A new work is here! Come read my story on Tomato Novel.
On a neon-drenched rainy night, mycelium writhes in the Blood-Eye Laboratory’s lamplight. Newborn shadows are forbidden in the red-light zone, forced to split apart in the blue-light zone, and awakened in the lightless zone by faceless figures carrying kerosene lamps. They use rules written in blood to reap violators, stripping their shadows away to feed the shadow cores beneath the earth.
When shadow cores consume too much dark element, reality descends into even deeper madness: shadow leeches burrow into the shadows of living beings, giving rise to faces twisted by pain; amber prosthetic eyes turn fear into energy for artificial suns; and the greasy stain left behind after a drunk on the street corner is devoured by a living shadow turns out to be the remnant consciousness of the first experimental subject.
The price of detonating a shadow core is that the protagonist’s body becomes half mycelium. His left eye crystallizes into a light core, while his right eye is entwined with dark-devouring mycelium. The newly born shadow-folk civilization signs the Treaty of Light and Dark Symbiosis with humanity, and stars and black holes exchange matter through shadow tunnels. When Snowball’s light core slumbers at the edge of a black hole, humanity finally realizes that the shadow killings were the universe’s extreme way of correcting the imbalance between light and dark.
