The inside of the bag smelled like shit.
Not metaphorical shit—though there was plenty of that too, swirling through Viridion Skylargh's consciousness like a toxic fog—but the kind that had a smell and a texture and a weight. The fabric pressed against his seed-body was rough and scratchy, stained with years of fish guts and river slime and whatever else the old man had hauled up in his fishing nets. It was damp in some places and it was the single most unpleasant environment Viridion had ever had the misfortune of occupying.
And he had spent ten thousand years in the Chamber of Forgotten Souls.
"This is worse," he thought bitterly, feeling the bag sway back and forth with Sanria's footsteps. "At least in the Chamber, I could spread out and wasn't pressed up against something that smells like a fish's armpit."
He had given up on trying to move, had given up on trying to see, and had given up on trying to do anything except exist in this miserable, suffocating darkness, listening to the muffled sounds of the town outside and wondering if his life would ever stop being a series of increasingly absurd humiliations.
"If only I could scream," he thought. "If only I could open whatever passes for my mouth and just SCREAM until my lungs—do I have lungs?—until whatever I have gives out. If I could just let out one good, long, soul-cleansing scream, maybe I'd feel better."
But he couldn't scream. He couldn't do anything except lie in a dirty bag and listen to Sanria and her mother walk through a town he'd never seen, past people he'd never meet, toward a future he couldn't predict.
The fate was playing with him.
It had to be.
No one's life was this ridiculous by accident.
[Do you want to check your progress?]
The window appeared in his vision and Viridion felt a surge of irritation so powerful it almost lifted him out of the bag.
"What's with it now?" he snapped, his internal voice sharp as broken glass. "What does it have to do with me?"
[Your status, idiot.]
"Whatever."
Viridion closed the window.
He didn't even think about it. He just willed it away, the same way he had willed away a thousand annoying thoughts over the past ten thousand years, and the window flickered once and then vanished from his sight.
Viridion sighed and settled back into his misery. He didn't want to check his progress or status. He didn't want to be reminded that he was a seed, weak, and was completely and utterly at the mercy of a family who thought he might be poisonous and a cat who thought he was a toy and a universe that seemed determined to make him suffer.
"I just want to rest," he thought. "I just want five minutes where nothing terrible happens to me. Is that too much to ask?"
Apparently, it was.
The bag stopped moving.
Viridion felt himself being lowered onto what felt like a wooden floor. The impact sent a jolt through his seed-body, and even though he didn't have a head, he felt something that was definitely a headache blooming behind whatever passed for his eyes.
"Ow," he muttered. "Ow, ow, ow. That hurt. And I'm going to complain about it for the next hour because no one can hear me and I have nothing better to do."
He heard voices above him and the sound of another voice, belonging to someone Viridion didn't recognize.
We're at the merchant's shop. They're going to ask about me. They're going to find out if I'm poisonous or not.
Viridion felt a flicker of hope.
Maybe this merchant will recognize me and know what I am. Maybe he'll tell them that I'm a rare and valuable seed that needs to be planted immediately in the finest soil, and then they'll bury me, and I'll complete my mission, and everything will be fine.
But then he heard the merchant speak.
"Never seen anything like it," the man said, and Vitidion could hear the shrug in his voice. "Been in the seed and spice trade for thirty years. Imported goods from three different kingdoms. Never once seen a seed with colors like this. Never seen one that glows, either. You sure this isn't some kind of river rock?"
"It's a seed," Sanria insisted. "I can feel it. It's alive."
"I AM alive," Viridion thought. "Thank you for noticing, child."
"Alive, maybe," the merchant said doubtfully. "But I couldn't tell you what it is. Couldn't tell you if it's poisonous, either. My advice? Don't eat it. If you don't know what it is, assume it'll kill you."
"THAT'S your advice?!" Viridion shrieked internally. "That's the best you can do?! 'Don't eat it'?! I could have told them that! I DID tell them that! I'm not paying you for this level of expertise!"
But Sanria and her mother were already thanking the merchant, their voices fading as they moved toward the door, and Viridion felt the bag swing again as they stepped back out into the street.
"Great," he thought. "So that was a waste of time. Wonderful. I love being a mystery that no one can solve."
They walked for a while longer.
Viridion lost track of time inside the bag. The swaying motion was almost soothing, in a nauseating kind of way, and despite his best efforts to stay alert, he felt his consciousness beginning to drift.
