Chapter 3: The Garden of White Whispers
Althea Magic Academy. Present (14 months after the expulsion)
Charlotte stood in the Academy gardens, seeking a bit of fresh air to relieve the constant pressure in her chest. However, Althea's vibrant and perfect green, pruned with precision magic and tended by hundreds of servants, now felt artificial to her—almost plastic.
William's letters detailed an outside world where, despite the difficulties of the journey, everything seemed to be fine, tinged with a rustic and noble beauty. But the physical state of the parchment she held did not match that story. For any high-born noble, educated in the strictest etiquette, it would be unimaginable to send a missive on paper with a rough texture and slightly frayed edges, no matter how far they were from civilization.
"What is a lie and what is the truth..." Charlotte murmured, her voice barely a whisper lost among the scent of enchanted roses.
With careful hands, almost afraid to break the spell of ignorance, she extracted the third scroll from the oak box. This time, the paper released a subtle aroma, a sweet and intoxicating fragrance reminiscent of freshly harvested honey and wild flowers after the rain. That trace of scent, so different from that of the Academy, made her genuinely smile for the first time in days before she began to read. The calligraphy remained perfect, but the strokes were lighter, with elegant and fluid curves, as if William's hand had been floating over the paper, free from any weight.
[Fragment of Letter 3]
Date: Two weeks after arrival in Xitalia.
"My dear Charlotte, I find myself exploring the surroundings of the regional capital, a place where nature seems to have decided to show its most poetic side. If Althea is the kingdom of the golden sun, Xitalia is, without a doubt, the kingdom of the silver moon. I have discovered a secret valley that the locals call, with a reverent whisper, 'The Garden of Whispers'.
Imagine, sister, entire meadows covered by a thin layer of white snow that never melts, even under the most intense sun; flowers that seem carved from the purest crystal, reflecting light in fractured rainbows, and a brilliant dust that floats in the air as if they were diurnal fireflies captured by a playful breeze. The people here possess a charming and enviable custom: they lie under the silver willows to take long naps, surrendering to a sleep so deep and restorative that neither the roar of the wind nor the passing of time manages to wake them. It is an absolute peace, so enveloping, that it makes me wonder why we wasted so much time in the noisy, empty, and superficial ballrooms of the Empire, chasing shadows of happiness".
The Reality: The Landscape of Decay
14 months ago. Xitalia Lowlands.
I walked along the stony path that bordered the border city, moving away from the noise of the taverns and the greedy gazes, venturing into the imposing forest that rose to the east like a natural barrier. The air here was different—heavier, with a metallic and sour taste on the tongue. As I advanced, the landscape changed alarmingly: the vibrant green gradually disappeared, as if life itself were being drained from the earth, replaced by a monochromatic palette of dead grays and ashen whites.
"Damn it... this is worse than I remembered," I muttered through gritted teeth, stopping to observe a large granite rock flanking the path.
I approached to examine it. Even the granite, known for its hardness, was veined with white and fibrous threads; fungal hyphae that, with a terrifying persistence, were devouring the stone itself, dissolving the minerals to feed an invisible underground network. The "Garden of Whispers" I described with such poetry to Charlotte was, in reality, an open-air biological graveyard.
In its own macabre way, the place had a "pretty" beauty, almost hypnotic. The trees didn't have a single living leaf; their twisted trunks and skeletal branches were completely enveloped in a thick layer of white, velvety mold that shone with a dim, almost ghostly light under Xitalia's perpetually gray sky. Every time a gust of icy wind swept through the forest, a rain of spores—my "brilliant dust" and "diurnal fireflies"—descended in silent swirls, covering everything like toxic snow that burned the throat and lungs of any living being that dared to breathe it without protection.
"Great... even the air tries to kill you out here," I murmured, my voice muffled by the cloth.
I urgently adjusted the thick piece of cloth I had prepared previously, impregnated with a mixture of pungent medicinal herbs, over my nose and mouth. Without this precarious barrier, my lungs would become a mushroom farm in less than an hour, and my adventure would end before it even began.
