The first thing Kenji Mori became aware of was light.
Not the thin, apologetic light that crept through his north-facing apartment window every morning like it was sorry for existing. This was real light - full, generous, pressing down on him from directly above with the kind of warmth that made his entire body want to just stop doing anything and receive it. Like lying on a beach, except he had never actually enjoyed lying on a beach because sand got into things and there were always people nearby being louder than necessary.
This was better than that. This was the best warmth he had ever felt in his life.
He decided to enjoy it with his eyes closed for another few minutes.
He tried to close his eyes.
His eyes did not close.
He tried again. Nothing. No flicker of lid, no dimming of the light, no cooperative darkness. He tried the way you try a light switch that isn't working - once, twice, a third time with slightly more aggression - and achieved precisely nothing except the dawning understanding that his eyes were open and intended to stay that way, and that he had, apparently, no say in the matter whatsoever.
Okay, Kenji thought. Both eyes open. Fine. I'll just - look at things then.
He looked at things.
Directly above him was sky. Blue, clear, enormous sky, the kind that exists in places far from cities, uninterrupted by buildings or telephone wires or the general visual clutter of anywhere Kenji had actually lived. A single cloud moved across it at the leisurely pace of something with nowhere to be. A bird crossed from one edge of his vision to the other and disappeared.
Around the edges of his vision - and his vision, he noticed, was very wide, wider than it should have been, almost circular, like looking through a lens someone had forgotten to put edges on - there was green. Grass. A lot of grass. Tall grass, short grass, the kind of flat open grassland that stretched away from him in every direction without interruption, which meant he was not in a forest, not in a garden, not anywhere near anything resembling human infrastructure.
He was in a field.
In the middle of nowhere.
Looking directly upward with eyes he couldn't close.
I've been dumped in a field, was his first coherent thought. Someone has driven me out to a field and left me here. This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me and I'm going to need to find my phone and -
He tried to sit up.
Nothing happened.
The inventory took a while.
Arms - no. Legs - no. Hands, feet, fingers, toes - no, no, no, and no. Torso, neck, the ability to turn his head in any direction - nothing, nothing, and absolutely not. He went through the complete catalogue of human body parts with the methodical patience of a man who worked in logistics and understood that you checked every item on the manifest before you concluded something was missing, and the manifest came back empty across every single line.
He had eyes. That appeared to be the full extent of it.
Eyes, and the warmth of the sun on something - some surface that was apparently his, that faced upward and caught the light with an efficiency that felt less like skin and more like -
He became aware, very slowly, of the fact that he was small.
Not small in the way a person can feel small - standing at the base of a tall building, sitting in the back row of an auditorium. Small in the literal, physical, measurable sense. The blades of grass nearest to him were tall. Not tall because he was lying down, but tall in the way that things are tall when you are almost not a size at all. They rose around him like trees. The nearest one, swaying gently in the breeze a few centimetres from his - from his -
He looked at himself.
Or tried to. His eyes didn't move on command, but his vision, that wide ambient thing, took in what was directly around him, and what was directly around him was soil. Dark, rich soil, and emerging from it, catching the sun, pale green and slightly translucent and smaller than his thumbnail had been when he'd had a thumbnail -
A seed.
A sprout, really - barely that. The very first suggestion of a sprout. A seed that had just, just begun to crack open, the tiniest possible pair of seed leaves unfolding toward the light with the fragile optimism of something that had no idea what kind of person was now inside it.
Oh no, thought Kenji Mori.
He looked at the seed.
The seed was him.
Oh no, he thought again, with considerably more feeling.
He spent some time not thinking about it, which was an unsuccessful strategy, and then some time thinking about it very hard, which was worse.
He was a seed. He was a seed that had just sprouted. He was in the middle of an open grassland with no arms, no legs, no ability to move, no ability to close his eyes, no phone, no way to contact anyone, no way to do anything at all except sit here in the dirt and photosynthesize, which was apparently just happening - he could feel it happening, some deep cellular process running in the background without consulting him, turning sunlight into something his body considered food — and he had not consented to any of this.
He had been eating ramen.
Shrimp ramen, which wasn't even his favourite.
And now he was a seed in a field.
He thought about this for a long time, and the thought went in circles the way thoughts do when there is no useful action to attach them to, and the sun moved a small distance across the sky, and his leaves tilted to follow it the way they apparently just did now, without his input, and everything was very still and very warm and should, objectively, have been peaceful.
It was not peaceful.