I'll maybe rest for a bit, and then I'll wake up and everything will be better.
He slept.
It wasn't a deep sleep but it was enough to blur the edges of his awareness, to soften the sharp corners of his anxiety, to let him forget for a few precious moments that he was a seed being carried through a strange town by people he didn't know.
When he woke, it was to voices.
"...absolutely certain," a new voice was saying, and somehow wrong in a way Viridion couldn't quite identify. "I've been studying botanical medicine for forty years. I've seen seeds from across the known world and beyond."
Viridion imagined the man leaning forward, his eyes gleaming with greed.
"This is something special."
"You keep saying that," Sanria's mother said, and there was a note of suspicion in her voice. "But you haven't told us what it is."
"It's a healing seed."
The words hung in the air, and Viridion felt his non-existent heart skip its beat.
"A healing seed," he thought. "He knows. How does he know?! How does this random apothecary in some random town know what I am when even I didn't know until the window told me?!"
"I've only seen two in my entire career," the man continued, and Viridion could hear the reverence in his voice. "Both were smaller than this. The healing properties of such seeds are... extraordinary. They can cure diseases that normal medicine cannot touch. They can accelerate recovery from wounds that would otherwise be fatal. In some cases—rare cases, mind you—they can even restore lost limbs."
"Restore lost limbs?" Sanria's mother hushed repeatedly.
"Under the right conditions, with the right preparation... yes. It's possible."
Viridion felt sick.
"They're going to grind me into medicine," he thought. "They're going to crush me and boil me and turn me into some kind of potion, and then I'll be gone, and no one will ever know that I was a person, that I had thoughts and feelings and memories, that I survived ten thousand years in the Chamber just to end up as someone's syrup."
"This seed," the man said, and now his voice had shifted like he was sharing a secret that could change their lives, "is worth a fortune. More than a fortune. With this seed, you could buy land, buy titles, and buy protection from every enemy you've ever had."
Viridion wanted to punch that guy who just spoke like everything could just be as easy as he says.
"I would be willing to pay you ten thousand rookies for it, in cash."
Ten thousand rookies?
Viridion didn't know what a rookie was, but the way the man said it, told him everything he needed to know.
Ten thousand rookies was a lot.
Ten thousand rookies was more than a fishing family had probably seen in their entire existence.
"They're going to sell me," Viridion thought, and the certainty of it was like a knife in his chest. "They're going to take the money, and they're going to hand me over, and I'm going to become medicine, and that's going to be the end of Viridion Skylargh. To become a mere ingredient."
[10,000 rookies. Not bad.]
The window appeared again, and Viridion wanted to scream.
"SHUT UP!" he snarled with cracking voice in desperation. "This is not the time for your commentary! You must help me! How does this man know I have healing abilities?! Why does he want to buy me for ten thousand rookies?! What is happening?!"
[I was asking earlier if you wanted to check your progress, but you closed me.]
Viridion opened his mouth to argue, and then closed it again.
Because the window was right.
He had closed it. He had been too annoyed to listen to what the system had to say. And now here he was, completely ignorant at the mercy of a situation he didn't understand.
"Stupid," he thought. "Stupid, stupid, STUPID."
"...can I see my progress now?" he asked, and even though there was no one around to hear him, he could feel the shame burning in his voice.
[Of course. That's what I've been trying to tell you.]
"Just... just do it."
[Checking progress...]
[Loading...]
[Do you want to see your status as well?]
"Yes," Viridion said quietly. "Might as well. It can't make things worse."
[Scanning system...]
[Please wait for five minutes.]
"FIVE MINUTES?!" Viridion's internal voice shot up an octave, warring for dominance. "I'm being sold for some kind of coins I don't even understand, and you want me to wait five minutes for my status?!"
[Thanks to you. You were soaked in water and nearly cooked in fire. Your status is still retrieving. These things take time when you keep almost dying.]
"JEEZ!" Viridion screamed. And if he'd had a body, he would have been pulling his hair out. "I wanna die right now..."
[Then become medicine. That would technically fulfill your wish to die.]
"I DON'T WANT THAT EITHER!"
[Then wait five minutes.]
Viridion spent his time looking at ceiling as he was still hearing voices coming from Sanria, her mother, and the guy who they are talking to.
