Black Oak

There has been a "black oak" legend in Huaichuan County since ancient times: There is a giant oak tree that is completely black, leafless and flowerless, and oozes water day and night. Anyone who eats its fruit can "see God's will". In the winter of 1992, a four-person team formed under the name of the "Provincial Biological Resources Survey Team" went into the mountains to search for a "fungus that can reshape meridians." Two months later, only one person from the team came back. His belly was ulcerated and his mouth was full of tiny tree buds. In the spring of 1994, Gu Chi, a young teacher at Peking Union Medical College, received the last audio tape sent by the missing team member. In order to find his missing brother Gu Hui, he returned to his hometown with his fiancée Shen Huaian (a native of Huaichuan), only to find that the entire county had been firmly controlled by the mycelial network of the "black oak": •The county hospital uses "black oak resin" as an anesthetic, and the patient is "grafted" into a part of a tree in his dream after surgery; •The underground cave is a millennium sacrificial site, with half-human, half-oak living bodies embedded in the cave walls; • County annals record: Black oak is not a plant, but the remains of a giant "Tai Sui" fungus and ancient human genes. It relies on "results" to allow the new host to inherit old memories and achieve "immortality". The closer Gu Chi and Shen Huaian get to the truth, the more wooden lines appear on their bodies. Eventually they discovered: ——The black oak tree has "fruited" long ago, and the last fruit was Gu Hui, who disappeared in 1992. When the brothers reunited, Gu Hui was no longer human, but a "new tree trunk" composed of hyphae and spores. Gu Chi must make a choice between "becoming a new branch of the black oak tree" or "burning the entire forest."