Where can you find berries that eat people from the inside out?

My low-fantasy setting features the deadly plant known as the wormberry. It produces small berries of a bright-but-overall-undecided color, all of which contain a small, edible seed. They have two distinct features:

1. The wormberry is incomparably sweet when ripe. It follows the standard operating procedure for fruit, which is "get yourself noticed, get yourself eaten with your seeds included." But eating them with seeds included is what enables...
2. The seeds of the wormberry are parasitic. They implant themselves in the digestive tract of the consumer and use their flesh and blood to sprout.

Once a wormberry has sprouted, it is almost always fatal. This is how it earns its name: the bodies of creatures overcome by the wormberry are shot through with roots until they extend through the skin and into the soil.

Now, the sweetness and danger of the wormberry makes it very popular with moonshiners. The high sugar content of wormberry mash produces a very strong wine, popular with the down-and-out. Some of these clandestine fermenters are even able to eat the berries whole and survive by drinking their own supply, unaware that alcohol's effects on blood pH is what's saving them.

What's the native habitat of these plants?

Note: This question is similar to You eat this plant, it eats you right back. Can it work? , which asks if it's possible for a plant to be useful in assassination via regular germination. This question differs in that it asks more for the ecology surrounding such a plant rather the mechanisms by which it kills its host.

posted over 4 years ago

Clockwork Parzival‭

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