Chương 199: Psilocybin Twelve

The next couple of weeks went well. Silent, sure, but well. The weather was growing warmer, and with that the mood across the city seemed to be on the rise. It was a... not a good time, necessarily, but not the worst time in the life of a City Nineteen citizen. The early harvests were in, and the price of many staple goods were down. I was keeping an eye on such things, of course. My business was selling food, and when people had it in abundance, then my sales were down. That was fine, I didn't mind at all.

It meant that I could tell the girls to take some time off here and there or I could set them to work on other things. The surplus in food was interesting, though. It was mostly a mixture of cruciferous vegetables (broccoli and the like, as well as peas and leafy greens). What was most interesting was the amount of these that were being canned.

As it turned out, canning factories were relatively simple to set up, and in the fall of the Ditz dungeon, several businessmen had stepped up and turned some of the old processing factories to other things. Good for the common person, that. It was work and preservable food. If I wanted to see the city flourish, I might even be happy about it. Seeing as how my goals went opposite to that, I wasn't quite pleased.

Still, I had several irons in the forge at the moment, and little time to be worried about new factories and the like. For now, my main time-sink was arranging the new farm and increasing production on my new drugs. It was working well, so far. Only the earliest of sales had happened, but it seemed like those that took the hook were already proving to be repeat customers. Given some time for organic growth... yeah, that would amount to something.

So, with that avenue of destruction laid out and the metaphorical ball rolling, I decided to explore something else. City Nineteen had two dungeons. Ditz was the first. It had provided the city with wood and raw resources. Some furnishings, and lots of goblin labourers. I'd destroyed it. I thought that would be it, once. That cutting off those resources would be enough to decapitate the industry of the city. That had been... kind of naive.

It had hurt the local economy, certainly, but a complex economy could stand to lose some of its strength without crumbling. I think that even Feronie had erred there. I... wasn't exactly chatting with the goddess, but I had the impression that she thought that starving out a system like capitalism was as simple as cutting off some base resources. It was more than that, of course. I don't think that the people raised in it could even fathom a world without, not unless they were pushed to the very brink.

"Come on, Nibs," I said to Sir Nibbles as I slung a satchel over one shoulder. I opened it up, showing the fat pan badger the darkened space within. He grumbled, then leapt with surprising dexterity and slipped into a hole almost too small for him to fit in with ease. I stood there while he spun around and made himself comfortable.

"Careful in there," I warned.

"I have some sensitive things." That wasn't quite true. I had a few self-defence options, but I wasn't carrying anything too suspicious on me. At most, someone might find the dried up [Mana-Infused Brown Horse Head] in a little jar that I carried. Someone searching in very inappropriate places with no common decency might discover my small arsenal of rather potent powders, all of which would likely kill the discoverer shortly after. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent.

Report it. Otherwise, all I had as a weapon was a bootknife, but that was practically a common accessory.

"Here, eat one of these," I said before giving Sir Nibbles a piece of mushroom to eat. He sniffed at it, then nibbled on the edge before deciding that it wasn't bad. He managed to clip my fingers with his stupid-sharp little teeth, the bastard. I grumbled as I ate my own. It was a fresh mana-infused mushroom, one that would, hopefully, help both of us passively regain some mana over the next couple of hours. Today we were visiting the Wendell-Smith Dungeon.

It was City Nineteens's second dungeon, and a source of much of the city's wealth. With the Ditz dungeon still out of commission, a... pretty decent percentage of the raw resources that the city processed came through that one dungeon. Better yet, it was supposed to be a little simpler than Ditz had been. I wasn't sure if I was ready for a full expedition into the depths of that dungeon, but it might be something I'd have to do.

A solid plan C, as it were, but one which I couldn't plan at all until I knew more about the location. So, Sir Nibbles and I closed up the farm, set a few traps, set the warnings to let any friendlies know that the traps were active, then headed out. The Wendell-Smith dungeon was right across the city from the slums I called home. It was in a section of the city called East Town. Technically, at one time, that had been a proper descriptor.

The area around the dungeon had started as a small exploitation town to the east of City Nineteen, run by the Wendell and Smith families. Strange, I'd gone to school with a Wendell. In any case, the 'town' had continued to expand, and so did City Nineteen. There was some strange legal stuff going on, with East town technically having its own mayor and council, but it was mostly an old formality. In all ways that mattered, it was part of the wider city.

I left the slums at a brisk pace, cap pulled low and one of my best, cleanest coats on. To anyone looking my way, I probably looked like a proper young lad off on a chore of some sort or another. At least, that's the image I was trying to project. I walked tall and kept my attention on the middle distance. The way the students at the academy walked when they were in a hurry.

Even if I would probably only pass for a teen at best--and probably a short one at that--it was still enough to let me slip through the early crowds with relative ease. Once out of the expanded area around the slums, I bought a ticket for one of the bus-carriages that ran circuits around the nicer part of the city. It was a little costly, but money was for spending, and I didn't fancy walking all the way over to the dungeon.

The ride wasn't all that bad, though the air stank the further east we went, especially as the bus rode next to the Gutter for a ways and eventually had to cross one of the bridges. Kerchiefs with powerful perfume were quite popular amongst the others on the bus, I noted. I held my breath as much as I could. I'd gotten over a lot of the pain and discomfort of having poor lungs and I didn't want any of that back if I could avoid it.

The prevailing winds over City Nineteen tended to go from north to south and from west to east, so East Town was downwind of a lot of factories. Probably why so few noble families lived in that area. Still, the quality of the housing was... better than the slums. Not by all that much, but there was a lot more space to work with here, even if the ground was a fair bit rockier. That just meant more homes made of stone and mortar, which were probably warmer than the tin-walled shacks elsewhere in the city.

I could tell when we were approaching the dungeon. The air gained a sort of thin quality to it. Not literally, but... I could sense that the ambient mana here was weaker even than the slums. Actually, no, that wasn't fair. For all that they were awful, the slums had decent mana to them. This was just the effect of being on the outside area of a dungeon. The bus stopped and I hopped off. It was just a couple more blocks to the dungeon proper, but I took my time walking over all the same.

There were fewer people around as I went. The homes were quickly replaced by warehouses and smaller factories. And it made sense. People, even those without magical abilities, would likely sense the deteriorating quality of magic so close to a dungeon and would want to avoid it. It was instinct. Like favouring the shade on a hot day. That was fine. Fewer people meant fewer problems. Or at least, that's what I told myself until I came closer to the dungeon and encountered something I hadn't predicted.

A wall, with a manned gate and sleepy bullies directing traffic in and out. Damn. Someone had learned a lesson from Ditz, and I wasn't well pleased about it.