Chapter 182: Actually... my mission is...
"She’s a little different than the rest," the Empress commented casually, her gaze fixed on Alyssa as she splashed and thrashed against the tea, desperately trying to regain her footing.
But the truly remarkable thing — the thing that had Aaron leaning forward almost without realizing it — was the tea itself. He could see it clinging to her skin, not soaking into her clothes the way water would, but visibly absorbing into her body in real time with every frantic splash she made.
The more tea she absorbed, the more her size grew.
The increase was gradual, creeping upward by slow, nearly imperceptible degrees, and Alyssa herself hadn’t noticed a thing.
She was far too occupied with trying to haul herself out of the bucket to pay attention to something as inconvenient as growing.
But for Aaron and the Empress, it was impossible to miss.
The Empress, for her part, was nothing short of delighted by the spectacle.
Her spiritual vision afforded her a level of clarity that Aaron could only imagine — she could see the countless tiny pores that had opened across every inch of Alyssa’s skin, functioning like miniature mouths, drawing the nutrients and nourishment out of the tea and converting it directly into growth.
The red mushroom cap atop Alyssa’s head, however, was doing the opposite. It was shrinking, slowly but unmistakably, and as it diminished, it developed a deepening golden tint that Aaron caught almost immediately.
He had already understood what it meant to call Alyssa a gold mushroom in theory. But only now, watching it happen before his eyes, did he grasp how it actually worked.
And then a thought struck him — a strange, unsettling one.
Did that mean there were multiple Alyssa’s growing beneath every single mushroom?
How had he not seen or felt them when he had been uprooting the shrooms?
The Empress turned toward him slightly, the way she always seemed to when she had already arrived at his thoughts before he’d finished having them. "What you’re thinking is wrong."
Aaron cleared his throat and shook the thought loose, lifting his gaze to meet her silken bandana. "Then pray enlighten this fool, Empress," he said with a short laugh.
"Hmm." She hummed in quiet amusement, her attention remaining fixed on Alyssa, who continued to grow in ways that clearly fascinated even someone of her stature.
"This one is a little different... as if her body had already tasted some potent nourishment before and had evolved, at least partially. Otherwise it should be impossible for one this young to develop into a gold-capped mushfolk. Only my elixir is capable of achieving that — as you saw with Melissa. I give those only to the elders of each tribe."
Aaron’s eyes widened. A cascade of thoughts churned through his mind as he stared at Alyssa, turning the information over and over.
He didn’t know the details of her life before he had been introduced into it. But he had a hunch — a growing, insistent one — that this evolution of hers was connected to him in some way. And when he searched his memory for a single incident that matched what the Empress had just described, only one came forward.
"Could it be my healing potion? She was the one who fed it to me, and a little splashed onto her in the process. It was a high-grade potion, so I think that might be the reason." He said it aloud as he finally lowered his hand into the bucket and lifted Alyssa out.
Like a puppy freshly extracted from a bath, Alyssa immediately shook herself with aggressive enthusiasm — tea flying off her in every direction, her small clothes whipping against the sudden rush of displaced air.
The Empress’s lips pressed into a thin, flat line. Her expression remained perfectly impassive, unbothered on the surface, but Aaron felt the shift in the air before he could name it. Something had changed, subtly and instantly.
And then he felt it — a pulse of mana radiating outward from her, clean and concentrated. It was the kind of thing that should have been entirely undetectable, and would have been, had it not been for his own innate connection to mana.
What he saw left him genuinely breathless.
It glowed with a deep purple tint, its threads woven together so tightly, so densely, that they practically hummed with the weight of infinite, untapped potential. And the result of that single, small pulse?
A fast gale of wind swept silently across the room, sliding into every corner, stripping every wayward droplet of tea from every surface it touched — and then making them simply vanish. Gone without a trace, without an explanation.
How, exactly? He had no idea.
