Literature / Little Mushroom

Little Mushroom (小蘑菇) is a sci-fi and danmei novel by Shisi.

In a world set over a century after the apocalyptic disappearance of the Earth's geomagnetic field, the remaining humans are doing their best to survive in a polluted wasteland where death or infection by mutated animals into mindless xenogenics is a constant danger even within the relative safety of the two still-standing human bases.

In the midst of all this, a little mushroom with unusual sapience meets a dying human named An Ze and absorbs An Ze's blood and genes, giving him An Ze's memories and the ability to shapeshift into a human form resembling An Ze. The little mushroom, renamed An Zhe, has only one goal: infiltrate the Northern Base — the human base An Ze came from — and find his spore which was taken away from him by humans.

However, the Northern Base is overseen by the Trial Court's judges and their Arbiter, a cold and merciless soldier named Lu Feng who will unflinchingly kill anyone he suspects of being a mutated xenogenic. An Zhe manages to hide his true identity well enough to avoid being killed, but Lu Feng still harbors suspicions about him, and finding his missing spore proves to be more difficult than he anticipated.

To make things even more complicated, the human bases are coming under increasing threat from mutated animals and xenogenics and An Zhe's interactions with Lu Feng and the other humans are causing him to develop feelings and attachments beyond just getting his spore back...

The novel was originally published as a Chinese webnovel and it has an official English translation published by Peach Flower House in two volumes titled Little Mushroom: Judgement Day and Little Mushroom: Revelations. It has also received an Audio Drama adaptation.

---

This novel contains examples of:

