The news hit Phong before his elf children could inform him of how had his order gone.
That alone told him how big it was.
He had expected an update from Lyon, or maybe from one of the mice in the Great Burrow, or from Emma carrying another polished piece of bad news in a prettier envelope. Instead, it came through every screen at once. League channels. News channels. Diver forums. Livestreams from amateur scouts and professional media crews alike.
A new structure had been found on Floor 1, near Lake of Doom - how humanity had decided lake Baratok would be called.
On every screen appeared the same footage.
A fungal dome.
No, not just a dome.
A city-sized growth of layered mushroom-flesh and pale, mineral-looking fungal plates rising from the earth like something between a hive, a fortress, and an organ that had decided the concept of scale no longer applied to it. Its surface was ridged and swollen, half-living architecture and half-geological nightmare. Holes of varying sizes dotted its outer shell, some no bigger than a person, some wide enough to swallow vehicles. They opened and closed in slow pulses that made the entire structure feel as if it were breathing.
The appraisers had only gotten one clean result before retreating.
Mushroomkhan.
Level 150.
Hivemind Structure.
No one knew what the holes were for. No one knew if it could move. No one knew whether it was a nest, a weapon, a mind, or all three.
The uncertainty only made the media frenzy worse. Pundits were already comparing it to an ant queen, to termite citadels, to a fungal Tyranid. Some channels used red circles and urgent music. Some tried sounding scientific and only made themselves more ridiculous when the word Slither slipped out. Military commentators called it a strategic threat, diver influencers called it a raid boss. Two separate economists were already discussing whether the discovery of this new threat would change floor-one property value, which made Phong want to put his head through a wall.
He stared at the footage long enough for the answer to settle into his stomach like a cold stone.
That was where he had relocated the Mushroomires.
That patch of land he had healed as per the Sky Emperor's request. That distance from the shoreline. He knew it.
The Mushroomkhan had grown from his own decision. He had moved the Mushroomires away from the meadow, given them bones, safety, and room to settle. He had watched the old colony changing without understanding all the possible outcomes. Had watched old Mushroomire slumped down and turned into housing. Just as Mushroomires could become Mushroompires under enough piled-up stress and aggression, apparently there was another branch. Another subspecies. Another state of being.
Mushroomkhan - a hivemind structure.
Phong did not know whether to feel impressed, horrified, or insulted that the dungeon kept using his logistical choices as fertilizer for apocalyptic side effects.
There was a knock at the door.
He knew before he opened it that nothing about this day was going to improve.
Bai Hu stood there.
The White Tigress had not bothered with one of her pettier disguises this time. She wore the shape of a tall, androgynously beautiful woman, all sharp lines and pale grace, her white hair falling like cold water over one shoulder. Her armor looked ceremonial and martial at once, like every plate had been designed by someone who loved war enough to make it elegant. Tiger ears twitched atop her head. A tail moved lazily behind her with the confidence of a predator entering a room it already owned.
Phong looked at her for one second too long before stepping aside just enough to let her in if she wished. She did.
"Farmer," Bai Hu said, voice smooth with that familiar edge of amusement she never quite hid. "I came to thank you personally."
Phong shut the door behind her and felt the rest of Team Nemean in the house pause around the sound of her voice.
"For what?"
Bai Hu turned toward the screen still showing the fungal dome and smiled in a way Phong immediately disliked.
"For this."
Phong's shoulders tightened.
She strolled closer to the display, hands folded behind her back like she was admiring an art piece in a gallery rather than a level 150 fungal hivemind that had just sent half the world's news cycle into convulsions.
"I had wished to grow a Mushroomkhan for quite some time," she said. "Yet no place on the higher floors proved stable enough." She tilted her head slightly, eyes still on the image. "Then I heard of you."
Phong said nothing.
That was the correct answer to things one could not safely call lies.
Bai Hu turned to face him. The smile did not leave her mouth. And there, in that instant, Phong could not tell which possibility he hated more.
Either she was bluffing and merely taking credit for another one of his unintended disasters, which meant she was still being insufferable for the sport of it—
—or she really had seen enough of the board to know what would happen once the Mushroomires were moved, fed, and left to settle under the conditions he created.
Five-dimensional chess played so far above everyone else, or a petty cat with the habit of idle cruelty.
Phong hated both options equally.
He crossed his arms.
"If you wanted a thank-you note, I'm out of stationery."
Bai Hu laughed softly.
"How sharp your tongue becomes when you're vexed."
"I learn from the best."
That earned him another amused flick of her ears. Then, without pressing the issue further, she dipped her head in a mockery of courtliness and turned for the door.
"I thanked you," she said. "That is enough."
She left just like that, and the room felt less safe for several seconds after she was gone, as if her presence lingered in the corners like frost.
By the time Phong returned to the main room, the others had gathered.
Dominic stood near the television with his arms folded, broad face set in a look halfway between disbelief and calculation. Jake sat on the couch arm, already scrolling through five different live feeds. Jack had gone still in the way he always did when he was thinking carefully. Joanne looked offended on behalf of reality. Janet had one hand over her mouth. Séline and Camille were speaking to each other in fast French under their breath. Alex had not moved far from where she had been, but her attention had sharpened completely. Emma, of course, looked like she had already been expecting the world to ruin the day further and had simply come prepared.
