Lieutenant Terra Firma: Part Two [Cosplay Cultivator chap 83]
The wood nymph looked like a person, but was dressed up in leaves. His skin had strange markings like you would see in the bark of trees, and his irises were the color of chlorophyll. Other than that though, he looked much like a regular human.
As a matter of fact, one could say that he looked closer to a human than Tang Ze currently did.
"This is uh, my friend Tang Ze," Yin Tiang said, introducing Tang Ze as the latter bent down to pick up a handful of soil.
Tang Ze was testing the soil out. One of Lieutenant Terra Firma's powers was to be able to both sense and remove pollution from an area.
This came in quite handy whenever he had to fight his arch-nemesis, the Patrician of Pollution. The Patrician of Pollution was a character that was dressed up in a fancy suit, much like a corporate executive, and could poison the environment around him simply by existing.
"Hmm…" Tang Ze muttered. Strangely enough, he couldn't feel any significant traces of pollution from the soil. As such, there really wasn't anything to treat here.
However, he did notice the lack of life near the soil here. Why was that though? As he held the soil in his hands, he could feel its texture, the nutrients within it, and all of that seemed somewhat normal.
So what was wrong?
He put his head to the ground like Lieutenant Terra Firma would often do.
"Ah, is your friend alright?" the wood nymph asked Yin Tiang with a concerned look on his face. He was really asking, 'Is your friend right in the head?'
"Yeah, yeah," Yin Tiang said, though he was slightly unsure himself. "Ah, Tang Ze, what are you doing?"
"I'm trying to listen to the voice of nature," Tang Ze said. That was also one of Lieutenant Terra Firma's powers. He wasn't sure how literal it was though, as he hadn't heard anything yet.
As you can imagine, this did nothing to reassure either Yin Tiang or the wood nymph that Tang Ze wasn't out of his mind.
The wood nymphs did have an instinctual understanding when it came to many plants and animals, but even they didn't claim to be able to 'talk to nature.' At least, not in a literal sense.
"And uh… what is nature telling you?" Yin Tiang asked after Tang Ze hadn't responded for an entire minute, ear still pressed to the ground.
"I don't know," Tang Ze finally said. "It's not really responding." His sense were telling him two different things - on the one hand, there was something off about the soil, but on the other hand, it seemed healthy and full with life.
As this line of inquiry hadn't gotten anywhere, he tried out another set of powers he had. Keeping his hands in the soil, he willed for life to grow.
Small plants began popping up out of the soil from nothing - this was Lieutenant Terra Firma's ability to repair the landscape.
Maybe something would happen to the plants and he could check up on them later to figure out if there really was something wrong?
"Right," Yin Tiang said, trying to give the wood nymph a reassuring smile. "Like I said, we're investigating the cause of all of this damage to the forest, and hopefully we'll get to the root cause."
The wood nymph didn't seem convinced at all that they were capable of solving the issue, but he didn't obstruct them either.
"So, what do you think we should do next?" Yin Tiang asked Tang Ze as they moved further into the woods.
"Listen to Mother Nature's call," Tang Ze replied.
"And what exactly is that supposed to mean?"
"I haven't really figured it out yet," Tang Ze said.
Yin Tiang had been having second thoughts earlier when he had seen Tang Ze's costume about bringing him along for this, but now he was having third and even fourth thoughts given how he was acting.
"But, let's see what the animals think," Tang Ze said.
He first approached a den of rabbits and coaxed them out, telling them that he only wished to communicate with them.
He didn't get much of use from them, though, in the middle of their conversation a bird swooped in and took one of the rabbits away, before Tang Ze could do anything to stop it.
After that the other rabbits retreated back into their den.
Nature truly could be quite cruel sometimes.
As the two of them went deeper into the woods, they would occasionally encounter other wood nymphs, many of whom gave Tang Ze rather odd stares.
Tang Ze for that matter, was too busy contemplating the mystery of what was going on to really notice the looks thrown his way. It helped that the wood nymph's facial features were slightly different from human's so they could be ignored or overlooked to some extent.
He kept examining the soil.
There wasn't really that much difference between the soil here deeper in the woods where things were doing better, and back near the town. At least, not in terms of things like nutrients or pollutants.
There was something that registered as being off to his senses - the soil near to the river seemed to be teeming with a multitude of small quantities of life like the stars in the night sky.