Because Kenji Mori had been in his current situation for approximately forty minutes, and he had just noticed the worm.
It emerged from the soil about ten centimetres to his left.
Just the front end of it first, that blunt, searching head pushing up through the dark earth the way worms do - blindly, purposelessly, with the absolute confidence of something that has never once in its evolutionary history had a reason to be afraid of anything it might encounter at ground level.
It was not a large worm. By any reasonable adult human standard it was an extremely normal, unthreatening, entirely ignorable worm.
But Kenji was not an adult human anymore.
Kenji was a sprout.
Kenji was a sprout whose entire body, in its full extension, was roughly the same size as that worm.
He watched it move through the soil near him with an attention he had never in his life devoted to a worm, cataloguing its progress with the focused anxiety of someone who had just understood, with horrible clarity, exactly where they sat on the food chain. Which was at the bottom. Which was under the bottom. Which was in a category that the food chain hadn't bothered to label because nothing had previously been small enough to occupy it and also be sentient.
The worm nosed toward him.
No, Kenji thought. No, no, no -
The worm lost interest and went back into the soil.
Kenji did not breathe - he had no lungs, breathing was not something he did anymore - but something in him released in a way that felt exactly like exhaling.
And then he looked up, past the worm, past the immediate perimeter of soil around him, out into the wide open grassland that stretched away in every direction, and he thought about what else lived in a grassland. Birds. Insects. Beetles the size of - well, the size of a seed. Things with mandibles. Things that ate plants. Things that ate seeds specifically, as a preference, as a lifestyle choice, as a calling.
He was a seed.
He was a seed sitting in open soil in the middle of a field with no shelter, no protection, and no method of self-defence available to him in any direction.
He was, in the most complete and literal sense of the phrase, completely defenceless.
The logic arrived slowly but it arrived clearly, the way solutions present themselves to people who work in logistics: you assess the situation, you identify the variable you can actually control, and you act on it before the shipment misses the window.
He could not run. He could not fight. He could not call for help.
But he was a seed. He was sitting in soil. And seeds - he knew this much from some half-remembered biology lesson he'd absorbed in middle school while thinking about lunch - seeds went into the ground. That was what they did. That was the correct and natural and sensible position for a seed to be in - underground, in the dark, beneath a surface that something would have to make an effort to get through.
Underground meant hidden. Underground meant protected. Underground meant not sitting exposed in open sun where anything with an appetite and no ethical framework could simply eat him without consequence.
He needed to be underground.
He focused on his roots - those thin, pale tendrils he could feel pressing into the soil beneath him - and he pushed. Not with arms or muscles or any physical mechanism he had ever used before, but with something more interior than that, something that felt like intention applied directly to biology, like telling a part of himself to simply go further, go deeper, pull the rest of him down and in and away from the open sky.
It was slow. Incredibly slow. The kind of slow that would have driven him insane in his previous life, staring at a progress bar.
But the soil gave way.
And he went down.
In the dark, it was quieter.
The sun was gone - or not gone, but distant, a warmth he could feel only faintly now, filtered down through the layer of earth above him. The sounds of the grassland went muffled. The world got smaller, and darker, and closer, and - and this surprised him - safer. Measurably, physically safer, in a way his body registered before his mind caught up to it.
He was under the ground.
Nothing could see him.
He stayed very still and let the dark settle around him and thought: alright. Alright. I'm alive. I am a seed and I am alive and nothing has eaten me yet and this is the best I can say about my situation but it is something.
It was something.
And then - in the quiet and the dark, as his roots pressed further down through the soil and found the deeper earth, the rich and mineral dark below the topsoil - something flickered.
Not light. Not quite. More like a thought that wasn't his, a structure assembling itself at the edge of his awareness with the clean, uninvited clarity of a notification he hadn't enabled.
[ YOU HAVE SURVIVED YOUR FIRST HOUR ]
[ SYSTEM INITIALISING… ]
[ Skill Unlocked: Nutrient Absorption Lv. 1 ]
[ You may now draw sustenance directly from soil. ]
[ Further paths will open as you grow. ]
Kenji read it once.
Read it again.
In the soil around him, his roots had already begun to pull - slowly, quietly, with the patience of something that understood that growing took time and that time, right now, was the one resource he had in complete abundance.
Fine, he thought.
Fine. Let's see where this goes.
Above him, the grassland went on without him, breezy and wide and full of things with appetites.
Below him, the earth was deep, and dark, and full of something else entirely.
TO BE CONTINUED ...