Ethan Cole woke up tasting copper and chlorophyll.
Not blood. Not vomit. Something green. Metallic. Wrong.
Like licking a battery dipped in wet soil.
His mouth was full of it.
He tried to spit, but his tongue stuck to his teeth, and when he finally forced his jaw open, the taste didn't leave. It bloomed—spreading from his mouth down his throat, into his lungs, like he'd inhaled a forest.
His eyes snapped open.
The sky was grey. Smoke-choked. Wrong.
He was lying on concrete. Still warm from the afternoon sun, but cracked, blackened, scorched.
Where the fuck—
The Brooklyn Botanical Garden.
The greenhouse.
The fire.
Ethan sat up—too fast—the world tilted and his stomach lurched, but nothing came up except a dry heave that tasted like ash and that copper-green wrongness flooding his senses.
The greenhouse was gone.
Not collapsed. Not burned.
Erased.
A crater. Fifty feet wide. Blackened earth. Twisted metal beams jutting up like broken ribs. The smell hit him—charred wood, melted plastic, something organic rotting beneath—
And then the text appeared.
Not on a screen. Not projected.
Carved into his vision.
Green letters, glowing faint chlorophyll-bright, etched into the air like words burned into tree bark:
[VERDANT SYSTEM INITIALIZING...]
Ethan screamed.
Short. Sharp. Cut off when his throat closed.
Because the text didn't go away when he blinked.
[Compatible host detected.]
[Genetic match: 97.3% (Exceptional)]
[Neural integration: COMPLETE]
[Welcome, ETHAN COLE.]
"No—" He clawed at his eyes. "No no no what the fuck—"
[Your planet is dying.]
[Planetary Vitality Index: 12.4%]
[Extinction threshold: 10.0%]
[Estimated time remaining: 487 days, 14 hours, 22 minutes.]
His knees hit the ground.
Not kneeling. Collapsing.
Because the words weren't just floating there.
They were inside him.
Carved into the back of his skull. Pulsing with his heartbeat. And beneath the text, he could feel—
Roots.
Millions of them.
Screaming.
The soil beneath his palms was screaming, a silent howl of anguish that bypassed his ears and stabbed straight into his nervous system. Every root severed by fire. Every microbe cooked alive. Every earthworm boiled in its tunnel.
He felt them.
All of them.
Dying.
"Stop—" Ethan gasped, pressing his palms to his ears like that would help. "Stop stop stop—"
[Sensory overload detected.]
[Initiating emergency filter...]
[Plant empathy reduced to 30% baseline.]
[You're welcome. 😊]
The flood of agony... muted. From scream to murmur.
Ethan could breathe again.
Barely.
He stared at his hands.
They were glowing.
Faint. Green. Veins of light spiderwebbing up his forearms like bioluminescent roots growing under his skin.
"What—what did you do to me—"
[I didn't do anything.]
[You touched the Primordial Seed.]
[Congratulations! You're now Homo sapiens verdantus.]
[A new subspecies. Exciting, right? 🌱]
The handwriting changed. The text shifted from carved-bark to flowing cursive, like ivy script:
Hi! I'm Sylvara, your personal AI assistant.
I know this is overwhelming, but you're handling it great!
Most people vomit OR scream. You did both. Very efficient. 😤
Ethan's vision swam.
Twenty feet away, in the shadow of a collapsed wall, something moved.
A sapling.
Oak. Three feet tall. Half its leaves were charred black, curling inward. Its trunk wept sap like blood.
It was dying.
And Ethan could feel it dying.
Not metaphorically.
He felt the sapling's roots withering in heat-shocked soil. Felt its chlorophyll breaking down. Felt the desperate, fading pulse of a living thing trying—trying—to survive.
"No," he whispered.
He didn't know why he said it.
Didn't know why he was crawling toward the tree on hands and knees, ash smearing his jeans, glass shards cutting his palms.
He just knew: It can't die.
Not this one.
Not after everything.
His mother's voice. Sudden. Sharp as broken glass:
"Even one tree matters, Ethan."
He reached the sapling.
Wrapped both hands around its trunk.
And the world detonated in green.
Not metaphor.
Literal explosion.
Every nerve in Ethan's body lit up like he'd grabbed a live wire made of sunlight. Life energy—raw, overwhelming, too much—flooded up through his hands, through his arms, into his chest—
He felt the oak's hunger. Its thirst. Its desperate animal need to grow.
And beneath that—deeper, older—something else.
Watching.
Vast.
Patient.
Hungry.
[LIFE ESSENCE DETECTED: 47/500]
[CRITICAL. User will expire in 14 minutes.]
[Emergency override authorized.]
[Dispensing: +300 LE (Primordial Seed bonus)]
[New total: 347/500]
[QUEST TRIGGERED: Save the oak sapling.]
[Reward: +100 LE, Tutorial unlock]
[Failure penalty: You die. The tree dies. Everyone you love dies in 487 days.]
[No pressure! 😊]
The green light pouring from Ethan's hands intensified.