It was the longest five minutes of his existence—and remember, he had existed for ten thousand years in a dark chamber where time didn't move. But somehow, these three hundred seconds were worse. Because out there, beyond the walls of the bag, Sanria and her mother were talking to a man who wanted to turn him into medicine, and every word they spoke was a hammer blow to his fragile hope.
"How much medicine would it make?" Sanria asked, and Viridion's seed-skin prickled at the curiosity in her voice.
"She's considering it," he thought. "She's actually considering it..."
The apothecary's voice was smooth as silk. "Difficult to say without testing. But if the healing properties are as strong as I suspect... this single seed could treat hundreds. Perhaps thousands. It could be ground into a powder and distributed across the country. It could be dissolved in water and fed to the sick."
"Could it save everyone?"
Sanria's question cut through the man's sales pitch like a blade, and Viridion felt something shift in the air.
The apothecary stopped talking for a second. "I... well, not everyone, but—"
"Could it stop the diseases that come from the swamps? Could it heal the children who get sick every winter? Could it bring back the soldiers who lose their arms and legs in the border raids?"
"I... perhaps, if used correctly, but—"
"Then we should plant it."
Viridion's non-existent heart stopped.
That's a good idea, Sanria! You are my friend now.
"Plant it?" The apothecary's voice had lost its smoothness. It was sharper now, edged with something that might have been disbelief or might have been desperation. "Child, do you understand what you're saying? If you plant this seed, you'll have to wait years for it to grow. Years before it produces fruit. Years before you have more seeds to work with. Years when people are dying now."
"Healing takes time."
"But—"
"If we sell it to you," Sanria continued, "you'll make medicine from it. And that medicine will help some people. Maybe a lot of people. But when it's gone... it's gone. There won't be any more."
The apothecary didn't respond.
"But if we plant it," Sanria said, "if we let it grow into a tree, or a vine, or whatever it's supposed to become... then we'll have more seeds, more fruits, and more medicine. It could help everyone, not just the people who are sick right now."
"Child, you don't understand the economics of—"
"I understand that our country gets raided every year by neighbors who have more soldiers than us," Sanria interrupted. "I understand that people are sick and hungry and scared. I understand that if this seed is used wisely, we could change everything."
She paused.
"If we plant it, and it grows, and we take care of it... then our country could become powerful. Not because we have more weapons, but because we have something no one else has. And when other countries see that, they won't want to raid us anymore. They'll want to trade with us."
The apothecary laughed his ass off. "Want to trade us? Child, they'll be more intrigued when they found out this country has ability to heal sickos."
Viridion couldn't see anything. He couldn't see Sanria's face, the apothecary's expression, or her mother's reaction. But he could feel the weight of the moment pressing down on him like a physical force.
"She's protecting me," he thought. "She doesn't even know me. She doesn't even know I'm conscious. But she's protecting me anyway."
The apothecary tried to argue.
He talked about time, about urgency, about the lives that would be lost while they waited for a tree to grow. He talked about the neighbours being paranoid once they found out about the seed's ability to cure people. He talked about the difficulty of cultivating unknown seeds, the risk of failure, the possibility that the seed might not even sprout at all. He talked about money, about how that money could change Sanria's family's life today, not in some uncertain future.
But Sanria didn't waver.
And neither did her mother, once she'd had a moment to think.
"My daughter is right," the old woman said finally, and Viridion could hear the pride in her voice. It's the quiet amazement of a parent realizing that their child was smarter than they'd given them credit for. "We didn't know what this seed was when we found it. We thought it might be poisonous or worthless. But if it's truly as valuable as you say... then it's too valuable to sell."
"Too valuable to—" The apothecary sputtered. "That doesn't make any sense! If it's valuable, that's exactly why you should sell it!"
"No," Sanria said. "If it's valuable, that's why we should keep it. That's why we should make sure it grows into something that can keep giving, instead of something that gets used up and forgotten."
The apothecary was silent for a long moment.
Then Viridion heard him sigh.
"You're either the wisest child I've ever met," he said, "or the most foolish. I can't tell which yet."
"Does it matter?" Sanria asked.
"No," the apothecary admitted. "No, I suppose it doesn't."
Sanria reached into the bag and pulled Viridion out.
For the first time since he'd been stuffed into that wretched fish-smelling prison, Viridion saw light streaming through the windows of the apothecary's shop. He saw shelves lined with jars and bottles, walls covered in dried herbs, a counter cluttered with scales and measuring tools. And he saw the apothecary himself: a thin man with sharp features and sharper eyes, wearing robes, stained with years of potion-making.
