The last thing Haruto remembered about Earth was the smell of rain.
Not the dramatic, cinematic kind of death no slow motion, no life flashing before his eyes, no profound final thoughts about the meaning of existence. Just the smell of wet pavement, the sound of his phone buzzing in his pocket with a reminder that his biology assignment was due in six hours, and then nothing.
Well. Almost nothing.
There was one final thought, small and embarrassingly ordinary: I never finished that documentary about carnivorous plants.
And then the universe, apparently deciding that was a perfectly acceptable last thought for a seventeen-year-old, went ahead and killed him anyway.
He woke up to dirt in his mouth.
This was, objectively, a terrible way to wake up. Haruto lay face-down on the ground for a full ten seconds, cataloguing the situation with the methodical calm of someone who had read enough manga to recognize the setup. The ground beneath his palms was soft, loamy soil rich, dark, full of nutrients, the kind that plant roots loved. The air smelled like pine resin and something sweeter, almost electric. Birds were calling in the distance, but they were wrong somehow. Too loud. Too melodic. Like birds from a nature documentary about a world that had never heard of traffic or fast food.
He pushed himself upright and looked around.
The forest was enormous.
Not the modest, human-scale forests of the world he'd grown up in the kind you could drive through in twenty minutes and emerge from the other side into a strip mall and a petrol station. This was ancient. Primordial. The trees were so tall their canopies were lost in a soft green haze far above his head, and their trunks were wide enough that it would take six people with linked arms to wrap around one. Bioluminescent moss clung to the bark in patches, glowing faintly even in the daylight. Vines thick as his arm coiled between branches. Flowers he had absolutely no name for bloomed in the shadows, their petals the color of bruises and starlight.
Haruto stood up slowly, brushing soil off his school uniform or what used to be his school uniform. The fabric was intact, which was more than he could say for his dignity.
"Okay," he said out loud, because saying things out loud helped him think. "I'm dead. I'm in another world. This is absolutely either the best or worst thing that has ever happened to me."
The forest did not respond. This was fine. He wasn't expecting it to.
What he was not expecting was for the grass at his feet to slowly, curiously, lean toward him.
He looked down. A patch of knee-high emerald grass the kind with flat, wide blades — had turned in his direction as if he were a source of light. As he watched, one blade stretched imperceptibly upward, reaching for his hand like a cat wanting to be petted.
Haruto crouched down and held out his fingers. The blade of grass touched his knuckle. Something warm and faint buzzed through his palm like static electricity, but alive.
"Huh," he said.
The voice arrived without warning.
"LOST SOUL FROM THE OUTER REALM."
It came from everywhere and nowhere at once not loud, exactly, but deep in a way that vibrated in his back teeth. Haruto straightened up and looked around. A figure had appeared between two trees: tall, robed in something that seemed to be made of compressed light, face obscured behind a veil of golden mist. It hovered three inches above the ground with the casual indifference of something that had never needed to worry about gravity.
"You have been called to the Verdant Realm. Your soul has been judged worthy of a second life. You will be granted a Cultivation Talent commensurate with your nature, and you will"
"Can I ask a question first?"
The figure paused. The golden mist swirled uncertainly.
"...You may."
"Is this permanent? Like am I permanently dead back home, or is there a reset button somewhere?"
Another pause. Longer this time.
"...Permanent."
"Right." Haruto took a breath. Back home, he had a half-finished report on mycorrhizal networks, a plant biology presentation, and a younger sister who was going to be absolutely furious with him. None of that could be helped now. He filed it away in the part of his brain labeled
deal with this later and refocused. "Okay. You said Cultivation Talent. What does that mean, exactly?"
"In the Verdant Realm, all living beings possess a qi core a reservoir of life energy that can be trained, refined, and weaponized. Your Talent determines your affinity: the element or force to which your cultivation naturally gravitates. Fire. Lightning. Metal. Water. Void."
"And what's mine?"
The figure was quiet for a moment that stretched just a little too long.
"...Plant."
"Plant," Haruto repeated.
"Grass-grade plant affinity. The lowest classification in the cultivation hierarchy. It is"
"Fantastic."
