Merchant Of Yliaster

They kept walking for a few minutes, or swimming in Bluberry's case, and the tunnel progressively widened until it reached truly cavernous proportions.

With the walls still being spotlessly covered with glowing mushrooms, the cavern gave an otherworldly vibe that Maxwell couldn't help but watch in amazement.

Blueberry was now travelling below the tunnels, the floor being very high and all. She swam through the sand with her eel body, still showing no signs of discomfort. From time to time, she ran into beasts of different kinds, but she could evade them or kill them pretty easily.

As they walked, Maxwell was examining the tunnel system, and he was happy to see that they had almost reached the center. Many tunnels were now merging into one, and he could sense many openings to different tunnels in this big tunnel.

He was excited about what he would find at the center. The fact that Felix was sniffing the air obsessively meant that there was something pretty interesting ahead.

Soon, Maxwell detected his first change. Among the numerous mushrooms on the walls, Maxwell could see a single one twice the size of the others. It was shining with a yellow light and looked almost crystalline despite being a mushroom.

If Maxwell had to guess, this mushroom contained around 4000 mana. Considering this was only a single mushroom, the prospect was quite terrifying if there were walls filled with this type in the core section.

The road ahead was empty of any brothers or sisters, albeit being incredibly bigger compared to the tunnels before. They walked for a couple of minutes, and Maxwell noted that the higher-tiered mushrooms increased in number as they progressed. More and more tier 3 mushrooms started to appear.

It was to a degree that Maxwell stopped for a moment to absorb all the mana he was getting from the fungi. Without his conscious effort, Mana was starting to get a bit overwhelming. The system also sent him pings from time to time as the compendium leveled up.

Light Mana reached Level 2 Recording.

Earth Mana reached level 2 Recording.

Lightning Mana Reached Level 2 Recording.

Wind Mana Reached Level 2 Recording.

There were some other elements in the mushrooms, but Maxwell first focused on the ones he already had. Reaching tier 1 recording would be easy anywhere, so reaching high levels was more important now that he had a proper source of mana.

This didn't mean that he didn't absorb some to see just what the types were. Surprisingly, the mushrooms seemed to be inherently aligned with light despite their underground nature, so there was no mana type one would associate with darkness.

As he sat examining the numerous types of mushrooms with oddly specific affinities, he managed to find something interesting.

Life Mana - Ready for absorption.

He was almost sure that this was a canopy element, but he was more curious about what it would cover. He started to absorb the mana eagerly. While there were only a couple of mushrooms with this element, they were all tier 3, making them more than enough for him to reach level 1 recording, and some.

Life Mana Reached Level 1 Recording.

Canopy element detected. Blood mana is absorbed by the canopy element.

This time, though, it was apparent that life contained much more than just blood, as the recording failed to level up once more. This new side to the skill proved that mana types had an actual system behind them instead of being randomly piled on the world, and it made Maxwell excited to see the whole picture.

The Compendium Leveled Up 13→22

The skill was improving much faster than before, but Maxwell still couldn't understand how it was a tier one skill. What it did was simply too broad and complex to be tier one, he felt. The system, though, seemed to disagree as the skill was allowed to exist as tier one.

Maxwell could see other mana types floating around, with almost a hundred different rock types along with some sand affinity mushrooms. He already absorbed some of these, but there were not enough of them with the same specific type to qualify for a level 1 recording.

Soon, he was walking once more, absorbing the energy of any mushroom with an affinity that would interest him. It was apparent that reaching tier 3 recording was much harder, as there was yet to be an element to reach that stage.

He was feeling a bit awkward as he treated the place similarly to a garden, but Felix seemed to appreciate it. The dog had been gobbling up mushrooms since he stepped inside the cave, and Maxwell was starting to get terribly impressed by the volume the dog was consuming. The dog was surely a net loss for the universe when it came to amount of matter.

Felix - Level 42

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Did he get a skill? Maxwell was not sure how it worked for other lifeforms. From what he could see from Blueberry, the animals seemed a bit less restricted when it came to their skills. Blueberry seemed not to really think about skills when she used her skills from the feeling he got from the bird.

He was a bit alarmed to see Felix eat a mushroom of the third tier, but he couldn't stop him in time. The dog's body momentarily lost all tangibility, turning into a spherical mass pulsing like a bomb ready to explode.

Maxwell immediately commanded the mana to be less volatile, focusing on it, and the pulsation immediately slowed down, making him sigh in relief. Soon, Felix once again took his dog shape, looking around dazedly as if he couldn't believe he could overeat. He actually released a burp, and mana was released from his mouth. Maxwell just stared at the dog, speechless.

"You are still tier two, so don't eat like you are already a god," he said after he was over his surprise, and he felt a weird feeling come from his mind. In his soul, the mask of Drakhabgar was vibrating, giving Maxwell a feeling of... amusement? The vestige became a lot more interactive after their recent episode. Maxwell was not sure if it was a good or bad thing.

