Forty-eight hours after her near-death vomiting, Rowan rose again from the cold mud.
Her stomach, deprived of sufficient gastric acid to digest food for so long, produced a dull ache, like being constricted by rusty wire. Trace amounts of alkaloids still lingered in her bloodstream, causing the muscles below her left eye to spasm uncontrollably from time to time. But her pupils were unusually clear—a physiological manifestation of all unnecessary senses being shut down, leaving only the ultimate survival instinct.
The rain stopped. Strong winds from the Pacific Northwest tore through the gaps in the tree canopy from above, and several extremely sharp, cold white rays of sunlight, like scalpels, sliced straight into this perpetually dark, warm water layer.
Within the beams of light, countless tiny dust particles and water vapor churned violently.
Rowan took a deep breath. After a stinging sensation, her nasal mucosa quickly picked up the complex information carried by the wind. The earthy smell of peat moss, the ammonia stench of blue-green algae in the puddles, and a faint, highly volatile odor of hydrogen sulfide.
In human society, this is called a foul stench. A warning to cover your nose and mouth, hold your breath, and flee. But to Rowan, starving to the extreme, this smell, produced by the violent degradation of proteins, was a resounding bell of mealtime.
Nature was feasting.
Following the source of the smell, she walked barefoot towards a dark ditch downwind in the woodland. Her muddy feet trod silently over the mountain of fallen leaves. She kept her weight low, like a lynx surveying the edge of its territory.
The smell grew stronger. After stepping over a massive, decaying North American cedar log over two meters in diameter, Rowan stopped.
In a shady hollow on the underside of a decaying tree, within a natural barrier formed by intertwined tree roots, lay the carcass of an adult red fox.
It had likely fallen from a high rocky ridge, or been abandoned after its spine was severed by some larger predator. The fox's once-proud, bushy, flame-like tail now lay limp and soggy in black mud, like a rotten mop soaked in sewage. Large patches of fur had fallen from its hindquarters, revealing the tissue beneath undergoing a violent chemical reaction.
Rowan felt no fear, nor did her stomach churn. She had vomited up all her stomach contents two days ago, and now her body craved only energy.
She walked to within half a meter of the fox's carcass and slowly crouched down. Her excessively thin kneecaps pressed against her filthy waterproof overalls.
Like a rational scholar adjusting the focus under a microscope, she stared intently, coldly and focusedly examining the shell before her.
This was an extremely solemn, efficient, and utterly merciless forest funeral.
The fox's abdominal cavity was completely bloated and ruptured. First to arrive were greenbottle flies and carrion beetles. Between the torn, dark red muscle fibers and the stark white ribs, a thick "white carpet" of thousands upon thousands of maggots surged violently like waves over the fox's visceral remains.
These maggots possessed no individual consciousness. They were translucent, exhibiting a near-marble-like whiteness; one could even see through their thin skin a black intestine frantically digesting the rotting flesh.
"Shh, shh, shh..."
The surroundings were utterly silent. Rowan could clearly hear the soft, grinding sounds of these thousands upon thousands of tiny mouthparts simultaneously gnawing and chewing the rotten flesh. The sound was as dense as spring rain pattering on leaves.
Due to their immense numbers and the rapid metabolic activity of their feeding, an astonishing heat was generated in the central area where the maggots had gathered. In the crisp, cool air of ten degrees Celsius, a wisp of white steam visibly rose from the fox's chest cavity.
It was life undergoing an extremely violent mass-energy conversion.
Rowan picked up a bare, withered fir branch. Without hesitation, she plunged the tip directly into the swarming mass of white maggots, gently parting them.
The underlying structure was exposed to the air.
The fox's once bright red liver and purple spleen were gone, completely dissolved into a pool of dark nutrient solution rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. This highly pure bio-fertilizer, carried by gravity, slowly seeped into the reddish-brown soil beneath the fox.
And the instant it came into contact with this nutrient solution, the fungal network at the bottom of the soil erupted.
