Where the Mantis had succumbed in seconds, Ren remained conscious.
His own spore, the "world's weakest beast," pulsed with light, as if it were... fighting.
Every effort was agony.
He pushed himself upward, his fingers finding the hole's edge just as his knees threatened to give way. The light blinded him momentarily as he crawled out of the tunnel.
It wasn't the outside.
He emerged into a small natural cave, its walls covered in bioluminescent crystals that bathed everything in an ethereal, spectral blue light.
But he could barely appreciate the chamber's beauty, the ancestral fungi continued spreading, consuming his vital energy.
"Please..." he whispered, his vision blurring. "I don't want to die here..."
His spore fought valiantly, its own mushrooms creating barriers against the yellow infection, but it was losing the battle. Ren could feel his consciousness fading, his body growing colder by the second.
That's when he saw it.
In the cave's center, bathed in crystal light, grew a plant that seemed like... it reminded him of the one on his father's stories.
"The plant..." he mumbled, crawling toward it as the yellow fungi continued their spread. "The one that helped Mother..."
His fingers brushed the luminous stem just as darkness began claiming the edges of his vision.
With trembling hands, Ren pulled the glowing plant free. The yellow fungi still expanded across his body, but something in his mind, something deeper than conscious thought, told him this was important.
This plant was...
Though he didn't fully understand.
His father had found one like it, almost 12 years ago, in another tunnel. The "miracle medicine" that had allowed his mother to conceive.
But this one was different, where his father's plant had been firm and robust, this one was delicate and ethereal.
This was the "female", his father had found the "male".
With the ancestral fungi consuming his last strength, Ren brought the plant to his lips. The taste was like liquid light, like remembering a dream. freeweɓnovel.cøm
And then he felt it, a deep resonance with something already existing in his body, dormant genes inherited from his mother, the echo of the other half of the medicine that had made his existence possible.
The two halves of an ancient medicine, separated by years and tunnels, finally reunited in his blood.
The effect was instantaneous.
Pure white light emanated from his skin, so intense that the yellow fungi recoiled, withering and falling like ash.
His spore, that supposedly useless creature, began pulsing with a new rhythm, perfectly synchronized with the energy now flowing through his veins.
To any observer, the spore would have appeared exactly the same, small, apparently weak. But Ren could feel that something had fundamentally changed within.
As if it had evolved into a completely new variant, one that no one had ever seen before.
Return.
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