The Archmage Became A Mushroom Tamer

Chapter 3

Chapter 3 · 1,683 words

## Ch003 - Garbage and Genius

The drainage pipe behind the dormitory wall became his laboratory.

He'd found it by the kind of systematic observation that made accidents unnecessary. The F-tier dormitory's plumbing was old, the pipes ancient, and the drainage system that ran behind the walls was largely abandoned. A section of pipe near his window had cracked. Age and moisture had done their work, exposing a space barely large enough for his hand. Behind the crack, the pipe continued into the wall cavity, a forgotten channel that hadn't carried water in years.

It was perfect.

The biofilm lining the pipe was rich with organic matter, ambient moisture from the dormitory's aging plumbing, trace nutrients from waste water, and a steady trickle of residual mana from the building's magical infrastructure. It was raw and damp. But it was alive, and it was warm, and no one would think to look for it. Among the biofilm's pale layers, he noticed older threads, dead, but structured in patterns that looked deliberate. They ran in parallel lines with regular intervals between them, like a miniature version of something much larger. The patterns were too regular to be random growth. But whatever had made them was long gone, and the new biofilm had grown over the top without disturbing the older architecture.

The mycelium he'd transplanted there three days ago had taken hold.

He checked it before dawn, as he did every morning, easing the cracked panel aside with careful fingers. The mycelium had spread across the biofilm, forming a thin but viable network. It was pale, almost translucent, with the faint luminescence that indicated active mana absorption. The threads were thin, thinner than they should have been, given the nutrients available, but they were growing, and they were healthy, and they were his.

"Good," he said to it. His voice was low, formal, the same tone he'd once used to address his spell components during critical cultivation phases. "Adequate conditions. We'll discuss your performance metrics once you've matured."

The mycelium pulsed faintly. Probably a reaction to his mana signature. Probably not a response.

He told himself it didn't matter.

He adjusted the nutrient flow, redirecting a small stream of waste water to provide additional phosphorus, and returned to his room. The cracked cup sat on the desk, its purpose served. He'd use it for substrate analysis, as a working vessel for the formulas he was sketching from memory. The real work was in the pipe.

He was at the common room table, pen moving across paper in precise strokes, when Kael Dorn arrived.

The common room was nearly empty. Aldric had claimed a corner table far from the door, the kind of position that let him see everyone who entered while minimizing the chance of interaction. He'd been working for an hour, the cracked cup beside him, empty now, its contents long since transferred to the drainage pipe, serving as a container for his substrate notes.

Kael entered with the easy confidence of someone who owned the room by right of birth. A-tier. Pyromancer. Built like a fighter, with broad shoulders and the kind of physical presence that filled space without effort. His entourage trailed behind him, three B-tier students who laughed at his jokes and nodded at his opinions with the practiced ease of people who'd learned that proximity to power was its own reward.

Aldric didn't look up. He kept working, his pen moving across the paper in precise, economical strokes. He was calculating thermal conversion ratios, how much energy a unit of mycelial substrate could store per gram of biomass. The numbers were encouraging, if the ratios from his old world held even partially in this one.

Kael spotted him. Of course he did. An F-tier in the common room was conspicuous by its rarity. Most F-tiers avoided the shared spaces, preferring the invisibility of their rooms. Aldric's presence was an implicit claim to space, and claims to space were not something F-tiers were supposed to make.

Kael approached. The entourage followed.

"Hey," Kael said. His voice was casual, but the edge was there, the edge of someone who'd decided, before the conversation began, how it would end. "What's this?"

He was looking at the cracked cup. It sat on the edge of the table, its contents long since transferred to the drainage pipe. It was just a cup now, cracked, stained, worthless. A piece of garbage that Aldric had left on the table because he'd been using it as a reference while sketching substrate formulas.

Aldric didn't look up. "A vessel."

"A vessel for what? Growing salads?"

The entourage laughed. Kael smiled. It was the kind of smile that came from knowing you were superior and expecting everyone else to agree.

Aldric set down his pen. He looked at Kael with the flat, clinical interest of someone appraising a rock sample.

"That was a discarded vessel," he said. His voice was calm, precise, completely without inflection. "It had no value."

Kael's smile didn't waver. "Then why were you working on it?"

"Intellectual curiosity." Aldric picked up his pen. "A concept I don't expect you to be familiar with."

