Governing the World and Benefiting the People
To begin with the conclusion: Arturo and the knights carried out the mission entrusted to them superbly.
Armed with devout faith and outstanding horsemanship, they weaponized their superior mobility to scrape up every mushroom that could be called a mushroom, and Asty personally tasted each one to confirm its toxicity.
Of course, measured purely by the quantity of her divine power, Asty was little better than a fledgling nun. She possessed neither toxin immunity nor any self-detoxification function, and so she had to endure the same horrific agony as any other idiot who went around eating poisonous mushrooms.
Headaches, stomachaches, vomiting, convulsions, nerve paralysis, fever, respiratory distress, catastrophic organ damage—and even temporary comas.
The side effects she suffered far outnumbered those she managed to avoid, and there were more than a few moments when she would have genuinely died if not for Rebecca.
Yet that road of penance was not without meaning.
Arturo and the knights threw themselves into Asty's orders with genuine fervor, employing every means at their disposal to secure even one more variety of mushroom.
Entering the forest themselves to check the bases of trees was the bare minimum. They risked searching caves, and even paid steep prices to woodcutters and gamekeepers to purchase various mushrooms that simply could not be found in this season.
At the end of that frenzied all-in on mushroom coins, the varieties presented to Asty exceeded a full fifty, and among them were quite a few that could be used as food.
...About ten kinds, roughly.
One might argue that recovering even twenty percent was something, but the real problem was that Asty had failed to properly distinguish the edible mushrooms.
In the twenty-first century, the criterion for classifying a mushroom as edible is that its toxicity is removed or reduced to a level harmless to the human body when sufficiently heated.
Therefore, among mushrooms that cause trouble when eaten raw, quite a few are still classified as edible—
...Naturally, Asty did not know this fact.
So she consumed every mushroom raw, and half of the edible ones they had gone to such lengths to find were judged poisonous and eliminated from the candidates.
The one silver lining was that all five varieties eliminated that way were species impossible to cultivate.
Ugh. The looks alone are already disgusting, and the taste is even worse...!
One more was then struck from the candidates for its bizarre appearance and flavor, leaving only four mushrooms in the running.
Button mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, cauliflower mushrooms, and even truffles of completely unknown origin.
Every last one was a mushroom whose name and appearance Asty already knew. One had to wonder why she had bothered eating the poisonous ones at all.
"Oh. If I only eat a little, just my eyes go blind."
No—strictly speaking, it had not been entirely meaningless.
She had been able to determine exactly what side effects occurred upon consuming specific mushrooms.
If asked what practical use that knowledge had, she would have had nothing particular to say, but new knowledge is precious, after all.
Unwilling to admit that her own grueling ordeal had been nothing more than a grand waste of effort, Asty immediately summoned the librarian and ordered the compilation of a mushroom encyclopedia.
Thanks to that, the paper industry workers who received yet another new order of work let out cries of joy, and Elder Pates—who had been attempting to freeload on his salary under the pretext of running the library—was able to take up his pen with a glad heart.
It was an act of extreme elder abuse carried out under the noble pretext of preserving knowledge and minimizing loss of life.
"Rebecca unnie. Rebecca unnie."
"Yes, Saintess."
"I can't see in front of me."
"I imagine so."
"Could you heal me?"
"No."
Of course, to Rebecca, either outcome was of no concern.
Having confirmed that the classification of those damned mushrooms was complete, she firmly shook her head against the malicious Saintess who was once again demanding detoxification.
She claimed she had already found all the edible mushrooms—so what sort of additional experiments was she planning?
This could no longer be tolerated.
Until now it had been work to save the young lambs from starvation, so Rebecca had followed reluctantly while voicing her complaints. From this point forward, however, it was nothing more than an experiment to satisfy Asty's intellectual curiosity.
As the Lantern Bearer ordered by the goddess to guard the Saintess, allowing her protectee to suffer for something so trivial was no different from committing a truly terrible sin.
Even if it was at the person's own request.
"If I heal you, you'll just go eat poisonous mushrooms again and collapse. Until you promise to throw away every last one of those damned mushrooms, I absolutely will not heal you."
So this was an entirely natural condition.
If she was not going to continue this self-destructive experiment, those useless poisonous mushrooms could all be burned without issue.
"...Alright. I'll call the painters to draw pictures for the encyclopedia, then dispose of them all."
