A certain no-man's-land in the north.
Two cities had once stood nearby. Neither was suited to defense, so during the Dragon Calamity both were abandoned and their populations moved to sturdier strongholds.
A no-man's-land meant less mana drain, so Lin Jun had dumped the still-growing No. 4 out here.
By now No. 4 had swelled to several times the size of a Giant Puchi, its bulk rivaling one of Qisi's flesh-pillars coiled up.
It sprawled across the ground like a small white mountain.
Right now, a figure was sprinting back and forth across that little mountain, pouring its whole heart into the effort.
Inanna had used magic to turn herself into a little giant. With both hands pressed to the underside of the enormous cap, she raced along the furrows of its rim. She reached the far end, doubled back, then ran the length again. Her steps were frantic and her panting faded in and out on the wind.
A long while later, the magic sustaining her giant form burst with a dull bang. Inanna dropped out of the air and landed softly on the huge, pillowy mushroom body. She lay on her back with her chest heaving, sweat soaking the pink hair plastered to her forehead.
"Little Four, how was it?" she asked through the mycelial network, her voice still ragged.
"Huh? Has it already... no, is it over already?!" After a brief silence, the Puchi mountain beneath Inanna began to shake violently. "I didn't feel a thing! Pink Puchi, you're too small, I couldn't feel you at all! Ruaaaah..."
It writhed, and the spores it shook loose blotted out the sky like a blizzard, smothering the whole area in a gray-white haze.
Inanna's flame robe surfaced on its own, the fire flickering bright and dim as it seared any spores that drifted close into fine ash.
It took a good while for No. 4 to settle and the spores to drift slowly back down. Inanna had already made it to the ground. She wrapped both arms around the edge of No. 4's cap, her eyes full of ache. "Little Four, maybe we should just stop. I'll go talk to Boss and tell him to give up on [Leviathan]."
"G-give up?" No. 4's mushroom body went rigid.
"Yeah. While there's still time."
No. 4 was silent for a moment. Then its massive body began to tremble, and the spores it shed drove Inanna back once more.
It wasn't crying, since Puchi couldn't cry, yet its thoughts carried a sob all the same. "No. I'm a glorious member of the Mushroom Tribe. I can't give up here, I can't, hnngh..."
"No. 4!"
---
"Boss, I think we need to produce more high-tier Puchi along the coastline. The ones stationed there are all hand-picked veterans. They've been Puchi Masters since the tribal war, and they can bring out a high-tier Puchi's full strength."
To hold off the coming Mist, Little Pig had already organized dozens of elite squads, each fielding ten to twenty Puchi Masters. It was a fairly reasonable number.
To make sure they could actually stall the Mist and buy time, Little Pig clearly wanted to raise these squads' strength another notch.
"Mm, fine!" Lin Jun agreed.
But that did mean No. 4 would have to be relocated, and the only direction left to move it was east.
"There's one more thing, Boss." Little Pig spoke up again, his tone a touch more hesitant than before. "I didn't want to trouble you with this at first, but it's been half a month now, and Spark and the others still haven't found the cause. Two more cases cropped up recently, and I'm worried it might be some kind of disease." As he spoke, Little Pig pulled up several images.
They were of several patients, taken from infirmaries in different cities under the Mushroom Fortress's jurisdiction.
The first image showed a lizardman.
A lizardman's scales were normally distinct, each one sharp-edged and separate. This one's scales had all fused together until the gaps between them vanished. His arm was locked straight out, the elbow joint sealed shut by that layer of hard shell so that it could not bend.
Beside him, a physician was shaving the shell away bit by bit with a thin-bladed knife.
The next image was of a human.
He lay face-down on a bed, the clothing on his back cut open to reveal a stub of newly grown tail at his tailbone.
It wasn't long, having only just poked past the hem of his clothes. It was grayish-brown, with a bald tip.
The third image was of a half-demon, fretting over the horns running wild on his head.
There were seven or eight such cases in all, every one of them sprouting things that had no business belonging to their bodies: horns, carapaces, tails, scales, and the like.
"When did this start?" Lin Jun asked.
"The earliest reported case was a month ago, but from what I dug up afterward, fungal folk were already undergoing similar mutations well before the Northern Territory campaign. Since it was just an isolated case back then, and the mutation didn't interfere with daily life, no one paid it much mind. It's only recently that several have surfaced at once. Spark has tried everything, and even the Water of Life can't cure it. Boss, is this some unknown disease, or a curse?"
Lin Jun had never told anyone he could see status panels directly. But as the Mushroom Fortress's marshal, Little Pig often helped him direct operations, and even without knowing the specifics, he had at least some notion of what the Boss was capable of.
After examining their panels closely, Lin Jun reached a verdict of his own. "It's not a curse. And it's not a disease."
"Then what is it?"
For once, Lin Jun didn't answer right away. Instead he said, "I'll need to watch this one a while longer myself. If any more cases with similar symptoms turn up, tell me the moment they do."
Once they had finished talking, Lin Jun pulled up the first lizardman's panel again.
His status field was perfectly clean. Aside from the [Parasitism] status that every fungal folk carried, there genuinely wasn't a single cursed or diseased condition on it. Nothing was abnormal, so of course the Water of Life couldn't cure it.
The real problem lay in the skill list.
[Chitin Carapace LV2]
This skill, which had no business appearing on a lizardman, was the true culprit behind his body's mutation.
What gave Lin Jun pause was simple. He had absolutely never granted this lizardman that skill, and it wasn't as if he were some D-class grunt prone to fumbling the paperwork. The human, meanwhile, had picked up [Tail Swipe LV1].
The other patients were much the same. Each had gained a few low-level skills, to the point that the matching body parts had started to grow in.
If Lin Jun were an ordinary person, he might have assumed he'd zoned out at some point and caused it by accident.
But Lin Jun's mind had never once wandered.
That left one question: if Lin Jun hadn't added them, then how had these skills ended up on their bodies?
He even suspected that the few he'd been shown weren't all of them.
If it was only a matter of an extra skill, then there might well be fungal folk who had gained one that produced no obvious physical change, a skill no one had paid attention to, or that its owner hadn't even noticed.
And this was only the situation among the fungal folk. Over in the United Kingdom, might Puchi Masters be developing similar symptoms too?
He still didn't know the cause, but the symptoms looked an awful lot like "skills being added," which probably meant he had something to do with it. Lin Jun resolved to look into the United Kingdom as well, to see whether any similar cases had turned up there.
(End of Chapter)
Comments