Chương 166: Cordyceps Thirty-One

I scoured the library for well over an hour before picking out a few books to satisfy my curiosity. The search really was just for that. I had questions about Feronie, and no one to ask them to. Poking at any sort of cleric or priest might make them suspicious, and Feronie wasn't one of those popular gods with their own temples. At least, not within this city. So that left books.

I'd considered raiding a bookstore before, or outright buying a book on the subject, but then I wasn't sure if I'd find what I wanted and books were expensive. If the city had a public library, then I'd never heard of it, and I doubted it let in street urchins in any case. But now I had an opportunity to look into things at my own leisure, and an entire library's worth of books to dig into.

There were a fair number of books that explored the topic, a whole section of the library was nothing but books about religion. Surprisingly, it was next to a section that was entirely about the system. Entire books on skills, classes, and the interaction between them. This wasn't a world without science, and so obviously someone had thought to sit down and figure out how levels and skills worked on a deeper level.

If I hadn't entered the room with a goal already, I would have been sidetracked pretty hard by discovering such a wealth of information just... sitting on a few shelves for anyone to peruse. But no, I had come here with one goal in particular in mind, and that was what I'd be digging into. I laid out all three books on one of the tables in the corner. It was the furthest table from the librarian by the entrance, ensuring some level of privacy, and I sat facing the doorway, just in case.

Not that I had to worry too much, the library was entirely empty at the moment. The first of the three books I'd found was more of a list of modern deities. For some reason, the first thing that came to mind when I picked it up was a vague memory from my past self, sitting in an eyewear clinic and idly opening up one of those thick car guides. The sort that they published a new edition every year with the newest models and some very thin reviews next to nice photographs of the newest cars. This book felt similar.

It was almost a buyer's guide to religion and worship, though it went by the name Modern Divinity: Deities of the Steam Age. I was pretty sure we weren't in the steam age. Coal, maybe, but I supposed that wasn't the right mental image. The deities within were listed in a helpful, alphabetical order, so I flipped through until I reached F for Feronie... and found nothing.

The book skipped from Elthine (the scaled whisperer, who was some sort of snake-person god) to Faltir (the Unseen Pathmaker, a weird god of crossroads and logistics of all things) to Festhara (the Hearthmother, goddess of warm homes and suchlike). No Feronie between them. Frowning, I turned the book over, then started from the back. Fortunately, there was an index, and that's where I discovered my mistake. The book was divided between major and minor deities, and Feronie was way at the back.

My goddess had half a page, and no pretty illustration. Feronie The Cruel Nature Goddess Once a major deity before the rise of rationalism and civilisation, Feronie is now an oft-reviled goddess of nature, though unlike many of her contemporaries, this goddess is often linked with bad weather, crop sicknesses, blight, and other natural misfortunes. Nonetheless, she is not necessarily an Evil god, hence her inclusion within this illustrious encyclopaedia.

Rather, she is a goddess of the ways of the past, with few worshipers and less power. There is no praying for her to leave you alone, nor any need to fear her any more than one might fear the winter storm on a warm summer's day. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. I frowned at the description. That was... unkind. And it raised a few more questions. Feronie had been worshipped more? Did worship matter to a god?

And what were Evil gods, and why weren't they included in this 'illustrious encyclopaedia?' Frustrating. And I couldn't leave the library with this thing either, which was too bad, I'd have loved to read the entire thing, even if it was clearly biased. So, Feronie wasn't strong. That wasn't news to me. I set the book aside and grabbed the next one. Gods and Goddesses of the Previous Era. This was a dusty old tome of a book, almost too thick to grab comfortably.

I opened it, and discovered that it didn't just look old, it was written in a much older, much thicker dialect. Not quite the super-academic text of a scientific piece, but not too far from it either. Also, it had a terrible index and no table of contents. I had a headache forming before I'd really dived into it. It took a half hour of scanning through pages and skimming past entire chapters before I found something.

Feronie, a goddess whose name recurrently arises amidst theological dialogues conducted by the clerics during divine communion, is an enigmatic figure indeed. It appears rather perplexing initially, as this divine entity, despite her occasional encounters with the spiritual intermediaries, does not claim a pervasive presence in the everyday discourse of the populace, known, as she is, merely in fleeting mentions. Neither does she reside among the pantheon of deities deemed unworthy of adulation.

Yet, the prevailing sentiment among those faithful to the more recent deities of popular devotion is one of passionate suspicion and marked antipathy towards Feronie. A multitude of religious texts reference her as a goddess presiding over nature, albeit the consensus concerning the specificity of her dominion is far from unified. On frequent occasions, she is posited as the unremitting overseer of natural calamities, plagues, and various other misfortunes bestowed by nature's caprice.

However, such spheres of influence are typically under the jurisdiction of alternative divine entities, whose worship, it is believed, possesses the potential to assuage their celestial ire. Consequently, the figure of Feronie occupies a curious position within the divine hierarchy. Misplaced within the pantheon due to the ambiguity of her dominion, and yet maligned with consistent distrust, she presents a paradox that perplexes the theological discourse.

My head was throbbing by the time I finished parsing all of that. The entire book was like this, filled with pretentious, overly complex near-gibberish. All I got out of it was that the person who wrote this didn't know what Feronie's domain as a goddess was. I frowned. Wasn't she just the goddess of nature? I thought that was pretty self-explanatory. Only... what was nature? Was it everything natural? And if that was it, then didn't that mean that her domain basically overlapped with dozens of other deities?

Was that why she was dying? She was being sapped of strength by some other gods? The third book I'd found wasn't one I expected to see in the religion section of the library, which is why I'd snatched it up. It was entitled Hymns of Hammer and Anvil, and I'd almost skipped right past it, only the pretty gold leaf on the spine had caught my eye and I'd grabbed it on a whim and opened it up between the stacks. It wasn't a book of hymns.

It was a book on the gods of industry, of which there were a lot, and while that was interesting all on its own, the book actually contained some texts from the gods themselves. It always struck me as wildly fantastical that this world had texts written by actual divinity, and that it could be proven to have been written by them because the gods were right there the entire time. In any case, I wouldn't have hung onto the book, except that my eye had caught onto something. Feronie's name.

It was in a section dedicated to Ghalak, the Hammered Heart. I was starting to notice that the gods, or at least the clergy, were really fond of titles. In any case, Ghalak was a god of hammers. Or something. It was a lot more complex than just 'hammers' but I didn't care about them enough to really dig into their entire gimmick. The book contained some passages spoken by Ghalak themselves, and one of these was about Feronie.

Inscrutable she remains, bearing the dual visages of merciless cruelty and tender benevolence. Once, she reigned supreme among us, a celestial matriarch, the primordial nurturer from whom this world first drew breath. Yet the path she treads into the morrow, we discern, does not align with our envisioned destinies. With the resolute clangour of our celestial hammers, we assiduously disentangled ourselves from the adamantine chains of her influence.

We have sundered these links, an act of divine liberation, not in defiance, but in a pursuit of self-determination. Unshackled, we stand poised on the anvil of creation, our hammers poised to beat out a resonant symphony of progress, a better world wrought in the crucible of divine resolve and industrious will. I frowned as I leaned back in my seat. What in the world had the other gods done to Feronie?

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