Asty no longer insisted and obediently accepted the demand.
It was not that she had been particularly moved by Rebecca's concern for her, nor that she had been cowed by the cute threat of refusing to restore her sight.
She simply could not bring herself to say out loud that she had been thinking of making poison with the remaining poisonous mushrooms.
"A wise decision. Please do not touch such dangerous matters any longer."
After a brief hesitation, Asty decided to bury the truth, and Rebecca failed to notice it.
The Order's Lantern Bearer, dispatched to protect the Saintess from the harsh world, succeeded without even realizing it in protecting the world from the schemes of the wicked Saintess.
"Sob sob. My precious Smurf friends..."
The bloodless, tearless Rebecca unnie eventually burned my precious mushrooms at the stake without a shred of mercy.
The fly agaric and the toadstool with their impressive red caps, along with various nameless mushrooms and all the rest.
A few varieties with relatively weak toxicity I managed to save by insisting they could still be used as food, but everything else was engulfed in flames and vanished without leaving even a handful of ash.
The dream of a mushroom kingdom accompanied by lethal doses of deadly poison was crushed before it had even begun.
To trample so cruelly upon the dream of a girl who had not even undergone her coming-of-age ceremony—such an extremely heinous atrocity that even the demonkin of Balkan, said to be so wicked, would be appalled.
"I'll remember this...!"
I drew an X with both hands and offered a prayer for the repose of the dead mushrooms.
Then I kicked the mushroom cultivation kit covered in white mold into the fire pit.
Model No. 24 failed to withstand the proliferation of mold and met a miserable death.
It was the moment when the first challenge toward large-scale mushroom farming ended in utter failure.
"Did it fail?"
"Yes. Every single one died without exception."
Once Rebecca unnie's interference had completely halted the poisonous mushroom research plan and created an environment where I could focus solely on edible mushroom cultivation, I immediately hired woodcutters and carpenters to produce various forms of prototypes.
The type of wood used for cultivation, humidity, the amount of sawdust, whether it had been sterilized, and even the size of the mushrooms to use as seed stock.
Flaunting my knowledge as a modern person without restraint, I placed dozens of prototypes in different environments and waited for them to grow—
and as you can see, they all perished before any mushrooms even appeared.
Mushrooms planted in undried logs rotted before anything could be done. Logs using unsterilized sawdust were completely covered in mold. Mushrooms stuffed into sterilized sawdust failed to survive, perhaps from lack of nutrients.
And since not a single prototype managed to sprout from the mushroom scraps stuffed into them, every variable I had set under the assumption of successful cultivation became meaningless.
Tsk. As expected, without enough information you have no choice but to go through trial and error.
The circumstances were different from when I made the spinning machine.
The reason I had been able to produce a hydraulic spinning machine that worked—however clumsily—without major trial and error was because in my tiresome previous life I had experience handling similar things.
But what I knew about mushroom cultivation was only the fact that some mushrooms could be farmed, plus partial knowledge gained through media, and even that had weathered over time because I had never considered it important to me.
So in the end, with only the barest guidelines of uncertain reliability and the belief that I would succeed someday, I would have to check and control countless variables one by one and pour time and effort into it until the day mushrooms bloomed...
...Should I dump it on Elder Pates?
Suddenly a wicked thought raised its head in my mind.
But it did not seem like a particularly bad idea.
If I could advance the timeline or improve efficiency with my future knowledge, that would be one thing—but this was just pure hard labor of changing one letter at a time in a fixed manual and bashing my head against it until it worked, wasn't it?
Our Order was not some gathering of druids, and a Saintess could not be tied down solely to mushroom cultivation. Finding a suitable person to take full charge of the field work while I simply set the direction would be far more efficient.
The problem was that I had already entrusted Elder Pates with the heavy duty of compiling the encyclopedia, so dumping new work on him felt a bit...
Why are there so few talented people?
Rebecca unnie was a bodyguard, so pass. Matilda unnie was already busy beyond measure. Arisa was a child, and Arturo was a swordsman.
It would be nice if a talented person with excellent scholarly attainments, overflowing enthusiasm to learn new things, and even surplus time would just pop up out of nowhere...
"Saintess! Saintess! I've drawn the blueprints for the new weapon you mentioned!"
There she is?
But why hasn't this princess gone home yet?