The Archmage Became A Mushroom Tamer

Chapter 5

Chapter 5 · 2,127 words

## Ch005 - Unauthorized Cultivation

The pounding on the door came at dawn.

Aldric was already awake. He'd barely slept. The dream had lingered, the mycelial cathedral's image burned into his mind like an afterimage from staring at the sun. He'd been lying in the dark, staring at the ceiling, trying to decide whether the dream had been a message or simply the residue of his cultivation work. The network beneath the academy. He'd felt it before, briefly, through the Mycelial Bond skill. But the dream had been different. The dream had been *invitation.*

The pounding decided for him. Three sharp raps, the kind that said *official business.*

He opened the door. Mira stood in the corridor, her expression stern. She was a C-tier student, a dormitory supervisor with the kind of rigid posture that suggested she'd been told once that rules existed for a reason and had decided to make that reason her entire personality. Her badge was polished. Her hair was pulled back so tight it looked painful. Her eyes were the eyes of someone who'd never had to question whether the System's verdict about her was fair.

In her hand, she held a jar. Inside the jar, mycelial scrapings.

"Unauthorized biological cultivation in a residential zone," she said. Her voice was flat, rehearsed, the voice of someone delivering a verdict they'd already decided on. "This is an expulsion-level violation."

His mind raced. The culture, Fireball Zero, his prototype, weeks of careful cultivation, was being scraped out of the drainage pipes. He could see the scrapings in the jar, pale threads of mycelium suspended in preservative fluid. The mycelium was still alive. He could feel the faint pulse of its mana signature even through the glass. But it was dying. The preservative wasn't designed for mycelial samples. It was designed for plant tissue. The mycelium would be dead within the hour.

"We traced the mana signature through the drainage system," Mira added, her tone shifting to the clipped efficiency of someone reciting procedure. "The pipe behind your wall connects to the greenhouse district's waste outflow. That's how your culture spread far enough for us to detect it from the external sensors." She said it without thinking, a casual piece of infrastructure trivia that revealed more than she intended. The drainage pipe wasn't just a forgotten channel. It was connected to the greenhouse. To the elevated foundation with its older stone. To whatever lay beneath.

"I need you to come with me," Mira said. "Immediate tribunal."

The tribunal was held in the F-tier common room, a space so rarely used for official purposes that the dust on the tables suggested it had been forgotten by the administration. Someone had dragged three chairs to one end and placed a table between them and the accused. It was meant to look formal. It looked absurd.

Mira stood at one end of the room, the jar of mycelial scrapings on the table before her. The dormitory head, a tired-looking D-tier administrator named Greth, with the posture of a man who'd been doing this job for twenty years and had stopped caring about fifteen of them, sat beside her.

And Professor Holt was there.

Aldric hadn't expected that. Holt was the F-tier welfare officer, a title that was largely ceremonial, given that F-tier students were considered too insignificant to warrant actual welfare. He was supposed to conduct monthly check-ins, ensure the students weren't starving, and file reports that no one read. His presence at a tribunal was technically required, but it was usually a formality.

But Holt was also a former A-tier student. Or so the rumors said. He'd been downgraded after an injury in a secret realm expedition, a catastrophic reduction in mana capacity that had moved him from combat class to support class to teaching the least important students in the academy. His face was lined, his hair graying, his posture the careful neutrality of a man who'd learned to stop expecting anything from his job.

He sat at the table, his expression unreadable, a small notebook open before him. His eyes, Aldric noticed immediately, were not the eyes of a man who'd stopped caring. They were the eyes of a man who was paying very close attention.

Mira presented the evidence. "Mycelial growth in the drainage system. Traced to this student's room through mana signature analysis." She held up the jar. "Cultivation of biological organisms in a residential zone is a violation of academy policy, section seven, paragraph three. The penalty is expulsion."

She set the jar down. She looked at Aldric with the expression of someone who expected him to confess.

Aldric stood. He didn't plead. He didn't apologize. He presented his case with the precise, unrepentant tone of a scholar defending a thesis.

"The mycelial growth in question was part of a substrate analysis exercise, conducted within the scope of Mushroom Tamer's Substrate Analysis skill. The skill's description includes the identification and analysis of organic substrates. Cultivation of small-scale samples is a necessary component of that analysis. You cannot analyze a substrate you haven't first grown."

Mira's expression didn't change. "The cultivation was not contained. The mycelium spread into the drainage system."

"The drainage pipe in question was abandoned. It has not been used in over a year. The mycelium was contained within the pipe's existing biofilm and posed no risk to the dormitory's infrastructure."

"You don't know that."

"I do." Aldric's voice was calm. "The mycelium was thermophilic. It required ambient temperatures above twenty degrees Celsius to remain active. The drainage pipe's ambient temperature is seventeen degrees. The mycelium was dormant beyond the immediate cultivation site. It could not have spread."

Mira opened her mouth to respond. Her face was flushed with the frustration of someone who'd expected an easy conviction and was finding the defendant difficult.

Holt spoke.

"Your substrate analysis required mana-flow manipulation beyond Substrate Analysis's designed parameters."

The question was directed at Aldric, but it wasn't the question Mira had been preparing to ask. It wasn't about the violation. It was about the technique.

It was a question that revealed knowledge. Knowledge of cultivation theory, knowledge of mana-flow manipulation, knowledge that a typical academy teacher shouldn't have. The Substrate Analysis skill didn't involve mana-flow manipulation. It was a passive identification skill. Holt knew that. Aldric knew that. The question was a probe.

