Chương 167: Cordyceps Thirty-Two

Sunday came. Sunday went. It was surprising how quickly a day could pass with basically nothing of note happening. I woke up a little late. Showered in a dorm that was nearly empty, then checked on my mushrooms, let Sir Nibbles run outside in the woods to get some fresh air (he caught and killed a bird, somehow) and then had lunch. The evening was spent in the library, at first looking for more about Feronie, then when I found that a bit boring, I started looking at books about skills and classes and such.

It was interesting enough that I didn't notice the time slipping by. It was only my stomach's gurgle that alerted me to supper time being close. After supper, I decided not to strain my eyes any further, so I dipped into the music room and practised with the violin in one of those sound-proofed magical areas. I was still very, very bad at it. It was going to take more than one evening spent testing out an instrument before I went from awful to passable.

When I returned to the dorm, it was to find that it was filling up again. A lot of the students that had left for the weekend were coming back, and some of them were clearly disappointed about being back in school. Couldn't blame them. I was treating this as something of a working vacation where I hoped to gain a few quick levels, but it was also... not helping me grow in every way that mattered. Anyway, it was fine.

I wasn't expecting to be here forever, so I'd get what I could out of the experience, and some of the boons had been worth the effort already. I slept well that night, then Monday rolled around, and it was back to the normal school grind. Geography in the morning meant more time spent learning about the city and its history as well as a bit about the continent and some local geographical features.

The teacher left us to mostly read straight from the textbook, then asked questions to random students to make sure we'd understood what we read. It was the most boring way to deliver otherwise interesting information I could think of. The period ended, then it was Herbology. There was a pit in my stomach at the thought of Herbology. One part because I'd have to deal with Harbin all over again, and one part because of Professor Moss.

The Troll's favourite bully had been in Geography class with the rest of us, and he seemed louder and more brash than ever. His friend circle had shrunk a bit, it seemed, but the amount of fear he wielded had increased. Rumours were still circulating that he'd gotten into a fight with an older kid and won, which might have been somewhat impressive if 'older kid' didn't mean a second year who was probably only a year older than he was.

I wasn't being very generous to the kid in the confines of my own mind, but I didn't feel like he deserved any generosity on my part. Walking up to Milo and the others heading to our Herbology and Botanical Magics class, I stepped close and stayed there.

"Hey. Stay close. It wouldn't surprise me if he tried something."

"Oh, right," Milo said.

"We might have to fight him, huh?"

"Don't worry, if he tries to hurt you, I'll do what I can to keep you safe," I said with a wry grin. I don't know how reassuring that could be, I was probably one of the shortest 'boys' in my class, and definitely one of the scrawnier ones. Milo didn't seem to consider that, his back straightening and a crooked grin appearing on his face. We didn't end up meeting any of the Trolls until we were already in the greenhouse, and by them Professor Moss was there.

The teacher eyed me, but didn't say anything before launching into his lesson. It was a recap of the previous week's work with plant nomenclature, then a lecture on the use of certain common plants as home remedies in the past, leading to more modern medicines that used the herbal properties of those plants. It started raining hard halfway through the class, which might have explained why we were staying inside. Did Professor Moss have a way to predict the weather?

It wouldn't surprise me that someone so invested in herbology would have a skill that let him do just that. The greenhouse grew increasingly uncomfortable as the temperature, and most of all the humidity, rose up and up, in the end all of us were tugging our shirts open at the front and we were too busy sweating for there to be any time for the Dragon-Troll rivalry. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Class ended, and surprisingly, we got out without a fight breaking out. Sure, there were a few choice words flung back and forth, but that was it. It looked like Harbin was in more of a growl and bluster mood than anything. I didn't complain. If anything, it was one more opportunity to stick close to Milo. I got the boy to talk up a storm just by asking him a few questions about his life at home and what he'd been up to yesterday. Then came the inevitable 'what does your dad do anyway?' question.

"Oh? I thought I'd told you. Well, whatever," he said.

"My dad's the Milo in Milo and Sons Herbal Remedies. We're one of the oldest and longest-lasting providers of non-magical medicines on the continent. We also produce a lot of food."

"Food?" I asked. I knew something about that.

"Yup! We grow rare, luxury foods. Stuff fit for kings and queens!" I nodded along. That much I knew.

"Baron Milo's asparagus, right?" Milo grinned.

"Yeah! Have you ever had asparagus?"

"Yeah, sure," I said.

"If you eat too much it makes your pee smell funny." Milo's face went beet-red and he shook his head.

"No! That's a rumour, it's not true," he said. The others immediately started to tease him about it, and he took it in stride.

"Okay, so it's a little true, but we don't advertise the fact! You need to eat a lot for that to happen."

"How'd your family get into the food business anyway?" I asked.

"Oh, you don't know that story?" he asked.

"Okay, well, the food part is actually just my dad's doing. He bought a lot of farms and discovered some locally grown foods that were quite delicious, but the peasants didn't know how to farm them well. So we set up proper farms and now we grow enough of those foods to feed every noble mouth across the entire city."

"Uh-huh," I said. I recalled that the same father had basically broken some local farmers while setting up his little empire.

"What about the herbal medicines and such?"

"That's my great-grandpa," Milo said.

"Was he called Milo too?" Andrew asked. Milo bumped shoulders with Andrew, and they scuffled for a bit, laughing all the while.

"Yeah! He was. He wasn't even a baron though. Not until he was an adult."

"Your line of peerage only goes back four generations?" Andrew asked.

"Great-Grandpa was a knight," Milo explained.

"So he was part of the gentry, but he gained a barony thanks to his hard work and elevated the family to where we are now. His goal was immortality."

"Immortality?" I asked.

"Yeah! Some plants, especially magical ones, can basically live forever. And my family has always been good with alchemy. So Great-grandpa Milo came to the continent and scoured it for new herbal medicines and cures for all sorts of sicknesses. He never found anything that made him immortal, but he did find a bunch of cures to common illnesses."

"That's... actually really nice," I said. He nodded.

"That's how we made our fortune at first. But grandpa Milo then discovered that the peerage would pay more for spices than for herbal remedies. Besides, alchemy is an expensive business, and a dangerous one."

"Dangerous how?" I asked.

"Well, a lot of the stuff you need to make is toxic," Milo said.

"That's why some of our best family skills are made to help us resist poisons. And some of the stuff is explosive, chemicals and... stuff, you know?"

"Right, yeah," I said. Family skills? Resistances to poison? I felt a bit of a headache coming on. What kind of a mess was this? The only good thing to come from this discovery was that I now knew that I couldn't just poison everyone and expect to get away with it. I'd have to be creative. And that would mean more research and more time to prepare.

"Hey, guys, go on to lunch without me, I think I need to check something out in the library," I said. There had to be something recorded about the Milo family and their resistance. Was it a bloodline thing? Did that even exist at all? And here I thought this world was done being blatantly unfair.

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