During the Shaoxing period of the Southern Song Dynasty, Wu Lan, a charcoal burner in Wushan Village, Fengqi County, discovered the strange "Dragon's Throat Mushroom" on a piece of rotten wood when the mountains were completely forested and there was no way to go. This extremely delicious mushroom actually grew on the ax mark left by his father - a secret of using wounds to activate rotten wood.
From then on, this taciturn charcoal burner embarked on an untraveled road: using an ax to "chop flowers" and tapping "fungus mushrooms", he found out a complete method of artificial cultivation of dragon's throat mushroom through repeated trial and error. But he soon discovered that growing mushrooms was never just a technical issue - the government wanted to reclaim wasteland to grow food, businessmen wanted to buy out the recipe, and the ignorant people wanted to cut down trees and destroy forests. Why should a mountain man who doesn't even know how to read stand against the world?
"Fengqi Mushroom" tells the story of how a little man used the stupid method of "settling accounts" to carve out a way out of a desperate situation. Wu Lan has no heroic words, only an axe, a mountain full of rotten wood, and a simple belief: trees have their own lives, and people have their own lives. What he wants to use is the life that the tree does not want.
From personal experiments to three-county industries, from technical authority to cultural symbols, what Wu Lan finally created was not only the cultivation technique of Dragon Throat Mushroom, but also a group called "Mushroom People" - they have a common code word "Shanliao Bai", a common drama, a common boxing technique, and a stone tablet inscribed with "Cutting down the strong and protecting the young, endless life".
This is the story of a person discovering technology, and also the story of a group forming a culture. In the era of war and chaos, a charcoal burner used an ax and rotten wood to find a way for countless mountain people to survive.
