoul Button Mushroom Spore]

A spore that nestles in the crevices of a mammal’s skin and which feeds on skin particles to grow. Will rapidly spread outwards from the point of contact and can spread necrosis within the flesh.

Interestingly enough, the mushroom seemed to counteract its own effect. That was a little confusing, but there were a number of medicines that worked in a similar way, and I wasn’t averse to the idea that my new mushroom was its own cure.

On its own, it was really only good against the undead, which I hadn’t ever run into and didn’t expect to. I wondered if the resistance to necrosis would work against my [Blight] but I was hardly going to test it on myself.

This one didn’t take to hybridization well. None of the samples I tried to combine with any edible mushroom worked. That might have been a coincidence, but I suspected it wasn’t. I obtained six working hybrid strains from the [Ghoul Button Mushroom], two of which came from combining it with existing hybrids.

[Ghoul Finger] - Common

A common wood-rot fungus. Its flowering scent, though unnoticeable to most, repels many insects. Inedible. Consumption leads to digestive issues. Will rapidly spread from the corpses of dead insects.

A spreading insecticide. It had its niche uses, but none that I needed yet. I kept note of it anyway.

[Death Agaric] - Uncommon

A powerful hallucinogen, capable of befuddling the minds of the undead with mere contact to its spores.

I had no idea what I’d use this on, but it was interesting nonetheless. Did that mean that the undead had minds? I wasn’t in a position to think too deeply about that.

The next was far more interesting. It came out as a roundish mushroom with a purple top half and skirt, the rest being a faded grey. It was relatively small, too, no bigger than my thumb.

[Purple Ghoul Watcher] - Rare

This rare mushroom is only found in areas with predatory undead. While very mildly poisonous, this mushroom allows those who eat it to see the life essences of those around them.

This one I tested as soon as I could, and the results were some of the coolest I’d dealt with yet. The poison itself wasn’t all that terrible. It caused stomach cramps and some abdominal pain, but nothing worse than the average person could live with.

The magical effect was... strange. It made living things glow faintly to me. Sir Nibbles gained a pale whitish glow around him, and many of my fungi had a very faint, nearly imperceptible green glow to them.

This would be invaluable in the dungeon.

In fact, I started to wonder if I could grow this one in larger quantities for resale. I imagined delvers might be keen on something like this.

I desperately needed to make a contact somewhere who could sell what I produced to the various alchemists in the city. I was sitting on a heap of coins here.

Oh well. For the moment I was flush, which is all that mattered.

***