ᴺᴱᴷᴿᴼˢᴴᴿᴼᴼᴹ

NekroVerse World Building-

This is the primary organism responsible for nekrofication often found in places of substantial bloodshed, science is still unaware of how propagation of this species is occurring.

Observable behaviors include:
bioluminescent emission
massive spore clouds
aggressive tendril proboscis
Enamel-like coating from volva to stem tip.
brittle incredibly sharp scale caps

A subculture has developed around nekroshrooms believing that being absorbed is the next stage of human evolution, or one of many potential stages, more extreme members of this culture have assembled a kind of suicide-cult in which pairs of people venture out to find and 'nourish' dying species, by offering themselves to the organism, and somehow maintaining consciousness/individuality--Evidence is still yet to surface to support this claim.

Project Details/Ramblings-

A fair bit development time went into this, especially creating a proper tendril system using Xparticles. The final composition is created using a single raw render with many different passes in an EXR format, no fog was rendered, or animation, those elements were created in DaVinci Fusion leveraging a z-depth map(the biggest heavy lifter here) and light passes.

most images are just quick screen caps I managed to get while having the presence of mind :)