• Air-Vent Passageway: An Zhe travels through the Main City's vent passageways in his hyphae form in an attempt to find the Lighthouse where his spore is being kept in.
• Arc Words: "Humankind’s interests take precedence over all else" is repeated multiple times throughout the story as the Northern Base's motto and justification for taking extreme measures to preserve the remnants of human civilization at all costs.
• Artistic License – Physics: There are several things that occur in this story that should not be possible with our current understanding of physics, like mutations being capable of causing an animal or human to instantly enlarge in size or sprout additional appendages. This turns out to be a justified plot point, because the real reason the mutations are occurring so strangely is that some cosmic form of 'distortion' is causing the very laws of physics to change from the laws that humans are accustomed to.
• As the Good Book Says...: When the human bases are facing a severe crisis, An Zhe overhears a group of military officers and scientists reciting Psalm 23:4 from the Bible that begins with "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil for you are with me". It leaves enough of an impression on him that he recites it from memory later on as he's walking with Lu Feng through a desolate landscape with their chances of survival uncertain.
• Attempted Rape: One of the mercenaries An Zhe meets early on in the novel tries to rape him, which is thwarted by one of the other mercenaries mutating and killing him.
• The Beforetimes: The human characters refer to the pre-apocalyptic times as "the Age of Prosperity".
• Big Damn Heroes: When the Underground Base is suddenly invaded by mutated animals and the artificial magnetic pole it was defending stops working in the chaos, Lu Feng and a number of the Northern Base's military forces come flying to their rescue. Lu Feng and his subordinates end up doing a similar big heroic rescue in the climax when they appear just in time to save the Highland Research Institute from being overrun by mutated animals.
• Big Damn Kiss: Lu Feng gives An Zhe one when when the two of them are stranded in the wilderness and he knows that An Zhe isn't human but still can't bring himself to kill him.
• Bittersweet Ending: Humanity manages to avoid complete extinction and they no longer need to worry about losing their minds to the effects of infection, xenogenics have gone from hated and shunned to accepted and welcomed, and scientists have begun to research the new physics laws and use them to create water and other valuable resources, but countless lives have still been lost, human civilization will never be able to go back to its former glory, and their chances of long-term survival are still not guaranteed.
• Black Market: The Northern Base's Outer City has a black market that sells banned goods and offers job opportunities difficult to find elsewhere, but doing business there can be risky if the military comes checking or the people there take advantage of you.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: An Zhe, as a mushroom, initially cares less about the cataclysmic events threatening the entire world and humanity at large and more about relocating his spore.
• Body Horror: When an animal or human gets infected and transforms into a mutant, the results are not pretty. One example of this is the xenogenic whose corpse is cut open to reveal that his internal organs had all been replaced by insect larvae.
• Break the Scientist: The scientists are driven to despair over how the worsening mutation situation can't be explained by any known scientific norms, especially when it turns out that humans are becoming mutated even without coming into physical contact or aerial transmission with mutants.
• Chekhov's Gun: The realistic mannequin Mr. Shaw and An Zhe make of Lu Feng ends up being used to help Lu Feng fake his death and sneak out of the Northern Base to aid his military peers.
• Crapsack World: The world has become overrun with dangerous mutant animals, humans have been vastly reduced in number and forced to resort to either braving a polluted wilderness full of deadly beasts to survive or living in bases ruled by a ruthless dystopian government that won't hesitate to gun down anyone on the spot if they have even the vaguest suspicion of them being infected.
• Darkest Hour: The humans' already-rough situation turns increasingly grim and dire over the course of the story, but it becomes its bleakest when the Highland Research Institute realize that there's nothing they can do to prevent the laws of physics from evolving into a new set of principles they won't be able to survive under, An Zhe is on the verge of death, and the mutated animals are launching an overwhelming assault on the institute. It's only An Zhe's Heroic Sacrifice and the Northern Base forces' Big Damn Heroes appearance that prevent the total annihilation of humanity.
• Despair Event Horizon: An Zhe is almost Driven to Suicide when he realizes that his former home of the Abyss has changed too much for him to find his original cave again.
• Disaster Scavengers: Some humans, called "mercenaries", take on jobs of exploring the dangerous wilderness and scavenging any useful resources they come across to sell to the base.
• Do Not Go Gentle: The Dylan Thomas poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" is taught to the Northern Base's children as a lesson to not meekly surrender to death and becomes an important motif in the story about humanity's stubborn refusal to give up even with the odds overwhelmingly stacked against them.
• Electric Torture: When An Zhe refuses to tell the base's humans where he hid the spore he took from their laboratory, they put him through this form of torture to try to get him to confess.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Humanity already went through an apocalypse over a century ago, but it gradually becomes apparent over the course of the novel that an even bigger and more terrifying apocalypse is imminent for the remaining humans and all of life on Earth if they can't somehow figure out what is causing the rapid acceleration of mutations and how to stop it.
• Fallout Shelter Fail: The humans established four bases to keep their remaining population safe from infection and mutated animals, but two of these bases have already collapsed by the beginning of the novel and the last two come under severe threat of also succumbing to the infection threat by the end of the first volume.
