CHAPTER 1 · PART I

I woke up facedown in the moss again. It hummed, crackled, and politely tried to electrocute my teeth. I rolled over, stared up at the teal‑streaked sky, and remembered, with some disappointment, that none of the previous day had been a hallucination.

No bed. No ceiling. No “you were dreaming, doctor, we forgave you.” Just alien clouds, alien air, and the distant silhouettes of two impossible mushrooms.

They rose out of the valley like fat columns holding up slices of a second sky. Their undersides glowed faintly blue, casting a ghost‑light over the moss and the strange trees. Even from my ridge, I could see how massive their stems were—bigger around than any building I’d ever worked in.

“You’re ridiculous,” I told them. “You’re also my new landlord.”

My priorities were simple now:

1. Stop sleeping on the electrified death‑lawn.
2. Find food and water that don’t immediately kill me.
3. Turn something, preferably tall and smug, into a home.

The moss made sure I moved quickly. Every time I lingered too long in one spot, it pulsed and snapped tiny arcs into my skin like a passive‑aggressive taser.

It took most of the day to pick a relatively safe path down into the valley. I learned to test each patch ahead with a long stick and a thrown rock. If the rock sizzled, I walked around. If the rock didn’t sizzle, I still walked around, but with slightly more confidence.

By the time I reached the base of the left mushroom, I was already exhausted, damp, and mildly crispy around the edges.

Up close, the stem was even more obscene. The outer skin was smooth but faintly ridged, like layered fibers pressed together. Warm, faintly damp, breathing a slow, subterranean breath. When I pressed my palm against it, I could feel a subtle thrum—not quite a heartbeat, but not entirely unlike one.

“You,” I said, “are going to be my house.”

I picked up the best stone I’d found so far—a fist‑sized shard with one reasonably sharp edge—wrapped a strip of cloth around one side for grip, and began to carve.

It was like trying to dig into a tire with a butter knife.

The outer layer gave way grudgingly, curling off in pale strips. Beneath it, the inner tissue was denser, a fibrous mass that resisted each strike with spongy stubbornness. After an hour, I’d made a shallow dent. After three hours, I had an indentation. After five, I had blisters, a colorful vocabulary of new swears, and a hole just deep enough to curl up in if I didn’t mind burying my knees in my chest.

It was not everything I wanted. It was, however, progress.

I spent that first night of deliberate shelter wedged into my mushroom notch, clutching my rock, listening to the valley.

The world here is never quiet. The moss crackles softly. Strange insects chirp in unfamiliar rhythms. The wind threads through the glowing leaves and makes a low, distant music like someone playing a sighing organ badly.

Sometime around what I guessed was midnight, the ground shook.

Not much. Just enough for the mushroom walls around me to vibrate, for a fine dusting of spores to drift down from above.

Something big walked through the forest.

I couldn’t see it. Couldn’t hear more than a muffled thud, then another, fading into the distance. But whatever it was, it made the titan I was sleeping inside feel small for a moment.

I didn’t sleep much after that.

---

The next days blurred together into a routine built from necessity and stubbornness.

Food. I needed something better than “maybe these glowing buttons under the log won’t kill me.” I watched the local herbivores instead.

One particularly large creature became my unwilling food taster. It looked like a rhinoceros someone had inflated and then forgotten about—six pillar legs, a hunched back, a head full of grinding molars, and slow, patient eyes. It wandered between the fungal clusters, tearing up small puffball mushrooms and chewing them contemplatively.

When it didn’t immediately explode, convulse, or collapse, I took note.

After an hour of observation, I picked one of the same species—a fat, round mushroom with a faint internal glow—cut off a slice, and roasted it over a low moss arc I’d coaxed from a patch near my work area.

The result smelled vaguely nutty with a hint of ozone, which is not the worst review I’ve ever given a meal.

It tasted… acceptable. Chewy. Rich. Only mildly suspicious.

I waited. Ten minutes. Twenty. An hour. No hallucinations. No paralysis. No sudden desire to eat dirt or confess my sins to a rock.

“Congratulations,” I told the mushroom. “You’re hired.”

Within a few days, I had a crude system for harvesting, slicing, and drying them. Thin strips strung on vine cord and hung near low‑energy moss patches dried out into something like jerky. Fungal jerky. I refuse to come up with a better name; some things should sound as unappealing as they are.

Water was trickier.

The air was moist, the ground damp, and condensation formed under the giant caps at dawn, but none of that translated into a stable, drinkable supply. I found no streams, no ponds—nothing that looked remotely like fresh water. I was weighing the relative merits of licking my own sweat when the fruit hit me in the face.

Literally.

They grew on wiry vines that spiraled up the mushroom stems—small, greenish, slightly translucent pods the size of my fist. I’d seen them, dismissed them as decorative plant tumors, and moved on. Today, one detached for reasons known only to gravity, bounced off the stem, and smacked me squarely between the eyes.

I took the hint.

Cutting it open revealed a mass of shimmering gel, cool to the touch and faintly luminous. It smelled tangy, with a sour‑metallic edge that did not inspire confidence. I sampled a drop anyway. It tasted like a battery had tried to be a lime and failed.

“You are disgusting,” I informed it, and tossed the half‑fruit aside… where it rolled onto a patch of moss.

The moss crackled. Tiny arcs of electricity kissed the fruit’s rind. A minute later, I noticed droplets forming along the cut surface—clear beads that swelled, frosted at the edges, and rolled down the skin.

When one dripped onto the back of my hand, it was shockingly cold.

I stared. I am not ashamed to admit I may have giggled.

Further testing confirmed it: apply a mild electrical current to the fruit’s gel, and it forces water out as chilled condensation. Increase the current slightly, and tiny crystals of ice form along the rind.

I christened it Cryosap and immediately set up a line of them over a cooperative moss patch. It is not a river. It is not a tap. But it is drinkable, renewable, and for now, it is life.

---

By the end of the third week, C.C. Labs—the first outpost of my new life—was more than a notch in a stem.

I had carved a standing‑height chamber just inside the left mushroom, with walls that curved around me in a pale, fibrous embrace. A narrow spiral ramp hugged the inner edge, leading to a second, half‑finished level where I intended to put a workbench.

The floor was still uneven. The air inside still smelled like damp bread and worry. But when the sky darkened and the valley lit up in waves of distant bioluminescence, I could retreat inside, wedge a woven mat of dried mushroom strips across the entrance, and pretend I lived somewhere.

Something big still walked out there. Some nights the ground shivered. Sometimes a roar rolled across the valley low enough to rattle my teeth. Whatever it is, it owns this place in a way I do not—yet.

So I do what I always do when the universe reminds me of my size.

I take notes. I build. I plan.

C.C. Labs is a crude thing now—a hacked‑out cavity in a living tower, furnished with rocks, vines, and sheer audacity. But it exists. I exist. I have food that doesn’t kill me outright, water that sweats out of fruit when I shock it, and walls between me and whatever considers me a snack.

From here, I can start doing what I was always meant to do: study, experiment, and turn this hostile world into a collaborator.

Somewhere out there, the Council is very sure they’ve won.

They have no idea I’m carving my name into the bones of a planet.