Chapter 173: Fungal Spirits

"Wake up, all of you!" Kraft caught up to Ma Ding and shouted at the group huddled around the fire—some overly agitated, others unnaturally subdued—pulling each one who sat with head bowed and knees drawn up to their feet.

It was no longer clear whether these were natural emotional responses, changes induced by external influence, or a combination of both. When awakened, they all exhibited a degree of daze and scattered attention.

With urgency overriding caution, Kraft unhesitatingly deployed his family's battlefield first-aid technique: the traditional, effective method of physical stimulation to peripheral facial nerves swiftly restored consciousness to those lost in fog—whether sobbing in grief or curled in silence—each one snapping back to reality after two sharp slaps.

He grabbed the recently risen attendant, raised one finger, and observed the subject's convergence reflex and ocular tracking. "Did you see anything? A bright patch? Double images?"

"I think I'm seeing spots," the attendant freed one hand from his face to rub his eyes; his vision seemed only mildly impaired.

"What about you? And you?" Kraft questioned each in turn; the replies were uniformly "blurred vision," "glare," or similar—no one yet reported the fungal hallucinations so vividly fused with the environment as he had.

Yet after the outbursts of intense emotion or prolonged despondency, they felt mental exhaustion, realizing they had become too immersed in their feelings, draining their energy beyond recovery.

Those feelings had swelled, exaggerated, spilled beyond words—rendering even battle-hardened veterans unable to control themselves. It wasn't merely fear triggered by the extraordinary; it resembled drunkenness, a surrender of consciousness to unchecked flow.

Add to that the faint floating light patches, the dreamlike haze—and even speech took on a surreal, floating quality.

Barro removed his helmet, shook out his flattened hair with mild irritation, and gagged twice. "Honestly? I feel… kind of cramped?"

He looked at the half-destroyed, spacious campsite, hunched his shoulders—then abandoned the motion as his armpit armor caught.

"I know this sounds weird, but really—it feels like everything around us has been packed solid."

Several others echoed this sentiment; those who had just curled up confirmed they felt the same, though the sensation was too strange, too abstract, to articulate clearly.

Though the surroundings were clearly empty, they still felt suffocated—nose and mouth blocked, chest tight—as if vast quantities of unseen matter pressed in from all sides, triggering an instinctive urge to curl up and escape the discomfort.

To an outsider, their breathing appeared normal—slightly accelerated due to subjective perception, yet in reality, ventilation was smooth, ribcage movement calm and steady.

Without a stethoscope, Kraft could only press his ear against their chests—unsurprisingly, he heard no distinct rales. He leaned toward this being a synesthetic distortion, but what exactly triggered it remained an open question.

Thus, only experiential advice could be offered now.

"Don't fall asleep. Hold on a little longer—the sun's coming up."

After a moment's thought, he added, for caution's sake and because it couldn't hurt: "If—if you find yourself separated from the group, alone in some unfamiliar place—don't shout. Find cover and hide."

The first cry came in the dead of night; by the time they'd endured their brutal battle with the horrifying things and shaken themselves awake from the emotional wreckage, night had silently slipped into its coldest, darkest hour.

It wasn't a bad thing—the chill would sharpen their minds, and signaled that summer's long daylight was near.

They sat in uneasy silence for a while, until someone could no longer bear the background noise of the fungal shells endlessly scratching at the soil, and began speaking of mundane, dull topics from ordinary life—to stave off exhaustion.

Training, food, even the rarely mentioned family ties. Most here were minor noble offshoots, stripped of inheritance or status, exiled to castles to find new paths. They saw themselves as upper-class, yet in reality differed little from commoners—worse off than some merchant families—a painfully awkward position.

Now, their mindset had subtly shifted; topics once carefully avoided no longer felt taboo, and could be freely turned into idle chatter.

Their complaints moved from poor rations and lodging to the stingy, heartless old man who refused to give even a fraction more from his estates—and here, they found common ground.

The conversation quickly expanded to those who had everything simply because they were born first, to the favored younger children, to unfair treatment, to what they deserved but never received.

The charged, resonant talk made them speak more freely—and time passed swiftly.

Kup listened with keen interest, imagining how much he'd give his own sons if he ever became "the old man"—but after careful thought, he decided he'd rather pass everything on intact, giving only a small sum.

Kraft silently timed the passage of moments, sensing the changes. He felt no resonance with any of this.

The influence—likely mediated by fungal spores—was visibly weakening. The light patches faded; the ground no longer seemed to ripple like a velvet carpet; the nonexistent fungal spots vanished each time attention shifted away.

【Hallucination】

But it had been too real—two indistinguishable layers unstablely overlapping in his vision. And that "crowded" sensation, though faint, never fully dissipated.