• Fungus Humongous: One of many indicators that the flora and fauna in this novel's world aren't quite like ours is An Zhe's casual description of mushrooms in the Abyss that are as large and tall as human buildings.
• Fusion Dance: The mutations of animals and humans turn out to be a world-scale process of this slowly happening, with mutated animals fusing together into even more powerful Mix-and-Match Critters as they kill and devour one another. To make this even more terrifying, this fusion is occurring with inanimate materials too, as the main characters discover to their horror when they find appliances in an abandoned city that have fused together over time.
• Garden of Eden: The Northern Base's Reproduction, Nurturing, and Education Center, where all the base's food is grown, all its fertile women are housed, and all its children are raised and educated, is known as the "Garden of Eden" for short because of how vital it is for the continued survival and reproduction of the base's human population. This nickname becomes cruelly ironic when it's revealed that its inhabitant Madam Lu was mutated into a xenogenic years ago without anyone knowing about it and that she's so sick and tired of living in a Gilded Cage as a glorified Baby Factory that she doesn't care if the rest of the Garden's women, children, and even test tube embryos all get mutated into xenogenics too from close contact with her.
• Gilded Cage: The women and children in the Main City's Garden of Eden live in much better and safer conditions than the people in the Outer City's slums do and their every care is taken of, but the women have no guaranteed human rights and are expected to reproduce as frequently as possible and any grown children who are deemed not useful or skilled enough are banished to the Outer City's poorer living conditions.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Hubbard mentions that a friend of his named Tang Lan sacrificed his life to lead a monster away from the rest of their team. In the extras, it's revealed that Hubbard himself performed a heroic sacrifice of his own by killing the monster trying to shut down the Highland Research Institute's wind turbine in spite of knowing that the only spot he could shoot it from without causing collateral damage was right at the edge of a cliff and the recoil of his gun would cause him to fall over it, and that this was immediately followed by Tang Lan, who had actually survived his sacrifice, diving after him to try to save him even if it meant sacrificing himself a second time.
  • During the climax, An Zhe walks into the Simpson cage to his death after realizing that his immunity to mutation could be transmitted by the Simpson cage to everyone on Earth and prevent humanity and the world at large from succumbing to the mutations.
• Heroic Willpower: Brutally subverted; the odds of a human being able to retain their consciousness after being infected are entirely random and are not affected at all by the human's strength of will.
• Humanity Is Infectious: An Zhe's absorption of An Ze's genes and memories causes him to develop the ability to feel human emotions that he wasn't expecting. He even calls himself a monster who got infected by a human.
• Humans Are Flawed: One of the novel's main themes is that humans can be petty, selfish, and think they're more important in the grand scheme of the universe than they really are, but that they're also capable of great kindness, intelligence, and proving their capability to endure even in seemingly hopeless circumstances.
• The Immune: An Zhe, unlike all the other animals and humans who can become infected and mutated from the tiniest wound, appears to be immune to infection and his spore is similarly completely unchanged even after numerous attempts by scientists to mutate it. This turns out to be key in him being capable of transmitting his immunity to the entire Earth in the ending.
• Interspecies Romance: Between An Zhe, a mushroom xenogenic, and Lu Feng, a human.
• It's the Only Way to Be Sure: After the Outer City suffers a wide-scale invasion by mutated animals, the military evacuates a small number of uninfected inhabitants to the Main City and then nukes the entire Outer City and the thousands of people still in it to prevent any xenogenics from escaping and passing on their human genes to even more dangerously powerful animals.
• Man-Eating Plant: A lot of plants in the irradiated landscape have become carnivorous and capable of eating any animal that makes the mistake of getting too close to them.
• Meaningful Echo: An Ze's line that An Zhe is "just a little mushroom" in the first chapter becomes a lot more poignant when Lu Feng says the same line in the ending after An Zhe's selfless sacrifice that prevented humanity from being completely wiped out.
• Meaningful Name:
  • An Ze gave the little mushroom he met the name of An Zhe, written with the Chinese character for "snap", after the mushroom told him that one of his most important memories was his body almost being snapped in half by the rain.
  • The Chinese character for the "Feng" in Lu Feng's name is an adjective used to describe the sound of wind or water, which also happens to be An Zhe’s favorite sounds from his time as a mushroom.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Many of the mutated animals are described as looking like a bizarre mixture of all the different animals they consumed.
• Mutants: Humans who have become infected and undergone mutation from contact with mutated creatures are called "xenogenics" and are feared and killed on sight by the human bases due to their new animalistic instincts almost always eliminating any trace of human thought or morality in their minds.
• The Needs of the Many: The Northern Base views their often brutal and merciless methods, which include killing any individual who might be infected even if it's uncertain if they truly are and forcing fertile women to birth as many children as possible, as necessary to ensuring the continued survival and reproduction of the human species.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Some of the human characters come to believe that humans, in resorting to indiscriminate killing of their own and depriving others of their human rights to survive, have become no better than the deadly animals they're fighting against.
