Spider Boss’s transformation was even more alarming than the baby spiders’ had been. It was now around the size of a watermelon, and its translucent wings now stretched out farther from its body, giving it a somewhat mystical, imposing appearance.
Despite being, y’know, a spider and all. Also, are you all gonna keep growing? How big are you gonna get?! Everything’s bigger in this world, from the fruit to the wolves. Wait, the basement level I found you guys in—it had much higher ceilings than the others. Ha ha ha... No way, right? Right?!
I decided to deal with the spider problem later. Right now, I needed to get the food storehouse up and running.
Before today, the only food I’d been eating—and therefore storing—had been meat. I’d outfitted one of the storerooms with a chilling spell, essentially turning it into a walk-in refrigerator. The idea had come to me after I’d accidentally installed the self-cleaning feature in my rock toilets. The toilet flushing itself had scared the crap out of me, but it had also taught me something: By pumping my mana into the rock while using Transform on it, the functions I visualized (like a self-cleaning feature, for instance) would keep working even after I finished casting the spell. With an image of my trusty refrigeration back home in Japan in mind, I’d poured mana into the rocky walls of one of the storerooms, resulting in a very handy walk-in fridge to store all the excess meat.
Today’s harvest hadn’t been limited to meat though. Now I had fruits and vegetables to deal with too—and a lot of them at that. If I simply chucked all the cabbage-like vegetables in the chilled storeroom, they’d lose any semblance of freshness long before I could eat them all. I briefly considered turning one of the other rooms into a freezer, but I was pretty sure that leafy vegetables didn’t take too well to being frozen. There was probably some household hack for storing leafy greens in a freezer without their quality being affected, but if there was, I didn’t know it.
It now fell to me to figure out a way to store my bountiful harvest without any impact on freshness. I started by removing everything from my bag, which was an incredibly strange experience in itself. It still looked like the same worn-out bag to me, which made pulling a market stall’s worth of produce from it all the more uncanny. Curious to see what would happen, I turned the bag upside down, resulting in an avalanche of fruits and vegetables.
I feel like a whole lot more came out than went in... Weird. I was sure I counted them pretty accurately. Oh well. I’ve got other problems to deal with right now.
I wanted to preserve freshness—in other words, I wanted to keep the fruits and vegetables in their current state indefinitely. Unfortunately, visualizing a lack of change wasn’t as simple as it sounded. I needed to figure out the right mental image, or I’d never be able to cast the spell.
But how do you imagine something being preserved? Chilled food isn’t gonna work—it looks exactly the same as it does at room temperature. Oh, what about hot food, then? With steam rising from it... Yep, that might work. So maybe a bowl of freshly cooked white rice— Oh, but what about a calendar? Maybe that’s a better way to capture the passage of time... Ugh. This is hard.
I went with the rice. What I really wanted was indefinite preservation, after all. A calendar flipping from 2018 to 2118 was still an indication of time passing—even if the food didn’t spoil in the process—but what I wanted was for time to stop entirely. Which probably meant something like—
“Chronostasis.”
A blinding light enveloped the room for an instant before fading away. Looking around revealed no obvious changes, so I would just have to wait and see if the spell had worked as intended.
Guess I’ll just leave it all in here for now... I really, really hope it worked.
I conjured up some roomy stone shelves and started loading the cabbage-like clusters neatly onto one. If the spell had worked, I’d be able to organize my supplies by type, rather than needing to keep track of what needed to be used first. Just to be on the safe side, I reinforced each shelf with an extra dose of Chronostasis too.
With the new shelving, the food storehouse was gradually starting to resemble something out of a high-end, high-turnover restaurant. It was still a little lacking variety-wise, but in terms of volume, I was more than satisfied with what we’d harvested in a single day. I was grateful to the baby spiders. Shocked, but grateful nonetheless.
I spent the rest of the day experimenting with my newly acquired ingredients. The greenish-yellow fruit’s flavor was somewhere between a lemon and an orange. When squeezed over a slice of meat, the juice gave the plain, heavy protein a surprisingly refreshing taste, bringing a tear to my eye. The cabbage-like leaves had tasted delicious on their own, but were even better when wrapped around a chunk of meat.
I’d give anything for some yakiniku sauce, though...
I peeled one of the greenish-blue fruits and was surprised to find that, despite being odorless when whole, it actually had a vibrantly bittersweet aroma.
Can’t hurt to taste it... Huh, it’s kinda like a strawberry? No, that’s not quite right... Hmm.
It was an unusual fruit, all in all, similar to an apple texture-wise but with a bittersweet scent and a flavor vaguely similar to strawberry.
It’s tasty...but it kinda makes my mouth confused.