“Wow, you discovered another new slime?” said Hudom.
As usual, we were exchanging reports of our morning over lunch. I had just told him about my accelerated hexing course and the new curse slime.
“That’s not all,” I said. “Lord Rosenberg told me about something called a miasma slime.” Recalling the Starving Gallows, I’d theorized with Rosenberg that there may be slimes that consumed cursed energy.
That’s when he told me that, in locations where cursed energy was especially dense, there were rare sightings of miasma slimes. “Warlocks are recommended to eliminate miasma slimes because they can spread cursed energy, and that is proof that they actually exist. Do not expect to find one easily, but there is at least a chance. However, even if you find one, it may be difficult to transfer the miasma slime outside of the area you find it in. Expect to go through some red tape or need to obtain a special permission.”
Cursed energy was a danger to anyone who came in contact with it, so all that made sense. Still, there wasn’t a rule against keeping a miasma slime as a familiar. There’s no way that anyone had ever attempted to keep a monster that oozed cursed energy as a pet. It would even be too dangerous to use for some kind of crime. As a result, there was no need for a law to prevent keeping one. Loophole or no, that meant that it was legal for me to have a miasma slime. Besides, I believed it would be possible for me to evolve a slime into a miasma slime using the cursed energy of this mountain without having to hunt all over the world for one.
I wouldn’t get to test that evolution for a while, though. First, I needed to find a slime that preferred to consume cursed energy. I tried presenting the cursed energy I had siphoned from the soil to it, but the curse slime didn’t take to it. Even if it had, I wouldn’t try to evolve it until after I thoroughly observed it. Based on how cursed energy worked and what reactions it caused, along with my experience from evolving poison slimes, I expected that any slime incompatible with cursed energy would most likely die. I sometimes fed my slimes poisons out of curiosity, but I’d never kill a slime for no reason. Cursed energy was still magical energy, so I expected miasma slimes to be close to curse slimes in the evolutionary tree of slimes. For the time being, I planned to find more slimes that liked Dark magic to evolve into dark slimes, so I could experiment with whether they would evolve into a miasma slime or another slime altogether.
Depending on whether the miasma slime emitted cursed energy perpetually or only when hunting or defending itself, there was a chance a miasma slime could help store or cleanse cursed energy by ingesting it.
“I will need to have appropriate safety protocols prepared,” I said. “Even though I have this testing ground, I don’t want to cause unnecessary damage. I would also like to hone my skills of dealing with cursed energy myself in the time it takes for those conditions to line up.”
“Good idea,” said Mizelia the tiger beastkin. “We don’t know about cleansing or hexes, but we did sense something bad in the land.”
The other beastkin and Jeff nodded in agreement.
“That’s how my morning went,” I said. “How was the mountain?”
“We focused on looking for parts of the mountain better suited for your projects,” Jeff said, referencing the flatland Cilia and the others had mentioned yesterday. “Like yesterday, the only living things we saw were bugs and small animals. Nothing big or dangerous. It’s no place for hunting, but the mountain’s safe save for that cursed land.”
“We weren’t sure how much work you were going to do on the mountain, but there’s plenty of room for farms and buildings too,” said Miya. “When it comes to securing water, Hudom has an idea.”
“An idea?” I asked. Did he find a river?
“I did find a creek, but it isn’t too deep and it runs too far from the flatland. We could secure drinking and household water from it, but it’s a little inconvenient. We were saying that, if you want to irrigate any farms, we should dig a well too,” Hudom said.
“So you must have found potential spots for a well,” I said.
“Right. There are all varieties of trees growing on this mountain, and one of them is called baobark. It’s a tree that stores a lot of water in its trunk, and they grow in water-dense soil. They’re famous indicators for water mains.”
While I tucked in that new knowledge, Hudom went on to add that they had already found a group of baobark. They were quick with work as always. I still hadn’t decided how much infrastructure I was going to build into the mountain, but if the creek and baobark cluster were separated, I wouldn’t have to worry about water. I could definitely dig up irrigation with magic, and probably the well too.
“When it comes to maintaining the mountain, we should trim the underbrush and take some saplings and branches. Not only does it give away that the mountain has been neglected, wildfires will spread more rapidly,” Hudom said.
“Right... We do need to prepare for mountain fires.” I hadn’t thought of that. If it was only about appearances, I could give the excuse that I hadn’t had control of the mountain for long. But if there were a fire that caused casualties, nothing I could say after the fact would do any good. I’d have to make the best preparations I could to mitigate any potential disasters. One thing I could do right away was to build a firebreak. If I recalled correctly, Japanese law stipulated a firebreak with a width of six to thirty meters where all trees were cut down to stop a wildfire when it came to it.
“Oh, Hudom. If the baobark trees retain water, are they more resistant to fire? If they can be transplanted, I was thinking of lining the paths we build with them to protect them from potential fires,” I said.