Black Mould - Eighteen - Knitting Together Threads of Passing Time

Black Mould - Eighteen - Knitting Together Threads of Passing Time

Black Mould - Eighteen - Knitting Together Threads of Passing Timenove(l)bi(n.)com

My mom grounded me for a month.

An interminable month, spent locked up in our little home, with nothing to do but knit and practise my meagre reading skills on the few books we had.

I hated knitting.

I knit an entire sweater for my mom. An angry sweater.

My anger and frustration redoubled when, a week into my punishment, my mom added another two weeks. She, being clever and conniving, had tied some string to the door so that it would signal her when anyone opened the door.

I had just gone to check on my farm! Some of my mushrooms were ready to harvest, and if left to grow for too long, Id miss out on none of my excuses mattered.

The day of my fourth birthday came and went with little fanfare. My dad got me some yarn, and my mom a small pile of books. It was actually a nice gift; though they were worn and well-read, that only meant that the last owner thought them entertaining.

One was a book about the history of textile manufacturing in the city we lived in. It was dry and a little bland, but I got a glimpse of the worlds history, or at least, a very edited and polished look at said history. I didnt believe half of what the book claimed.

Still, some facts would be easily verified. The land was once a kingdom, part of a greater empire which essentially colonised the entire surface of the world. I couldnt decide which empire back on Earth it reminded me of the most. Maybe some weird French-English-Spanish-Portuguese cross?

Eventually, my punishment ended, and I was allowed to return to work on my farm.

Fortunately, most of the mushrooms I had could survive a couple of weeks without tending. Some had died and rotted away, but that wasnt too terrible. It provided some compost for the next generation of the same mushroom to grow in.

What interested me the most were the grafted mushrooms that had grown out of my notebook.

One was outright dead, but the others werent so shrivelled that I couldnt observe them.

So, four surviving samples, five including the one Id already planted. I rubbed my hands together to warm them back up. My little farm was surprisingly warm, at least compared to the chill creeping up on the city from outside.

The dead sample was the combination of brown chanterelle and bug agaric. That wasnt too surprising; it was an outright miracle that so many of the other grafted samples had worked at all. It was certainly unscientific. These fungi were probably not even close to being in the same family, so there was no way they should have been able to combine in any reasonable way.

But magic, it seemed, didnt care much for my scientific knowledge.

Or I paused and considered it.

No, the scientific method was still valid. It was just that magic was a new variable that needed to be taken into account.

Two types of mushroom combinations remained. Bug agaric and horse head produced an edible mushroom that was nutritious and mildly poisonous to insects. That was interesting, but not immediately useful. I didnt have a bug problem in my farm. If I did, then an insect-resistant cultivar might be more tempting.

As it was, the new [Brown Horse Head] was just better in nearly every way.

The last mushroom was the strangest looking one of the lot. I suspected some magical interference of some sort was at work.

[Dead Horse Head] - Uncommon

A magical mushroom that is high in nutritious content and has a smell that will tempt mammalian creatures into consuming it. Very mildly poisonous.

The mushroom looked like a knight piece from a fungal-themed chess set, if a little malformed. I wondered if I could cultivate mushrooms to complete the set A thought for the future, perhaps.

I plucked the mushroom and eyed it a bit.

This was poisonous, but it didnt seem to have the same level of lethality as the [Dead Mans Agaric]. In fact, this seemed downright tame compared to that.

I chewed on my bottom lip as I thought.

If I wanted to develop an immunity to poisons, then Id need to survive some poisoning. I was pretty healthyafflictions asideyoung, and in decent shape.

I could probably live through a bit of cramping.

Still, it wouldnt be smart to consume a large dose of a poison. Id have to work on starting small first.

I split up the [Dead Horse Head] with a knife, creating a thin cutting of it that was no bigger than my pinkie.

Most of the more lethal mushrooms back on Earth werent really as dangerous as people thought. Death caps were probably the most lethal, and it wasnt all that common that someone who ate one died. Not in the modern day, at least.

I went about picking things up, harvesting a healthy amount of mushrooms to bring back home in a sack (way more than we could eat over the course of even a whole month) and then I wasted a few points of mana here and there.

The [Brown Horse Head], I decided, would replace my other mushrooms as my main growing stock. It would take a while for me to have enough to replace everything else though, so Id do it in small stages.

Once I was done for the day, I picked up the tiny sliver of [Dead Horse Head] and plopped it into my mouth.

It was actually pretty tasty!

With a smile on my lips, I ran back home with my bounty.

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