A Jaded Life

For all the negatives of exploring the strange forest of deadly plants, there was one major positive point. The plants that had changed to become the forest used to be crops, mostly corn and some sort of grain, with a few potatoes and such thrown in for good measure. That meant, even after their change, they had parts that could be edible, at least some of them. Granted, other plants had changed to the point that they were far from what they used to be, their edible parts replaced with insanity, but that didn’t change the fact that we could harvest some of them.

The Stalking Stalks might be the best example of that. From what I could tell, they used to be some sort of grain, not that I knew enough about grains to recognise the plant even before it had been turned into a stalk the height of a house with an unrealistically large ear on top that could launch the stalkers the stalk was named for. Curiously, the launched stalks were constructs made of Astral Power, mainly Earth and Life, with some Water thrown in for good measure, but when we felled one of the stalks, the ear turned out to be composed of actual grains, only grains the size of footballs. From everything we could tell about them, they were edible and safe, though we made sure to have a few of the oversized squirrels that inhabited the area test the grains first.

When they could eat the grain just fine, we decided it was good enough and we’d try it ourselves, only that I had no idea how to prepare the grains. Using Hard Ice to create a millstone worked surprisingly well, especially as what little liquid was ground off the stone was still composed of my Astral Power and thus under my control. That allowed us to make some fairly good flour, even if it had a slightly strange taste. Amusingly, Death Magic was an excellent tool to sterilise food, making sure that there were no parasites or insects in the flour, even eggs or larvae would instantly perish. It wouldn’t work with something like yeast or any other cultured produce, but it worked incredibly well for the flour.

Adding a bit of water and salt to turn it into the simplest of doughs worked quite well and once it was roasted we had one of the original dishes humans had come up with. There were countless varieties of it, as any culture that had access to some sort of grain had ground that grain, added water and roasted the result, with names ranging from Naan to Tortilla, flatbread or hundreds of other names, depending on the grain used and what additives were available.

Other experiments included simply roasting the grain, though that didn’t work as well, grinding it into large, slightly flaky chunks that could be cooked in soup alongside vegetables and even boiling those flakes as if they were rice. Some of these experiments worked quite well, others were sadly less successful. But either way, we didn’t have to worry about our food situation for the foreseeable future. While wild vegetables or salad weren’t overly abundant, turning some leafy greens into a serviceable side-dish was always possible, especially if taste wasn’t the deciding factor. Similarly, finding some wild game was comparatively easy, too, the change had done wonders for the population of wild animals, be they squirrels, rodents or those preying on them, like cats, dogs or other small- to mid-sized predators. Again, as long as taste wasn’t the primary criterion, they were fairly edible, as were the various oversized insects that were crawling in the similarly oversized forest.

What made things even better was Luna’s success at reducing some of the grains to seeds and growing a medium-sized Stalking Stalk, reducing its size from some eight to ten metres in height with a three-metre ear on top that had a diameter of almost a metre, to something only two metres high, with an ear a little under a metre in height and maybe ten centimetres in radius. That, in turn, reduced the size of the grains we could harvest from the size of a football to the size of a tennis ball, but I really didn’t mind, especially as it got rid of the plant’s ability to launch its stalkers.

Thanks to that development, I was confident that we could survive long-term. We might not be able to have a luxurious and tasty diet, but we wouldn’t starve, of that I was certain. Adding to that my ability to conjure Water and create shelter either within the Earth or by drawing up rocks and turning them into sturdy buildings, either way, we wouldn’t be exposed to the elements. We had our necessities covered.

With that realisation and the assurance that came with it, I felt a weight lifting from my shoulders. Amusingly, it was a weight I hadn’t even noticed before. Now that it was gone, I felt as if I could breathe freely for the first time since things had changed, no longer weighed down by the burden of ensuring the survival of not only myself but also the children I had adopted. My daughters wouldn’t starve. It was a strangely simple, yet profound understanding. We might not always be comfortable, but we could continue, no matter what.

Amusingly, even with the realisation and the contentment that came with it, our actual activities didn’t change from day to night. We continued to travel during the night, looking for interesting supplies and specimens for later experimentation, we avoided nasty weather by hiding in hastily dug shelters and experimented with the things we had found and spent our days hiding from the sun.

That is, until Luna and I noticed a strange change in the forest around us, a subtle shift in the magic that confounded us as we observed it. There wasn’t any obvious reason why the Astral River should flow the way it did in the area, no cause we could observe or circumstance that would explain it. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that I had seen similar effects and had even studied them for an extended period of time.

Not only was the effect greatly similar to the way the elves had hidden their presence in their forest on Arbortoma, but it also shared similarities with the way the revels of Aletoma had hidden themself. Furthermore, and most importantly, it was almost identical to the way Adra had hidden our camp night after night while we travelled on Mundus.

I really shouldn’t have needed multiple minutes to recognise the effect, even if I only counted the times Adra had used it, I had probably seen the effect, or the mobile version Adra had called Pass without a Trace, hundreds of times if not a thousand times. And yet, I had been fooled by it, even if only for a bit.

Shaking my head, I focused on the effect and followed the tendrils, observing how the magic merged with the vegetation and used the plants to conceal itself from observation while misdirecting and concealing effects prevented us from finding the path that was concealed by the formation here. Now that I knew what to look for, I could begin to trace it, noticing that multiple layers were trying to keep anything from moving in a certain direction, by simple virtue of subtle misdirection. It wasn’t so much forcing the approaching person away but encouraging them to take another path by repeatedly making the other path the easier one to tread. Not a tremendously powerful individual effect but the many, many layers I could feel were enough to create a powerful result.

“Quite impressive, do you feel it, Luna?” I asked once I was fairly confident that I’d be able to ignore the effect if needed and completely certain I’d find any approaching enemy, if only because the ward was focused on keeping people out instead of concealing people inside.

“There’s something,” my munchkin muttered, her eyes narrowing as her eyes began to glow with the familiar silver hue.

Nearby, Lia, Alex and Silva looked a little confused, having failed to notice the neatly concealed and incredibly subtle effect but now that they heard Luna and me, they began to search as well. Not that I was confident that they’d find it, Silva’s traits focused her on perceiving the physical, while Lia didn’t have the Intuition to find this or the traits to make up for them. If anything, Alex had the best chance as their focus on Alchemy gave them some surprisingly versatile skills but by the looks of it, they couldn’t find what we had noticed, either.

“We should investigate!” Luna enthused, having deciphered the warding herself, “There’s clearly someone interested in keeping people away, that has to have a reason.”

Grinning at my munchkin’s enthusiasm, I could only nod. There was no way we wouldn’t be drawn in by an active, magical concealment ward, just the ward’s presence was like a red flag to a bull. At least a bull that wasn’t colourblind and all that.