The figure stopped again. This seemed to happen a lot when it talked to him.
"...You are not distressed."
"Should I be?"
"Most souls, upon learning they have received the weakest possible talent, experience significant distress."
Haruto looked at the blade of grass still brushing against his knuckle. He looked at the enormous, ancient, impossibly alive forest surrounding him. He thought about the seventeen years he'd spent obsessively reading about plants their biology, their chemistry, their slow and patient and absolutely relentless way of conquering every surface they touched. Given enough time, plant roots split boulders in half. Given enough water, vines consumed entire buildings. The oldest living organisms on Earth were trees. Not dragons. Not warriors. Trees.
He thought about carnivorous plants. About poison spores. About the Venus flytrap that could snap shut in one tenth of a second. About strangler figs that slowly, over decades, consumed their host trees from the outside in.
He thought about how nobody in a cultivation world had ever probably thought to weaponize botany.
"I study plants," he told the glowing figure. "Back home, I mean. It's kind of my whole thing."
"...We are aware."
"Then you already know this isn't a bad draw." He stood up straight, brushing the last of the soil from his uniform. "It's just an unconventional one."
The figure regarded him for a long, unreadable moment.
"The Azure Cloud Academy will provide your formal cultivation training. You will begin tomorrow. Be warned your rank will be known. You will face mockery. Dismissal. Underestimation at every turn."
"Good," Haruto said simply. "I work better when people aren't paying attention."
The figure dissolved. The golden light faded. The forest settled back into its vast, breathing quiet.
Haruto looked down at the grass one more time. The whole patch had turned toward him now a small circle of emerald green, leaning in his direction like a crowd straining to see something exciting.
"Don't worry," he told them quietly. "I've got plans for us."
The grass swayed. Almost like it understood.
Almost like it approved.
The village found him before he found it.
Specifically, a small boy of about nine came crashing through the undergrowth, tripped over a root, faceplanted six inches from Haruto's shoe, and looked up at him with wide eyes.
"You're the new one," the boy announced, as if this explained everything.
"...The new one?"
"The one who fell from the sky. Elder Bao said you'd be in the South Grove." The boy scrambled upright, apparently unbothered by the spectacular faceplant. He had a round face, muddy knees, and an air of absolute confidence that Haruto immediately respected. "I'm Wei. I was sent to find you before the wolves did."
"The wolves."
"The Duskfang wolves. They hunt at dusk." Wei looked at the sky. The green tinted light was beginning to deepen toward amber. "Which is soon. So we should go."
Haruto decided that questions could wait and followed.
The village was called Greenroot which, given the circumstances, felt almost like a sign. It sat in a clearing carved from the ancient forest, ringed by a low stone wall covered in thick moss. The houses were built from pale wood and dark stone, rooftops heavy with cultivated herb gardens. Everything smelled like earth and growing things.
People stopped to look at him as Wei led him through the main path. He was, admittedly, conspicuous strange clothes, no qi aura, clearly foreign. A few people whispered. An old man smoking a long pipe on his doorstep squinted at him with the sharp assessment of someone who'd seen a lot of things and been impressed by very few of them.
"New cultivator?" the old man called out.
"Apparently," Haruto said.
"What's your talent?"
"Plant affinity."
The old man took a slow drag from his pipe. Smoke curled upward in a lazy spiral.
"Grass grade?"
"Grass grade."
The old man nodded, as if this confirmed something he'd already suspected. He didn't laugh. He didn't sneer. He just looked at Haruto for a long moment with an expression that was almost not quite, but almost sympathetic.
"The tallest trees," he said finally, "started as seeds no one thought would grow."
Then he went back to his pipe and said nothing more.
Haruto filed that away too.
Wei tugged his sleeve. "Elder Bao is waiting. And then tomorrow the Academy."
"Tomorrow," Haruto echoed.
He looked back at the treeline at the ancient, enormous, bioluminescent forest that stretched in every direction as far as he could see. Somewhere out there, plants were growing. Roots were spreading underground in networks stretching for miles. Vines were coiling, climbing, reaching.
And somewhere in an academy full of gifted cultivators with impressive talents and impressive rankings, nobody was going to see him coming.
He smiled.