The green glow draws the protagonist forward through a passage that breathes — walls contracting and expanding in a slow peristaltic rhythm, filaments thickening until the light barely clears. The hum changes pitch as they advance. It has been a low note, patient and chest-deep; now it layers, harmonic, as though a second voice has joined from somewhere below. The sweetness in the air deepens too: not unpleasant yet, but insistent — the kind the protagonist cannot stop tasting, the kind that coats the back of the throat. At the passage's end the walls open suddenly into a domed chamber, and they stop. At the centre, a mass of mycelium has gathered itself into a shape — or nearly a shape — pale gold threaded through with the green that illuminates everything. It pulses in the same rhythm as the hum. From its base, dark channels branch outward across the earthen floor like exposed veins, tracing where ordinary soil has been replaced by something finer and darker: digested, incorporated. The broom handle is warm in the protagonist's grip.