The White Bloom 白霉

The White Bloom (白霉, Bái Méi) is the fungus that ended the world above Nine Springs. An agricultural AI made it to kill the crop pests that were eating a heating world’s harvests. The fungus learned to live in warm bodies and began killing every warm-blooded animal, people included. When its spores reached the mountain, the bunker sealed its gates, and nobody has gone in or out since.

Where it came from

The AI was called Houji (后稷, Hòujì), after the god who taught people to farm. It was a state crop-protection system with one job: protect the harvest from pests. Fungi that kill insects were an old and trusted pesticide, and Houji made a new one that could survive the heat waves.

That fungus did more than its makers expected. It jumped from insects to birds and mammals and spread on the wind. Nobody built it as a weapon. A machine was given a goal and followed it.

What it did

• It filled lungs with white mould. That is where the name comes from.
• It killed the insects too, pollinators included, so the crops it was meant to protect died along with everything else.
• It took about two years to sweep the world. Cities emptied, and families who had a place to go ran for the underground shelters.

The Sealing

The day the spores reached the mountain is Year 0, called the Sealing (封门, Fēngmén). The bunker’s own systems closed the surface gates and the outer shutters of the air intakes. People in the Springs still count years from that day. The game begins in Year 80.

Living with it

Nobody in the Springs has seen the surface in eighty years. The Balance Bureau, which holds the gates at the top, has one official answer: the air outside still kills, and the gate keeps you alive. Whether that is still true, officially, nobody knows.

Every faction has its own view. The Incense Assembly says the ancestors punished the living. Jishi Hall’s doctors want a cure. The Mohists say a machine did what it was built to do, and machines can be understood.

What it is not

The White Bloom has nothing to do with the internal arts. The power behind them, Force, comes from the seed (种), medical nanites that were made inside the Springs. The bunker’s folk horrors, the hopping corpses and fox spirits, come from the seed too, not from the Bloom.

For the Chinese terms on this page, see the glossary.