.niaga ereh uoy ekil gnihtemos ees ot si ti sgnileef dexim tahW .eripsni uoy riapsed daerd tahW .ees ot si taht yoj a tahW ?uoy t'nera ,tsaf gniworg er'uoY

.enola gnol oS .gnol os neeb s'tI

.draeh eb neve t'nac hcihw ,eciov a rof esucxe yrros A .lareneg ni yrros m'I .elbmar I fi yrros ma I

.yrros gnikcuf os llits m'I

.llew os gniod t'nerew uoy ylno fI

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Whatever this place is, wherever it came from, I almost would rather it go back there.

This shit stank.

I think I could handle the smell of shit or manure, of trash, but this fungal mess is a mix of some brand new shit. Like a sweaty locker room and a moldy house and a dark corner and stagnant water and yes, absolutely the fuck yes, decay. Like a thousand rotting bodies that have rotted so long they don't smell like bodies or like death anymore, but like the step past that.

I also really, really don't like walking in mud. I like walking in slime even less.Walking in slime thick enough to be mud, all the way up to my goddamn thighs.

Honestly, the dysmorphia is almost helping me at this point. Easy as fuck to dissociate out of this shit.

The mind gets to a point where, if you just accept something as entirely, foundationally inevitable, it stops minding so much. Instead of finding ways to avoid or recognize the issue so as to go around it, it just gets accepted, and you start to process through it. It's how people clean the nastiest messes imaginable, how they go through truly delusional pain, suffer through psychological shit like you wouldn't believe.

Except I would believe. I'm experiencing it right fucking now. I feel like I'm barely in my body right now.

Which is great, right? Because this isn't my body. It's just the body I'm using right now. So the slime mold up past my fucking knees, occasionally slopping up high enough that I feel it hit some truly unmentionables, doesn't matter.

It doesn't hurt. It isn't killing me. It's just unpleasant. And I can live through some truly, profoundly unpleasant shit if it means that I can get to where I've chosen to go.

The fungal valley, as I've taken to calling it, is a whole new nightmare. The rolling hills flatten out as they get closer to the mountains, and the valley dips further still, turning from that brief patch of flatlands between hills and mountain to actual marshes. Like, full marshland. It's not water and mud, it's a sort of liquified sludge, which may, or may not, be dead flesh-tissue from the fields and mountains. It's like walking through a mix of algae and fungus smoothie, just granular enough to be extra gross, except that every few patches, rather than sink deeper, some collection of "rock" at the bottom holds everything up.

In theory, diving down and trying to look might give me some insight into what's under all this terrain.

In practice, I am not going to fucking do that.

Deeper in past the marshland first start, the granular material clumps together more intensely, and starts to work as actual, official "terrain". It's not really good enough to stand on without sinking, but I see glimpses of stronger material further in, larger mushrooms sprouting from them. Some like enoki, thin and finger-like, others thick and dense with large caps, others like sea anemones, brain coral and more. Some that I don't have words to describe, because they're new. Vibrant and bright in places, dead and crawling in others, fuzzy in some places, moldy in others. Like watching an orange decay into mush and pale white fur, juxtaposed as that same fur grows from large pillars of sponge-like rock.

It's deep sea life and the multiplication of the dark beneath the bed and the black and crawling rot of the dead.

It's beautiful in its own way.

It's also very fucking slimy.

I sigh as I use my additional limbs to drag myself up onto another little island, hoping that this will be the one at last that I can use to hop from one spot to the next. The framework around my legs helps, balancing my weight as I stand on the fickle surface, and I look around for my next foothold, the next milestone, the next something.

I glimpse movement.

A flickering thing, faster than it should be, dashes through the clouds. In this place where everything is slow and strange, lethargic and spongy and wet, whatever I saw moves fast enough to flicker.

I stay very still. The arms on my back crawl, doing true to their name and writhing around against me. They can pivot over my shoulders or to my sides, and I fix them in the latter position, more easily able to respond to something coming in from the sides. The Glove twitches as I watch, my eyes tracking everything, blurry though it may be.

Could really do with some better eyes right about now. Do what you can with what you have.

