The Archmage Became A Mushroom Tamer

Chapter 10

Chapter 10 · 2,069 words

## Ch010 - Into the Ruins

The portal to Hollow Ground shimmered like heat haze over summer stone.

Aldric stood before it, his assignment paperwork in hand, his expression carefully neutral. The realm supervisor, a bored D-tier student with a checklist and a mana-attunement bracelet, glanced at his papers, glanced at him, and made a mark on the form without reading either closely.

"F-tier. Material collection. Outer zone only. Six-hour window." The supervisor recited the restrictions in the tone of someone who had recited them many times before and expected them to be ignored by approximately half the freshmen who entered. "If you die in there, the paperwork is your problem. If you bring back anything that bites, that's also your problem. Sign here."

Aldric signed. He stepped through the portal.

The air pressure changed immediately, a subtle shift, like descending into a valley. The light was different too, filtered through the portal's boundary into something warmer, more golden. The sun inside the pocket dimension a few degrees closer than the one outside. Hollow Ground stretched before him: rolling terrain covered in low scrub and scattered trees, the sky a pale blue without clouds. The outer zone was peaceful. It was also, to Aldric's trained eye, unremarkable.

Low-level mana beasts, slimes that quivered in the grass, minor earth elementals that looked like animated rocks, moved through the terrain in predictable patterns. Herb patches grew in clusters marked by the academy's cultivation department, each one labeled with species and collection guidelines. It was a teaching realm, safe, controlled, designed to give freshmen their first experience with mana-beast encounters and material harvesting without actual risk.

Aldric moved through it efficiently.

His Substrate Analysis skill, the same skill the Mushroom Tamer tutorial described as useful for identifying nutrients in mushroom soil, read the terrain like a text written in a language he was fluent in and everyone else was still learning the alphabet for. The bone fragments from skeleton-type mana beasts were scattered across the northern section of the outer zone, where the mobs patrolled in slow, predictable circuits. He identified the phosphorus-rich specimens by density and mineral composition. Most students would have collected any bone fragment, but the quality varied enormously, and the high-phosphorus pieces had a specific weight and texture that his fingers recognized.

The heat-resistant moss grew near a thermal vent in the eastern section, a natural mana anomaly where geothermal energy from the pocket dimension's unstable core seeped to the surface. The moss clung to the warm rocks around the vent, its dark green fronds curled against the heat in a way that demonstrated exactly the thermal resilience Aldric needed for his substrate base.

He collected the mission materials with methodical precision. His efficiency was the efficiency of someone who had done this a thousand times in a thousand different contexts. The identification and harvesting of magical materials was second nature.

Forty minutes. The mission materials were collected. The six-hour window had barely begun.

He stood at the boundary.

The safe zone ended at a line marked by waist-high stone posts connected by a mana-ward that hummed at a frequency Aldric could feel in his teeth. Beyond the line, the terrain changed. The rolling scrub gave way to broken ground, collapsed structures, and the dark mouths of underground passages. The inner ruins. Unmapped. Officially off-limits to freshmen. Officially dangerous.

His Mycelial Bond skill was tingling. This was deeper than the gentle awareness of nearby fungal organisms that Spore Sense provided. Older. A vibration in the mycelial network that connected him to something beyond the boundary. Something large. Something ancient.

The "STOP DIGGING" message was fresh in his mind.

He crossed the boundary.

The inner zone was quieter than the outer. The mana beasts here were fewer and larger. He passed the tracks of something with claws wider than his hand, and the air carried the scent of a predator's territorial marking. He moved carefully, using the broken terrain for cover, his Substrate Analysis skill scanning ahead for biological threats.

But it was the stone that held his attention.

The ruins were underground, a collapsed complex accessed through a fissure in the bedrock that Aldric descended using handholds that had been carved into the rock centuries ago. The carvings were worn smooth by time, but the patterns were still visible: spirals. Interlocking, recursive, precise. The same spiral he had used for Fireball Mushroom optimization. The same spiral carved into the binding of the book on Holt's shelf.

His blood ran cold.

He had thought the spiral was his innovation. A novel application of pre-System formation theory to biological substrate. An original synthesis of old-world knowledge and this-world's fungal biology.

It was not original. It was carved into stone that was centuries old. Someone, or something, had used this pattern here, in this place, before the academy was built, before the System classified fungal magic as F-tier, before anyone alive had drawn breath.

He had not invented the spiral. He had rediscovered it.

The mycelial fragments were embedded in the walls of the underground complex, dormant threads of ancient mycelium, calcified into the stone but still structurally intact. They followed the spiral patterns, running through the carved channels like veins through marble. The network they formed was visible even without his skills, a web of fungal threads that covered the walls, the ceiling, the collapsed doorways, extending downward into passages he couldn't see.

He walked deeper. The air was still. The silence was the silence of a place that had been sealed for centuries.

In a collapsed chamber, the ceiling partially fallen, the far wall cracked open to reveal another passage beyond, he found it.

An intact section of mycelial network. Not calcified. Not dormant. Alive.

