Reincarnated as a Mushroom?-Chapter 50 - 49: "The Chonker Sentinel and the Architect’s Week of Stillness"

Chapter 50: Chapter 49: "The Chonker Sentinel and the Architect’s Week of Stillness"

Chapter 49: "The Chonker Sentinel and the Architect’s Week of Stillness"

I awoke under the heaviest, most comforting suffocation known to sapient life — a living, breathing, half-ton security blanket that smelled faintly of ozone and blood sap. She sprawled across me like a psionic avalanche, one that just so happened to purr in her sleep and occasionally snort through her oversized nostrils.

The blanket in question was, of course, Sapphire. Named not for her temperament — which could only be described as possessive dragon meets lazy ocean tide — but for those massive, uncanny blue eyes of hers that shimmered like liquefied gemstones under stormlight.

I gave a lazy neck roll and mumbled into the crook of her shoulder, "Morning, Sapphire."

Whether it was actually morning was irrelevant. Inside my laboratory — nestled in the nerve-pulsing bowels of the hive’s core chambers — time was more of a vague suggestion than a linear reality. Without sunlight or breathable air to anchor your circadian rhythms, you started measuring time by how many times Kimchi tried to lick your ear in a given sleep cycle.

Sapphire, ever dignified, blinked once at me with glacial slowness, then promptly buried her head next to mine and returned to sleep. Classic.

It had been a hell of a year.

The progress I’d made with my genetic splicing project — the grand endeavor of self-modification and improvement — had been both thrilling and infuriating in equal measure. Initial results were promising, but soon the simulations began failing. My already enhanced genome, bolstered by Crystal’s essence, psionic boons, and biomechanical marvels, had grown too complex. Too stable. My body rejected most of the alterations outright like a bureaucratic immune system armed with red tape and contempt.

It wasn’t until a stray memory from my old Earth life slithered into my mind — probably dragged in by some karmic brainworm left by the Reincarnation Department — that inspiration struck. Drastic inspiration. Ill-advised inspiration.

I had started mutilating myself. Surgically. Precisely. Elegantly.

With my existing bio-architecture too fortified for subtle tweaks, I began carving targeted incisions into my legs — deep tissue cross-sections, carefully mapped incisions — to create "gene beds." Fresh, fertile zones that would encourage the new predator traits to take root. I made the changes slowly, deliberately, and with enough paranoia to make a nuclear technician look reckless.

The result?

My legs still looked structurally functional — no overt signs of trauma from the outside — but internally, they were utterly borked. I couldn’t walk. Not until the spliced jungle predator DNA took hold.

And in the meantime? I had my airlift.

"Alright, chonky girl," I murmured, patting Sapphire’s massive foreleg. "Time to get off. I need to finish my pre-tank protocols."

She let out a grumble that could have passed for tectonic activity, gave a yawning snort, and — without theatrics — vanished. Folded into some unseen spatial dimension like she’d never been there at all.

Not two seconds later, a sultry voice laced with amusement and faint jealousy slithered into my mental link.

<"That overfed psionic mattress deliberately keeps you hostage when you sleep. I disapprove.">

"Crystal," I said aloud, smiling as I visualized her smug frown. "She’s just doing her job. My powers are still nerfed from soul-healing recovery, and I’m essentially legless right now. Let the girl cuddle."

<"You are surrounded by armies. By living walls of loyal flesh. What, exactly, do you need protection from?">

I gave her naked form a deliberately slow, exaggerated once-over. Top to bottom. Her bioluminescent dermis flared a bashful pink — a rare shade for the apex goddess of the hive. She looked away, mortified.

We’d promised to never speak again of the time she’d vaporized a moon after misreading my dream signals.

Anyway.

With sass out of the way, I allowed Crystal to levitate me — her telekinetic grip gentle, intimate, and a little smug — as I floated toward my surgical station. She moved me with the care of someone holding both a priceless artifact and a personal chew toy.

The final preparation began with one last injector dose — the seventh in a series. These bio-serum vials contained heavily modified predator genome splices that had been refined down to a viable rootform. I’d been injecting them daily into both legs, slowly building up the saturation in targeted tissue until the final transplant moment.

As the sharp hiss of the injector pierced skin, a wave of placebo nausea rippled through me — psychosomatic but familiar. I powered through it.

Next came the maintenance mutilation.

See, my surgical alterations needed to stay open. Scar tissue and healing responses were a problem. Unfortunately, there were areas I simply couldn’t reach anymore — not with any precision. Crystal, of course, had long since offered to take over the whole process. But she’d only managed a week before her maternal instincts collided with horror at seeing my legs flayed like sacrificial meat. The trauma lingered in her psionic aura for months.

