Chapter 38: White Wood 4

“That’s all?” Reysha asked looking at the fine she had just been given for her fleeing the payments on her debt. After her little brawl she had walked up to the counter and pretty much immediately been told to seek out a higher official in the building. Not the Guild Branch Master himself, her case wasn’t nearly important enough to bother that man, but pretty high up nevertheless.

The reason for her question was the number on the fine, much lower than what she expected. She had left the dungeon with one gold coin in her possession, which had since translated into 90 silver pieces, from her buying a meal, boots and the crossing back over onto the main continent. The fine she was staring at demanded twenty of those. Sure, that was a couple of nights and meals at an inn of satisfying quality, with clean beds and good ingredients, but compared to what she had expected she basically got away with a slap on her wrist.

“That is all,” the official stated, a nice-looking young man with glasses on his nose and in a set of fine clothes. His lanky body and pale skin made it clear that he was only working at the guild, but himself couldn’t be called an adventurer. Being pale on a world of endless summer was pretty difficult in the first place, he had to spend a lot of time indoors.

“Peachy,” Reysha had a giant grin on her face, “Who are you again? I like you. I will remember you.”

“Lanshe, but I am married so please keep your flirting to a minimum,” the official joked and the tiger girl made a mental note not to stab this guy if she ever felt like running wild inside this building. “Would you like to pay now or later?”

In answer, Reysha pulled up her velvet bag and put it on the table. Reaching into the pocket dimension it represented, her hands magically found the item she was searching for. A single silver coin left the bag and was put on the table. “Really should have this in a smaller bag inside this one, shouldn’t I?” she asked as she went through the unnecessary process of repeating that motion 19 more times.

“As long as you don’t put another spatial bag into this one,” Lanshe pointed out. It was a very basic piece of knowledge that forcing a piece of permanent dimension bending magic into another piece of dimension bending magic would cause both items to disappear and take whatever was inside them with them. Although strong artefacts and items have been known to resist attempts at removal through that method. That and certain specializations of Mages had access to dimensional spells and through them made recovery possible, although the exact means and reliability varied immensely.

“Duh,” Reysha rolled her eyes and the pile of money on the table reached its peak. After taking and counting the coins again, Lanshe grabbed an envelope, marked it accordingly to purpose, put the coins inside, sealed it with some wax, and then put the whole thing away. “Can we get to my actual problem now?” she asked, pulling her eyes lids wide open between index finger and thumb. The greyed sclera was obvious even without that gesture.

“Sure, sure,” the official rose from his seat. To him, this was a workday like any other. Reysha wasn’t the first adventurer with a strong personality who fled from having to work as a housemaid or another form of normal labour for a year to shoulder her debt and she sure as hell wouldn’t be the last. Most of those people returned with their tail between their legs (literally in the case of many of the more animalistic species), some died and even fewer managed to make enough cash to justify that behaviour.

The guild wasn’t too harsh on that last group, as they were clearly promising in many regards and an investment that returned was much better than a dead investment. Too many of those would lead to increased rates on the loans, to fewer adventurers, and ultimately to a death spiral in the local business. Nobody wanted that.

Now, the fact that she claimed she had some odd disease was new, but as she was still able to beat an overgrown man and scratch trenches in his face had Lanshe not too worried about her physical condition. Whatever she suffered from was clearly not that pressing a matter. At least that’s what it looked like on the outside.

Together they walked into a part of the guild that was dedicated to treating the unorthodox wounds one may suffer fighting monsters. Although one wouldn’t quite guess it from the face alone, the Guild housed many facilities, as the building extended far back and even underground.

Diseases caused by the nasty bites of giant rats, some long-lasting poisons or anything else that needed a specialized healing class found its mending here. Groups that had a Priest tended to do badly with poisons, in contrast, groups with Druids were less apt at dealing with curses. All healing classes had their bonuses and their drawbacks. For what couldn’t be fixed in the dungeon, there was the guild hospital.

If there was an answer to Reysha’s condition, it should be there.