It wasn't the narrowness that returned after severing mental senses—it was a tangible, intuitively imaginable crowding, as if the amorphous light patches had solidified, compressing his breathing and movement space.

His focus, however, remained fixed on the stationary shells.

At a certain moment, they all synchronized into a slow, sluggish halt—the taut, bone-straining mycelial bundles relaxed, their solitary umbrella caps drooping to the ground.

The chattering group, startled by this familiar change, sprang to their feet, readying for another assault.

Even without mental senses, when scale reached this magnitude, the residual connection to the other side allowed Kraft to faintly perceive something withdrawing from within the shells—their latent "vitality" plummeting sharply.

A living, minute entity slipped into grass, soil, and every hidden mycelial network, "conducting" like the neural signal animations he'd once seen.

【Conduction】

It couldn't even be called an "entity"—it was a signal on a carrier, a cluster of tiny beings existing between matter and void, faintly perceived as they detached en masse from the shells.

He even thought he saw pulsing spots on swollen roots, fungal clusters trembling faintly in shadows. Kup instinctively lifted his foot, as if dodging a scurrying rabbit swarm beneath him.

A mottled shell stood upright in the woods; the crossbowman strained to crank the winch, aiming warily in its direction—but it remained motionless.

As time passed, the drooping crown and the arrow embedded in its chest became visible—they realized it was a shell nailed to a tree trunk, gradually revealed by the brightening light.

Above, the sky, fractured by branches and leaves, faintly glowed with a barely noticeable grayish hue—though the forest floor would take much longer to be touched by it.

Dawn had come. They waited. No more shells approached from the village. It was over—at least for now. A sense of unreality clung to them; even surrounded by corpses, it felt as if waking from a nightmare back into reality.

"Rest for a bit. We'll head into the village afterward to finish what's left." Kraft stood, stretched his joints, and met the terrified gazes of others without flinching.

"Are we going to leave them here and return? Wait until tonight for the rest to catch up? Or do any of you think you can walk out of this forest in one night?"

This reasoning was compelling. If another terrifying night came, none here would survive. The best course was to return—to the source, the village—and while the force driving the shells had temporarily receded, smash every one of them into fragments.

"I'll keep watch this time. Move quickly—best to depart before noon."

…

…

"Professor, are you truly alright?" Before departure, Ma Ding asked Kraft, his tone tinged with reverence, as he looked at the man who showed no sign of fatigue.

"Better than you imagine. Did you know? When someone's used to working all night, sometimes the next morning feels sharper than after waking."

This wasn't bravado—he had ample experience with sleep deprivation—but his current state couldn't be explained by mere all-nighters. After the influence faded, he didn't feel bone-deep exhaustion; instead, it felt like waking from light sleep.

The odd sensation returned to his left arm, drifting between the embedded components—returning him to his usual discomfort. Subconsciously, he found himself almost nostalgic for the prior state: the bodily anomaly had calmed, granting a quiet, restful peace—and his attitude had subtly shifted.

His psychological resistance to the influence had lessened. Intellect told him this was wrong—but the mind's preference for comfort could not be undone by denial, just as the open, irresistible sensation of his mental senses could not be refused.

【Influence】

This too was influence: mental influence acting on the body, and bodily influence acting on the mind.

Kraft considered rolling up his sleeve to check his arm—he suddenly realized he hadn't inspected it in days. The dense stares around him made him abandon the thought.

"Let's go."

The group once again followed the narrow path back to the village thick with fungal growth.

This time, he stepped onto that path. His thick boots felt as if they didn't exist—the comfortable, nauseatingly soft texture, along with a shiver, spread from his soles through his entire body.

The path now bore many gaps, no longer perfect—yet somehow, it felt like an invitation, urging him to fill in its missing pieces.

From the surrounding houses came the sounds of breaking, toppling objects—others were destroying the remaining shells, venting their accumulated fear and rage upon them, while deliberately avoiding this path—and the center it led to.

Kraft ascended the stone steps, hands behind his back. Above the arched entrance, a circular emblem hung against a broken brick facade; on either side, faint discolored patches remained—where something had hung for a long time, leaving its shadowed imprint.

"Orthodoxy?" He pondered, chin resting on his hand, then pushed open the unlocked door.

The structure mirrored other churches: a straight aisle between rows of pews led directly to the object of worship—visible from the threshold.

Midday sunlight streamed through broken windows, illuminating the tall, wingless circle below, painted with numerous grotesque demons and evil spirits subdued—yet far less expressive than the fragments glimpsed outside.

On either side of the central symbol, the angels had been altered with fresh paint, noticeably newer than the base.

The once benevolent face had been defaced: its wings erased, replaced by a halo larger than its body, features displaced, limbs multiplied, fingers and toes splayed, bent, twisted, boneless.