The Flesh Gardener

He ate the fungus to survive. It's been eating him back ever since. A hunter follows a bear that won't die into the woods, and crawls out of a cave with a wound that stitches itself shut. He can feel the wrongness inside living flesh now — the knot where a body heals crooked — and his hands know how to set it right, or pull it apart. The world rates the infected by how far gone they are. It reads him as F-Rank. Barely touched. A nothing. It's wrong about what's growing inside him. The power isn't free. Every time he uses it, the pale threads under his skin spread a little further, and the hunger spreads with them. The stronger he gets, the less of him is left. Now the infection is already threaded through the city, and the F-Rank that isn't has drawn eyes — people who want to bottle what's growing inside him, and people who want to feed it. Getting stronger is the only way to survive. Staying himself is the only thing he can't afford to lose. The door is still open. Something on the other side is still singing — and it's learning his reasons. What to expect:- Dark progression fantasy — the power is real, and so is the price.- Body horror and fungal biopunk: infection, mutation, "the stronger he gets, the less human he is."- A first-person hunter who can read, sever, and graft living flesh.- Urban decay, a cult, and a slow cosmic mystery beneath the city.