(52) Already A Win

Nephthys stared, dumbstruck, for several long moments, at the enormous strip of blackened soil. Of course, she had known intellectually what would happen when she asked Hannibal to trim the Gloam, but seeing it in person was still jarring.

There was no stench of char, the fire having faded over a week ago, and she could even see the occasional bit of green reaching through the ash and debris. She recalled that forest fires occurred naturally in her world, and were even important for forest regulation, lest the oldest trees strangle all the life around them.

Nephthys shook her head, reframing the situation: this streak of black, the scar across the land, was to eliminate an invasive species. With the Gloam retreated, life would return. Nature would bounce back to where it was before the Gloam snuffed it out.

Refocusing, she shifted her attention back to her main goal. She flew back north over the mountains that separated Radaar from the main Gloam, trying not to gawk at the sheer scale of destruction Hannibal had unleashed, or its control, rather.

Nephthys knew, deep in her bones, that such destruction was possible for her, too, yet Hannibal had confined his flames to specific dimensions, the controlled burn doing exactly as he commanded.

She hoped she would have as much control, should she ever require a spell of such magnitude.

The scarred ground quickly gave way to a thick mire of tangled vines and tall, tree-like mushrooms. Though it retreated, the Gloam edged up against the scoured earth in the foothills as if waiting for its moment to reclaim lost territory, though Nephthys knew that no such intellect drove it. It was simply a growing organism—a collection of them, that is.

A smell unlike anything she had experienced reached her nose as she gazed out over the Gloam. It was sweet like decaying meat, the smell abhorrent to her own senses, but it was undercut by the distinct scent of life, a thriving ecosystem. Beneath the rot and decay was the earthy tones of groundcover, the scent of wet soil below even that.

It was nasty.

Briefly, Nephthys wondered if players would have ever attempted to build bases here if Prelude could have somehow projected the stench through their monitors. It was foul, but not just bad-smelling. It was vile in a way that raw sewage was, the brain instinctively knowing that long-term exposure to the gas would be dangerous.

Nephthys flew low, scanning the floor of the mire. The Gloam posed unique challenges for searching. She had various forms of sight available, yet it thwarted nearly all of them. Magic sight? The flora and fauna practically glowed with mana. Infrared? Unfortunately, temperatures throughout the murky forests of fungus varied wildly, confusingly, with pockets of heat and cold lingering this way and that for seemingly no reason.

Counterintuitively, her plain eyes proved to be the most reliable. That said, it was hard to spot her target, considering the wetlands had a natural fog about them at all times, due to the humidity and spores.

Nephthys had learned only a little from Clayton’s confession: that an underground operation was underway to harvest spores from the Gloam, and a trade company from Vadenlaud was secretly funding it. Well, that was what Clayton seemed to suspect, at least. He was pretty sharp for hired muscle.

The Taolu Trading Company was based in the Sardvend Kingdom in Vadenlaud and was prolific. Apparently, it had connections to the royal family, though whether that was actually true, and to what extent, was unknown.

It dealt primarily with legitimate trade operations on the surface, but it was well known that it also dabbled in any venture that promised profits. Morality did not factor into its calculations, and the royal family looked the other way regarding these less-than-moral operations, according to Clayton, even if they were outright illegal.

Nephthys had to restrain the revulsion she instinctively felt. Again, she was judging this world too harshly. By all measures, her home’s society was far more advanced, yet the same thing happened there as well. Neither she nor her home was better than anyone in this world.

A recent memory bubbled to the surface of her mind: walking home in the twilight after a double shift, the bags below her eyes hanging down past her nose. If her new body had allowed it, she would be shaking, a sudden, overwhelming urge to get to work overtaking her. She was going to be late!

Nephthys breathed the fetid air deeply, far more foul than even the air above the manholes in the sidewalk of her home. She was Nephthys, now. She did not have to go to work, and she needed to focus on the task before her.

Her main goal now was to investigate this trading company, and she suspected the best way to uncover its seedy underbelly was to follow the dirt.

There it is.

A trail of decay, independent of the natural decay the Gloam was known for, ran in a straight line from south to north. Nephthys could see wisps of black smoke rising from the surface of the earth, and the mushroom trees nearby were drooping, dying, or already dead.

The Taolu, or whatever their clandestine branch called themselves, had been harvesting spores from the Gloam for years, though with how far Hannibal had pushed it back, they were forced to push even farther from Gloamview.

Their system was quite clever, she reluctantly admitted. The Gloam was dangerous for two reasons: the wandering creatures infested with spores and the spores themselves.

These made travel overland a poor option for the average person. However, the average person could not fly either, which meant the Gloam was essentially an unbreachable barrier dividing the continent.

What the Taolu had decided was to use earth magic and tunnel beneath it.

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Now, if one had asked Nephthys’ opinion on the matter, she would have called the effort foolish. The ground was completely saturated with water. It was sopping wet for hundreds of feet down. Indeed, much of the Gloam could be described as a swamp, the water table so thoroughly saturated that it pooled on the surface.

Tunneling beneath the swamp was a great way to end up with a flooded tunnel, drowned diggers, and wasted effort. That was not even accounting for the fact that the largest of the mycelial networks was underground. The fungus visible on the surface was like a bit of an iceberg poking out of the water.

The Taolu’s solution seemed to be fire, specifically, burning the mycelia. They would tunnel dozens, perhaps a hundred, feet below the swamp with earth magic, presumably creating adjacent runoff tunnels to drain all the water, and then ignite the tunnels, using the exposed mycelia to fuel the burn.

Nephthys had long suspected that the source of all the water in the Gloam was the mycelia itself. It likely displaced a great deal of water from deeper underground, pumping it to the surface for who knew what. Maybe the fungus just needed lots of water to thrive.