The mycelium maps spread across the oak table like a web of veins, glowing faintly in the dim light of Kaelen's workshop. He had traced every thread himself, mapping the underground filaments that pulsed with the lifeblood of the inland fields. Three months of careful cultivation, of feeding the network with alchemical solutions and whispered incantations, of watching the crops surge upward in impossible abundance. The grain had risen twice as fast. The vegetables had grown to three times their normal size. The inland villages had stopped sending children to beg at the city gates.
Now the threads were thinning.