The oak sapling moved.
New leaves unfurling from blackened branches. Bark knitting over burns like sped-up time-lapse footage. Roots punching down through concrete, finding pockets of uncontaminated soil and drinking.
It was growing.
Because of him.
Ethan's vision went white.
When he came to, he was on his back again.
Staring at the grey sky.
His hands were still glowing. Faint. Pulsing with a heartbeat that wasn't entirely his.
The oak sapling was six feet tall now.
Blooming.
Out of season.
[QUEST COMPLETE.]
[+100 LE rewarded.]
[LE: 447/500]
[Achievement unlocked: SEEDLING RANK I]
[Congratulations! You're officially a Verdant User now.]
[You can manipulate plants, absorb sunlight, and feel every dying houseplant within 50 meters.]
[Side effects include: green skin, dietary changes, and crippling guilt every time you eat a salad.]
[Enjoy! 🌱]
Ethan sat up.
Slow. Deliberate.
Looked at his hands.
In the shade, they looked normal. Pale. Human.
But when sunlight hit them?
Green.
Not paint. Not a trick of light.
Chlorophyll in his skin cells.
"No," he said quietly. "No. I didn't—I didn't ask for this—"
[Nobody asks. You touched the Seed. The Seed chose you.]
[Now get up. You have 486 days left.]
"I don't want this!"
[Irrelevant.]
His phone buzzed.
Ethan pulled it from his pocket with shaking hands.
Forty-seven missed calls.
Eighty-three texts.
The screen was cracked—when had that happened?—but the notifications were still readable:
Mom:ethan please call me back the news is saying thousands of people are having seizures and seeing things please be safe
Unknown Number:Mr. Cole. Mira Laurent, Verdant Concord. We need to talk. NOW.
News Alert:BREAKING: Global "Green Light" phenomenon. Millions report hallucinations. WHO declares international health emergency.
Ethan's stomach dropped.
Millions.
Millions of people.
He looked up.
And for the first time, he saw the chaos.
Sirens. Distant. Getting closer.
Two blocks away, someone was screaming. High-pitched. Desperate.
A woman stumbled out of an apartment building, clutching her head. Vines were growing from her hair, spiraling down her back, digging into the sidewalk.
She was sobbing.
"Get it out—get it OUT—"
A man on the opposite corner was kneeling in the street, hands pressed to the asphalt. Grass erupted from the cracks beneath his palms, spreading in a ten-foot radius, choking the gutter drains.
He was laughing.
Hysterical. Broken.
Ethan's phone buzzed again.
He looked down.
Twitter was exploding.
#VerdantAwakening – 14.2M tweets
#PlanetDying – 8.7M tweets
He clicked the first video.
Tokyo. Shibuya Crossing.
A man standing in the center of the intersection. Roots growing from his feet, punching through asphalt, spreading across the entire crossing in seconds. Trees sprouting. Full-grown. Impossible.
Traffic stopped.
People screaming.
The man's eyes were green. Glowing.
He looked at the camera.
And smiled.
The video cut off.
Ethan dropped the phone.
"This is happening to everyone," he whispered.
[Not everyone. 1 in 10,000 humans are compatible.]
[Roughly 800,000 people globally just awakened.]
[Most of them are going to die within a week.]
[Thornbound cultists hunt new Users. Thorne Industries enslaves them. Verdant Concord recruits them.]
[You have three choices:]
[1) Join a faction (survive longer, lose freedom)]
[2) Go rogue (die faster, keep dignity)]
[3) Activate Tutorial Mode and actually learn how not to be useless.]
[I recommend option 3. 😤]
Ethan stared at the text.
Then at his glowing hands.
Then at the oak sapling, now taller than him, blooming cherry blossoms that shouldn't exist on an oak tree.
Then at the woman two blocks away, vines eating her alive while she screamed.
His hands clenched into fists.
"I didn't ask for this."
[I know.]
"I don't want to save the world."
[I know.]
"I just wanted to save one fucking tree."
[...I know.]
Silence.
Then:
[But you DID save it.]
[And if you walk away now, it dies anyway in 486 days.]
[Along with your mom. Your friends. Everyone.]
[So what's it going to be, Ethan Cole?]
[Die a coward?]
[Or die a hero?]
[Either way, you're dying. Might as well make it count. 🌱]
Ethan closed his eyes.
Took a breath.
Opened them.
The green text was still there.
The screaming was still there.
His hands were still glowing.
And the oak sapling—his tree, somehow, impossibly his—was watching him with branches that moved like arms.
Waiting.
"Fuck," Ethan said quietly.
He stood up.
[Tutorial Mode?]
"Yeah. Fine. Tutorial Mode."
[Excellent choice! 😊]
[Lesson 1: RUN.]
[Fire department arrives in 90 seconds.]
[They're going to shoot first and ask questions never.]
[GO GO GO! 🌱]
Ethan ran.
Behind him, the oak bloomed brighter.
And deep in the earth, something vast and patient smiled.