Xiao Mogu

In the year 2020, Earth's magnetic poles disappeared and humankind was nearly wiped out by cosmic radiation. Within the span of a hundred years, living creatures began to mutate and devour each other while the remaining humans, numbering in the tens of thousands, struggled bitterly in their man-made bases. In the Abyss, home to the mutated xenogenics, there lived a sentient little mushroom. Because it had been nourished by the blood and flesh of the deceased human An Ze, not only did it take on a similar-looking human form, but a similar name as well: An Zhe. An Zhe is determined to go to the human base to search for his spore, which had been harvested by humans. Once there, however, he faces the omnipresent risk of discovery and certain death as he tries to keep his non-human nature hidden from the Judges, whose responsibility is to inspect for and eliminate xenogenics like himself. And of all the Judges, Colonel Lu Feng is the most perceptive and merciless—as soon as he determines that someone is a xenogenic, he will execute that person on the spot. But An Zhe's mutation goes undetected by Lu Feng's eyes, and so a tale of humans and xenogenics unfolds... (Source: Peach Flower House)

Xiao Mogu began as a web novel on Jinjiang Wenxue Cheng (晋江文学城) where 89 chapters were released from October 22, 2019 to June 3, 2020. It was published in print by Beijing United Publishing Co., Ltd. (北京联合出版公司) on July 1, 2020. The series won the silver award for best original novel at the 2021 Xingyun Awards for Global Chinese Science Fiction (全球华语科幻星云奖). It was published in English as Little Mushroom by Peach Flower House from February 22, 2022 to January 9, 2023. After Peach Flower House went defunct, the series was relicensed by Seven Seas Entertainment.