Seeing that Xu Huo seemed particularly interested in the fungi of District 013, the people from Brown Skin City told him quite a bit about them. Unlike books, which focused on describing their growth patterns, they went into detail about what happened when fungi parasitized someone: what symptoms they caused, what the pain felt like, or how one fungus might happen to counteract the side effects caused by another kind of fungus in the body.
They seemed to have grown accustomed to suffering. They even deliberately picked out some interesting fungi to entertain the Players listening in. For example, inhaling the spores of a certain irritating fungus could make someone sneeze nonstop from morning to night for ten days or half a month. They'd have to snatch a moment just to drink some water. Then there were fungi that made people suffer fixed bouts of convulsions at set times or whenever they heard certain sounds.
"The Li family's boy on our street ate some twitching fungus. Whenever he got excited, he was sure to collapse. After a few attacks, he could just about hold them back. But then, on his wedding day, right in front of the bride's family, he wiped every inch of the floor in the house. Nobody could hold him down..."
The people of District 013 told their stories with such gusto that they ended up laughing.
"What happened after that?" Tong Qi asked with keen interest.
"He got so happy the day his child was born that he had an attack and never woke up again," said the Brown Skin City resident who had told the "joke." "Before long, the child followed his father. The mother couldn't take it and starved herself to death."
"In District 013, starving to death is a relatively peaceful way to