Holt's expression was neutral. His eyes were not.

"How did you manage thermal regulation without a cultivation chamber?"

Aldric's mind raced. The question was dangerous. It revealed that Holt understood what he'd been doing. Holt knew about thermal regulation. He knew about cultivation chambers. He knew that the Substrate Analysis skill, as designed, couldn't do what Aldric had done.

"Theoretical optimization of ambient mana ratios," Aldric said carefully. "The mycelium's thermal requirements could be met by adjusting the nutrient gradient to create localized heat production. High-phosphorus substrates generate heat during decomposition. By controlling the gradient, I could maintain the required temperature range."

It was a partial truth. It was technically correct. It was also not the whole truth, not by a long margin. The formation geometry, the spiral patterns, the precise mana pulses, none of that was in his answer. But it was defensible. It was the kind of answer that was true without being complete.

Holt stared at him. The stare lasted too long. It was the kind of stare that said *I know you're not telling me everything, and I know you know that I know.* It was also something else, something that Aldric couldn't quite categorize. Recognition? Confusion? Fear?

Then Holt turned to Mira.

"The Mushroom Tamer skill tree includes Substrate Analysis. Substrate analysis requires cultivation. The student was working within his skill scope. Close the case."

It was a technicality. Everyone in the room knew it. The skill tree's Substrate Analysis didn't require the kind of mana-flow manipulation Aldric had performed. The thermal regulation he'd described was possible in theory but not in practice, not without the formation geometry, not without the precise mana control that went far beyond what an F-tier should possess. But the technicality held. The rules were the rules, and Holt had found the gap in them.

Mira's jaw tightened. The dormitory head, Greth, nodded reluctantly. The case was closed.

Aldric was placed on disciplinary probation. Any further "unauthorized cultivation" would result in immediate expulsion. The drainage pipe culture was classified as a biohazard and scheduled for immediate incineration.

He watched through the window as they burned it.

The fire was small, contained, efficient. A maintenance worker had scraped the remaining mycelium from the pipes and deposited it in an incineration bin. The flames were blue, mana-assisted combustion, the kind used for biological waste. The mycelial scrapings, weeks of work, the Fireball Zero prototype, the first functional fungal strain he'd built in this world, turned to ash in minutes.

His expression didn't change. His fingers rested flat against the window frame, pressing the stone hard enough to whiten the knuckles.

Inside, something cracked.

Loss was familiar. He'd lost things before. He'd lost students, lost research, lost centuries of work to betrayal and time. Loss was, if anything, the most familiar thing in his experience.

But the burning. The fire, the smell of organic matter turning to ash, the blue flames consuming the threads he'd nurtured one pulse at a time. It triggered something. A fragment of memory, sharp and sudden, cutting through the discipline like a knife through cloth.

Fire. A voice saying his name, his real name, the name from his old world. Hands, these young uncalloused hands, wrapped around something that glowed with the same blue as the incineration flames. A face, blurred but present. A face he trusted. A face that was...

The memory dissolved. Gone. Like smoke in wind.

He stood at the window and watched the last of the mycelium turn to ash. His fingers left the stone frame, one joint at a time, and his hands fell to his sides. Something behind his eyes had gone very, very still.

He turned away from the window. He walked back to his room. He sat on the narrow bed and stared at the wall.

He was still enrolled. He was on probation. His drainage pipe culture was gone. He needed to start over.

And this time, he couldn't hide in the dormitory.

After the tribunal, Holt watched Aldric walk away. He sat in the empty common room, the small notebook open before him. He wrote something, a single line, in handwriting that was small and precise. He closed the notebook. He put it away. He sat for a long time, staring at the wall where the window showed the gray sky of the academy.

Then he stood and left.

Back in his room, Aldric discovered the incineration order.

It was a standard form, academy letterhead, official seal, the signature of the authorizing professor at the bottom. He'd found it slipped under his door, probably by Mira or one of the maintenance staff. He read it without emotion. The drainage pipe culture was classified as a biohazard, scheduled for immediate incineration, the order signed by...

Professor Holt.

He read it again.

Holt had defended him in the tribunal. Holt had argued that the cultivation was within the skill scope. Holt had saved him from expulsion.

And Holt had signed the destruction order for the thing he'd just argued was legal.

Why?

The contradiction sat in his mind, sharp and uncomfortable. Holt could have simply let the case proceed. Aldric would have been expelled, the culture destroyed, the matter settled. Instead, Holt had intervened to save him, then intervened again to destroy the culture. Two interventions, pulling in opposite directions.

Unless the two interventions weren't contradictory. Unless they were the same intervention.

Holt wanted the culture gone to protect Aldric. Because what was growing in that drainage pipe was a conduit to something older, something that Holt recognized, something that he didn't want anyone else to notice.

Aldric set the incineration order on the desk. He sat in the dark.

Holt knew what the mycelium was connecting to. Holt knew about the network beneath the academy. And Holt had chosen to protect Aldric by destroying the evidence before anyone else could find it.

The question wasn't *why did Holt do this?* The question was *what does Holt know?*

Aldric folded the incineration order along its original creases and slid it under the mattress. Holt's signature was on every copy. If Holt was protecting him, the next move would come from Holt's side.

He lay back on the narrow bed and stared at the ceiling, listening to the drip of condensation somewhere in the walls.