Now, with clinical precision and zero emotional leakage, she vibrated her psionic energy between my molecules — not so much cutting as resonating them apart like a laser built from heartbreak. No pain. Just the strange sensation of tissue being edited by love.

Once my incisions were reset and prepped, she floated me around the lab like a proud but silently judgmental mother hen, triple-checking every device, every nutrient pipeline, every isolation sigil.

Despite her reservations, Crystal was proud.

She was proud I hadn’t asked her to do everything for me. That I’d devised this crude, borderline masochistic gene-splicing method myself. That I’d solved a problem not by leaning on her overwhelming power, but by learning. By innovating.

She would’ve helped, of course. She would’ve torn open space and time to ensure I succeeded. But that I didn’t ask — that I grew — filled her with an emotion so rich she nearly shorted out our neural relay.

Satisfied with my checklist, I gave her the final nod.

"I’m ready."

She, of course, took this opportunity to smugly telekinetically strip me again — peeling away my clothes with all the dignity of a flirtatious squid.

"Really?" I muttered, as I floated naked and unimpressed.

<"I have no eyes, and yet I still visually devour you. Explain that, scientist.">

If she had lips, she’d be biting them. If she had saliva, she’d be drowning. I coughed theatrically to jolt her out of her imaginary wet daydreams.

With a ripple of embarrassed amusement, she finally lowered me into the bio-splicing tank. I fitted the respirator into place as the medical arms descended, and then — predictably — came the stabby part. Dozens of gene-threading needles plunged into my body, latching onto pre-mapped nerve points and blood paths.

The coma-inducing anaesthesia surged through my system like a crashing black tide.

I felt it coming.

<"I will be here the entire time, love,"> Crystal whispered through the psionic link as my vision dimmed. <"Nothing will harm you. I love you.">

My last conscious sensation was the smile I gave her beneath the mask — before everything vanished.

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I expected darkness.

Instead, I found myself standing in my own mindspace — the metaphysical inner sanctum shaped by my psionic cognition. The drug had paralyzed my body, sure, but apparently not my consciousness. A side effect, or perhaps another bizarre blessing from my origin boon.

My mindspace, however, felt... weird. Sluggish. Like walking through syrup made of dreams. I could no longer extend my thoughts outward into the psionic plane — the anesthesia had severed external communication. I was, for all intents and purposes, trapped inside myself.

But not alone.

Sapphire materialized next to me again, flopping across a giant obsidian memory-pillow with a huff. My literal bedbug chonk. She wanted pats. Deserved them, too.

"You saw me two minutes ago," I said, scratching her head anyway.

She purred like a tectonic plate sliding into place.

"Come on. Let’s gather the others. Might as well turn this brain vacation into a spa week."

We didn’t need to search long.

I knew exactly where my two sentient passengers — Onyx and Kiya — were coiled up within the folds of my subconscious.

Onyx was the first I saw.

Her form had changed since last I beheld her within. Like Kimchi, she’d undergone a transformation in pursuit of being more compatible with me — though hers was less about beauty and more about functional evolution. She still wore her sleek stalker bioform, but it was refined now. Sharper. Hungrier.

She looked up from where she lounged against Kiya’s lap, her slit-pupiled gaze softening at the sight of me.

<"My love. We get to spend an entire week together. Alone.">

Her voice was monotone, as always — but that only made the undertone all the more unsettling.

I walked up and plopped my projection between her legs like the cheeky bastard I was.

"I see we’re in combat mode," I said, eyeing her armor.

<"Because if I switched to my other body,"> she said in her flat, honeyed rasp, <"we’d never leave this mindspace. And you don’t want to see what happens when I lose control.">

The way she said it made me both scared and aroused.

Scaroused.

The week passed in a hazy, dreamlike bliss. We relaxed. We cuddled. We discussed evolving psychic mutations. We had a philosophical debate about limb utility versus tail dynamics. Onyx gave me a scalp massage that threatened to launch me into astral projection.

But all good coma vacations must end.

As I lay in a pile of chimeric affection, I felt my connection to the outside reawaken. The psionic plane cracked open like a fresh egg, and I could feel my mind pulling back into my flesh. My time was up.

I hesitated.

I liked it here.

Onyx noticed. Of course she did.

She pulled away from the massage and whispered, <"Go, my love. Your work awaits. There will be more massages when you return.">

With that promise lodged in my frontal cortex like a motivational grenade, I let myself drift upward and out — leaving the mindspace behind.

Back in the tank, my eyes fluttered open as needles retracted. My legs twitched.

And somewhere, behind me, Onyx’s gaze turned bioluminescent green as the emotions she had dammed all week finally broke.

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