Cordyceps Four
My schedule was... a bit of a mess. Digglestein’s lessons were held five days a week, usually somewhere in the day. We didn’t have a fixed hour, exactly, but rather a range of hours. I’d show up somewhere after Digglestein’s breakfast and leave before he prepared his supper. Lessons usually took an hour or two, depending on the subject and how difficult it was, and how busy I was otherwise.
In the afternoons, I liked to have my girls out and about, selling skewers and raking in a few pennies. I didn’t need to hover over them too much, not after a while, but I still wanted to keep an eye on them and their work. It was better than leaving them be and discovering that they’d gotten themselves into trouble.
On weekends I had my [Cooking] lessons with Aunt Nicole. She only popped in irregularly, so I had to keep on my toes so as not to miss any lessons. Normally I wouldn't make such a fuss for what was such a... dubiously useful skill, but every single lesson presided over by Aunt Nicole gave me a level or two, even as I pushed the skill upwards and grew more competent with it, she merely took some time to show me and the others a new trick of her trade and then I’d get just enough experience to slip up to another level.
I had no idea if she was doing it on purpose or not. Digglestein certainly wasn’t an incompetent teacher, and lessons with him weren’t pushing my [Academic Mind] skill up nearly as quickly.
In any case, that took up a neat slot in my weekly schedule. The rest was taken up by two tasks that I had to take care of near constantly. My mushroom seller girls, who while fun to work with and quick on the uptake for the most part, still needed some guidance, and my farm.
I had to establish a second growing location soon, and I chose a location literally behind my old farm. As it turned out, the building that my farm was in was split down the middle, and the back wall of my farm room was the back wall of another warehouse. I’d discovered that after one wall started to fall apart and I ended up poking a hole through it.
A bit of careful engineering with a hammer and a length of wood to act as a lever, and I had an opening more than large enough for me to squeeze through into a dark, damp warehouse that had clearly not seen use in a long time.
There were mushrooms growing all over it.
Unfortunately, they were all very familiar. Now that I was on the other side, I could make out pinprick holes in the wall leading into my farm. Clearly, those were enough for a few spores to slip through, then the damp nature of the room and its undisturbed darkness and rotting crates did the rest.
A few weeks of clearing this warehouse out and I had a new place to grow mushrooms in. I found someone to change the lock on the other door for me for cheap, then left the door open for a week or two. Some vagrants moved in, then back out after they discovered that staying in the warehouse lead to several painful bowel-related issues. Nothing lethal, of course. I wasn’t cruel. Just enough to keep them away.
Rumours went around that the place was no good, a few locals etched a mark next to the door saying that the air was bad within, and then I relocked and sealed the place up tight. If things were done right, no one would bother me there.
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Then I moved a few racks over and hid the connection between this warehouse and my farm.
With more space, I could expand my mushroom farming quite a bit. After booby-trapping everything, of course.
I wasn’t paranoid. I was cautious. Or so I told myself.
So, my day-to-day was packed. I’d wake up early, rush to the farm, then run over to my lessons halfway across the city. Then it was managing the girls, and back to the farm to keep on top of the dozen or so mycologic projects I was working on at any given time. Weekends were, if anything, busier.
I was quickly running out of time for anything. Fortunately, my managerial work was centred around food, otherwise I might have failed to eat anything.
In the before, when I had been a grad student, I’d gotten a doctorate in just a few years. I knew what crunch was like, and I could take it. But I had been an adult then. Here and now, I was eight, approaching nine. I’d be ten by the time I would be sneaking into the Academy as a student next to twelve-year olds.
I needed to blend in, and at the moment... that wasn’t working out.
My scrawniness was fading bit by bit as I ate more than the bare minimum, and a skinny kid wasn’t too unusual. What was unusual was how little I was growing. Even with healing mushrooms as part of my regular diet, I still stayed small.
I needed more than just more food, I needed rest, rest which just wasn’t fitting into my schedule.
My first thought was finding ways to better use the time I had. My [Management] skill came in handy there, I successfully arranged things to be easier to organise and work around. It was just shaving a few minutes off of a few tasks here and there, but those added up.
And then I instantly used that free time to tackle even more projects. I read more books from Digglestein’s private library, I practised sneaking around and walking like a boy, I tended to Sir Nibbles.
Every minute I gained was a minute spent, and soon I was moving around with bags under my eyes and a constant low hum of tiredness covering my world like a soft blanket. I suspect that everyone noticed after a while, but there was nothing I could do about it.
That was, until I chanced upon Eight-Three-Eleven.
The acolyte of Galen had aged a bit since I’d last seen her. That was... maybe a year and a bit ago. Now she was closer to a proper adult and it showed, both because of a bit of added height, and thanks to a new layer of confidence that she wore around herself like the layers of her red cloak.
“Mushroom girl!” Eight-Three-Eleven said. We met, by happenstance, in one of the markets near the centre of the slums. I was there watching over Bet and a new girl who I suspected would be flaking off in a week or so.
“Eight-Three-Eleven, hi,” I said with a genuine smile. “How are you doing? What are you up to? It’s been forever.”
“It has been,” she said. She gestured back to a few others in the same red cloaks as she wore, masks and all. “I haven’t been here in a while. Not since Eight-Three-Thirty and Eight-Three-Oh-One... you know.”
“I don’t, actually,” I said.
“Oh... well, the riots, they got caught up in them. We found their bodies a few days later and since then, Galen’s wisdom suggested that we leave this area for the moment, spare people his mercy. But we’re back now! I’m training these two to take over the routes I once had.”
“Ah, that’s nice,” I said. I wasn’t so keen on Galen’s so-called mercy, but Eight-Three-Eleven had always been kind and helpful. I offered her a few free snacks, for her and her skittish acolyte friends, and then we got to talking a little. Her schedule was worse than mine.
“I wouldn’t be able to take it all in if I had to sleep as much as everyone else,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked. My first thought was that it was a strange perk of her service to Galen.
Eight-Three-Eleven shrugged. “I have the [Quick Sleeper] skill. It shaves off a couple of hours of sleep every day. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but an extra couple of hours is priceless.”
“Oh?” I asked, but the conversation moved on.
My mind didn’t, however, and for the next month I tried different things to wake myself up, I even let myself sleep until I was no longer tired at all one day. The trick, as it turned out, was to pace my sleep schedule for a week or so, taking nothing but rapid naps around the clock.
And just like that, I unlocked the most useful and potent skill yet.
[Quick Sleeper] {Uncommon}
You’re quick to fall asleep and quick to awaken. As this skill grows your need for long rests will decrease. Shorter, more potent sleep will allow you to function as though you were well-rested.
Category: Sleep skills, Dream magic
It felt like I’d just unlocked the best cheat code ever!
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