He looks around once more, and if he finds no answer to that, and no clues, leaves by crawling back. Sometimes, dead ends are just that, despite what he had just stated.
Crawling backwards up cave [G] was uncomfortable and exhausting, but the tight spaces left little choice. Tihomir rested his arms a few minutes when he reached [F3]. Once again the choice was between the larger cavern [F4] and the small side passage [H]. While [G] hadn't been the most pleasant experience, it was not a wasted effort. So the same curiosity that drew him into [G], drew Tihomir into [H].
Cave [H] descended 1 meter for every 3 meters of forward progress and the entrance was both low and narrow with a difficult pinch point that required Tihomir to wiggle sideways through it. Fortunately, the cave seemed to alternate between chambers almost tall enough to stand in and either vertical or horizontally challenging connections between them. Standing about 2 meters into cave [H] in the first of the tall pockets, Tihomir saw the tunnel bent sharply ahead and led to another difficult pinch point. It was not the narrow tunnel that caught his attention, but something radically different. Switching off the light, Tisho just stared at the strange rosy pink glow that came from the chamber beyond the narrow space.
Shoving your arm through the opening to scan ahead with the camera before committing to squeezing your body through, the image revealed a long vertical chamber that forked about 3 meters further on. Growing from pockets of compost collected in depressions in the floor and crevices in the walls were the source of the light. A tiny bio-luminescent fungus that Sapphire was pretty sure was Netted Rose dash twelve forty-two.
"The notes say that it has antibiotic properties." whispered Sapphire.
Spoiler:
F1: [Split Gill-2676]: (up to 1.5 m tall) - Pale grayish-white - Oil on the surface hairs contain a contact poison.
F2: [Crested Parasol]: (2.5 cm tall) - White cap with brown spot in center - releases a puff of microscopic spores
F3: [Black Jelly-2166]: (up to 1.5 m tall) - Cluster of shiny, black blister-like growths - Oil coating on the surface acts as a hallucinogenic drug [LSD] when ingested.
F3: [Cave Cockroach]: 9 cm, 30 g herbivores (eat fungus)
G: [Red Star-6155]: (up to 0.4 m tall) - Red star-shaped structure with pale tentacles on a white stalk (eats insects) - If the tentacles are ingested, they will induce sleep.
H: [Netted Rose-1242]: (2.5 cm tall) - A flattened hemispherical cap with a deeply wrinkled surface with pinkish veins and grooves that clings to vertical surfaces. Bio-luminescent (glows in the dark). - used to speed healing of diseases (antibiotic) when ingested