The man took Viridion from Sanria's hands.
His fingers were cold. They moved over Viridion's surface with the clinical precision of someone who had handled a thousand seeds and thought nothing of any of them.
But there was something else in his touch, too. Something that made Viridion's seed-skin crawl.
[DANGER: The guy holding you wanted you to become medicine.]
"This man is dangerous," he thought. "He doesn't care what I am. He only cares what I can do."
The apothecary held Viridion up to the light, turning him this way and that, examining him from every angle.
"Extraordinary," he murmured. "I've never seen anything quite like it."
"Yes, I'm very special," Viridion thought bitterly. "Now put me down and let me go back into the bag!"
The man's fingers tightened around him.
Viridion thought he might refuse to let him go. Thought he might refuse to give the seed back, might insist on buying it, or might do something desperate and terrible to get what he wanted.
But then Sanria's mother cleared her throat.
"We'll be going now," she said. "Thank you for your time, Master Apothecary."
The man hesitated.
Then, he handed Viridion back to Sanria.
"Consider my offer," he said. "Ten thousand rookies. It will still be on the table if you change your mind."
Sanria put Viridion back in the bag.
They left the shop.
Viridion could feel the shift in the air as they moved from the apothecary's dim interior back out into the sun-drenched street.
"She saved me," he thought. "That twelve-year-old Scorpio saved me from being ground into powder and sold as medicine."
Back in Shatterloam, seeds like him had been hunted, because they were useful. The Zodiac Orders had prized healing seeds above almost everything else. They had collected them, hoarded them, used them to fuel their endless wars against the devils and each other.
The ability of the seed had been passed down through generations, from one healing plant to the next, until the last Zodiac War had wiped out almost everything. The devils had come for the seeds first, knowing that if they destroyed the healing, they destroyed the Orders' ability to recover from battle. And the Orders had fought back, using the seeds to patch up their soldiers and send them back to the front lines, again and again, until there was nothing left but memory.
Viridion had seen it happen as a witness. He had watched the devils descend from the rifts between worlds, how the Archons fell one by one, watched the Wheel shatter into a million pieces and scatter across the cosmos like seeds thrown by a furious wind.
And now he was a seed himself.
The kind of thing that devils hunted.
"But there are no devils here," he told himself. "This is a different world. A world where the biggest danger is an apothecary with greedy eyes and a cat with too much curiosity. I think I'm safe here."
The bag swayed.
Sanria hummed a tune and Viridion felt himself smile.
He didn't have any of the physical equipment necessary for smiling. But somehow, he felt the corners of his mouth curl upward.
"I' saved today," he thought again.
[Viewing your progress...]
[PROGRESS: Your outer shell is becoming soft due to moisture from being soaked in the water. You cannot use any abilities except Danger Sense.]
[STATUS WINDOW]
- Danger Sense (Lv.1)
Can locate threats within 1 meter radius.
Current range: 1 meter.>
Viridion stared at the window for a long moment.
Then he sighed.
Back in his old life, he had never known his own weaknesses. He had never seen a status window for checking his stats, and never had any way of knowing just how weak he truly was.
"Strength Level 0," he whispered. "Fighting Level 0. Mana Core Undeveloped. Magic Resistance None."
He wanted the window to disappear.
The knowledge was there now, burned into his consciousness like a brand, and no amount of wishing would make it go away.
"At least I have Danger Sense," he said. "At least I can sense threats within one meter."
Viridion heard Sanria's voice again, muffled through the fabric of the bag.
"Mother," she said, "when we get home, can I plant the seed in the garden? Near the window where I can see it every day?"
"Of course, dear," her mother replied. "But why there?"
"Because," Sanria said, and Rider could hear the smile in her voice, "I want to watch it grow. I want to be the first person to see it sprout. I want to take care of it, and protect it, and make sure it becomes something beautiful."
"She wants to watch me grow," Viridion thought.
And for the first time since he had awoken as a seed, Viridion felt something that might have been hope.
Not for himself, but for her.
For the twelve-year-old girl who had saved him without even knowing it.
"Maybe being attached to her isn't such a bad thing after all," he thought. But I don't wanna babysit this one."
The window flickered.
[Side Quest active: Be attached to Sanria Vancove.]
[Progress: 10%.]
Viridion didn't close the window this time.