Felix just stared at him for a moment, contemplating, but he was soon distracted by a fire affinity tier three mushroom. Maxwell grabbed the dog with his telekinesis before it could bite it, though. "Wait," he said, commanding the mana inside the mushroom to be less volatile like before, before letting Felix go.

The dog immediately bit the mushroom, not needing any further encouragement, and this time, apart from his fur taking a green tint for a moment, he managed to keep his form. He gave him a happy look, and Maxwell sighed, seeing the dog running after a different mushroom.

They walked like this for some time, Maxwell constantly pacifying mushrooms as Felix ate them. He could see that Blueberry was hunting with his eel body outside the cave. He felt a bit bad about leaving her outside the cave, but there was no safer way to carry Darve. With the guy's level, he could easily die from a surprise attack otherwise. Maxwell would prefer not to cause the death of someone like the promising young man.

At some point, Maxwell suddenly stopped, and he was not surprised to see Felix stop too, as he smelled the air suspiciously. The field before them was a lot different, as there were no tier 2 mushrooms on the walls. The area felt artificial, and Maxwell could see that it actually had a curve on the border, indicating that it was a spherical area.

This meant that this was probably due to an effect with a limited range, probably stationary, as the difference was simply too much after moving only a meter back and forth. He could almost taste Felix's greed as the dog stared at the field covered with tier 3 mushrooms, but even the dog knew better than to dive into them.

If this field exploded, Maxwell was pretty sure that it wouldn't be much different from a nuke. The whole place gave a faint feeling of danger due to the sheer amount of energy contained within. Even with how curious he was, Maxwell was having second thoughts about this whole thing. If the creature inside did the same thing as the brothers and the sister from before, Maxwell didn't know if they could survive.

His final decision, though, was due to something he didn't quite expect. As he got a bit closer to the idea of turning back, he felt a familiar feeling coming from his soul. The feeling was similar to the time when he found the parasite Felix now carried, and the time he first crafted The Dark Mask of Drakhabgar.

Deep in his soul, he could feel that something ahead was valued highly by his trait. And his trait seemed to dislike his decision to turn back. While he felt that the decision was ultimately on him, Maxwell couldn't help but be even more curious now.

"If I tell you to run, you run," he sent to Blueberry, receiving a confused mental chirp. "There could be danger soon," he clarified, but the bird seemed hardly impressed by the prospect. "Chirp?" The chirp almost felt identical to a "So what?" and Maxwell just shook his head helplessly. "Just be sure to survive if something big happens," he said before starting to walk.

He somehow didn't doubt that Felix would survive whatever he could survive, but Blueberry was a bird with no inherent advantages. While she was overpowered, too, the explosion of this size would immediately destroy even her mental form.

The size of the enhanced area was not very big, but that statement could only be made comparatively. Since entering the tunnels, they had walked for almost 20 kilometers. This area, though, according to the curvature of the edges, was around 2 kilometers.

Maxwell didn't expect his illogically strong geometry skills to come in handy like this, but he wouldn't complain. His domain was only 150 meters when they entered the rift, but after his recent level-ups, it stood once more at around 200 meters.

Also, he was a bit surprised to see that apart from his soul attribute increase, the domain was slowly expanding to its previous size without any additional strength increase.

Like before, this area too was eerily silent, but Maxwell could feel a slow buildup of anticipation. Due to the concentration of mana in the cave, his prima sense was almost blinded recently, and he was tweaking with the skill for some time now, trying to isolate a mana type which was rare enough to give him a proper vision.

In the end, though, it turned out that any kind of long sight was quite needless, as they could see something soon enough.

A few hundred meters away, after they passed through a passage, they could see something in the distance. It was undoubtedly a creature, but Maxwell couldn't even understand the shape of the creature for a moment due to the sheer amount of mana inside it. He immediately tuned down the skill and started to use his dominion as his primary sense skill.

What stood before them was a creature around thirty meters tall, and it was quite literally a huge mushroom. The words, though, didn't do it justice. The whole trunk of the mushroom was made of a crystalline structure, shining with mana. And the cap was made of a material that looked more organic. The mana density was even more insane in the cap, though. However, what made Maxwell really alarmed was something unrelated.

As they got close enough to the creature so that it was inside his dominion, Maxwell could see mental waves radiate from the creature. There were an incredible number of small waves, and Maxwell could feel that they were moving around the cave with intricate patterns, connecting the mushroom to all others. On the other hand, there was a higher frequency of mental waves contained in the cap, and the feeling these waves gave Maxwell was suspiciously close to a proper sentient creature.

His doubt soon ceased to be, as he felt a wave of telepathy rush to him. He felt it crash to the outer shell of his mind, and for a moment, he could feel surprise radiating from the mushroom, as it failed to pierce through. Maxwell immediately formed a channel between them, consciously making his side a bit stronger.

What followed couldn't be easily described with words, as Maxwell felt the message sent by the mushroom getting translated in his mind into an understandable format in real time.

The original message was so weird that Maxwell was pretty sure that the only reason he could understand it was that the system was helping with the translation.

"A human? I thought your kind was destroyed by the Shergoth? You did pillage my home, too. A fitting deed for your species," the giant mushroom said.