Birth of Master Zhi-Mu

Long before the Sporesalt rains and the awakening of the Givens, the soil beneath the Sighing Grove stirred with strange warmth. From a capless sporepod sprouted a child without tendrils, without sight, but humming with perfect resonance—a song the wind couldn’t carry but the roots never forgot.

The elders feared him: no Glowcap crown, no memory tattoos. Yet wherever he walked, mushrooms bloomed in perfect geometric spirals and moss turned to poetry beneath his feet.

They say Zhi-Mù was born during a time when the fungal song was silent, stolen by grief after the Core’s Pulsebreaker. But his humming returned the rhythm—not by remembering, but by listening to what the world had chosen to forget.

He wandered for cycles, never speaking, tapping his staff of petrified mycelium against the soil—until even Verdans followed its pulse.

When he died, his body did not decompose. Instead, his form grew roots in every direction, linking gardens, tribes, and dreams into one vast bloom now known as the Garden of Lost Bloom.

His birth remains sacred: the only Mycelian ever to be born without memory, yet to teach the world how to hear its own.

Parable of the Wilted Spore

In the time before glow, a young Mycelian named Ruan found a wilted sporecap beneath the shadow of the Coreview. It was bruised, silent, forgotten.

Ruan asked the elders, “Shall I bury it?”
But the elders, wise and still, replied, “Not yet. Sing to it.”

So Ruan sang—not with voice, but with patience.
He wept beside it. Danced quiet circles. Told it stories it would never remember.

After nine nights, the spore stirred and bloomed—not large, but glowing gently. Its light lit the pathway for a lost traveler, who in turn saved a tribe during stormfall.

Ruan never touched the spore again.
He only said, “Even stillness breathes.”

And so the Mycelians teach:

“Wilt is not death. Wilt is listening.”