IWUAaDNW: Party 5.9

The unit moved with military precision, other than the occasional gripe at the grime and the grimness of the odor. A third of the group, those with heavier weapons, moved quickly through the portal and started chopping a few of the smaller trees down––we didn’t want to be too obvious and affect the canopy in a way that would raise the wrong kind of attention. The second third carried the trees through the portal, and a last third chopped them down into pieces small enough to fit into my entrance, whereupon other villagers would carry them and throw them down my stairs.

The trees tasted amazing.

They were also noisy. When the rotten dead wood touched my floor, it made high-pitched whistles and screeches as it melted; it reminded me a bit of the vermin I’d killed with spider venom. The brown gunk just melted straight off, leaving a core of diseased-looking wood that took much longer to rot and tasted vaguely like polenta.

Sadly, while it tasted good, it seemed to be wasted effort; my impurity count remained at 54 as the pile of dead wood grew. Even my mana count wasn’t rising. I was, however, getting progression points for trees.

[...]

“So, you getting anything out of those trees?”

“It’s delicious, but I’m not getting anything else,” I replied. Naïa translated. Kamella frowned.

“That’s disappointing.”

I made my illusion shrug. “It’s not the first time this system’s let me down,” I replied.

Then my impurity count ticked up. By one.

“Never mind, I just got one impurity.”

“Impurity?” Karjn asked after Naïa translated for me.

“That is the ‘food’ you’ve mentioned before, is it not?” Kamella asked. At my nod, she said, “That’s interesting.”

“You’d expect something the size of a rotten tree would give her more than that,” Tyr noted. “Unless one impurity is a lot?”

I shook my head. “Bodies give me 2 to 4.”

He grimaced. “Never mind, then. I guess we can’t use this trick to help you grow––we’d need to chop a large hole in the woods, and questions would come up.”

“Shame,” Kamella said. “On the upside, it means we don’t have to do… well, this, too often.” She waved a hand in front of her face with a grimace. “I expected it to be bad, but not quite this bad.”

“It’s an entire deadwood forest, of course it stinks,” Karjn pointed out. “On the actual upside, we’ve learned that Rot is basically dungeon sugar, so… yeah, that could be useful if we want to treat a wild dungeon or something… you know, if you don’t mind carrying a piece of Rot on you.”

“In Central?” Tyr raised an eyebrow.

She shrugged. “Never know, maybe the Planet’s gonna spawn another new dungeon somewhere out here, without conveniently putting a person inside.”

“What is Rot anyway?” I finally asked.

I had, until now, been assuming that Rot was the same as impurities, but this experiment clearly told me otherwise. These trees were almost as much of the delicious brown gunk as they were bark and wood. As I watched, one of the soldiers gave a mighty battleaxe swing at a deceptively hard-looking trunk section, which liquefied under the blade and splattered Rot all over the place, much to the disgust of everyone watching.

“Rot is dead stuff,” Naïa helpfully replied.

“Rot is a corruption that attacks that which is dead, but has not returned to the planet. It is the suffering and regret of the soul trapped inside the corpse,” Kamella corrected gently.

“If you believe that, anyway,” Karjn interjected, drawing a sour look from the elder. “One of the other two mages… I guess three mages now, might know more about it.”

“So all things get covered in Rot after they die?” I asked.

That wasn’t normal. This place operated by its own laws of nature, but something like this didn’t seem like it fit—the whole system had a feel of artificiality to it, with how everything seemed to be related to dungeons and how dungeons themselves were clearly artificial. Why would something like Rot be designed into it? Again, it stood to reason that Rot was the same thing as impurities, and that it was the stuff that dungeons were meant to filter out, but the system itself clearly disagreed with that conclusion.

[...]

Karjn spoke up. “So none of you know anything about Rot, then? Or why entire trees covered in the shit barely give Taylor anything?”

“I received one impurity out of each of those trees,” I spoke up, and Naïa translated.