And ‘should’ was the operative word. After being guided to the arrangement of chambers, separated by lines of cloth, the tiger girl was examined by one person. Then, after that woman brooded over the list of symptoms for ten minutes, she pulled a second person to help. Then a third. Finally, the entire staff was looking at her symptoms and nobody had any idea what was going on with her. Luckily, she was the only case that needed attention currently.

“We will need to check the books on this one,” one of the higher ups finally decided. “You just wait there.”

Reysha, who had fallen back into a state of relative lethargy at that point, nodded sluggishly and, without anything else to do, curled up on the little bed she was assigned to and took a nap. Feline genes be blessed that she had the ability to sleep easily and shallowly through the hours.

Nevertheless, the sound of a heavy book slamming on a desk wasn’t how she wanted to wake up and she darted back upwards, ready to leap at the danger. When it turned out to be that first woman, she relaxed and went straight into yawning, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “Found it?” she asked, eyeing the book with interest.

It was old and clearly hadn’t seen much usage lately. Where the book hit the table a cloud of dust was dancing upwards and rose into a golden ray of the late-day sun that fell in through a high window. Aside from Reysha, her bed, the wooden desk, the doctor and Lanshe, who must have been notified to join them, nobody was around in the curtain chamber.

“Yes,” she answered, her happiness about having found the answer was subdued by being the bringer of bad news as she opened the book and simply read the bit about the condition she had never heard of before. “Noir, or Dungeon Poisoning Darkening Condition, short DPDC, is an extremely rare and extremely curious case. The symptoms can be summarized to a dulling of the senses and the character, followed after an immense spike during the initial stages of acquiring Noir. A much easier way to identify this condition is through darkened sclera or reddening nails.”

“That’s it!” Reysha shouted, way too loud and interrupting the doctor in her reading of the text. “Tell me the rest, come on, go on!”

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“Uhm… yes,” the healer cleared her throat and continued. “In my studies, I have only ever encountered three people that had this condition and it is therefore hard to accurately study. The common theme of acquirement seems to be a prolonged period, the lowest I was informed about were four weeks, during which they consumed nothing but raw meat from dungeon monsters and drank nothing but health fountain water.

“This is highly peculiar, as such cases normally lead to a simple overcharge of the person’s magic systems and death. Particularly the dungeon-exclusive magic of the healing fountain tends to mess with people when drunk in high quantities. Normal adventurer’s offset these effects through a combination of their own rations and cooking, as both these effectively remove the dungeon’s natural influence on the ingredients, or at least lessens them to a safe degree. For further information, I cite the work of Rateruskus on the basis of dungeon deadliness.

“People affected by Noir didn’t have these luxuries for whatever reason and also survived that diet. What sets these people apart from the normal people is unknown. From my interviews with all three individuals, I can confirm that all of them named an awakening savagery at the start of those testing weeks, so it might be related to a certain state of mind.”

So far, Reysha followed and she enthusiastically nodded. Much of it fit what she knew and what had happened to her. It was the great choice of either dying by hunger or by poisoning that had made her take the gamble, as the latter sounded generally more pleasant. Before finding Apexus she had ripped and torn her way through the corridors basically naked. Savage was definitely the word she would describe herself with at those moments and one she desperately wanted to get back to. The dullness was a terrible weight on her formerly colourful life, like sensing the world through a sheet of paper. She yearned to devour something that tasted again and get her brains screwed out after a bit of a massacre.

“Whatever the case, once the change began their eyes began to grey and, with varying degrees of delay afterwards, their nails to redden. They all describe a lack of worry at the changes, a continued need to devour monster meat and to…” the woman hesitated for a second, “pleasure themselves furiously as often as they could took precedent. All senses were heightened, a condition that quickly reversed once outside.

“The reason for that are, once again, speculative. It seems easy, however, to conclude the meat and the water as the cause. Once the ravenous hunger was no longer being fed and the affected returned to civilization, Noir’s effects could be asserted. Of the three specimen I encountered, one of them went through a rehabilitation period afterwards…”

Now that was incredibly important to Reysha’s interest. If Apotho had said the truth, then there should have been no cure.