On the way, I crossed paths with a group of villagers. They walked in single file toward the center of the valley, like pilgrims in a silent procession. They did not speak; they did not look at each other; their movements were slow, rhythmic, and heavy, almost like a funeral dance. They were mostly elderly, with tattered clothes and a vacant gaze fixed on nothingness. What was most disturbing was not their rags, but what grew on them: from their necks, behind their ears, and sprouting from their knuckles, small white mushrooms peeked out, vibrating with the energy of the mother fungus.
However, their faces showed no trace of pain, fear, or distress. On the contrary, they smiled with an empty happiness, an absolute bliss that chilled the blood. It was the first phase of the infection: the fungus flooded the host's brain with dopamine so that they would not offer resistance while their body was consumed and turned into fertilizer.
"Hey, stranger," one of them called out to me, a man whose skin looked like tree bark, sitting at the foot of a rotting willow whose wood crumbled like wet paper at the touch. "Are you coming to rest too? The Garden is very welcoming today. The peace is... wonderful. Join us".
I looked at the old man. His legs no longer moved; they were literally taking root in the damp earth, merging with the network of white filaments that covered the ground like a carpet. It was not a "charming nap" as I had lied to my sister. The fungus was digesting him alive, extracting every nutrient, every drop of life, to feed the central core of the plague.
"Not yet, old man," I replied, forcing a calm I didn't feel, while my hand instinctively closed around the hilt of my sword. "I'm just admiring the view. Enjoy your rest".
I continued forward, leaving the doomed behind. In the heart of the valley, visibility was reduced to a few meters due to the density of the spores in suspension, creating a white and suffocating mist. The "silver willows" I mentioned in my letter were actually colossal fungal structures, deformed and gigantic stalks that rose toward the sky to release constant clouds of acidic pollen.
To anyone else, this place would be the end of the world—a biological nightmare. To me, it was a scene I remembered perfectly from my player days. I wondered for a fleeting moment why, in this new body, I only kept the technical knowledge of the game and not my personal memories of "before". Who was I before becoming William? Did I have a family? But it was no time for philosophy. I knew for certain that behind that white "snow" lay the entrance to the underground ruins where the original fungus was parasitizing the remains of a Transcendent—a being of incalculable power.
I stopped before a young girl kneeling in the middle of a field of these "crystal flowers". They were chalice-shaped mushrooms, translucent, fragile, and of a lethal beauty. She stroked the petals with infinite tenderness, as if they were the most precious thing in the world, while the spores stuck to her skin and dark hair like fake diamonds.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?" she whispered without looking at me, her voice sounding like it came from a deep dream.
"It is," I lied, feeling a knot in my stomach as I saw the thin white line already encircling her pupils—an unmistakable sign that the fungus was already claiming her nervous system.
I continued walking, mentally mapping the paths that led toward the supposed lake where the mother fungus resided. Apparently, according to my knowledge of the game, this thing attacked passively in the outer zones; therefore, I could theoretically walk along the peripheral paths without being directly attacked by the hyphae, as long as I didn't show hostility or use magic.
The closer I got to the center, the trees changed drastically. Before, they were grayish trees covered in mold, but now the original vegetation had completely disappeared. What rose before me were structures of pure fungi—gigantic and twisted, imitating tree forms in a grotesque way. There was nothing but fungi; the ground, the "rocks," everything was a unified fungal mass. If I got closer, I would definitely enter the active danger area.
Crack!
A strident sound resonated inside my own body. The Cursed Chains creaked violently around my bones. I felt the little environmental mana my body tried to absorb stagnate, blocked by the curse's reaction to the presence of a rival energy. The pain was sharp, but it served as certainty: in the center, there must be something with a power concentration high enough to make the chains of a Goddess react so aggressively.