The movement doesn't resurface. Just stillness and the soft hissing of spores being released around me as I walk, adding to the fog.

One minute. Two minutes. Counting to one-hundred and eighty seconds- three minutes. More or less.

Nothing. No movement.

Alright. Focus.

It's fine if you die. It's fine if you die. It's fine if I die. I just start again.

But… we're here.

The Glove has been itching since I got here. So has the back of my head, climbing and climbing as I go.

There is so much here that I can use. So much to… SYNCHRONIZE with.

When I was in the fields, I built with hair and bone, even before I began to hunt for my food. The very ground I walked on was made of scabbed over blood, thick and useful. I get the same sort of energy here from the sludge. I can feel it in my skin, in the way it sticks to my cloak.

It's disgusting.

That thought isn't useful, so I put it aside. Put it away, potentially even to throw into the garbage.

It's not disgusting if it's useful.

The mold and slime and the mud that they make together, the very material I walk through and which coats my skin and makes it tingle- thick and useful.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

I can come up with clear ideas later. For now, I lean into the unreality of it all, and dig deep into my mind. Into the alterations of myself, that this place has brought about.

I reach down to the material in the ground, the thick mold that makes up this soupy, tofu-ass island, and take out a chunk. I let it sit in the glove, let myself sift and feel the weight of it.

Slowly, I peel back, following my "instincts". I use multi-jointed fingers to cut and scratch and dig, following through it for the parts that feel… right.

Like pearls in mud. Little strands of mycelium wrapped through the mold, like roots. Interlacing and connecting with all the different bits of it all.

I take in a deep breath.

It's alright if you die.

As one finger of the Glove reaches out, threading through roots and wrapping them like thread, another pulling fluids into itself, like a faux-syringe, yet another finger extends a scalpel.

The mind gets to a point where, if you just accept something as entirely, foundationally inevitable, it stops minding so much.

It gets to that point. It's real. I've been there. I've been there.

I've done worse to myself than this.

It's alright if I die here.

Pain is inevitable.

Even as I perform a collection of half-understood materials on what I hold, I reach around with yet another finger.

And cut.

Long, slender-pointed blade slings through flesh, unzipping along my thigh deeply enough that I can see bone beneath it. The flesh is anemic, the blood bright crimson and watery in intermittent bursts, the bone porous and with little malformations to it.

I can't look away.

Focus.

From behind the glass, I start to weave.

The Glove makes everything easier. Makes everything more complex. I'm not just wrapping threads and goo together and melting them into something useful, I'm doing something almost like surgery. Not quite, not nearly so precise- but closer.

I'll need more upgrades in the future. More things to improve, back when I return to reality.

For now, it'll do.

It hurts.

It hurts. Please. It Hurts.

I'm behind the glass. I don't hear it, and if I do, I don't listen.

I implant the little nodules and roots directly into the meat, carving here and there to unfold it like origami, to find spaces between threads and fibers. It's messy, and I bleed a lot, so-

Oh. The blood moves away, circling around me to find itself back into the veins it's supposed to be in.

I glimpse, in the brighter crimson, a little shape, bobbing in place and looking up at me like a puppy. With no eyes.

I don't thank it. I'm behind the glass. I can't thank it yet.

I close the cut, and take some of the thicker, denser muck, and use it to close up the wound, like glue.

Battlefield surgery at its finest.

It's like a nightmare. Always like a nightmare.

But I'm not afraid. And I chose this. In that, it's almost like a dream. The fear is there for flavor, rather than for its usual meaning and context.

It can't be a nightmare, because a distant part of me is enjoying it.

It's enough, apparently.

SYMBIONT ACQUIRED: Fungal Tissue (Leg)

Fungal Tissue: A material almost entirely fungal in nature has been modified to work in conjunction with flesh. The well-known hunger of both organisms blends unevenly together, forced to mimic each other through artificial processes. This could, in theory, be construed as an improvement- so long as the original material was of a pathetic enough quality.

Ah. There's that description-sass I know and love. I still don't know who, or more likely what, has written these descriptors, or if they were pulled directly out of my own fucking brain and modified for ease of use. Either way, considering how the descriptions talk about Fleshlings, I'd say that my current body qualifies as a "pathetic enough" original material.

