Deadworld Isekai

Between dungeon runs, improving the estate, and a lot of digging, time during the system’s absence had passed quickly for Matt and Lucy.

In the meantime, they had multiple harvests of various kinds of fruits and vegetables. Since Matt was eager to shift his food consumption away from his dwindling supply of foods, he had begun to do his best to exist on the vegetarian diet the estate was now providing.

The only problem was that the estate system didn't do a very good job of explaining the nutritional value of the food. Gaian vegetables didn't map one-to-one with Earth plants, so even Matt’s limited knowledge of Earth nutrition didn’t do him much good. Since getting some weird Gaian fantasy scurvy wasn’t high on his list of ways to get killed, figuring out a balance was a high priority.

Luckily, it was a problem he could brute force even in the absence of knowledge. He had taken to a rotation of meals that guaranteed he was eating a pretty good amount of every edible plant every couple of days. He hoped relying on blind variety would help cover his ignorance, get him all his amino acids, and keep him more-or-less alive in the same way the food cubes always had.

After a couple of unsuccessful attempts to cook everything together in some kind of meatless stew, Matt eventually settled on combinations of fruits and vegetables that went reasonably well together as salads. Given that he spent all of his time either walking, killing monsters, or farming, these salads ended up having to be pretty big to cover his energy expenses.

In this new broken-skill era, big salad had become an understatement. Without Eat Anything!, the salad Matt had put together was gargantuan beyond all reason. By the time Matt finished it, he was full to the point his stomach hurt.

The last few bites of plain nothingness were the hardest to fork down. Matt wasn't sure, but the food had been tasting worse in the past few days. An all-plant diet devoid of seasoning had taken a lot to get used to, but the last few meals were beyond even that.

“This food tastes… funky, I guess?”

“Are you sure it isn’t just a side effect of coming off of a whole life of meat and into several months of just cubes? I don’t have taste buds, Matt. I’m not sure what shifting your diet in weird ways all the time does to them.”

“I dunno. You might be right. This feels different than that, somehow.”

“Well, it’s not like the vegetables aren’t fresh. If you want something different, you could try figuring out if Barry will let you steal and tame some Clownrats.”

Matt winced. “I’ll eat the salads.”

But the food still felt off, somehow. He wasn’t sure what to attribute it to; it could have been anything from the absence of his eating-related skills or even recent memories of horrific monster bats.

Ding!

You can’t give me achievements for eating big salads, Matt thought. As much as he appreciated the help, that kind of thing felt like too big of a risk for Barry to be taking with the rules. The system was going to wake up eventually, and the last thing he wanted was to lose Barry in some weird AI court case over technicalities.

It was only after pulling up the window to see what kind of contortions Barry had pulled to make the achievement defendable that Matt saw that it was actually something much different. And much worse.

Warning: Mana-deficient Food Ingested

Many reincarnators lived lives on worlds with little to no system involvement, and thus have no concept of what is commonly referred to as magical force, life force, or mana. Whether you knew of it or not, your planet contained these forces. Life is not long-term sustainable without them.

You have somehow managed to consume food that is deficient in this force. This might be because you ate food grown on blighted land, food affected by life-draining magic in some way, or food that had its life force damaged by some other occurrence.

In the short term, this is not a danger. Mana-deficient food is not poisonous, nor does it lack in conventional nutrition. With that said, a long-term diet of mana-deficient foods would “wash out” the levels of mana produced by your body over time, eventually resulting in a variety of problems.

This message is meant as a warning for anyone living in a magical, system-driven world for the first time, and not a complete guide to mana-deficient foods. Please seek advice from locals inhabitants to understand why your food was mana-deficient, as well as more details on the specific issues that mana-deficiency will cause your body.

The solution to this problem is quite simple, however, and can be shared. Find and eat foods that are not mana-deficient.

“Uh, Lucy…” Matt relayed everything he had just read to her.

“Shit. One second.” Lucy buried herself in her store of information. Her expression grew more serious as time went on.

Unable to bear the silence, Matt offered his thoughts, “I don’t get it though. I can see all sorts of things being wrong with the food because of, well.” Matt gestured at everything around them with a big sweep of his arm. “All this mess. That part makes sense. But why didn’t this message trigger before? I’ve been eating this stuff for weeks, at least.”

“It has to be Eat Anything!. It was probably papering over whatever the problem was with the food. And without it…”

“I’m screwed?”

“There’s always the food cubes. It’s not like we're out of those, even if I don’t much like you having to dip into emergency reserves. Eat one.”

“But, I’m full. I just ate this gigantic salad. You saw me.”

“You ate a gigantic poison salad, Matt. We have no idea what that crap is doing to you right now.”

“But…”

“No buts! Matt, I’m not the best system guardian in the universe. I admit it. But I’m NOT going to let the reincarnator I guard get taken out by a fucking salad. It would be embarrassing. Eat a damn cube.”

Matt huffed, but went and got a cube to do as he was told. Lucy's logic made sense and he knew it was pointless to argue with her. Fighting with an indefatigable hologram was a dumb decision in the best of times. She would keep hammering her point until Matt gave in.

But there was, it turned out, something wrong with the cubes.

Matt brought the cube towards his mouth, then suddenly pulled it away. The thing stank. It wasn’t a spreading scent exactly, in the sense that he wouldn’t have been able to smell it across a room. But close up? It was vile.