I decided to move away from the center for now and return to the edges of the infection to run some tests. I took out a couple of objects I had managed to store in my small magical inventory before the expulsion. I tried high-proof alcohol on a small colony of fungi; it reacted by bubbling but lacked the lethality required to be an effective weapon. When I tried to break a mushroom with my gloved hand, it released a defensive cloud of spores before quickly withering. Apparently, these organisms had a rudimentary nervous system that felt damage as if they were animals.
Suddenly, the silence of the forest broke. An erratic, heavy, and fast trot was heard approaching along the path. I instinctively hid behind a moss-covered rock formation, as far from the road as possible. From my hiding spot, I sighted the creature: a sizeable boar. But it wasn't a normal animal. Two large, pale purple mushrooms grew directly from its back, pulsing with a sickly light. The creature moved spasmodically, as if fighting its own body, its eyes bloodshot and spores coming out of its snout with every snort. Wow, the infection in the local fauna was more advanced than I thought.
The creature stopped, sniffing the air. I knew it was close. I carefully grabbed a thick vine hanging nearby and quickly tied a couple of heavy stones to the ends to create an improvised bola. I waited for the right moment and threw it toward the creature's hind legs. The bola hit the legs, but the infected boar's brute force was superior; it broke the vine like sewing thread and let out a furious squeal, turning its head in all directions.
Damn, it didn't work. I crouched lower in my hiding spot, holding my breath. Apparently, its detection was precarious; the fungus affected its primary senses. The boar passed by, ramming a nearby tree in its confusion.
I waited, observing its patterns. On the fourth attempt at a blind charge, I saw my opportunity. I left my hiding spot in silence, using the trees as cover, and approached from behind. With a quick and precise movement—the result of years of muscular training—I drove the black iron sword directly into the base of the skull, severing the connection between the brain and the spine. The beast fell with a thud, convulsing a couple of times before becoming still.
I approached the corpse with caution. Now that I thought about it, this meat, due to the fungal infection, was lethal for human consumption—a slow poison. But its blood... the blood of a creature infected in this early stage could serve to distill a powerful paralyzing poison if treated correctly. Additionally, the tusks, although deformed, could be used for craftsmanship or even as components for basic weapons, although I doubted this animal fell into the category of "magical beast" per se, since its power came from the parasite and not from its own core.
Just in case, and with my stomach churning from the pungent smell emanating upon opening it, I cut open its chest with a clean slice. I searched among the modified organs, but, as I expected, it had no magic stone. With a sigh of resignation, I proceeded to extract the tusks and collect a vial of blood, storing everything in my magic warehouse.
El almacén was the last gift from my parents before everything collapsed. It was an intricate rune design on my left wrist that allowed access to a small dimensional space. Normally, only high-ranking nobles could afford to pay magicians specialized in inscriptions to create a storage tattoo. Some went further and created tattoos that imitated their families' emblems as a symbol of status. Mine was discreet—a simple band of runes that was now my lifeline.
Finishing with the collection, I cleaned my sword on the animal's fur and walked back along the path to where the girl with the crystal mushroom was. She remained in the same position, lost in her toxic adoration. I took a wool cloak from my inventory and, being careful not to touch her directly, threw it over her shoulders to protect her a bit from the cold, although I knew it was a useless gesture. I secured the cloth covering my mouth, making sure the filter was still effective.
I sat at a safe distance, took out my notebook and charcoal, and began sketching the landscape. In my mind, with the coldness of an editor rewriting reality, I transformed every pustule into a pearl, every trace of rot into a metaphor for rebirth, and the toxic mist into a veil of mystery for my next letter to Charlotte. It was a cruel and necessary irony: I was surrounded by the most selfish and destructive life form in this world—a plague that left nothing in its path—and yet, under the right light and with the right words, the horror could seem like a work of art.
I put the notebook away and touched the hilt of my black iron sword. The cold, hard steel was the only real thing—the only thing I could trust in this garden of white lies.