Alyssa, for her part, had seized both sides of her mushroom-cloth outfit with white-knuckled urgency, convinced the wind intended to leave her standing completely bare in front of two supremely powerful beings.
One was literally her goddess. The other was, apparently, her goddess’s personal friend. Naturally, her image was of the utmost concern.
Fortunately for her, neither Aaron nor the Empress spared her more than a passing glance, and the Empress responded to Aaron’s still-hanging question with the same effortless calm she brought to everything.
"It could be the potion that splashed onto her. Whatever it was, it carried considerable potency — I could sense that much. Would you mind if I examined it?"
"Ah — I’m really sorry, Empress, I only had one of those and it’s already been used. I do have a couple of medium-ranked ones remaining. They’re not quite the same potency, but they should be enough to give you a reasonable idea of it."
Aaron answered without a moment’s hesitation, and without giving her even a breath of time to respond, he summoned his backpack directly onto his lap and produced one of the highest-ranking potions he had left.
He only had a handful remaining, but declining such a simple request from the Empress wasn’t something he was willing to entertain.
He stepped gracefully out of the hammock chair and crossed the short distance to present the vial to her, and as he drew near, a scent reached him — strong, floral, and deeply calming, radiating from her like warmth from an open flame.
It invaded his senses without invitation and showed no interest in leaving.
It was nothing like Mrs. Clint’s scent. That one had always felt manipulative, laced with something ominous — the pull of a forbidden fruit.
The Empress’s was something else entirely.
It felt divine in the truest sense of the word. Like something that existed at such a remove from the ordinary that approaching it felt like an act of transgression, as though simply being near it risked tainting something that was never meant to be touched.
She wasn’t called the Empress of Serenity without reason.
The Empress herself, however, was already elsewhere in her attention. Her eyes had dropped to the vial the moment it entered her hand, and now they were diving deep — past the glass, past the liquid, past the surface of things.
She was peering into the quantum realm, studying the raw materials and the method of creation from their most fundamental level, as if watching the original alchemist brew the potion from the beginning, step by meticulous step, in perfect clarity.
Once satisfied, she simply returned the vial.
Aaron had already made his way back and settled into the hammock chair, so rather than asking him to rise again, the Empress simply extended two fingers and sent the vial floating toward him — a gentle, frictionless drift through the air that landed precisely in his waiting hand.
It resembled the minor telekinesis he himself could perform using mana, except hers was refined to a degree that made his own feel rough and unfinished by comparison.
"So?" he asked, curious, wholly unbothered by the casual display of power.
"Your theory is correct," the Empress replied, her tone carrying the same easy calm it always did. "The potion contains materials that mimic the effects of my elixir to a small degree, which is most likely why this little one was unable to fully upgrade and received a mutation instead."
Alyssa kept her eyes moving rapidly between them, her expression caught somewhere between desperate confusion and a profound desire to understand at least a fraction of what was being said.
She wanted to ask them to slow down, to explain it in plain terms she could actually follow — but she didn’t dare breathe a word while they were mid-conversation.
"Well." The Empress let the syllable settle in the air between them with a kind of easy finality. "It was fun seeing you, Aaron." She raised one hand to cover the lower half of her face and leaned back in her seat.
The yawn she was concealing wasn’t particularly difficult to identify.
"Tell me about your mission — this class trial of yours. I will help you finish it."
The gears in Aaron’s mind turned immediately.
This was it.
This was the moment. The iron was hot, the opening was there, and sometimes — sometimes — the boldest possible move was also the correct one.
He took a breath, schooled his expression into something between theatrical shock and embarrassed discomfort, and looked directly at her.
"Actually... Empress... my mission is...
To court you."
Both the Empress and Alyssa went still at precisely the same moment, their mouths parting in identical, unguarded shock.
The Empress even lowered her hand from her face in pure surprise, and for just a fraction of a second, Aaron caught a glimpse of a flickering, bluish tongue concealed behind her lips.
A beat passed.
Silence stretched.
And then —
"WHAT?!"