The day was winding down when Davin got home.
A data analyst at a big firm, he spent his days breaking down chaos into profitable probabilities. Numbers and cold logic. That was his world. There was no room in it for the unexpected.
The silence of the house felt familiar. His mother wasn't home — overtime at the hospital again, like so often these days. Before he'd even taken off his shoes, he grabbed the small watering can by the bay window and stepped out into the garden.
The evening air was heavy. Not a breath. Not a single leaf moving.
Lost in his thoughts, mentally running the variables on a project he'd left hanging at the office, he watered his plants on autopilot. His eyes drifted toward the back of the yard. Toward that scrawny little apple tree that had never produced anything edible.
That's when he saw it.
An anomaly.
Alone on a low branch, an apple sat in the dim light. Its surface, perfectly smooth, caught the fading sun and threw it back with the hard gleam of polished stone. A deep green. Unreal.
"Looks like jade…" he murmured, his voice rough with fatigue.
Davin narrowed his eyes, looking for a logical explanation. A memory came back to him. A few months earlier, his mother had returned from a flea market with that vague little smile of hers: "I stopped by an old antique dealer's stall. Found some ancient seeds — apparently they grow even in the worst soil. Look." At the time, he'd barely listened.
He tapped the frame of his smart glasses — the work toy his company had given him — to wake up his assistant.
"AI, run a visual search. Is there any apple variety with a color and texture close to mineral jade?"
A faint hum vibrated through the frame, but the retinal display stayed blank. The AI didn't respond.
"Hm. Unknown species, or just a bug?" he muttered. "Whatever. Might as well take it."
He reached out and plucked the fruit.
The weight surprised him. Too dense. And weirdly cold, like it had just come out of a freezer.
A few minutes later, he was sitting on the living room couch, the fruit cradled in his hands.
He studied it from every angle. The bluish glow from the dark TV screen reflected off the green skin. No spots. No flaws. Perfect geometry.
"This thing is way too perfect," he muttered into the silence of the room.
He was hypnotized by it, for no reason he could name. He rolled it between his palms. His analyst's mind kept screaming at him to wait. Wait for his mother, do some real research on this anomaly. But the strange coolness of the fruit was creeping under his skin, dulling his reason, pulling him in.
He stood up suddenly and walked to the kitchen.
He set the fruit on a ceramic plate and grabbed a paring knife. The blade scraped against the hard skin before sinking in with unexpected resistance. The flesh wasn't white. It was a translucent green, threaded with thin silver veins that seemed to hold the ceiling light in them. It was beautiful. Almost hypnotic.
I'm probably going to regret this if it's toxic, he thought.
He brought a slice to his mouth. He bit down.
His pupils dilated instantly.
"Holy shit…"
The explosion of flavor swept everything else aside. Not sour. Not sickening. An absolute freshness, almost… alive. Like water from the purest spring flooding his palate.
Driven by an impulse he didn't recognize, his rational mind shattered. He devoured the rest. The flesh, the core — he even crushed the hard black seeds between his teeth. Each bite wiped away the day's exhaustion and dropped his brain into a soft euphoria.
Then the silence came back. The plate was empty.
Davin stood frozen in the middle of the kitchen. The euphoria vanished as fast as it had come. A strange emptiness took its place.
"That's it already?" he said, slowly coming back to himself.
He shook his head, embarrassed by his own greed, and slumped back onto the couch.
"Alright, AI, find me a good movie for toni—"
His sentence died in his throat.
A heat bloomed in the pit of his stomach. No. Not heat. A burn. Something was spreading through him. Sudden. Violent. Out of control.
"Argh…!"
A painful gasp tore through his chest. He doubled over, hands clenched against his stomach. This wasn't indigestion. It was like someone had just poured molten lead straight into his guts.
"AHHH!"
He rolled off the couch and crashed onto the floor. His breath locked up. His lungs refused to expand.
A blazing burn shot from his stomach up through his ribcage. His veins swelled under his skin. He tried to crawl toward the kitchen for water, to call for help. But his legs wouldn't obey. He collapsed onto his back, racked with violent convulsions.
The pain became total. Absolute.
Every cell of his body, from the marrow of his bones to the tips of his fingers, felt like it was being ground down, dissolved by an invisible force, then rebuilt raw.
"Help me… Please!"
His cry was nothing more than a strangled rasp.
"HELP ME! AAAAAH! IT BURNS!"
His eyes rolled back in their sockets. The burn reached his brain, drilling into his skull like a red-hot bit. His body, stretched to the limit, looked like a bow about to snap. He thrashed on the floor, slamming his head against the wood without even realizing it, desperate to escape the torture inside him.
The last thing his analytical brain could process was the absolute certainty of his own death.
Then nothing. Silence.
With Davin's last breath, the burning stopped. From his frozen body rose an ethereal flame, a brilliant jade green. A cold fire, that consumed neither his blackened flesh nor the floor of the living room.
The flame pulsed once, then shot toward the sky. It passed through the ceiling as if it didn't exist, tore through the atmosphere, and plunged into the void of space. At a speed defying all logic, the jade comet streaked across the cosmos until it slammed into the orbit of a distant world.
It fell onto the surface of this new planet. In the mud of a wretched encampment, beneath a broken cart, a gaunt young beggar slept fitfully.
The emerald light came down on him and burrowed into his chest. The shock of heat and pain ripped him out of sleep. His eyes flew open in terror, his jaw locked open in a silent scream. The energy crushed his fragile soul in a fraction of a second, killing him on the spot to take the body.
The jade light slowly dimmed, sinking deep into his guts, then faded completely.
A heavy silence settled back under the cart.
And after a long moment, the body moved again.