At the edges of the fox's carcass, in the areas soaked in the corpse fluid, several clusters of grayish-white, extremely thick-stalked agaric fungi burst forth from the soil with visible tension. These were ammonia fungi. They are usually dormant, only awakened when the soil nitrogen concentration spikes dramatically due to the excrement or putrefactive fluid of a fox's carcass.
They greedily suck the essence left by the fox's decomposition, reconstructing the animal's fat and protein into plant cell walls rich in amino acids.
Rowan looked at the mushrooms, some still bearing tufts of the fox's red fur. Her eyes reflected this miniature hellscape, her pupils devoid of any tremor befitting human morality.
A year ago, the hunting dog of a woman named Mary in the commune died. Mary wept bitterly, and the adults not only cleaned the dog's body but also wrapped it in thick canvas, placed it in a nailed-solid pine box, and buried it deep underground.
They called it love.
But in Rowan's eyes now, it was the most cruel selfishness. Sealing a nutrient-rich body in a wooden box, cutting off oxygen and moisture, preventing maggots and fungi from entering—this was tantamount to severing the forest's lifeline. That not only reduced the dog to a pile of useless bones, but also starved the surrounding soil.
The fox had no wooden box. It gave its heart to maggots, its blood to fungi, and its bones to the rains of time to dissolve into calcium.
The fox didn't die. It was merely dismantled by the forest, becoming thousands of molting insects, the saturated ammonia bacteria on the edges, even the ferns around it, their leaves greener from the abundant nitrogen.
Death is not the end. Death equals nourishment.
This is the only and absolute fundamental logic of nature. There is no plunder, only circulation; no need for epitaphs, only digestive enzymes.
This cold, impersonal law, like a red-hot branding iron, was thoroughly imprinted into Rowan's cerebral cortex during those brief, silent minutes of observation. All her socialized neural circuits concerning "human remains," "corpses," and "fear" were physically severed and reshaped in that instant.
She tossed aside the slimy, withered twig and fixed her gaze on the clumps of large ammonia fungi surrounding the fox's carcass.
She knew what they were. They weren't the deadly autumn galerinaceus, nor the death lily that made her vomit. They were edible, high-protein, fleshy mushrooms. Having absorbed the fox's bodily fluids, they were a full size larger than usual, their caps gleaming with an oily sheen.
Rowan extended her hands, her knuckles blackened from being buried in the mud for so long.
Her movements were remarkably steady. Not a tremor even as she was less than two centimeters from the swarming maggots. Her thumb and forefinger pinched the mushroom's thick base, and she gently twisted it.
With a soft "snap," the fungus was uprooted.
She didn't even use a knife. Driven by extreme hunger, she simply wiped the mud off the mushroom's base with the corner of her clothing, then stuffed it into her mouth and chewed vigorously.
The mushrooms were undercooked, with a strong, raw, earthy smell reminiscent of moldy, sour basement soil. They were chewy, like biting into a sponge soaked in cold water. But with each chew, a large amount of juice mixed with plant protein was released, flowing down her esophagus directly into her stomach, which felt like a parched riverbed.
Her stomach lining immediately began to greedily suck in the juices, as if a parched land had finally received rain.
She devoured five mushrooms growing on the fox's corpse in one go. Then, she stood up.
Still slightly unsteady, as the calories hadn't fully entered her bloodstream. But when she looked down again at the foul-smelling corpse crawling with white worms, an irreversible change occurred in her eyes.
It was a calm that came from understanding the true nature of biological transformation.
The wind blew through the canopy again, ruffling the fox's last tuft of fur on its neck and drying the cold sweat on Rowan's forehead.
She turned and left, her steps more steady and deliberate than when she had arrived. Her overalls were stained with black ash, emanating a smell perfectly indistinguishable from decaying forest wood.
From that day forward, ten-year-old Rowan completed her initiation ceremony on this continent of fungi, toxins, and degradation. She was no longer a vulnerable human cub abandoned by her parents. The laws, compassion, and fear of human society could no longer reside in this frail body.
Someday in the future, whoever—whether a black bear or the corpse of an adult human male named Julian—died on this land in the war for living space,
she would not feel fear.
Because in this vast laboratory composed of inorganic matter and microorganisms, death wasn't even considered garbage.
It was merely another form of fertilization.