Chapter 4

It took me a while to get used to doing two things at once, but I’m not human anymore so while some things were practically impossible to do — like walking — some things were incredibly easy to do. Like multitasking.

All in all I made pretty good time finding the outer edges of my rotting log. In the time it took me to reach outside of my log I grew four mushrooms all along my log

So great news! I’m in a forest, not in a farm.

How could I tell? Well see I asked myself the same thing and after successfully reaching the outer edges of my log I found soil.

Now finding soil is fine and dandy but how would I specifically know I still wasn’t in/on a farm and then it hit me. While all I could see as a human was what was above ground, as a mushroom and I guess a plant too, I could sense so much more.

See underneath a forest there’s a plethora of roots belonging to trees and plants but most importantly fungi networks! These fungi networks allow trees and plants to basically talk to each other!

High school knowledge for the fucking win. Why? Because I wouldn’t know how to make heads or tails of what I sensed, if it wasn’t for those damn lessons about ecology, nature and whatnot I would have never known what I'm sensing was.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

The thing is though, while I am a mushroom through and through, I don’t have many instincts a natural born mushroom woulda and should have. I don’t know how to carry their messages. I didn’t even know if I could. Some mushrooms don’t do that at all.

See in school we learned that some mushrooms in exchange for carrying and delivering messages and nutrients, mushrooms are repaid with carbons. This being a mutualistic relationship. Where each entity benefit from coexisting.

Priorities though, while communicating with the other species and benefiting from these types of relationships I still needed to expand a bit so that if something were to destroy my log I would still survive in the soil.

Growing was hard. In a normal human body we just let our bodies grow by themselves and go about our lives. Never giving it much thought. I however as a mushroom needed to consciously grow. Eating and consuming my log carrying the nutrients to the ends of my mycelium and encourage growth all the while trying to track time by growing my mushrooms.

It was definitely harder growing as a mushroom than as a human.

I am curious though if my mushrooms release my spawn will that spawn grow to be more of me or would it be another of my species? Will it have the same intelligence as me? Will it be a basic version of my species, one without intelligence?

I don’t know which I’d rather have. On the one hand having someone to talk to would be nice. But creating other lifeforms as smart as me is a little disconcerting. Even as a human I was a little wary of making and raising babies. I'd much rather have a pet and leave the raising of children to other people.

So lets hope its just more of me.

In fact lets run an experiment. If I grow one of my mushrooms at the edge of the log and then cut it of from my nutrients until it detaches and falls to the ground, will it grow into more of me? Of course I'd have to produce spawn before I drop them, but that was luckily one thing I did have an instinct for.

Also I can check the area if I also grow towards that point from the ground.

I have time so why not?