Chapter 16 –– Calling

I found an orange ore on the ground while doing some foraging in the woods. After I picked it up, I tried to take a closer look at it from various angles. It didn’t look like an ordinary crystal ore. It felt warm on my hand and emitted some kind of calming low frequency vibration.

“Congratulations. You found it.”

The old man just appeared right in front of me, out of the blue. I was so startled that I almost dropped the ore I was holding.

“Shit. You scared the hell out of me.”

“That’s a gnoxichalc ore. It is a precious lost object that contains infinite gnox energy.”

Oh, wow. I didn’t expect to find such a thing here, in this woods. This must be super valuable.

I noticed that there was some kind of residue on my paws every time I touched the ore. It looked like some kind of glittering golden dust.

“What do you use it for?” I asked him.

“I will tell you tomorrow.”

Hmm....I didn’t know why he was being so mysterious, but I guessed that was just how he’d always been. I didn’t expect anything normal from a spirity looking ghost.

Since the daystones* were slowly turning into nightstones**, I went back home bringing all of the things I foraged from the woods.

Once I arrived home, I went to the kitchen to give the wild berries that I just picked in the woods to my older siblings. They were preparing some dinner for tonight.

“Oh! How did you find these, Avram? Aren’t they not in season right now?” one of my siblings asked.

“Yeah. I happened to find some while I was doing my calling,” I replied.

“Sweet! We can make some jam for tomorrow’s breakfast, then.”

Since today was not my turn to cook for the family, I left them and immediately went to my room. After entering my bedroom, I pushed the bed aside to reveal a hidden entrance to my secret lab. Located under my bed, there was a rabbit hole that led to a secret tunnel to get to the lab that I built myself. After I entered the tunnel, I pulled the bed back to where it was to cover the entrance so that no one would notice.

The lab was filled with samples and things that I found in the woods. Nobody knew this, but I actually liked to experiment with stuff I found in the woods. I even made several potions and remedies using the herbs that I found there. You could say that I was a self-proclaimed alchemist.

All my life, I’d been wanting to meet the boy I met when I was small. Because he never came to see me, I decided that I was going to see him. However, the customs of the tribe forbid me from leaving the village unless I finished my calling. Having received such an impossible calling–– one that took more than 8 generations–– it was impossible to do it the conventional way. It would take more than my whole lifetime to finish it.

That was why I secretly built this lab to find alternatives that could help me finish my calling. By doing a lot of experiments, I might find a way that could help me leave this village to meet my fated one once more. I tried and failed so many times, but nothing ever stopped me from trying.

I went to the table with an experiment that I’d been working on for most of my life. It was a long term project and the solution to my never-ending calling.

On the table, there was a tight-sealed jar with a mushroom I plucked from the Sacred Giant Mushroom. I managed to bring one home by bypassing the conditions it would take for it to evaporate. I figured out that, because it evaporated due to stonelight, that meant it wouldn’t evaporate as long as it didn’t get exposed to stonelight. Turned out, that wasn’t the only condition. It also could not be exposed to air and room temperature either, so it had to be covered in something tight-sealed under a certain temperature. After a lot of trial and errors in order to create a jar specially designed to prevent it from evaporating, I finally managed to bring one of the mushrooms home to examine it for my project.

I read a lot of books about the Sacred Giant Mushroom and everything related to the woods in this district. I once read that occasionally, monsters appeared in random places due to leakage of fyx and gnox energy. I wasn't sure what fyx was, but I assume it was another type of energy, just like gnox. I also read that there was a low level monster called slime that was able to consume and digest anything with fyx and gnox energy. Since then, my journey to find one of these so-called slime began.

I searched all over the woods to find any slime-looking organism that resembled the image in the book. After months of searching, I found nothing. No clue whatsoever. I didn’t know how these things spawned in the wild and I didn’t know how to find them either. In the end, I gave up on searching for it.

Yet, one day, when I was making dinner for my family, I heard some ruckus in the field. My parents and some of my siblings were fighting off some kind of pest that was eating our crops. I was so bothered by their voices that I ended up pausing what I was doing to check on them.

I asked them what was going on and saw a tiny blue slime on the field, consuming some of our crops and digesting it. It was exactly what I was looking for! Exactly how it was described in the books I'd read. My family used whatever they were holding to destroy the slime–– a hoe, a scythe, a rake–– but nothing worked. It just phased through the slime, like some kind of jelly.

I told my family to stop trying to kill the slime and let me handle it. I quickly went to my lab to grab another spare of jar that I used to keep my mushroom. After I returned, I caught the slime and trapped it inside the tight-sealed jar, preventing it from escaping. My family was so distraught by what I did but was grateful regardless for taking care of the pest. I collected the slime and brought it to my lab to finally get onto the next stage of my project.

