The deeper into the school Jin walked, the less it resembled a building at all.
Root and bark had folded through the old hallways over the last month, moss softening every footstep, faint veins of pale light tracing patterns through walls that had long since stopped being just concrete and plaster. The old main office sat half swallowed now, a mural on its far wall reduced to vague color beneath a lattice of creeping vine. The forest hadn't simply grown around the school. It had grown into it, patient and thorough, until the two had become something neither building nor forest could properly claim alone. He passed a classroom where vines had grown thick enough to replace the chalkboard entirely, and further down, a hallway where the old lockers sat half consumed by root, doors hanging open on hinges that hadn't moved in weeks.
