Chapter 135 (2/2)

For instance, Jose, as a barbarian, did not believe in his own patron saint, but the Goddess of Snowstorm.

If it was just so, that would be alright. But Jose’s line of belief shimmered in a weird light. It gave out believer’s radiance, but was filled with bright red anger. The combination of two became a heavy curse.

In a more straightforward explanation: he was once the believer of the Goddess of Snowstorm, and he still believed in the Goddess, but was fuelled with rage and anger towards Her too. Such resentment combined with his faithful belief turned into a curse to the Goddess.

A commoner blaming and cursing the God that he believed in?

Sui Xiong felt that there must be a heavy-hearted story behind this.

He was very curious about it so he instructed Gerald to attract Jose to his side.

Of course, if Jose’s encounter was worth sympathy, he wouldn’t mind lending him a helping hand at his convenience.

Anyway, according to Snowflake’s prediction, when he became God officially, Goddess of Snowstorm would probably come to cause trouble. Instead of waiting for Her to bring along a bunch of wicked Gods to cause trouble, he might as well find ways to weaken Her influence and power. It’d be best if he could cause Her some trouble so that She would be unable to fend for herself.

When he saw that Gerald lodged a representation with Jose successfully, Sui Xiong smiled faintly and redirected his attention to the other side.

It was a deep and gloomy underground world, within a natural limestone cave.

In the current world, there wasn’t any huge and complicated underground world like those in the fantastical production before Sui Xiong crossed. But they could find a limestone cave that was bigger. Most of them were located at the border of the mountain range, deep underground. Naturally, there would be a unique life form system that was interesting there.

Palin brought a few adventurers into the limestone cave underground to explore with great care.

His mission was to look into ecology underneath and collect specimens of animals, plants and especially mushrooms, in order to aid Arcaian with his research.

To cultivate mushrooms that could grow normally under negative environments and were not poisonous but edible, was not an easy task. Arcaian spent almost the entire winter trying, but only managed to cultivate two kinds of mushroom that barely fit the requirements.

The first type of mushroom could resist negative energy. Not only it could be eaten, it could provide resistance towards negative energy for a short period of time. But its output was problematic. Even within Arcaian’s cultivation room that provided it with a better growing environment, its output was not enough to reach the level of “food.”

After all… it originally existed as medicinal material.

The second type of mushroom would push the negativity onto the tip of its cap. So, once the tip of the mushroom cap was cut off, the rest of the mushroom could be eaten. But it was impossible for it to smooth away all negativity onto the tip of its cap, so there would still be part of it left on the other parts of the mushroom. According to the experiment results with the animals, any common wild beast would not be able to resolve the remaining negativity. Their activity level would drop and they would be in listless spirits after consumption.

Arcaian didn’t want to do human experiments and Sui Xiong didn’t want to either. They could both imagine how would a human be like after eating the mushroom. Obviously, any common frontiersmen would never take it as food.

The experiment didn’t go well and Arcaian felt sorry but he emphasised that research was a task that required time and luck. It wouldn’t be easy to get a satisfying success in a short period of time.

“Then what should we do?” Sui Xiong asked. “Is there any way for you to speed up your research?”

Arcaian pondered in silence and indicated that if he could go to the limestone caves underground to collect more specimens of mushrooms that grow in underground environments as a reference, it might be helpful.

Mushroom was a huge system of organism. Even the Pasteur family that had been researching mushrooms for many years couldn’t possibly collect all kinds of mushrooms from all over the world. Those they collected were species that were representative because those were sufficient for their research in the past.

If they were to switch their research to a rare situation according to Sui Xiong’s requirements, what the Pasteur family collected was not enough. He would need to scout for more material.

Sui Xiong accepted Arcaian’s suggestion to send people to limestone caves nearby to pick some mushrooms.

He sent out two troops. The first troop was Frost and Graupel. The brother and sister were in charge of an isolated limestone cave. It was said to be less dangerous for magic beasts. It would be risky for commoners to visit.

The second troop was Palin. The limestone cave that he was sent to was a famous tourist attraction. Many travellers often visited to explore. To a complete troop with mages, warriors, priests, archers, and thieves, such a place was considered safe.

The development of the task was as expected by Sui Xiong; Palin and his troop had been exploring underground for two days, and they didn’t come across any significant danger.

No doubt they slowed down their schedule in order to ensure safety, but the limestone cave itself was pretty safe.

Even though… It was safe, but their working efficiency dropped. These two days they found a few types of mushroom, but judging from the images that were transmitted, they were all types that weren’t worth much attention. Arcaian vetoed the mushrooms’ values with one glance.

To find mushrooms that he needed, they needed to go deeper underground…