Later that night, I tried putting the slime inside the mushroom to see if it could digest it. At first, the slime was able to consume it and ingest it into its body, but was not able to break it down and digest it. After a while, the slime adapted and managed to modify its body to be able to properly digest the mushroom. It finally worked! The slime broke down the mushroom into smaller pieces and absorbed it into its body as nutrients. However, another problem arose. After digesting the mushroom, the slime got bigger in size. It didn’t disappear and just moved around the jar, trying to find something else to digest. I just realised something else that I needed to do: how to dissolve the slime.

Thankfully, I realised this problem early on before I actually released the slime to the Sacred Giant Mushroom. This could have gone wrong so badly and created a whole other disaster. Now that I found something that could destroy the mushroom, I needed to find something else that could destroy the slime.

Back to the present, I checked on the jar if there was any change on the slime. After not getting any nutrients for months, I thought the slime would wither away and disappear. Yet, the slime was still in the jar alive and well, actively moving around inside the tightly-sealed jar. It was a good decision that I used a jar big enough to contain it, otherwise it could find ways to slip through the edges of the lid.

I ran out of ideas and decided to call the day off. I put the gnoxichalc ore that I found on the table and went upstairs to get some dinner with the rest of my family.

Right when I put the ore on the table next to the jar, I noticed the slime scooting away from it, trying to avoid it by leaning to the opposite side of the jar. I took the ore and put it near the jar. The slime moved around accordingly to the opposite direction of the ore, trying to avoid it. I also noticed some of the dust on my paws. Suddenly, I got an idea to sprinkle some of that dust onto the slime to see what would happen. I opened the lid of the jar and did just that.

After I sprinkled some of the residual dust from the ore, I heard a tiny shrieking sound from the slime. It was agitated because some part of it got corroded by the dust. The dust was able to dissolve part of the slime for it to cease to exist.

This was it. I finally found it.

I was finally one step closer to see him again.

The next day, I went to the woods to the Sacred Giant Mushroom to do my calling. Apart from a pair of gloves, a wicker basket, and a trowel, I brought something else with me. I brought a jar of the slime as well as a spray bottle filled with residual dust from the gnoxichalc ore.

After having arrived at the Sacred Giant Mushroom, I opened the lid of the jar filled with the slime and let it slither to the mushroom. It then started chipping away the smaller mushrooms on the outer layer and digesting it, making it bigger in size in return.

“What is that, child?”

Hubal the old man appeared right next to me, asking me what I just brought. As expected, this must be his first time seeing such a thing.

“Just watch and you’ll see,” I told him.

After growing big enough, the slime that I put on the mushroom then multiplied into several smaller slime. They consumed the external mushrooms by consuming it into their slimy body and slowly digesting it. After digesting a certain amount of mushrooms, I decided to spray the gnoxichalc ore dust towards the slime. Upon contact, the dust immediately dissolved the slime and turning it into thin air.

The old man looked awfully surprised by the process. He never expected there was an organism that was able to consume the mushroom.

“Is that.....a monster?” he asked.

“It is a low level monster, a slime. After conducting countless experiments with a mushroom from the Sacred Giant Mushroom, this slime, and some gnoxichalc ore dust; I managed to find a more efficient way to destroy this mushroom.”

That was right. I was so proud of this creation. Even though it worked slowly, it was better than having to come here every day just to pluck those never-ending mushrooms. Since the slime would keep multiplying and I could get more dust by rubbing the ore, I wouldn’t have to worry about the mushrooms that kept regenerating day by day. I was sure that the slime would digest more than the Sacred Giant Mushroom’s regenerative ability.

“I don’t think you should keep this going,” the old main said, disapproving the method I used for clearing my calling.

I turned my head and looked at him with annoyance.

“Why?”

“This looks like it can pose some problems in the future,” he said, with a suspicious tone.

I was silenced by his remark. Why did he say that? What was he not satisfied with? I thought this worked just fine. Besides, it hadn’t even been a day, had it? Who was he to judge what was good and what was not good about it?

“But if I don’t do this, I won’t be able to meet him again,” I told him.

“I am sure there is another way,” he said, telling me to cancel my plan and returned everything to how it was.

“What way? Tell me," I asked him with an annoyed tone.

"That is something that you have to find out yourself," he answered nonchalantly.

I tried holding off my anger before speaking my mind.

"Look. If you don't have anything to say, don't say anything. Especially not discouraging someone who spent years in the making to find a solution to his life-long problem."

Old man Hubal just kept silent. He did not say anything.

"I have searched and tried every possible way to get rid of this calling. It took 8 generations and I’m not even anywhere close.”

He was supposed to be the only person who could understand me. Yet, after I found something that could help me, he didsn’t even support me.

“I know you think you’re some kind of a know-it-all being. But, guess what you don’t know? The feeling of frustration after being told that you had a soulmate but not to chase after him. You know nothing of how I feel.”

I left him in anger and ran away to the other side of the woods. I didn’t want to see his face nor that stupid giant mushroom. I wanted to get away from everything and left everything behind.