  Madam Lu: We resist monsters and xenogenics along with the contamination of human genes by foreign genes for the sake of preserving the will that is specific to humans and avoid being ruled by animal natures... but to achieve this goal, all of our actions run counter to the norms of human nature. And the community we collectively form—all of the things it does, such as obtaining resources, strengthening itself, and producing offspring—can only embody the nature of animals. In fact, humans are no different from the monsters of the outside world.
• Outcast Refuge: The Highland Research Institute is a hidden sanctuary for the xenogenics who retained their human will and the members of the Fusion Faction who fled the Northern Base after considering the Arbiter system they established there to be too inhumane.
• The Promise:
  • When An Ze dies, An Zhe makes a promise to himself that he'll return to the cave where An Ze's remains are located in after he regains his spore. He's unable to find the specific cave with An Ze's remains in the maze-like Abyss even with Lu Feng's help in the epilogue, so he settles for talking out loud in the Abyss about all the things he wanted to tell An Ze's remains about when he came back.
  • An Zhe asks Lu Feng at one point if he's ever made a promise to someone else that he couldn't keep. He expects Lu Feng to say no, but Lu Feng unexpectedly says that there is one promise he couldn't keep: the promise he and Dr. Ji made to his mother that there would come a day when they would be able to enjoy being free together.
• Resurrective Immortality: After An Zhe's Heroic Sacrifice, his spore ends up growing into a new An Zhe with all his past memories intact. Lu Feng speculates that he might be capable of repeating this process indefinitely as long as he keeps on growing spores.
• Science Hero: The scientist characters, while not immune to experiments going very wrong or people criticizing their apparent inefficiency, are all portrayed sympathetically as intelligent people who are doing their best to research solutions for the mutation problems and they end up contributing massively to saving the remaining humans from complete destruction, with the Fusion Faction scientists who were condemned for their Mad Scientist experiments with mutated humans being the ones who figure out how to permanently stop humans from losing their minds to infection.
• Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing: When An Zhe shapeshifts into his hyphae form, his human clothes don't shapeshift with him. Fortunately, he can use his hyphae to weave a robe-like covering around his body if he has to shapeshift to human form without any clothes nearby.
• Summon Bigger Fish: When the main characters are confronted by a gigantic mutated monster that Lu Feng's gun alone can't take down, Lu Feng fires a series of gunshots close to the monster to attract the notice of an even bigger creature that kills it (and, thankfully, does not take notice of the humans afterwards).
• Superpower Russian Roulette: The process of mutating into a xenogenic turns out to be this. Almost all humans who undergo this mutation lose their human consciousness entirely and become a mindless creature that only cares about spreading their infection to as many humans as possible, but in extremely rare cases, the human is able to retain their consciousness and sense of morality. And even with these rare lucky humans, their mutant abilities can range wildly from "permanently stuck in an animal or plant form that can't speak or perform most human actions" to "can take on a humanoid form with some non-human characteristics" to "can turn parts of their body into wings or claws or other powerful animal appendages at complete will".
• The Tragic Rose: Roses are associated with the Rose Manifesto, a policy that forces all fertile women in the Northern Base's Main City to become baby factories living in a Gilded Cage, and also with Madam Lu, a beautiful woman who has experienced the tragic losses of both her mother and lover and is the only one in the base who can grow roses. The eventual infection and near-downfall of the entire Main City occurs because the roses Madam Lu was growing attracted a bee who stung her and left her with a latent xenogenic mutation that didn't fully manifest until years later.
• Tragic Keepsake: Lu Feng believes that the bullet An Zhe wears around his neck is one and that the bullet is what killed a loved one of his, but it's really the bullet that struck An Zhe before his spore was taken from him and he's keeping it with him to figure out where or who the bullet originated from. It is a keepsake, but not as tragic as Lu Feng assumes. However, it turns out that Lu Feng himself wears the bullet that killed his father as a tragic keepsake of his own.
• Transferable Memory: An Zhe acquires all of An Ze's memories after absorbing his blood and genes and he also sees snippets of memories from mutated creatures who try to infect him.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Si Nan and Lily are both unsettlingly quiet and emotionless for children of their age. This is implied to be a product of them having been raised since birth in the Gilded Cage of the Main City to be either soldiers or breeders, but it turns out it's also a sign that they're secretly xenogenics who haven't outwardly mutated yet.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: An Zhe, after absorbing An Ze's blood through his hyphae, gains the ability to shapeshift into a human form that looks exactly like An Zhe and he can also transform part or all of his body into mushroom hyphae to escape or sneak around more easily. Some of the xenogenics at the Highland Research Institute have the ability to shapeshift between human and beastly forms too, like Tang Lan who can shapeshift his body parts into things like wings or claws. An Zhe also discovers in the post-main story extras that he can shapeshift into other animal or plant forms if he consumes enough of them.
• What Is This Feeling?: An Zhe, as a mushroom who doesn't think of himself as a member of the human species even after he absorbs a human's memories and genes, becomes confused when he starts experiencing human emotions like grief or love and frequently can't identify what they are.
• You Are Who You Eat: Mutated animals who feed on each other can gain the appendages of the organism they eat or, in rare cases, shapeshift into that organism's form.