“Man, them nobles are really turning that forest up there upside down,” the innkeeper said as she polished a mug clean. “You’d have thought some kinda monster was sent loose on the grounds with all the racket they’ve been makin’.”

“Whatever’s going on, they’re right pissed about it,” the woodsman said as the figure sat in the back of the room. “Asking about suspicious people, letting loose the hunting hounds, all of that.”

“Think there was a theft?” the innkeeper asked, and the woodsman hummed.

“Maybe? They’re looking for someone,” he said, and the person finished their drink and pushed out of their chair for the door.

Mally went outside the inn and swung up onto the freshly purchased horse, leading it out into the street and clattering down the cobblestones. Darven was a bustling city, set on the confluence of two rivers, a port city. It was beautiful and boasted festivals and celebrations on an almost weekly basis. But, there were secrets in this city. The underground was relentless and violent, and if you wanted to get work here, you needed to be prepared to deal with the dons to approve it. The information guild here was booming, and it was a dangerous town to be in. The black market reigned supreme here, if you knew where to go, and it was…

Well.

It was exactly the place Mally didn’t want to be.

Because Mally was the murderer of Georgina DeVille, of the DeVille Marchdom, the very people that presided over this city.

Mally was also Georgina DeVille.

It was a complicated situation, and Mally was not keen on explaining it. They had to get out of here.

The inn was at the far side of town, and on the opposite side of the city from where the estate sat, and people were checking identification cards at the bridge crossing over the Jung River. Mally pulled out the identification card they had so painstakingly prepared, and came to a stop at the front of the line.

“Identification, please,” the guard said, and Mally passed down the card. “Mally Mack?”

“That’s me,” Mally replied and leaned on the horse they had just bought at the market. “What’s the occasion? They weren’t checking papers when I came in.”

“That’s none of your business,” the guard sniffed, and Mally idly wondered when the news was going to hit that Georgina was dead.

“Fair,” Mally replied and looked up at the sky.

“It says here you’ve been here for a week? And your occupation is adventurer, not guild affiliated?”

“I travel too much to be affiliated with a guild,” Mally replied with a yawn. “Do you need anything else from me?”

“What were you in town for?” the guard asked suspiciously, and Mally shot him a grin.

“Gathering materials for my next job!”

“And what’s that?”

“Confidential,” Mally replied, and the guard eyed them with suspicion. Jeez, he really was hoping Mally was Georgina’s murderer so he could go home, wasn’t he?

“Alright,” the guard said and handed the card back to Mally. Mally slipped it into their bag and waved at him.

“Have a good day!” they said cheerfully, and then they clopped across the long bridge. They were home free. Ah, it was a good day to be alive.

Mally had worked hard to make this body, growing it out of a mycelium and forming it from literal mushrooms. It had taken years to make, but it was finally ready. The process of transferring their soul into it had been even more time consuming. They had to track down ancient, forbidden texts, but it was lucky they were in Darven, where ancient and forbidden texts were the specialty of the locals. They were virtually indistinguishable from any other human, so long as they didn’t bleed, because when they did bleed, it was a pale, whitish liquid, and they hadn’t managed to figure out how to change that. There had been a lot of trial and error involved in making this body, but Mally had prevailed.

After all, they were a sorcerer of spores.

Now, they could avoid the plot.

Because they really, really hadn’t wanted to encounter the plot.

The DeVilles would fall in seven years, and they would be far, far away from the fallout. They were all fucking horrific people, anyways, and Mally held no affection for them. Georgina DeVille was the villainess in the manhwa The Saint’s Life, vying with the Saint for the place of Duke Harwith’s wife, and Mally had killed Georgina literal weeks before the fateful ball where all three of them met each other. In fact, she was supposed to leave for the capital today, for the debutante ball where all the young ladies turning fifteen this year gathered to make their social debut in high society.

Georgina met the son of the present Duke Harwith there, and Mally was not going to be doing that. No, sir. Not them. They were entirely uninterested in the trappings of a noble life, given that they were literally nonbinary, and nonbinary people didn’t fit in that world. Furthermore, their family was horrific and traumatizing. They still remembered their brother killing a puppy when they were six years old and taunting them to cry. They had beaten his ass for that, sent him sobbing to his mother, and, well.

There was also the fact that Georgina was an illegitimate child.

There was also that.

Ripped from her mother’s breast as a baby, she was raised among the scum of the earth, who got away with literal murder. They were not going to be doing that. Their two brothers had tormented them for being illegitimate on a regular basis, and their stepmother had poisoned them multiple times. They had survived each time, and over the course of their life, had come to sympathize with the character of Georgina.

Maybe they could give her a happier ending this way.

Georgina in A Saint’s Life had never had any magical aptitude, but magical aptitude was a nebulous sort of thing in this world. It typically revolved around the four elements, though there were other specialties, but Mally had figured that if they were reincarnated, transmigrated, whatever, they probably had an aptitude for life and death magic. So, naturally, to mushrooms they turned. Because that was obviously the correct answer. Never mind how many mental gymnastics they had to do to get to that point. And mushrooms had turned out to be the right call, because Mally was very good at it, and had the additional bonus of being very knowledgeable about mushrooms. Not that it counted in this world, because all of the mushrooms were different, but Mally knew enough.

And, so, Mally had learned. And learned. All while pretending to have no magical aptitude at all, and it had paid off. While their brothers had both boasted powerful fire magic, Mally had honed the magic of mushrooms to an art. As Georgina, they had trained with the knights to learn how to wield a sword, and at night, they snuck down to their hidden workshop to learn about mushrooms.

Caesar probably wouldn’t take this lying down, but there was no way Mally Mack could be tied to the murder of his daughter. It was preferable to dying by being beheaded.