“What in the… smell this. Is it off to you, too?”

“Matt, I can’t smell. It’s rotten, or something?”

“Something like that, yeah.” Matt did a quick double-take. “Wait, you can’t smell? This whole time, you haven’t been able to smell anything?”

“No, Matt. This is what you get for never asking questions about me. I can’t smell. You know. This is what happens when you don’t show an interest in other people.”

“What about…” Matt wracked his brain for examples of things she should have been able to smell, but couldn’t. “What about when I farted, that time?”

“That time? You do it all the time.”

“Whatever. You did the whole waving-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face thing. Why?”

“Because it’s still gross, Matt. I walk behind you a lot. You should move off before you do that. It’s just common courtesy.”

“But you just said that you can't smell anything!”

“It’s still poop gas in the air, Matt. I’m not exactly real, but I’m real enough to know that’s gross.” Lucy jumped over and got up in his face. “And all this talk is not going to distract me. Go get another cube, one that isn’t rotten, and eat it. We have other stuff to do!”

“We aren’t on a schedule!”

“EAT THE DAMN CUBE, MATTHEW!”

Matt smiled inwardly. Look who’s a little nutritionist all of a sudden.

He didn’t want to eat a cube right now, but he could, and he would. It was nice to have someone looking after him, and he wasn’t going to spit in the face of the only person in the universe who cared about him. Barry, the dungeon system, didn't count. His official job description was to maybe kill him.

Going back to the open cube bag, he pulled another cube and lifted it towards his mouth.

Most of the way there, he stopped. It was spoiled too. He pulled out another cube, then another. The whole bag had turned. In his thinking, that was a huge loss. Every one of those cubes represented an entire day's worth of provisions. They were a really primal source of survival, and he hoarded them like treasure. Reluctantly, he pulled another cube bag from his pack, opened it and removed a new cube from a fresh batch.

It was bad too.

Lucy had been watching Matt. Her expression started off as being annoyed, but slowly morphed into concern.

“Umm, Lucy? We have a problem.”

—

After testing out all of the bags of food cubes and finding that they all smelled funny, Matt and Lucy laid everything out in front of them.

“They can’t have all gone bad at once, Matt. That doesn’t even seem possible.”

“Maybe they had the same expiration date?” Matt offered.

“You know that's just marketing, right? Companies just slap a date on it so they don't get sued,” Lucy responded.

“Wait, what? How do you… ok never mind. It might be Eat Anything! again. I think it… okay, bear with me. In the skill description, it says I can stomach mildly spoiled food. That’s the baseline description, that’s been with me since level 1.”

“And you think it’s been curtailing your sense of smell so you don't have a reaction to spoiled food?”

“I think so. It’s not just that it lets me stomach spoiled food. It lets me eat it at all. I think all these cubes have always been kind of on the cusp, and Eat Anything! just papered over it.”

“So you can’t eat it?”

“I mean, maybe. Eat Anything! got disabled a while ago, but I guess the effects lingered on. I don’t know how to parse the semantics of 'mildly spoiled' or something the system thinks I couldn’t stomach otherwise. I could give it a go.”

“Do.”

—

It was ten minutes before Matt felt confident he wouldn’t puke again. Leaving a suddenly over-fertilized turnip patch in his wake, he walked back to Lucy.

“I’m going to starve to death.”

“Maybe.” Lucy had the faraway look in her eyes she got when she was looking through the system’s reference materials. “Maybe not. There’s something in the estate system that might fix this.”

“Some kind of magic fertilizer?”

“Not quite. Go into the house accessories and furnishings tab. Look up ‘mana generator.’”

Matt did. It was in a section of what the system termed cultivation and recovery aids, ranging from floor mats to an awful lot of things that looked like the kind of lamps you’d buy at a head shop. The mana generator was in the latter category, looking like a mix between a fortune-teller’s orb and a lava lamp.

“What does this even do?”

“From the description, it’s for regenerating your mana points faster. You never had any mana to begin with, so we never cared about this kind of item before. But if you were a wizard, or something else that had and used a lot of mana? Having one of these would let you cast more spells faster, so long as you were near it. You can’t move them around with you, so it’s more like something that would make you tougher when you were at home and let you practice more.”

It made sense, in a weird training fanatic sort of way. Matt had known guys who owned their own weight benches and drank pickle juice just so they could lift more weights. This wasn’t weirder than that, except he didn’t think any of them had weight benches that cost more than a good-sized house. This literally did, at least based on how the estate system had priced them.

“And you think setting this up will fix the crops?”

“Not all of them. But I’ve been thinking about this, and I have some guesses about how all this works. In the message you got about mana-deficiency, the plants had to be drained of life energy to not work. Or grown on blighted land, which I assume drains the land of mana. But mana has to come from somewhere, right? I’m guessing if we run this thing for a while and get the soil loaded up, maybe the problem will fix itself. And, if the plants are healthy, they might start feeding mana back into the field. If not, we just run one for each field, and see if it sticks. Bare minimum, we need enough vegetables for you to survive, and this thing is our best bet at the moment. I doubt the plants would want mana pills.”

“It’s not cheap.”

“The alternative is turning into some kind of mana vampire or something, Matt.”

“Point taken. We can start saving up for that tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yup. Don’t forget what day it is. Today is Museum day.”