The common room went quiet. The entourage stopped laughing. Kael's smile hardened into something that wasn't a smile anymore.

Aldric returned to his notes. He didn't look up again. He could feel Kael standing there, deciding whether to escalate. The calculation was simple: an F-tier had talked back. An F-tier had used words that cut with precision, which was worse than vulgarity. The question was whether Kael's pride could tolerate that, or whether he needed to respond.

"My father supplies half the fire-attribute reagents in this academy," Kael said, his voice dropping to a register that was almost conversational. "You know what that means? It means I've been around cultivation materials since before I could walk. I know what they look like when they're worth something. That," he pointed at the cup, "isn't."

Kael's hand moved. The cracked cup was "accidentally" knocked off the table. It hit the stone floor and shattered. The sound was loud in the quiet room, sharp and final.

"Oops," Kael said. He didn't sound sorry. He sounded satisfied.

Aldric looked at the broken pieces. His expression didn't change. Not a flicker. Not a twitch. His face had the blank stillness of a man who'd spent centuries controlling what it revealed.

"That was a discarded vessel," he said again. "It had no value."

"Then you shouldn't mind if it breaks."

"I don't." Aldric returned to his notes. "I was using it for substrate analysis. The analysis is complete. The vessel has served its purpose."

Kael stared at him. The entourage shifted uncomfortably. They'd expected anger, humiliation, perhaps tears. They hadn't expected this. They hadn't expected an F-tier to look through them the way one looks through a window at something more interesting outside. The silence stretched.

Kael left. The entourage followed, casting uncertain glances over their shoulders.

Aldric sat perfectly still until they were gone. Then he gathered his notes, returned to his room, and allowed himself a small, private smile.

The cup was empty. The real culture was in the drainage pipe, safe and growing. Kael had destroyed a decoy without knowing it. The academy thought he had nothing.

He waited until nightfall. Then he went back to the drainage pipe.

The mycelium had doubled.

The thermal selection process was working. He'd been exposing the culture to alternating warm and cool mana pulses, forcing it to develop heat-storage capabilities. The same principle from the drainage pipe's first day: selective pressure, applied with precision.

It was slow. Painfully slow. His mana was too weak to maintain precise temperature control. He had to rely on ambient fluctuations, on the waste heat from the dormitory's plumbing, on the subtle gradients created by the building's infrastructure. Every adjustment was a compromise. Every pulse was less precise than he'd have liked.

But it was working. The mycelium was learning to store thermal energy. It was the basis for what he'd eventually call Fireball Mushroom, a strain that could absorb, store, and release thermal energy in a controlled burst. The thermal storage vacuoles were forming, tiny pockets within the mycelial structure that could absorb and retain heat.

It would take weeks. He had days. Something worse than a broken cup would happen soon. He could feel it in the way the upperclassmen looked at him, in the way the supervisors patrolled the F-tier dormitory with extra diligence, in the way the System's tutorial kept reappearing to remind him of his place.

He worked through the night. The mycelium responded to his careful mana-flow adjustments, its thermal storage capacity increasing by fractions of a percent with each cycle. Tiny gains. But gains nonetheless.

The System notification came just before dawn.

**NEW PASSIVE SKILL UNLOCKED: THERMAL RESONANCE (LV 1)** *Detect thermal energy patterns in organic matter within 3-meter radius.*

He stared at it.

This skill shouldn't exist. The tutorial had been explicit: Mushroom Tamer has no combat-adjacent abilities. Thermal Resonance skirted the edge of combat utility. It was a detection skill that could identify thermal signatures, which was the first step toward thermal manipulation. It was the kind of skill that a combat-adjacent class might receive, not a cultivation class.

Either the System was adapting to his cultivation, responding to the thermal selection process by granting a relevant skill, or someone had added this skill after the initial classification.

He checked the skill's details. The timestamp on the skill definition was blank.

Not missing. Blank. As though someone had deliberately removed the record of when it was created.

He closed the interface. He sat in the dark.

Someone was editing the System's records about Mushroom Tamer. Someone had added a skill that shouldn't exist, then removed the timestamp to hide the modification. The footnote in the tutorial. The blank timestamp on the skill. Someone was watching the classification of fungal magic. Someone was making changes.

And they didn't want anyone to know.、