Chapter 67

With little to no fanfare, not really but… the fire simply flickered itself out.

Project fuck fire was successful.

Bonus! Because I managed to come up with the mycelium carapace idea the fire quickly lost its’ intensity and didn’t completely burn everything within the enclosure. So the bde monument didn’t go crispy.

Well mostly.

It was a little smoky around the edges but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t repair. Plus out of the 27 lichen colonies I connected with 18 survived. I had plenty of nutrients left to play with.

And now without the fire breathing down my neck, I could even attempt to encourage more colonies of lichen to spread to trees that never had them to begin with.

Buttons hadn’t even been touched by the fire so the tiny mycelium carapace I grew on it was completely futile. That was fine though, I would have grew one on it eventually. It was just a matter of time and nutrients.

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I was still periodically checking the hub just to see if the hub had stopped fluctuating. And while fortunately it had stopped being so volatile, the hub was still a mess. I was panicked for a second thinking that the fire was still going on somewhere else where I couldn’t sense, but that just wasn’t the case.

See I figure the only reason the hub would go crazy like that was because the trees somehow sensed the fire coming.

I remember a line from some documentary stating that sometimes animals react to things before major events happen. Like earthquakes or tornadoes. Animals can in some strange way sense it and get the hell out of dodge. In fact this could very well have happened to the animals when the fire started.

Anyways it stood to reason that much like animals the trees could have sensed the fire approaching as well. Since they weren’t mobile they were preparing in the only way they could the nutrients that lay in the hub.

… wait.

Hmmm.

You know, with all the preparations I had to do, I don’t think I ever realized it but I never stopped providing the hub with water. It had become almost second nature for me. And I was only checking the hub occasionally if it received an influx of nutrients from a dead mother tree. That never came to be unfortunately and I was reduced to cannibalizing myself but I never really bothered to check the hub thoroughly.

I just now checked and I found the water that I’ve been delivering through all this was nonexistent. Usually, before the fire, when I checked the hub it would contain a pool of water that would slowly trickle out to whichever plant wanted some. But right now the only water there, was the water I was only just now delivering. And that was practically disappearing before it even fully settled.

The only reason I can think this was happening was because the plants were trying to defend themselves. And it just happened that the only way they knew how they were embedding themselves with water.

That couldn’t have been pleasant.

I remember my mom gardening occasionally growing up and I remember her telling my dad that sometimes plants would do this but it would result in burst cells.

Basically, these bastards were harming themselves in order to stave of complete annihilation.