The mycelium here was different from anything he'd encountered in the crawlspace or the drainage pipes or even the training hall floor. It was thick, visible to the naked eye as a web of threads each as wide as his finger, pulsing with a faint bioluminescence that shifted between blue and green in a slow, rhythmic pattern. Warm to the touch. When his Mycelial Bond skill reached out to it, the response was immediate. A resonance that vibrated through his entire mana system. It reached beyond the narrow F-tier channels his current body possessed. Something deeper. Something the body was too small to contain.

He felt the same vast presence he had felt during the assessment, the thing beneath the training hall, the thing that had reached up through the stone and fed his mushroom energy he hadn't asked for. It was here. It was connected. The secret realm's ruins and the academy's foundations were part of the same network.

The network extended downward. He could feel it. His F-tier senses were limited to a few meters of fungal detection, but something else reached further. The Mycelial Bond skill was a door, and through that door, he could sense the outline of something vast. The academy was a house sitting on top of a mountain.

He extracted samples. Carefully. Living mycelial fragments, sections of the active network that he severed with a knife and wrapped in substrate to keep viable. Pre-System stone shards, pieces of the carved wall where the calcified mycelium had formed a shell around the original spiral patterns. Ancient substrate, the accumulated detritus of centuries of fungal growth, rich with compounds that no longer existed in the surface ecosystem.

He worked quickly. His hands were steady, the steadiness of a man who had performed delicate procedures under pressure for three centuries, even if this particular body's hands were smaller and weaker than the ones he'd learned on.

The samples secured, he began the climb back to the surface.

He was twenty meters from the boundary when they intercepted him.

Three figures. Two B-tier, flanking an A-tier. They were positioned at the narrowest point of the ascent, a passage where the broken rock forced anyone climbing to slow down and single-file. The A-tier stood in the center, arms crossed, his expression the flat, professional indifference of someone doing a job.

"Freshman." The A-tier's voice was calm. "You're past the boundary."

Aldric stopped. His mind was already calculating. Three opponents, one A-tier, the passage was too narrow to run, his Fireball Mushroom Mk II was in the crawlspace, he had no combat-capable strains on his person. The calculation was brief and conclusive. He could not fight his way out.

"I'm aware," he said.

The A-tier extended a hand. "Half your collection. Freshman privilege doesn't extend to the inner zone. Consider this a tuition fee."

Aldric looked at the hand. Then at the A-tier's face. Cold. Professional. This was routine. The kind of thing that happened in the margins of the academy's jurisdiction, where the rules were enforced by the students who had the power to enforce them and the freshmen who didn't.

He handed over the marked materials. The bone fragments. The heat-resistant moss. Half of what he'd collected in the outer zone, plus the secondary collection he'd made in the inner zone's upper passages, common specimens, nothing critical.

The A-tier glanced at the materials, nodded to one of the B-tiers, who pocketed them. Then the A-tier looked at Aldric again.

"You're the F-tier. The one who triggered the assessment anomaly." It wasn't a question. "I've been assigned to monitor anomalous F-tier activity in the realm. By the administration." He paused. "Be more careful about where you walk."

Aldric said nothing. He descended past them, through the boundary, and back into the outer zone. His features stayed still. His mind was running.

The A-tier had been assigned to monitor him. By the administration. Not by a professor. Not by Holt. By the administration, the academy's governing body, the people who made decisions about resource allocation, student oversight, and the suppression of anomalies that didn't fit the System's classifications.

Someone in the academy's leadership knew about him. Was watching him. Had placed a sentinel in the secret realm specifically to intercept anything he might find beyond the boundary.

But they had missed the important samples.

The living mycelial fragments and the pre-System stone shards were hidden in a pocket inside his jacket, shielded by a layer of dead substrate that masked their mana signature. The A-tier had taken the marked materials, the ones that would show up on a routine inventory check. The real collection was still on his person.

He walked back to the portal. He checked out with the realm supervisor, who marked his return time and made another note on the form. He stepped through the shimmer and back into the academy.

The afternoon light was harsh. The training grounds were busy with students practicing. Nobody looked at him. He was, after all, just an F-tier freshman returning from a routine material-gathering mission.

In his room, behind a locked door, he examined the pre-System stone shard.

Under the makeshift microscope, the water droplet, the magnifying lens, the careful alignment, the interior of the stone was visible. The calcified mycelial network inside was not random. It was structured. Patterned. The threads formed sequences, repeating motifs at regular intervals, each one slightly different from the last, in a progression that Aldric recognized from his old world's work on information encoding.

It was a data storage pattern.

The mycelium had been used to store information. The fungal threads were encoded with data, each thread a unit of information, the sequence of threads forming a record. The information was still there, preserved in the calcified structure, waiting to be read by someone who understood the encoding.

He sat back from the microscope. His hands were flat on the desk. His expression was blank.

The ancient network had been infrastructure. A conduit for mana, a substrate for magic, a foundation that the System was built on top of.

It had been a library.

A continent-spanning communication and storage system, encoded in living fungal threads, preserved in stone, buried under centuries of System-mediated civilization.

Someone had silenced it. Destroyed it. Buried it so thoroughly that the world had forgotten it existed.

The question was no longer "what is the network?"

Who killed it, and why?