Here, deeper in the woods, the soil was teaming with life, but it was larger and more prominent for lack of a better word.
The only other thing that he could find that was somewhat out of the ordinary was that the deer had begun taking a different path through the woods recently for some reason.
Other than that, nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary.
Returning back to the town, they went to examine the containers that they were making to store waste, and there didn't seem to be any change to them recently that might cause a leakage.
They didn't have the body paint they used earlier, otherwise, Tang Ze could've also chosen to dress up as Deepcurrent and taken a dive into the river to get a better idea as to what was happening in the water.
Ultimately though, sunset came and they hadn't made any real progress with revealing the root cause.
The next day, Tang Ze went to go see how his plants were doing, to note that they seemed to be withering for some reason.
And yet again, he couldn't find anything that was necessarily overtly wrong with the soil or water, but something was affecting the plants regardless.
He still felt that the answer was right in front of him, just that he couldn't see what it was.
If he wanted to, he could regrow part of the forest near the river, but that was a temporary solution and equivalent to putting a band-aid on the problem.
If things continued, the new forest that he would grow would end up withering away as well.
It would do nothing to assuage the wood nymphs that the humans weren't the cause of why this was happening, either.
The two of them wandered into the woods, and it was when Yin Tiang said something offhand that things began to click for Tang Ze.
"Who knows, even if we can't solve this issue, maybe we can find some inheritance in a secret realm like Zhang Long did…" Yin Tiang muttered.
"Wait-" Tang Ze said. "Wait, we need to track down some deer…"
The deer had told him something that he hadn't thought was so important earlier, but they talked about a place they visited which didn't match up with how the environment of the forest was.
Tang Ze found one and managed to get directions to this place - while the animals really couldn't 'talk' like people given their low intelligence, he could still communicate with them using a kind of telepathy. And they were able to give him information via things like sight and smell.
"Okay, we found it," Tang Ze said as they came to the area in question.
"And what is here?" Yin Tiang asked. This place looked just like any other part of the forest.
"Something should open up soon," Tang Ze said.
Sure enough, a tiny bit of light emerged.
"A secret realm?" Yin Tiang muttered.
"Yes, a naturally occurring one," Tang Ze said. No one knew for sure what caused secret realms to be created when they weren't made by people. They spawned without any rhyme or reason.
Inside the secret realm, there was a large field of grass. No wonder the deer wandered into this place whenever it opened around this time of the day, given how plentiful the foliage was here.
But that wasn't what Tang Ze was interested in. The environment of the secret realm had one thing that explained everything that was going on - the mushrooms that sprouted along the grass.
"Do you know what those are?" Tang Ze asked Yin Tiang, wondering if his hunch was correct.
"The mushrooms…" Yin Tiang muttered. "They're not from around here, so I'm not entirely sure, but they seem to be poisonous… you can usually tell by the way the spots are on their caps."
Tang Ze nodded. "I think that's what's going on."
"What's going on?"
"This secret realm opened up very recently," Tang Ze said. "And the deer, when they come into this place, rub against the mushrooms, naturally. They then carry it to the river when they go for a drink, carrying the toxins in large quantities there because they have a habit of resting near the river, don't they? I could feel life coming from the soil, but I think those were just small mycelium spores which couldn't grow any bigger as the soil there isn't that appropriate for their growth. I'm guessing the mushrooms are only poisonous to plants and not the deer, otherwise they'd be showing some symptoms too."
He had not been able to pick up on this with his powers as the mushrooms were still considered to be life forms, and so didn't trigger his senses which were trying to pick up pollutants.
Yin Tiang considered things. "That… explains a bit. Let me take these mushrooms back to town and see if someone recognizes what they are."
It turns out that Tang Ze's hunch had been correct - this mushroom was an invasive species that was affecting the plant life near the border of the river. However, not only was it causing the other plants to be unable to grow, it also couldn't grow properly either in the foreign soil of the forest that was different from the soil in the secret realm.
The solution to this issue was simple - they just had to seal off the secret realm. That would take some time, and in the meantime, an easier solution was to spray fungicide near the riverbed. The wood nymphs were none too happy at even more chemicals being released into their habitat, but they were mostly convinced of the truth regarding what the humans were saying was the cause of things.
With that done, Tang Ze and Yin Tiang returned back to the sect right as their allotted time was about to be up, but having been successful in their mission.