Chapter 203: Greenhouse Plant
’Okay, Your Majesty.’ Ren grinned, staring at the wrong-colored sky while lying flat on his back in the grass — one life left in his pocket and three days on the clock. ’Now I know what you look like. Three days to figure out how to kill a light.’
The grin faded; the math wasn’t getting any better no matter how long he stared. Since he was stuck in the grass with nothing but time, he decided to do something he’d never actually bothered with before: start arguing with the System. Even a twice-lived farmer gets a vent now and then.
"First question," he said to the sky, to the panels, to whatever was listening. "Why is my first realm built like this? I’m serious. There’s a tree over there that kills me in three steps flat without even bothering to file a cause of death, and a king that deleted me through a five-hundred-times power-up before my punch crossed the room. Who hands a newbie a final-boss dungeon? I want to speak to the designer."
He expected the usual silence. He got a panel instead — arriving with the finality of a stamp coming down.
[THIS IS NOT A GAME, HOST.]
[IF THE HOST REQUIRES A GAME, THE CAMPUS MARKET STOCKS SEVERAL IMMERSIVE ONES. THE REVIEWS ARE EXCELLENT.]
Ren lay perfectly still, processing the fact that he’d just been sassed by his own UI. The panels kept coming, patient as a ledger.
[THE SYSTEM LOCATES FRAGMENTS THE HOST CAN REACH. IT HAS NEVER SORTED THEM BY KINDNESS.]
[NOTHING WAS PROMISED TO BE EASY. NOTHING AHEAD WILL BE EASIER.]
"Great," Ren said. "Inspiring. And the part where my first one comes with two unkillable landlords? Just bad luck?"
[LUCK IS A BUDGET, HOST.]
[CONSIDER THE DUAL LAWS. THE WORLDROOT. THE GRAFT. THE REVIVALS. CONSIDER WHERE YOUR BUDGET WENT.]
Ren, twice-lived and freshly cremated, raised one very specific finger at the sky and held it there until he felt better. The System stayed quiet, and somewhere in the back of his head, Kaia radiated the exact warmth of someone trying very, very hard not to laugh.
He stood up, intending to make the rest of the night pay for itself, but the fragment had its own schedule. The shift let go of him mid-step, and he woke in gold light with his slate chiming on the bedside table. Messages never reached him inside, so this one had just been sitting there, waiting for him to exist again.
— • —
It was from Instructor Holt, and it was long enough that Ren made tea first.
The short version: he didn’t have to come to class. The rest of the cohort was starting first-year foundations with everyone else, but the academy had looked at his file and concluded, in Holt’s words, that "making a Stage Five sit through breathing exercises would be a waste of nine chairs." There was nothing in the syllabus his hands didn’t already know; the techniques were beneath him, and the ones worth learning would come later, through merit and rank. The library was open. Missions, secret realm runs, campus work — it all paid merit, and merit bought everything.
Then the part that mattered: as a Stage Five, he was owed a resource allotment. The academy was putting it together now — materials matched to his profile, routed through the General’s channel. Variety took time; two days, give or take. "Your resources will never be cut," Holt wrote. "That’s the academy’s end of the deal. But the law rooms, the graded halls, the good chambers — those you earn like everyone else, champion, Trial or no Trial. If we give you a free pass, this campus grows a line of students holding very reasonable arguments for theirs."
And then, in warm gravel even through text: "Understand something. It’s not that we won’t feed you — it’s that a plant fed everything and asked for nothing grows up a greenhouse plant, and greenhouse plants die the first time the weather gets honest. Go outside. Fight your way up. Gain your experience where it costs something. Show some worth to go with the talent, and the academy will match you coin for coin. P.S. — the class door’s open if you ever feel like sitting with your people."
Ren read it twice, and found, annoyingly, that he agreed with every word. A greenhouse plant. He’d have to remember that one, mostly because it was the first time anyone had ever told the Bloodline Plant Lord path to go touch grass.
He sent the group a quick message — skipping class, training for a few days, save my seat at dinner — and got back a string of replies he chose not to count as votes. Yuelan’s was one word long: "UNFAIR."
— • —
The plan was simple, because the wisp had simplified it for him. Unless a miracle wandered in, he wasn’t going to get strong enough to kill that firefly in three days; he’d measured the gap with his own death, and the gap had measured back. So he stopped planning a kinghunt and started planning a harvest. The warring land had days left before it scattered back into the Boundless Ocean of Planes, and until then, he’d spend every hour farming the one crop this place grew better than anywhere: law.
Two places were off the list, permanently. The grey tree that killed for free, and the hollow mountain that charged one blink. Everything else was inventory.
The warring land, minus its two landlords, was just a field. Ren farmed it.
The first fight of the morning set the pace. It came out of a collapsed trench — a mantis-form soldier the size of a man, all edge and angle, its blade-arms polished and moving like drawn wire. Twenty-seven days ago, when the warring land had first opened its doors, its cousin had killed him. Today, Ren left his shields down on purpose and met it with Heavenpiercer alone, blade-art against blade-arm. Monsters below his level were still the best whetstones in existence, and real combat sharpened a skill faster than any yard. They crossed maybe forty times in four seconds, sparks stitching the trench, before his point went through its eye and out the back of the carapace. The body went into storage — the one thing the warring land refused to allow was the Graft itself, so he could only kill and collect.
The ashfall came mid-morning, grounding the skyrazors and making it perfect working weather. He walked into the low brown cloud of an ashmote swarm with Stormsever turning, burning the whole cloud down in one circle, then a second swarm an hour later, then a third. Dust was Earth’s cheapest child, and the swarms paid it in steady coins. When the ash cleared, he took the skyrazor flocks, threading their dives until the sky paid out too, and when a cinderwheel column ground past at dusk, he opened the lead wheel with two arts and stored the furnace whole.
He kept every fight efficient; the mission was volume, not style. But where a monster was far beneath him, he made it a lesson: Heavenpiercer only, or Stormsever only, or nothing but footwork and hands until the skill panels stirred. The kills stacked, and the storage rode heavier every hour, a whole day’s slaughter waiting for the door.
The payday came after, both nights, when the shift let him out. Back home with the fragment behind him, the Endless Graft finally got its turn, chewing through the stored backlog body by body while the panels stacked up like receipts.
[GRAFT COMPLETE: METAL — EARTH +MINOR SHARE.]
[DUST — EARTH +MAJOR SHARE · AIR +MINOR SHARE.]
[LAVA — FIRE +MINOR SHARE.]
The second night’s haul was bigger but paid thinner, the manual’s fine print proving itself in real time — each hundredth of a point costing more bodies than the last. The field was getting stubborn. Ren farmed it anyway; stubborn fields were the only kind he’d ever owned. When the last body was gone, he called up the ledger and looked at two days of slaughter in clean print.
[EARTH LAW: 1.23% → 2.13%.]
[FIRE LAW: 0.68% → 0.74%.]
[AIR LAW: 0.09% → 0.14%.]
[FOUNDATION: 42,300 → 49,800 TONS.]
[PASSIVE: FOUNDATION HARDENING — DEEPENED.]
Not a miracle. Just wages. When he stepped back through the arch for the fragment’s final day — ash falling like grey snow, his coat long past pretending to be a specific color — he looked out at the two glows he’d been ignoring. The basin with its grey tree, the mountains with their patient king. The panel found him, right on schedule.
[FRAGMENT DISSOLUTION: 1 DAY REMAINING.]
’One day left,’ Ren thought, wiping ash off his jaw, feeling the two glows watch him. ’No miracles. I know, I know.’ The problem was that in his experience, miracles had never once waited for an invitation.