Chapter 1122
When he paid for a room to stay just to seem like he was properly part of the habitat in the depths of Moturn, Anton technically gave fraudulent payment. He didn’t have any of the local currency, and most of the valuables he had would stand out too much. However, he had no intention to let things remain in such a state. Though his coins were only a temporary product of energy, he would replace them as soon as possible.
It would have been strange for him to stay out all day and night, however, and he was being watched. So far it didn’t seem like there was anything but vague suspicions, but people would eventually risk probing closely enough to determine that Anton was beyond Life Transformation. Even an unknown cultivator in Life Transformation would be suspicious, as the total population under the dome was limited.
The setup of the habitat was… sloppy. Industries were imbalanced, with many having more workers than jobs or materials. But Anton didn’t blame them for that. It was unlikely they were able to choose exactly who and what they brought with them. The fact that they survived at all was already impressive.
It took three days for Anton to sell more than a few handfuls of mushrooms. Nobody trusted his words about how much they would grow on any sort of organic refuse, even though Anton thought his numbers were actually quite conservative. Mushrooms were already one of the most rapidly growing life forms, and with the right conditions- which were not terribly difficult to achieve- they would thrive.
Anton ended up eating about half of what he’d produced, not because he was hungry himself but to demonstrate they were safe. It was a reasonable concern, but he did get tired of the same suspicions over and over.
Nobody wanted a full manual, but he did manage to sell some mushrooms and some ‘tips’ to a grocer. Not that they were anything like the grocers he was used to- because they didn’t have much in the way of products. Not by their own fault, but by the limited resources around them.
Or at least, seemingly limited resources. It wasn’t as if it was actually possible for a population measured in millions to use up any significant portion of the material of a gas giant or to deplete the total energy. Just what was immediately usable. They needed special formations, strong cultivators, or something similar to capture more natural energy. And special techniques would be required to transform the compressed material beneath them into something usable.
But waste they had aplenty, and all manners of fungus would be happy to devour it. Plants would too. It was merely a matter of organizing everything and potentially giving the industry a boost with a few good crops.
Unlike what first seemed apparent, plants did not grow in size primarily by absorbing the soil in which they were planted, nor from water. The gain in mass from such things was extremely minimal, with the majority of mass coming from the air. Fungi, however, often gained much of their mass from breaking down components of what they were growing on. Both behaviors were good in certain circumstances.