Chương 127: Penicillium - Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Six Bet explained as best she could, but what she knew wasn't enough. She wasn't connected to anyone who actually knew what was going on, and for that matter, nor was I. What she knew could be summed up quite simply though, it was the kind of thing that a lot of people had observed already. Things removed from the dungeon were breaking apart. It had taken a day or two for people to start to notice, which I took as a small blessing.

It would obfuscate the time when it actually started, create a wider timeframe for anyone investigating. It was a small mercy, but I'd take it. I didn't want to ask Bet any more questions than I had to, not if it meant she might grow suspicious too. I'd have to figure things out on my own. So I told Bet that for the rest of the week we'd be selling mushroom skewers at a few different markets across the slums and their surroundings. I said it was to gauge which market was the best, and that wasn't a lie.

My plain and simple ulterior motive was to be closer to the centre of gossip. The number of men and women who lingered in the marketplaces and chatted about inane things was astounding. An hour spent listening attentively and you could discover who was marrying whom, who had been fired, hired, fell sick, got pregnant, and who was cheating on whom with whom. Most of the time the information was worthless, at least to me, but once in a while there was something interesting. Nothing I could ever act on, but still.

This time the gossip might well be because of something I'd done, and I wanted to hear its spread and growth. I had enough edible mushrooms that had grown to maturity while I was out of the farm to keep us going for a day or two, and my magical growing skills had improved a little while in the dungeon. I didn't mind pushing them to ensure a good crop. Besides, I had time to kill while my new mushrooms grew.

So the next morning, Bet and I scrubbed our equipment clean, dressed in our best, least ratty clothes, and we headed out to the nearest market from my farm with a good load of mushrooms, skewers, and fuel for the burner. I had some garlic–fresh, because mushrooms weren't the only thing I could grow–and carried enough halfpennies to buy half a dozen sticks of butter.

When we arrived, I bribed the guards with a pence each and a promise of a few skewers come lunch time, and then we set up shop next to one of the market's entrances. Bet was significantly more personable than I was with clients. She even bothered to remember their names sometimes. I, on the other hand, had to fake it all. But damn was I ever good at that.

"Hi sir!" I said, voice upbeat and chipper, with just a hint of a waver. My eyes were big, my smile a little uncertain but still happy, and my hair was set in a high ponytail with a few strands artfully loose to frame my face. I had an adult mind to gauge my own appearance with, and I was cute as hell.

"Would you like a mushroom skewer? They're good for you!" I smiled and sold two. I wondered, was I so susceptible when I was an adult, a lifetime ago? Probably. But at that time propaganda and advertising had had a lot more time and money poured into them to perfect the art compared to what I was used to seeing in City Nineteen. Maybe if I'd been born the child of some rich business mogul I might have been able to revolutionise that particular industry. But that was useless speculation.

My attention perked up as I overheard two people talking nearby. A craftsman who sold these little stools and tables and chairs, all hand-crafted with what was probably skill-assisted speed and dexterity. He was complaining to one of the other merchants, which I almost ignored until I caught the word 'dungeon' slipping between the two.

"--insane hike in prices," he said.

"Aren't there storehouses?" the other asked.

"Yeah, sure, but they're not going to last forever. The other dungeon's on the other end of the damned city and it doesn't produce half the wood that Ditz does."

"It's temporary, probably." The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"You think this is some sort of strike? The delvers or whatever pulling a fast one to get what they want?"

"Tsk, typical. They already live like kings." I noted what I could from that. There seemed to be about the normal amount of bias and bullshit in their whole rant, and it had the flavour of one guy venting to another. The next few discussions were a little better, but again, all I had were piecemeal details without anything concrete to attach them to. So we repeated the same thing the next day, and the next, and with each repetition I gained more information and got a little bit richer.

The coin I made (a few shilling at best) was nothing compared to what I learned from listening though. The dungeon's materials were breaking apart. Not just that. They were breaking apart into ash and raw, rotten material that seemed to frequently turn into mould. Entire trees, harvested from Ditz the night prior, were replaced by long lumps of humid dirt covered in fungal growths. The goblins taken from the dungeon? All sick with lung rot. Most died within a few hours of being removed from their dungeon home.

The Non-plant materials didn't fare much better. Stone quarried from the first floor broke apart into dust as if it were no tougher than poorly hardened clay and any of the plants cultivated from the dungeon turned to rot. I heard one person, an old herbalist lady who sold homemade cure-all tinctures complaining that any plant she bought from the delvers was blighted, and that blight liked to travel to the next nearest plant. It wasn't hard from there to piece together Feronie's plan. The dungeon fed the city.

That wasn't a metaphor. It was a literal feeding. Sure, gatherers only took from the topmost floors, and there was only so much taken every day, but that amounted to a lot nonetheless. An infinite source of raw meat, silk, wood, bricks and all sorts of plants. Did the dungeon produce enough to keep the city going? No, of course not. I had been in there. Even if every rat and edible creature was butchered for its meat, it wouldn't make enough to feed more than a hundred odd people.

Certainly less than the number of people working at the dungeon every day. But it wasn't food that mattered, I didn't think. It was the other, limitless resources. Trees took decades to grow. In the dungeon, there were new ones every day. Goblins took a while to breed and train. In the dungeon, they had new, adult goblins, daily. The various plants, the silks, all those bricks.

Sure, they weren't enough to feed a big economy, not on a daily basis, but if those materials were accumulated and stored and then processed after a while? I knew that several local factories worked on a seasonal basis. They operated one week out of the month. So the rest of the time they were accumulating whatever resource they'd be transforming. The rest had to be operating as factories in my old world did, but collecting raw materials gathered elsewhere. Ditz wasn't the beating heart of City Nineteen.

It was more like a lung. And now it was punctured and worthless and the city was starting to be short of breath. On the fourth day, the market was filled to capacity. At first I dismissed it as normal, but a few of the stallkeepers said that it very much wasn't. People were buying all the canned food and preserves they could. There was a tension in the air that hadn't been there before. I discovered that the Ditz dungeon had been closed for an official investigation.

That meant the hundreds of delvers and gatherers were without work, and in turn, several factories were out of resources to work with. Ditz's main resource was its wood. That wood was processed into planks for building, boards and beams for other factories, and the scraps were turned into sawdust and charcoal which could be burned elsewhere to power other machines. With each day that passed a new factory had to shut down because of missing resources. More people ended up on the streets, and the unrest grew.

I cut visits to the various markets short when I started to sense that things were taking a turn for the worse. City Nineteen took an entire week before it turned into a rioting, screaming mess, and it was all entirely my fault.