Chapter 28: Among the choir of spores

Words : 1057 Updated : Sep 16th, 2025

Chapter 28 - Among the choir of sporesAfter killing 1 Nexus Guardian and surviving the other, for a while, I experienced something I never thought was possible in Echoterra. I experienced peace, safety, the grandiose feeling of authority and rulership. And yet, safety is an illusion in Echoterra. I've confirmed it countless times with every deadly battle that I fought, every near-death encounter that I had, every manipulation by the system. And those guys, those poor fellows like me, the trial candidates who didn't survive and were eliminated. They were proof that in Echoterra, safety is nothing but an illusion. And now, that illusion was just shattered into countless pieces by my decision to reject the Thorn Assembly's negotiation. Once again, I was plunged into the cruel crucible of Echoterra. Once again, war was imminent. I grinned, literally. 'Hehe, peace? Peace is overrated'. 'War? That's where I truly belong'. 'That's where I feel at peace'. After making the decision, I had to live with the consequences. And so, my decision led to only two options against the Spore Choir; either defense or offense. Do I prefer a more defensive encounter, where the first spores of the Choir test the edges of my domain with invasive whispers? A conservative approach for me to learn more about my opponents' powers before deciding an attack plan. Or do I prefer a more proactive approach, directly attempting to infiltrate into the Spore Choir to find what I need to know about them the hard way? The decision was an easy one for me. 'I'm not the waiting guy'. 'I want something, I go out to get it. The patient dog eats the fattest bone? Nah, not in the outskirts. In the outskirts, the patient dog dies an early death; that's the true reality of life. The decision was made. ... Searᴄh the NôvelFire(.)net website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality. War was coming, and I knew it. But war was only one branch of survival. Intelligence was the root. So I moved. Quietly, strategically, and with the kind of paranoia that only the outskirts had ever taught me. Live long enough in the outskirts, and you learn to read the streets, smell the danger before it shouts. And I could smell it now, in spores and fungus. The Spore Choir was a faction unlike the Thorn Assembly. Less organized, less talkative, but infinitely more insidious. They spread like fungal infections; rootless, boundaryless, faithless. An ideology more than a kingdom. A psionic mycelial web of growth, death, and control. You don't negotiate with the Choir. You don't talk to them. You either join them... or get composted. But I wasn't looking to talk. I already made my decision. I was looking to infiltrate, insidiously, like an infection. It started with a mask. I grew it over the course of a day; an exo-organic bloom designed to mimic the shape and signature of law-ranking Choir strains. I shaped the surface with microfilaments soaked in aphid-spread fungal code, matching the chemical signature of known Choir spores I'd analyzed through the network. Then I compressed my aphid network signals, simulating the deadened pattern of converted plants. To the network, I'd appear muted. Half-asleep. Subsumed. Like one of them. My newly grown body? It was hollowed, streamlined, roots pulled in tight. No defensive pheromones. No toxins. I was blind and mute and vulnerable, a walking carcass playing possum in the lion's den. Then I walked; for the first time since my latest evolution. I took on a plant-humanoid form, tall and gangly, with bark-like plates growing over vascular musculature. My eyes were pinprick apertures hidden beneath petal-like bone. Their territory wasn't marked by borders. It was felt. The ground grew soft underfoot. Spongy. Waterlogged. Every step I took left a faint smear of mold. The air turned thick with yellow dust, and my sensors nearly tripped alarm reflexes before I dialed everything down. Spores danced in motes around me. Watching. Testing. I saw them then... their drones. Walking fungus. Plants hollowed out and replaced by hive-threads. Some still bore the twisted husks of leaves and fruit. Others had shed everything, reduced to bulbous heads and dragging stalks. None of them spoke. But they sang. Not in words; in pulses, in rhythm. A psionic hum that pressed on the edges of my mind like a migraine wrapped in lullabies. I followed it deeper. Moving with the same awkward shuffle they did. At any moment, I expected them to smell the predator behind the mask. The sharpness beneath the rot. But they didn't. They let me pass. Deeper. And that was when I saw it. A Central Sporemind. A massive mound of fungal flesh, twenty feet across, breathing through a dozen vents. Flowers grew from it, skulls too. Dozens of half-rotted plant corpses fed into it like offerings. And above all, a spire of mycelium rose into the sky like a rotten horn. This was no ordinary sporemind. This was a pre-Sovereign, an Ascendant Choir Node. And it noticed me. 'You are not of the Choir!' The voice cracked like dry rot in my mind. I froze, but didn't flinch. 'You wear our mask. You sing our silence. But you are still alive beneath'. 'Why have you come, Falseleaf?' I answered the only way I could. I shed the mask. Not physically, conceptually. I released my suppressed network signals in a bloom of bright, searing defiance. I flared my pheromones. I unleashed the hum of sovereignty deep in my soul. And then, I said. 'Because I wanted to know if your rot could be cured'. The forest went still. Then the Sporemind laughed. Not with joy but with ancient, malevolent mold-sick contempt. 'No cure. Only surrender. Or consumption'. I grinned with madness. 'Then come try'. And like that, I triggered war. Not on my land. But on theirs. But I wasn't there to win. I was there to learn. My aphids were already deployed; hiding in the undergrowth, transmitting back everything; nutrient pathways, command rhythms, psionic vulnerabilities. The moment they surged toward me, I turned and ran. Not from fear, but by plan. Because war was coming. And now? I knew their roots.

Chapter 28: Among the choir of spores

Comments (0)