Mally grinned to themself as they made it across the bridge and stepped onto the dirt road. They had done it. They had really done it. They faked their own death and escaped. They had worn a potion to mask their scent, so the dogs couldn’t track them, and they had made it out. They were free.

They couldn’t stop the excitement from boiling up. It was wonderful. They were so happy. They were so incredibly happy. This was great. Now, they just had to make it to the capital.

“I think I’m gonna name you Rat,” they said to the paint horse they had bought, and it snorted. Rat was a gelding, and would carry them to the end of their journey. If he didn’t die, but he was only five, and had many years left to live. He was specifically bred and trained for adventurers, and they were so excited. They felt like a real adventurer with him at their side.

This was the new chapter of their life.

….

The thing Caesar couldn’t understand was why. Why Georgina? She was his illegitimate child, with no political power, not even an engagement yet. His older sons, Augustus and Marcus, were rising in terms of political power, and had powerful political alliances. Marcus had just opened multiple successful businesses and was probably running several black market deals on the side. Augustus was engaged to the daughter of a marquis with a lot of trade power.

She must have made an enemy somewhere, but what really concerned him was where they found her. The destroyed workshop was clearly hers, and the journal they had recovered had been penned in her own hand. She was… studying the magic of life and death. It was an ancient magic, not really used nowadays, and rarely ever inherited. Children with a life and death aptitude had always been described as strange and other worldly. They were incredibly rare, but there were typically signs that they had inherited the magic. Plants dying around them, plants blooming, accidentally draining the lives of animals, things like that. Georgina had shown no such signs. She had been… normal.

Except, his daughter hadn’t been normal. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something about her that was unnerving. The way she stared at him with his own purple eyes, as if she was peering right into his soul, as if she knew everything there was to know about him. The way she spoke so eloquently, even from a young age, punctuated and short. The way she never cried about having no friends, preferring to occupy her time with books on the occult. She cared, though. She was unlike her brothers. When Marcus killed that puppy in front of her, she had given him a beating he never forgot. Three guards had to pull her off of him, and she broke one of their knees with the force of a kick.

Who had she gotten involved with with her arcane research, and how did this go under his nose for so long? He knew everything. He knew everything, and yet he didn’t know his own daughter was doing this? He found it strange that she spent so much time in the forest, but…

What was that bed?

It was made out of dirt, loose soil, and something had been dug out of it. What was dug out of it? Her journals were disjointed and confused, and most of the books were lost. He had no idea what she was studying. Why did they light a fire? To destroy her research? What was she researching?

He would have to figure out what pseudonym she used to buy her books. She had to have gotten them from Darven, and probably changed her face with potions. It would be a long, bloody trail to discover her killer, but in the meantime, he was studying the one journal they managed to save.

Most of it was burned, but there was one drawing that managed to survive. It was a diagram of a human body, but it wasn’t a human body. It seemed to be made out of interlocking branches, and he didn’t know what to think of it. It was confusing, and unlike anything he had ever seen.

What was she doing?

Why was she killed, and who were her confidants? How many times did she sneak to town? Whoever had destroyed her research had done a very good job of it, and he was…

It was like he never knew her at all, he realized.

He never knew her at all.

His office door opened, and he looked up. Only Augustus would have the gall to enter his office without knocking, and sure enough, there was his oldest son and heir, entering the office with a straight back and grim expression on his face.

“Augustus,” Caesar said. “What is the news?”

Augustus dropped a potion bottle on Caesar’s desk, and Caesar picked it up and examined it.

“They used a drug to mask their scent. The dogs can’t catch it,” Augustus said, and Caesar pursed his lips. So. It was a dead end.

“Find out what identity Georgina used to purchase all of those books,” Caesar ordered, and Augustus hesitated.

“There’s something else,” he said, and Caesar tilted his head.

“What?”

“Two days ago, Georgina withdrew all of her allowance from the bank, in coin, and bought a spatial bag,” Augustus said, and Caesar frowned.

“All of it?”

“Nothing was left,” Augustus confirmed, and Caesar sat back in his chair.

“And the spatial bag?”

“Missing.”

“Are you saying this was a common theft?” he asked, and Augustus shook his head no.

“No. They wouldn’t have burned the room if it was a common theft,” he replied, and Caesar’s brows furrowed.

“Is there a way to track the bag?”

“No. She made sure it was an unregistered bag,” Augustus replied, and Caesar’s frown deepened even more. Most spatial bags were registered on account of theft, and could be traced back to the source of the theft with a simple location spell. Why buy an unregistered bag? And why even take out all of her allowance?

“Look into it,” Caesar ordered, and Augustus nodded. “... Wait.”

“What?” Augustus asked, and something occurred to Caesar.

“The scent. You found the bottle at the site of her murder?”

“That’s right.”

“Then where is the scent leading into the lab?” Caesar asked, and Augustus was silent for a long, long moment.

“The dogs haven’t picked up anything,” he said, and Caesar frowned again.

“Alright,” he said and stood. “This is… wrong.”

There was something very wrong here. Those potions lasted twelve hours. Why take it in the lab? Why not take it elsewhere? It felt like Caesar was being mocked. And what was Georgina researching? What was…

His daughter was dead, he realized.

His daughter was… dead.

He didn’t even get to dance with her at her debutante. They were supposed to leave today for it, and he didn’t get to dance with her.

It felt a bit like loss, and he didn’t know why, because he had never loved her all that much. She had been nothing but a piece for a marriage, with none of the tenacity her brothers had, none of the drive or ambition. But, with the discovery of her lab, he was… realizing some things.

He was realizing a lot of things, and he didn’t like it.