Moss of Life

One key step in the true liberation of wishrats’ species was the introduction of a comprehensively nutritious food so abundant it couldn’t be siloed or scarcified. With food freely available to everyone, no individual could be coerced into labor or undesirable circumstances by threat of starvation. With this independence came a radical shift in mindset that propelled the species into its ruling status. The organism that made this possible? A humble slime mold.
  Moss of Life is a misnomer, a carryover from before microscopes or genetic understanding, when creatures had to be classified by their naked-eye resemblance to other beings. Lifemoss does indeed bear a notable textural similarity to bryophytes, as well as some lichens. In truth, it’s a protist, distantly related to either. As a different life form, it has a combination of features that make it perfect to live alongside the Indigo and to feed them. It’s highly adaptable, and quite mobile for a non-animal, capable of living in a variety of environments. This makes it an invasion risk, but various societies have taken measures to keep it contained. Chief among those measures, ancient societies domesticated the slime mold millions of years back, such that cultivated strains depend heavily on active care, or carefully calibrated pseudo-ecosystems, to survive. In the same domestication process, those slime molds developed a perfect balance of nutrients to give any given person baseline nutrition.
  There are hundreds of different cultivars of lifemoss, each possessing a different flavor and texture profile (as well as a slightly different nutrient allocation). A handful of these breeds can be found in nearly every Indigo garden, one of which has been bred to fill a culinary niche akin to rice or tofu. This strain is great at soaking up flavorful juices and particles from other foods and even the environment. You need to be careful not to let it grow in polluted areas, but it’s a great way to get just about any food flavor into a meal. Another strain can take on a variety of textures depending on how it’s prepared.
  Moss of life became a ubiquitous part of every Indigo settlement millennia ago, through a combination of intentional release programs and good old fashioned escapes. As such, it is considered the de facto food consumed by these people. They have plenty of other foods as supplements, shake-things-ups, and art forms, but lifemoss is the defining fuel for wishrats, individually and as a supercivilization.