Reincarnated as a Mushroom?-Chapter 46 - 45: The Heart That Refused to Die, and the God That Fed It

Chapter 46: Chapter 45: The Heart That Refused to Die, and the God That Fed It

Chapter 45: The Heart That Refused to Die, and the God That Fed It

Before me lay six massive hunks of carcass—each still humming faintly with the echo of a kill hard-won and recent. The aftermath of my "fun time" with Kimchi had left the room hazy with pheromonal humidity and psychic aftershocks, but true to her dutiful nature, she had slithered off shortly afterward to procure something with a bit more iron and muscle fiber than my particular brand of protein. A snack was fine; a proper meal was necessary.

That left me alone with the beast’s remains. Or more accurately—my prey.

"Onyx," I had called earlier, "fetch the jungle predator’s biomass. I trust you didn’t digest anything important?"

She obeyed without hesitation—but the way she did so was something out of a xeno-cryptid fetishist’s fever dream. Her jaw unhinged and split like a blooming orchid made of obsidian blades, revealing mandibles twitching in anticipation, and a throat that should not have been that wide. Piece by piece, she began regurgitating the intact remains of the feline apex predator I’d slaughtered during my prior little jungle misadventure.

Chunks of it thudded wetly to the floor. Entire limbs. Ribcages. Organs that glistened like alien gemstones. No stomach acid. No rot. No enzymatic damage. Just... preserved.

A slow, horrified grin crawled across my face. "No wonder she’s so obsessed with swallowing me whole. She literally could."

I muttered this with a shiver of bemused disgust—and admiration.

Focusing, I laid out the parts in anatomical order and began reconstructing the fallen predator like some grotesque jigsaw puzzle of sinew and steel-hardened tendon. My intent: autopsy, analysis, and, if the gods were kind and evolution hadn’t been stingy, augmentation.

The torso was first. I sliced through the musculature with a scalpel made from Kiya’s alloy-flesh, opening the chest cavity with a satisfying wet schlick. What I found was... standard. A feline predator’s biology writ large—overbuilt lungs for sprint bursts, a tripartite liver, nothing exotic. No glandular mysteries or internal weapons caches.

I moved to the head. Bisecting the skull with care, I plucked out the brain and weighed it in my palm. For a beast of this kind, the neural mass was impressively developed—nearly a pound of cognitive tissue. No doubt this explained the terrifying coordination it had displayed. This thing had hunted with strategy.

I placed the brain gently back into its cranial cradle and turned my attention to the limbs.

The forelegs were the first surprise. From the exposed marrow to the tendon sheathing, they were overengineered for sheer murder. Dense bone—dense enough to survive gravitational pressures three to four times that of the native world. I gave one claw an experimental press.

Snick.

It extended like a switchblade on instinct alone, slicing a thin, bloodless cut across my finger. The wound was instantly licked clean by an unseen appendage—probably Onyx. I didn’t bother scolding her.

I peeled back the skin to examine the musculature beneath—and I whistled low. Fiber bundles denser than steel cabling. Flexibility married to raw tensile strength. Evolution had not fucked around with this thing.

Abandoning the forelimbs, I scrambled to the rear legs like a child on Lifeday. As expected, the hindlegs were the crown jewels. Huge. Engineered like biomechanical springs. Each one stored more kinetic energy than my entire lower body.

My mind was already racing with potential augmentations. With enough splicing fidelity, I could mimic this musculature and catapult my speed and agility into obscene territory.

But first—ritual.

I forced myself to complete the autopsy with reverence. Every incision was deliberate. Every observation recorded. This beast had earned my respect in battle, and I would not dishonor its memory with sloppy science.

That’s when I found it.

While stitching the chest cavity back together, I noticed something... wrong with the heart. ƒrēewebnoѵёl.cσm

The last time I’d seen it, it was a solid blood-red organ. Now, though? There was a glow. A low, electric blue thrumming near the base.

"The fuck?"

I paused my work, scalpel still in hand, and extracted the heart once more. The anomaly wasn’t physical. When I touched the blue section, my fingers passed through it—ghostlike. Ethereal.

Recognition slammed into me like a freight train made of lightning.

"That’s... psionic."

The realization chilled me.

It was like Crystal’s secondary brain structure—the one that could transform into pure psionic mass. This was similar. But not from her. This was the beast’s heart. Part of it had turned into psionic energy.

I coated my fingertips in my own psionic aura and reached again. This time, I could feel it. I pulled gently—and more of the blue mass emerged like thread from a needle, leaving the physical heart untouched.

Now I held two hearts: one of flesh and blood, and one composed entirely of condensed psionic energy.

"What the actual shit?"

As I cupped the spectral heart, a wave of energy pulsed through me. Thurum. A deep, internal beat that wasn’t mine. The thing... throbbed. Alive. Awake.

I immediately dove into my Mindspace.

My Origin—a vast lattice of fractal code and pulsing crystal veins—was reacting. A gout of psionic fire erupted from it, funneled toward my mental barriers, then phased through them with ease.

The next beat came. Thurum.

I didn’t understand it fully—but my Origin did. I let it do what it needed. I trusted it.

When I returned to the physical plane, the heart was still in my hands. Still glowing. Still pulsing.

Thump-thump.

I turned to grab nearby instruments, only to freeze.

There was a hole in the wall. A Jewel-sized hole. And, lo and behold, there she was—Crystal herself—emerging from the wreckage with the posture of a goddess and the eyes of an addict in withdrawal.

"DON’T STOP!" she shrieked into the link, manic and incandescent with hunger. "KEEP GOING! DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE STOP!"

Her face had evolved past lust and into something primal. Insanity layered over obsession.

Crystal had never looked more terrifying.

With a nervous gulp, I focused. I continued drawing in the ambient psionic energy. Every time I pulsed it into the heart, it responded. Thurum. Thump-thump.

Crystal, in turn, began flooding the space with her own power—like an addict supplying their dealer just to ensure the fix wouldn’t end.

The rhythm continued for hours. Then days.

Thirty-six hours later, I was still fully alert. My body surged with energy from Crystal’s offerings. The heart now beat every few seconds. Then faster. And faster.

Thump-thump.

Thump-thump.

Thump-thump.

And then...

It beat on its own.

We both stared at it in awe.

Sixty seconds later, the heart ignited. A radiant white nova of light burst from its surface, brighter than anything I could have prepared for. I had to turn away—retinal safety demanded it.

But Crystal didn’t.

She didn’t need eyes.

She saw through energy. Through potential. Through evolution itself.

And what she saw?

It made her grin like a predator that had just spotted a new god rising from the corpse of its prey.

End of Chapter

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