Chapter 98: The Part Nobody Collected

Chapter 98: The Part Nobody Collected

Silas came back to the notice board after Sorel’s lecture and read the whole thing properly, standing to one side so the bell society could pin up a second, larger appeal.

Harrowglass Conservatory was an old cultivation facility half a day’s travel from the academy. Its outer sections had been cleared, surveyed, and used for supervised field exercises for years. The inner conservatory was restricted, and the notice said so twice, once in bold.

The exercise ran for two days and left in a little over two weeks. Its stated purpose was practical: navigation through a managed site, hazard identification, team tasks, and approved salvage collection. Applications were open to students from several classes, Rank One and above, with current field clearance. Near the bottom, he found something encouraging.

Selection and role assignment depend on demonstrated practical readiness, not Talent grade alone. Roles include survey, carrying, support, and collection.

A smaller sheet pinned beneath it set out the salvage terms. They were the academy’s standard ones, and he’d half known them already. Students could collect designated low-risk materials from marked areas, in approved quantities. Anything dangerous, protected, or restricted had to be reported and left alone. Collected materials belonged to the collector once logged and cleared.

He read that part twice. Then he looked at the map.

It was a simple printed plan. The great glass hall sat in the middle, shaded gray and stamped RESTRICTED. Around it, a ring of outer buildings: potting houses, a long propagation range, storage sheds, a boiler yard, paths in neat dotted lines. The open areas were left white. The closed ones were hatched.

On the east side, tucked between a storage shed and the outer wall, there was a small square marked service court. Half of it was white. The other half was hatched.

Silas stood very close to the paper.

He remembered Harrowglass the way he remembered most things from the game: unevenly. He had done a side task there in one playthrough, a dull one about clearing an old water channel so some later quest could use it. He’d skipped most of the dialogue. What he remembered was afterward. A merchant in the academy market had started selling silver-thread moss, Harrowglass-sourced, and he’d bought a stack of it to have incense made for a party member stuck at a cultivation wall. It had been expensive. It had worked. He’d gone back to that service court in a later run and found the moss growing along the channel, pale threads on gray stone, in a corner nobody else had bothered to look at.

He didn’t remember the quest giver’s name or how deep the channel ran. Someone might already have scraped the walls clean. Worse, the printed plan didn’t show whether the channel lay on the open side of the court or the hatched side.

So find out, he thought. Before you get excited about a picture of a shed.

"You’re reading that like it owes you money," Alden said.

Silas turned. Alden stood behind him with his sword across his back and a library book under his arm, looking at the notice over Silas’s shoulder.

"It might," Silas said.

Alden came up beside him and read it, lips moving slightly at practical readiness. "Harrowglass. Is that the old greenhouse place? Someone in my year went last spring. He said it smelled like a cellar full of tomatoes."

"That’s the one," Silas said.

"Huh." Alden studied the map. Silas watched his attention go straight to the dotted paths and the corners of the outer buildings, the way it had gone to the corners in Carrow Hall. "That’s not bad, actually. Uneven floors, things growing over the paths, nobody knowing where anything’s going to be. Osk keeps telling me I need more than a practice yard. Everything in a yard is flat."

"You’d apply?" Silas asked.

"I’d ask her first. Star Class has its own field rotation, and she might want me on that." Alden glanced at him. "Why are you so interested? You hate leaving your room."

Silas almost shrugged off the question. Then he remembered how long he’d been staring at the map. Alden wasn’t going to believe he was only passing by.

"Cultivation materials," Silas said. "It’s an old cultivation facility. The salvage terms let you keep low-risk material from marked areas. Supplies cost money, and I’d like to buy fewer of them and collect more."

"You sound like a quartermaster," Alden said.

"I’m practical," Silas said.

"You’re greedy," Alden said, but he was grinning. "Fine. That makes sense. More sense than you suddenly loving the outdoors."

"How’s Star Class?" Silas asked.

Alden’s grin turned rueful. "I walked into Sorel’s room again yesterday."

"Again?" Silas asked.

"Third time. My feet just go there. I sat down, got my notes out, and then I saw Sorel looking at me." He winced at the memory. "He didn’t even say anything this time. He just pointed at the door. Without looking up. Like he’d been expecting me."

Silas laughed, and Alden looked aggrieved, then laughed too.

"And Osk’s put me with Dagna for the rest of the week," Alden went on. "Which is good. She pushes. It just means I get hit with a shield about forty times a day, and it only starts to help after about the thirtieth."

"So you’re losing more," Silas said.

"So I’m losing more." He shifted the book under his arm. "Look, I have to ask Osk before I promise anything. Let’s see who gets in and what they put us on. Then we’ll compare."

"That’s fair," Silas said.

"It’s more than fair. I’m a Star Class student now. I have obligations." He said it with such mock grandeur that Silas snorted, and Alden went off toward the training wing still looking pleased with himself.

***

The academy library’s botany section was on the third floor, past the restricted shelves, and it smelled of glue and old paper. Silas found what he wanted on the second shelf he tried: a thick, unglamorous reference called Common Botanicals in Cultivation Supply, its spine held together with tape.

Silver-thread moss had half a page.

It was a low, mat-forming moss found in shaded stonework, the entry said, often around old conduits, cisterns, and drains. Dormant growth appeared gray and dry, easily mistaken for exhausted material. Viable growth put out fine pale strands that caught the light. In raw form it had no cultivation value at all. Once dried, cleaned, and properly compounded by a trained refiner, it formed one of the standard ingredients of low-grade cultivation incense, the kind that helped a practitioner settle and focus during refinement. It was not rare in principle. It was uncommon in practice, because it grew slowly and was rarely found in useful quantity.

There was a small engraving beside the entry, a stone wall with a channel at its foot and the moss drawn in a band along it. Silas glanced at it and moved on.

He read the refining paragraph twice. He would have to pay someone to process a harvest or sell it raw and let the buyer handle that part. Either way, collection and transport would have to leave enough usable material to justify the trouble. He made a note to ask about quantities before spending anything substantial.

That was still worth having.

He copied the half page and went down to the reading room to check the academy market listings on the public terminal.

He found it on the second page.

Pell & Daughter, Horticultural Salvage, Lower Market Row. Old conservatory substrate by the half-measure, including licensed Harrowglass lots. Good for potting mix and grit. Sold as found.

Silas sat back.

So people were already collecting the old stuff, legitimately, and selling it cheap as potting dirt. That made sense. Someone cleared the outer potting houses under license, sacked whatever came out, and sold it to gardeners who wanted grit. If silver-thread moss turned up in those sacks at all, it would be dormant and gray, looking exactly like everything else that had died in a sack.

He copied the lot description beside the ingredient’s name.

He could test it here first, cheaply. If a handful of old substrate from Harrowglass had anything living in it, he’d know the moss could survive, and that his memory of it wasn’t just a game’s convenient loot table. If nothing woke up, he’d have lost the price of a bag of dirt.

He wrote down the shop’s address and folded the copied page around it.

Tomorrow, he decided. Free period. Buy the cheapest bag they’ve got and find out if I’m an idiot.