Chapter 1593: The Possibility of Coexistence
It was hardly more difficult than taking off clothes.
"Good craftsmanship," Xu Huo praised without stint.
"The district where I was born was incorporated into the game very early on. Before I evolved, I was in the slaughterhouse business," Chi Xian said. "Skill comes from practice. I'm also good at cooking."
"Then I'll take advantage of that today," Xu Huo said.
Chi Xian chuckled and told him to just wait and eat.
As he had said, animals parasitized by fungi tasted especially delicious.
"Thank you for nature's gift," Chi Xian said with a smile.
After eating, he said he wanted to look around nearby for any fungi worth taking. Xu Huo, after several days of consideration, seemed to have changed his mind and planned to complete an instance in District 013. The Suffocating Rainforest Station was clearly not a good place to finish an instance, and he happened to have a ticket for the Big Eye Small Eye Station.
Chi Xian didn't know much about the instances near the station, but since Xu Huo had decided not to return to District 013 through the station, they agreed to travel together. After all, Stone Medicine Island wasn't far from the Suffocating Rainforest on the map.
Then he put away the location item "Secret Place" and returned to the dust-filled rainforest.
Xu Huo casually found a stone cave to rest in.
After resting for half a day, his fatigue was completely gone, and he began to check the results from the female butler No. 11.
There were several passages that had been forcibly destroyed, with the entrances completely buried by rocks. Additionally, it had found several large boulders suitable for blocking the fungal caves.
He wasn't sure if Butterfly Bone Town had been completely destroyed, but in any case, there were no books or paper items to be seen here, not even a simple map. Only a few places had trap locations marked on the walls with stones. Most items in the ordinary people's dwellings were made from local materials—bowls and chopsticks from nutshells or tree branches, and bedding, at best, woven from leaves, or at worst, a few scraps of cloth. If not for the clothes still worn by the people he had seen earlier, one might think this place hadn't even begun to develop civilization.
Connecting this to the mountain of shoulder blades piled up in the underground caves, the cities near this rainforest must have once suffered a massive disaster far beyond fungal invasion. Almost everything from the previous civilization had been destroyed. Even the station above ground, with only its sign left, might not have originally been here.
So after resting, he began searching the surrounding area again.
Eventually, far from Butterfly Bone Town, he discovered the ruins of a city.
Unlike the stone caves he had seen earlier, this place still retained the foundations of a city. Traces of modern civilization could be seen among the broken walls and rubble. Occasionally, one or two pieces of human bone that hadn't completely disappeared could be spotted in the lush grass and fungi. Judging by their distribution, these were the remains of people who had died here and hadn't been properly buried.
The city was quite large, with many areas completely buried, creating patches of various colors. But when Xu Huo walked past the broken wall of a large building, he unexpectedly saw raised shapes lying on the ground, resembling human forms.
They were indeed human-shaped. From a distance, they looked like deliberately shaped greenery, but they were actually composed of a type of fungus, with dense fungal threads standing upright on the surface.
These "human forms" varied in height, fatness, and thinness. They lay in rows, one next to another. A rough count put them at least in the hundreds.
Xu Huo stood at the edge and dug down on the spot. Soon he unearthed human bones. Strangely, these bones were also covered in a layer of green fuzz, giving them a jade-like texture at first glance. However, the green fuzz could be scraped off, revealing white bones beneath that were riddled with tiny, needle-eye-sized holes from fungal parasitism.
The size of this skeleton roughly matched the human-shaped fungal colony growing above ground.
Taking a few steps, he dug up two more skeletons. Comparing them, he found that the human-shaped fungal colonies on the surface and the buried human bones were all roughly the same size.
"Pretty amazing, isn't it?" Chi Xian happened to come over. He bowed to the human-shaped fungal colonies on the ground. "This is a kind of anthropophilic fungus. They especially like to grow into human shapes, but they take a long time to develop. Usually, only dead bodies allow them to parasitize and imitate like this. This is the final form. Some districts plant this kind of fungus in cemeteries to express mourning for the dead."
"I once got off at a station in a cemetery. As far as the eye could see, the whole mountain was covered with lying 'people.' The scene was spectacular."
Xu Huo buried the skeleton back as it was. "Being able to imitate humans as they grow—the mutated organisms in the game are truly amazing."
"Don't underestimate these mutated organisms," Chi Xian said. "There's a type of fungus called 'Net' that can even communicate across an entire district. How they do it, no one knows to this day."
"Cross-district communication?" Xu Huo was curious. "How does that work?"
"Habit," Chi Xian explained. "For example, on this island, if someone damages part of the Net fungus, the subsequent fungal growth will specifically supply nutrients to the damaged area. Correspondingly, on another island thousands of miles away, the fungal colony in the same growth state will grow wildly in the corresponding spot."
"It sounds a bit unintelligent, but it's been tested. As long as it's within the same district, without special means to isolate these fungi, they can sense each other."
He was truly obsessed with fungi, so he didn't mind explaining in detail. Seeing that Xu Huo was interested, he continued sharing his understanding and imagination of fungi. "Fungi are everywhere. They can survive in places where even animals and plants struggle to live. Humans are evolving, and so are they. Once they start growing, they often spread in large clusters. The Net fungus is a good example. Perhaps in the fungal world, they have their own information network. In a sense, they might be better suited to evolution than humans. Otherwise, districts like 013 wouldn't exist."
"Maybe one day, fungi will become the rulers of the game's natural world."
"Besides, toxic fungi have long become part of the game's food chain. They're more covert and convenient to use than items. Take the people of District 013, for example. If you ignore the side effects of parasitism, from a certain perspective, they have an advantage over ordinary players."
Xu Huo understood what he meant. It was roughly about transforming the human body into a state that could coexist with fungi, allowing one to use various fungi freely without suffering the negative consequences of toxic fungi or fungal mutual erosion.
This might have sounded like a fantasy to others or to other players in the past, but as someone who had truly benefited from it, he certainly couldn't think Chi Xian was being fanciful.
"Are there any players who have undergone super evolution in this direction?" Xu Huo pondered briefly. "Even if they wanted to evolve in this direction, they would first have to experiment on their bodies."
Quantitative change leading to qualitative change wasn't just empty talk. Super evolution, especially physical super evolution, was partly achieved through long-term training. Similarly, mental evolution and spatial evolution were based on one's innate talent. But fungi like those in the rainforest naturally lacked the foundation for coexistence with humans. To complete evolution in this direction, a massive amount of accumulation would be necessary, and even then, the chances of success were very small.
Chi Xian was somewhat surprised by his ready acceptance, but soon said meaningfully, "Where there's a will, there's a way."
(Chapter End)