“…successfully. Through starving themselves of the causes, the subject reported to eventually feel a subsiding in the dullness and finally a return to the normal state of senses. Both the colour of the nails and the eyes returned to normal. The process reportedly took 5 years.”

“5 YEARS?!” Reysha shouted out loud in disbelief. That was an absurd amount of time, almost a quarter of her life so far.

“That’s not all,” the healer had a sorry expression on her face, going on. “In addition to the lost time, the person reported a permanent loss of advanced magic skills and a detailed probing with all available tools revealed his level to be permanently stuck at 15.”

15 wasn’t a bad level at all, it was the level of a well-established Walker, somebody who frequented already discovered worlds to scout small changes, solve local monster problems or crawl the dungeons for money and loot. That was, however, about all they would ever accomplish. Reysha herself judged herself to be level 8 at this point, a proper test would reveal that to be true or not. Either way, that drawback were immense. “What about the other two?” she asked, hoping for some better news.

Unwillingly, the healer read out. “A second subject was in the end stages of the process of rehabilitation while I was interviewing him. He was inside a cell, having been locked away by the locals due to his primal behaviour following each dungeon visit. It is the third subject that is most interesting, as they continued to eat dungeon monsters to that day. Their sclera had assumed a completely black colour and nails were crimson red. That person had a voracious appetite and had spend years in dungeons following their discovery of the condition.

“From them, I learned the most about Noir. The heightened state can be acquired through simple continuous consumption of monster meat. It evidently had strengthening effects, as the person had a physical strength quite impressive for their level and announced class, a Scout of all things. So impressive in fact that I happen to believe that Noir is some sort of special condition class improvement that comes with a sort of curse, much like Darkspeakers and Diviners. That remains, as much else, speculation, however. This third subject also reported the effects lessened once their transformation was complete, although it never vanished completely.

“I can only conclude this report with Noir being an unreliable condition that we know too little about. It happens infrequently and its onset cannot be observed due to the way it starts with cornered individuals. Testing on this matter would be inhumane and must thusly remain in the theoretical realm, as sad as it makes my curious mind.”

Reysha sat there in silence. “That piece of shit did lie to me,” she mumbled, “First he had me look at some disturbing shit and then he lied to me, the massive ass, what an ass.” She cursed around for a few more minutes before finally announcing, “Well, thanks, I will be on my way.”

“Just like that?” Lanshe asked. “Don’t you want me to arrange a nice room for you to begin the rehabilitation process?”

“What? No,” Reysha gave him a wide, unnerving smile that had the bureaucrat instinctively take a step backwards. “I will go to the nearest dungeon and sink my teeth into everything that looks remotely tasty,” she licked her lips greedily and chuckled. What even was that question of his? Like she would sit on her ass for five years, lethargy overcoming her periodically, with a body that could find pleasure in neither sex nor food. Much better to just embrace the rampage and live on a trail of monster blood as far as she was concerned. Wasn’t even a choice really.

“Uhm… well…” both Lanshe and the doctor seemed immensely uncomfortable with the prospect of having a mildly insane tiger girl running around as a Noir Rogue, a class they had no idea what it could do aside from the fact that it was somehow better than the norm at the cost of the individuals civility. “Maybe you can tell us more about that person that lied to you?” he tried to change the topic to keep her around, hoping she would change her mind.

“No,” Reysha stated and walked away. Not that she was planning to hide Apotho and Hemle’s demise at his hands from anyone, but she had no intention to get herself involved any deeper in that mess, neither did she want to be questioned for hours on something that was clearly some important matter.

She would write a letter and drop it anonymously somewhere and then the officials could deal with that problem on their own. Reysha just knew there was a creepy old man with insane powers sealed in the woods and she didn’t desire to know more about it than the sealed part.

Currently, her predicament of not having eaten something that didn’t, at best, taste like a piece of rancid butter in almost three weeks and not having had sex in the same span of time was a much bigger point of concern to her.

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