Mushrooms

Qu pulsed her mana out into the area around her and tried to will the air around her to move and change to her thoughts. Now in theory it sounded all well and good, but in practice it was extremely hard and the best she could do was get a gentle breeze to push against her face.

Soon enough she had been at it for hours, and she continued to do so until she nearly ran out of energy and her body felt heavy. Her affinity was slowly but surely raising, but it would take a while until she was able to rank it up.

Qu eventually grew bored waiting for her energy to fill back up, so she did the next best thing, she switched form to one she had not used yet, she switched into her new air elemental human form.

After transforming she tried to have a good look at herself, her hair colour changed to blond, and seemed to move slightly in some unknown breeze, her eyes also turned ever so slightly grey and dulled.

After changing into this form, she then got straight back into manipulating the air around her. The air reacted much more strongly, and she was able to get the gust of wind to blow against her more consistently.

Now that she had the stabilisation period under way, she chose to get herself back up from the hard ground and go exploring, she was looking to find really anything, be it herb, food or even animals to hunt.

She walked through the forest easily dodging the branches and roots in her way. She plucked random plants as she walked through the forest, but after inspecting them she found them to be different types of weeds and dropped them back down.

Eventually however, she did find something in the forest, fused to the bark of a tree a large mushroom, its stalk as thick as her arm and the cap dark purple with large with a spiked top. This mushroom was nothing like she had ever seen before, the forest itself seemed to be devoid of mushroom anyway.

Qu ran her finger up the stalk of the mushroom, it felt like rubber. She then pressed her hand against the cap, unlike the stalk it felt spongy and compressed under the weight of her hand. She then began to examine the bark that the mushroom was attached to, it seemed to have completely fused with it, like they were both one and the same despite the direct differences between them.

Qu was mostly fascinated with the sheer size of the mushroom; it was just so much larger than the few she had seen. She wanted to figure out just how the mushroom had gotten so big, was it just the species of mushroom, or did something happen to it.

Qu glared down at the mushroom, this time trying to focus on the mana inside of it with her mana sense ability. And what she saw was indeed rather weird. It seemed the mushroom was pulling mana from the tree to sustain itself, but that was to be expected, the strange thing was that it seemed to switch the type of mana. The mana in trees and plants were almost always glaring green, but this mushroom seemed to switch this out into a dark, near black mana.

Now while Qu was aware of mana being able to be broken down or even recombined, she had never seen it in action, and she never expected to see it come from a plant. So Qu tried something else, she put her hand against the bark and tried to push air mana straight into it. She felt mush resistance while doing it but eventually she seemed to get a small amount of mana flowing into it.

She then followed the mana running through the tree with her eyes, eventually it circled around to the mushroom in which it pulled some of her mana into it. She then witnessed as the mana began to change, turning darker and greener while keeping some undertones of the original colour. But what got her attention even more was that the mushroom itself began to react, it began to spring up and down and the spiked tip started to slightly open. And from the tip green mist poured out, until the newly transformed mana all disappeared.

Qu walked towards the mist and took a breath to see what it would do, her body felt ever so slightly harder to move and her mind felt slower. From this she concluded, it seemed that the mushroom was able to gather mana and transform it into some sort of paralysing poison, furthermore it seemed that different types of mana seemed to be transformed in different ways and as such used in different ways.

This mushroom was fascinating in so many ways, and Qu wished she could take it with her, but it wasn't like she could uproot a tree and carry it with her. So, with that she took a mental note of where the tree was located so that she could play around with It another time, and as a goodbye present to the mushroom she placed her hand directly onto the stalk of the mushroom and pushed as much mana into it as she could muster, she pushed so much into it that the spiked tip of the mushroom completely opened up like a blooming flower and continuously poured the smoke out from it body.

Qu quickly escaped from the area in fear that there could be enough poison in the air to paralyse her, she had no clue the mushroom would react in such a way from that amount of mana, she had hoped it might have slowly released it, or even stored it.

Qu eventually found her way back to the tree she had slept in many times before, but this time she saw an intruder. A deer was curled up sleeping in her spot, but this deer was different. Its antlers were made up of large spiralling stalks of mushrooms splitting off and forming caps in the rough shape of a normal deer's antlers.

The day was only getting more and more peculiar, first the large mushroom attached to the tree and now a seemingly infected deer. She checked the creature's mana like she did with the previous mushroom, and it seemed that this one was taking excess mana from the deer to fuel its own growth, but in such a delicate way it doesn't harm the host.

It just could not be a naturally growing species of fungus, for these mushrooms that she had seen to work in such specific ways tailored perfectly for the host, it had to have been artificially created and/or fused with these things.

Qu looked around the area with her mana sense on and eventually she found another mushroom, these ones smaller, attached to flower, seemingly using the stem and growing instead of the flower itself. Qu uprooted the flower and kept it.

One thing was certain the further she seemed to head into the forest, the more of these mushrooms seemed to appear. Which only made her question who or what could have done this and how did they manage to infect such a large space in so little time.

But before she tracked down who was doing this, she wanted to deal with the deer in her sleeping spot, infected or no it was in her home, and a creature to eat and hopefully transform into was always an added bonus.