The soldier...deliberately lowered his voice... ‘What is the Colonel doing?’ ‘Fixing the faucet.’ ‘The Colonel knows how to fix faucets?...Then you and he are...' ‘Right now, we're neighbors.’ ‘What about before?’…An Zhe recalled how they had slept in each other's beds. ‘Friends, I suppose.’…He seemed to not believe An Zhe. Perhaps it was that Lu Feng very rarely took apart other people's faucets."

You say that you’re a monster but as a judge, I haven’t found the difference between you and humans. ” Lu Feng lowered his head and gently spoke into his ear. "Let me see you give birth to another one." i want to perish this book caused me so much pain yet i loved every second of it. i'm too tired to write a proper review so here are some of my annotations. please excuse the inappropriate amount of will wood references. This little heterogeneous seemed so sure that Lu Feng wouldn’t hurt him despite his body being covered with marks from the electrocution. ”

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bluntly interacts with the dehumanization of people who have been to prison, people with less education, impoverished people, and the elderly However, the fact that our protagonist is a nice young man who is secretly a sentient mushroom in search of his “kidnapped” spore is nicely bonkers, and since we share his POV we also tend to view the fate of humanity with a touch of detachment. The fate of the “little mushroom” An Zhe and his spore, on the other hand – and that of the human kids he somewhat incongruously ends up teaching - I am VERY invested! I also love the intervals when An Zhe risks using some of his “mushroom powers”, like turning into a ball of hyphae so he can explore the air vents of the base!

Link to tweet with map from manhua (which this book desperately needed): https://x.com/dokkaebisan/status/1691... are there other jobs in the outer city besides mercenary, supply depot person, and sex worker? like who made all that potato soup they ate out there? Later me: Ok, so it seems like the garden of eden also grows the vegetables? But do they also cook the soup?Number of women with speaking roles counter: Doussay (dead), lady who comes to lu feng on behalf of the government to ask him to donate sperm, Lily, Lu Feng’s mom An Zhe felt that it was better when this man was in a worse mood, because at least then he wouldn't randomly bully others.

And it’s this sweet, naïve mushroom who may be the solution for humanity. I first began to suspect An Zhe may be more important to humanity’s overall survival when he was bit by bugs and didn’t mutate. Instead, An Zhe appears to be capable of creating full, unblemished genetical replication of what he “absorbs”, human genes included, as can be seen by Doctor Ji’s examination, which found no abnormalities within An Zhe, deeming the little mushroom “human”. I suddenly recalled that An Ze, in An Zhe’s company, did not mutate either. And maybe he was too fatally wounded to mutate, but he has chatted with An Zhe for quite a while before his death, so that seems a little unlikely. Then the scientists spoke of An Zhe’s spore being the potential future solution and that just cemented it for me. I am super excited to see if this bears fruit in Revelations!But where will he find it, in a world so big, where elemental beings infect humans and in retaliation, humans kill them?