I didn't sleep that night.
Not because I was afraid.
But because the soil was dreaming.
I lay on the cot in the back room, eyes open, listening.
Not with my ears.
With my skin. My bones. The thin thread between me and the roots beneath the floor.
They were whispering.
Not words.
Images.
Fragments.
A forest, vast and black, stretching beyond memory.
A tree with bark like carved stone, its branches holding up the sky.
A voice — deep, slow, like tectonic plates shifting — saying one thing, over and over:
"She lives."
I sat up.
And then I saw it.
Floating in the dark, just beyond the window:
[System Notification]
Botanical Empathy — Rank F → Rank E
Ability: Photosynthetic Recovery (Passive)
You now regenerate stamina and minor wounds under sunlight.
Title Acquired: Tender of the Wild
Plants within 10 meters respond to your presence.
No fanfare.
No chime.
Just text, glowing faintly in the air, like mist.
I exhaled.
So it wasn't just me imagining things.
The System recognized it too.
The garden wasn't reacting to me.
It was responding to what I am.
I stepped outside.
Dawn was coming — pale light bleeding through smoke.
The crushed rose still lay where the man had dropped it.
I knelt.
Touched the broken stem.
And without thinking, I pushed — not with hands, but with something deeper. A pull from the center of my chest, like drawing breath from the earth itself.
The rose trembled.
Then, slowly, impossibly —
its petals uncurled.
The stem straightened.
A single new thorn sprouted, sharp and black.
It wasn't the same as before.
It was…
more.
Thistle swayed beside me.
"Took you long enough," he said.
"You were humming yesterday. Like a broken tuning fork. Now you're… in key."
I looked at my hands.
No glow. No spark.
But I felt them — the roots under the yard, the vines on the wall, the old oak's slow pulse.
Like fingers I'd forgotten I had.
Then, from the edge of the lot, a sound.
Not voice.
Not wind.
A tap.
I turned.
The oak's lowest branch had shifted.
Its bark split slightly — not cracking, but opening — like a mouth.
And from within, a single seed fell.
Black. Smooth. Heavy with silence.
It didn't bounce.
It sank into the soil.
And where it landed, a circle of green spread — fast, like ink in water.
Grass grew.
Clover bloomed.
A sapling shot up, thin and pale, its leaves already turning toward me.
I didn't touch it.
I didn't need to.
It knew me.
And then, clear as a bell in my mind:
"Begin."
Not from the System.
Not from Thistle.
Not from the wind.
From the seed.
I didn't understand.
I didn't have to.
Some things aren't learned.
They're remembered.