Rico stared at the screen and said, with rare solemnity, "Mushrooms got really extra."
That broke the tension just enough that nobody strangled him.
"It's where we moved them," Phong said.
The room looked at him. He nodded once.
"The Mushroomires. That area. I'm sure of it."
Dominic let out a long breath.
"So the peaceful relocation plan accidentally grew a level 150 hivemind fortress?"
"When you say it like that," Joanne muttered, "it sounds bad."
"It is bad," Janet said.
"It is also kind of impressive," Jake added.
Emma, who had been checking her phone through all of this with increasing intensity, finally looked up.
"The executives are already pivoting."
That got everyone's attention faster than the Mushroomkhan had, which in some ways said worse things about humanity than any fungal dome ever could.
Emma moved to the center of the room and started speaking in the clipped, efficient rhythm she used when repeating information she had already had to process on behalf of a dozen wealthy idiots.
"The double-elimination format is under attack."
Phong frowned. "Already?"
Emma gave him a flat look. "The Sky Emperor introduced Celestial Skeletal and then reminded everyone on Earth that human warheads are decorative compared to higher beings. Of course already."
That was fair.
She kept going.
"A new proposal is gaining traction among the executives, the ministry people, and most of the elite sponsors. They want to reshape the second half of the league."
Dominic's expression darkened.
"How?"
Emma lifted one shoulder.
"Not match-to-match anymore. Not in the current sense." She paused. "They want a joined adversary format in the dungeon."
Now everyone in the room went quiet.
Emma continued.
"Teams would go dungeon diving for four months. Survive down there. Compete over how many Celestial Skeletal they harvest. The team with the most wins the whole thing."
Silence landed hard.
Then Jake said what most of them were thinking.
"So they want to turn the league into a survival reality show?"
"Yes," Emma said. "And the executives love it."
Of course they did.
Phong could already see why. It was grotesquely perfect for the class of people who liked money because it could disguise appetite as vision. A live competition inside the dungeon. Teams bleeding and surviving and gathering divine body parts while millions watched from the surface. Sponsorship opportunities, nationalistic spectacle, exclusive rights deals, embedded military partnerships, mana-tech testing in real conditions, and all of it wrapped in the language of adaptation and a new era.
Emma, reading their faces, gave the answer they already knew.
"They're calling it evolution."
Joanne made a disgusted sound.
Emma ignored it.
"With Celestial Skeletal on the table, they don't just see strong divers as entertainers now. They see them as national security assets." Her tone sharpened. "The Sky Emperor showcasing the complete inferiority of human nuclear stockpiles forced that conversation overnight."
Dominic swore softly in Spanish.
Emma continued anyway.
"The old format suddenly looks small to them. Too safe. Too controlled. This new one gives them spectacle, data, and a race for power all at once." She tapped her phone. "And because it's framed as adapting to the dungeon's new era, anyone objecting risks sounding weak."
Phong said nothing.
That was what unsettled the team more than if he had cursed. Because he did not look surprised. Only tired.
Alex watched him closely.
"Say it."
Phong looked up.
"The league was never really about sports," he said. "Not for them."
No one argued.
He went on, quieter now.
"It was about sorting assets. Measuring influence. Deciding who would own the future once the dungeon stopped pretending to be separate from the surface."
The room held that truth in silence for a few seconds.
Then Rico said, "I'm gonna miss the commentator booth."
Again, somehow, that kept the world from becoming unbearable by a very small margin.
But even after the laughter passed, the pressure remained. Outside, media feeds were still screaming about Mushroomkhan. The fungal dome had become the latest great terror and the latest great promise depending on who was speaking. Military analysts wanted contingency maps. Scientists wanted tissue samples. Divers wanted to know if a level 150 hivemind counted as a boss entity and whether it could drop Celestial Skeletal. Property interests wanted to know whether floor-one danger zones would make some routes more or less lucrative.
And somewhere inside all of that, Phong knew the truth. The Mushroomires had become this because he had moved them. Bai Hu had thanked him for it. The elite class was already repurposing the Sky Emperor's appearance into a game show with state funding.
And none of it, not one part of it, slowed the calendar. Because the league still had to go on. Even now. Even while the world convulsed. Even while governments re-evaluated war, science, and greed all at once.
The next scheduled matter still stood. The rematch with Maine Vikings.
Team Nemean gathered around the coffee table after that and, perhaps because the alternative was staring too long into the shape of the new era, they began talking about the next fight instead.
The Jameson quadruplets with their spirit animals: Bison, Alligator, Eagle, Bear.
The same old names, the same old forms, the same old league logic trying to survive inside a reality that had just become much larger and much less stable.
Phong let them talk. Let Dominic outline likely opening lines. Let Emma comment on media spin. Let Joanne complain about the exact phrasing used by one commentator who had called Maine "a sentimental underdog." Let Alex half-listen while still chewing on the implications of Celestial Skeletal and changing battlefields.
He did not interrupt. Not because he had nothing to say. Because he knew none of them were really thinking about Maine alone.
They were all thinking about the same thing.
The world had shifted again.
And whatever came next, no one would get the privilege of staying ordinary through it.