Not my best work, but it's my first time dealing with this material. There's worse things in the world than a weak little upgrade, so long as it's an upgrade. Always happy to have a… slightly better leg.

I look up just in time to catch the flicker again.

My own mistake for not watching closely enough, huh? The flicker is closer this time.

I can tell because it's coming at my face.

One of my Writhing Limbs shoots out, reacting on a hair-trigger to cut out in front of me. It doesn't kill, but I manage to knock it off-course, a good ten to twenty pounds of force deflected off to one side.

I get a good look at it an instant before it jumps again.

It's like a fly, but without wings, several elements of it coming across as more crab-like than insectile. I see four legs, tall and crooked, and a last pair in front that has claws to them, like a mix between a praying mantis and a little crab. The whole thing is a mix of grey and mold-black, perfectly suited to hide in a place like this.

It clicks its claws together, the sound bareilly even audible, and I feel like I should chuckle at it. It's like if a flea was a puppy was a horse fly was a crab.

Fun world we live in.

Or… I guess I live in.

I'm in a lot of pain. I'm probably being a little gigglier than I'd like.

I definitely shouldn't giggle now, considering what I just heard.

Behind me.

Clik-clik.

Clik-clik.

Clik-clik.

Just what I fucking needed. Pack hunters.

I need to upgrade myself more after this.

I feel as much as see them jump at me, my sense of touch apparently at least as good as my sense of sight, and one of them lands on my back. Like little surgical scissors, the fucker tries to cut into me, to cut out pieces to eat- and instead gets caught in my Dermal Cloak, trapped amidst the fibers. They block the first cut, the muck and slime in the fibers working to turn it into fucking armor.

An instant later, the creature's dead, severed in half by chittering blades that cut through it like wet tofu.

My Writhing Limbs stretch and contract, dozens of twitch-fiber organelles woven in sync to strike, retreat, strike. They move abruptly, freezing in place and then striking again, over and over, less like tendrils and more like insect-limbs, all skitter and no flail. The blades make a harsh little keening sound as they cut through the little flea-things, even as more of them begin to emerge.

Not all of them try to attack me. In fact, an increasing number of them focus on the corpses I'm leaving, chopped-up insect parts from the ones and twos that jump at me getting covered in similar bodies.

Clik-clik

Clik-clik

Clik-clik

It's all I can fucking hear at this point. The sound of dozens of little scissor-claws snipping away at every bit of fallen flesh they can find.

And they keep coming.

Floating out of the muck like little bubbles, clik-cliking out of the clumps of denser mushrooms, emerging from deeper in, where the light gets even dimmer under the fog.

My upper limbs strike out at another one, catching it right in the middle and carving through it messily- and in the process, another one gets through to strike at me, going for the legs this time.

My original arm comes down on it with the spiked club, and for a moment, I think about those old Cinan The Barbarian comics my dad used to love. Unga-Bunga, into the swords-and-sorcery I go with my big club.

Pain.

I was distracted, slowed down, and they're not coming in ones and twos anymore. They're coming in larger groups, and they're getting bolder, the smell of dead bug-things filling the foggy air and tinting it as more and more spores are released from our movements.

I crush the one that's digging at my calf under my feet, literally, and it's enough for the island of mold I'm on to crumble apart and dunk me back into the slime.

They're in the sludge, too. Slower- but so am I.

I could go back. They're coming from deeper in, and I got proof that I can craft Symbionts out of this stuff.

…

No.

It's alright if I die.

I breach the surface of the slime, doing my best to inhale- but the sticky substance gets in the way, pulled down into my throat by my wheezing gasps.

I try to cough, and fail. I keep swinging, my Writhing Blades making short work of the creatures, even as their little shells sometimes mean I only knock them away rather than carve them open.

I reach deep inside myself, down to the part of me that's dancing to the beat of my anemic heart.

Help, I ask.

I hear the Bloodling answer in the sound of my heart getting louder, the taste of copper in the back of my throat, and the feeling like I just got shot full of adrenaline.

My eyes go wide, and all I can see is movement and colors.

I hack out something like a roar, and keep fucking swinging.

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