Elder Bao had one rule for Haruto before sending him to the Academy.
"Do not," the old woman had said, jabbing a bony finger at his chest, "embarrass Greenroot village."
That had been last night.
It was now morning, and Haruto was already embarrassing Greenroot village.
Not intentionally. It was just that he'd woken up at dawn to find the entire garden outside his guest room had rearranged itself overnight. The medicinal herbs Elder Bao had been carefully cultivating for years had migrated in tidy, organized rows directly outside his window. The prize-winning moonpetal flowers had abandoned their designated beds entirely and were now clustered against the outer wall of his room like fans waiting at a stage door.
Elder Bao stood in the middle of her destroyed garden with an expression like someone trying very hard not to scream.
"I didn't do that on purpose," Haruto said.
"The moonpetals," Elder Bao said, with the terrifying calm of someone who had moved beyond anger into a place of cold, transcendent fury, "took me four years to grow."
"They seem happy though? Look, they're"
The moonpetals were, in fact, visibly leaning toward him. One had extended a small tendril in the direction of his hand.
"They're fine," Haruto finished, a little weakly.
Elder Bao closed her eyes. Took a breath. Opened them.
"Go," she said. "Go to the Academy. Go now. Go before anything else moves."
Haruto went.
Wei insisted on walking him to the Academy gates, which were a two hour journey through the forest. Wei spent the first hour asking questions at a pace that suggested he had stored them up for years and was now releasing them all at once.
"Can you make trees grow really fast?"
"I don't know yet."
"Can you talk to plants?"
"Sort of. It's more like... feeling what they feel. Like reading a mood."
"What's that bush feeling right now?"
Haruto glanced at a large shrub by the path. He paused.
"Smug."
"Smug?"
"Smug. I don't know why. Plants are weird."
Wei considered this. "Can you make a plant eat someone?"
Haruto opened his mouth. Closed it. Thought about carnivorous plants. Thought about the Venus flytrap's jaw, the sundew's sticky fingers, the pitcher plant's slow and patient drowning trap.
"...I'm going to try not to lead with that one," he said.
Wei looked deeply disappointed.
The Azure Cloud Academy looked exactly like what you'd get if you asked someone to design a school specifically to make teenagers feel inadequate.
It was massive. It was ancient. It was built into the side of a mountain that glittered faintly with embedded spirit crystals, its multiple pagoda towers visible from miles away, each one representing a different cultivation element. Fire tower: red tipped, always faintly smoking. Lightning tower: crackling with visible arcs of electricity. Water tower: wrapped in a permanent low mist. Metal tower: gleaming even on cloudy days.
There was no plant tower.
There had, apparently, never been a need for a plant tower.
This fact was delivered to Haruto by the Academy's registration officer a thin man with the energy of someone who had personally alphabetized every document he'd ever touched the moment he arrived at the gates.
"Name?"
"Haruto."
"Cultivation affinity?"
"Plant."
The registration officer's pen stopped moving. He looked up from his ledger. He looked at Haruto. He looked back at his ledger. He made a small sound that was trying very hard not to be a laugh and failing modestly.
"...Grade?"
"Grass."
The pen went down entirely. The registration officer took off his glasses, cleaned them on his robe, replaced them, and looked at Haruto again as if hoping the prescription change would alter what he was seeing.
"Grass grade plant affinity," he repeated.
"That's the one."
"And you're enrolling in the Azure Cloud Academy."
"That's also the one."
The registration officer wrote something in his ledger. Haruto craned his neck and caught a glimpse of the words:
Special Case. Assign to Class F. Alert Instructor Chen.
"What's Class F?" Haruto asked.
"It's…" the man searched for a diplomatic word. "...the foundational development class."
"You can just say bottom class."
"The foundational development class," the man repeated firmly, in the tone of someone who had decided they were going to maintain professionalism if it killed them.
Class F was held in a building at the very back of the Academy grounds, half hidden behind a large ornamental hedge. Haruto suspected the hedge had been planted specifically to make Class F harder to find, so the other students wouldn't have to look at it.
There were eleven students already inside when he arrived.
He assessed them quickly, the way he'd learned to assess a new environment cataloguing, organizing, looking for patterns. A stocky girl in the front row with her arms crossed and the expression of someone who had been told she was in the wrong place and was absolutely furious about it. Two boys in the back who looked like they'd been placed here by accident and hadn't stopped trying to figure out the paperwork to transfer. A very tall boy asleep across three desks. And in the corner, completely alone, a small girl with extremely long sleeves who was reading a book and appeared to have emotionally checked out of the entire Academy experience.
They all looked at Haruto when he entered.
He looked back at them.
"Let me guess," the furious girl in the front said. "Plant affinity?"
"Grass-grade," Haruto confirmed, taking a seat. "You?"
"Wind," she said. "But my control is unstable, so they put me down here while they figure out how not to let me accidentally launch people across the courtyard."
"Has that happened?"
"Twice."
"Respect."
She blinked, apparently having expected a different response. Then, grudgingly, she uncrossed her arms. "I'm Sora."
"Haruto."
From the back, one of the confused-paperwork boys leaned forward. "Did you say grass grade? Like grass? As in the stuff on the ground?"
"The very same."
"So you can what grow a lawn? Really fast?"
"Among other things."
"Like what?"
Haruto thought about carnivorous plants again. He thought about strangler figs. He thought about the way bamboo could grow three feet in a single day, hard enough to crack stone. He thought about the manchineel tree the most dangerous tree on Earth, every part of it toxic, its sap capable of burning through skin like acid. He thought about the humble dandelion, which had been fighting a losing war against humanity for centuries and was, on balance, winning.
"I'm still figuring that out," he said pleasantly.
The boy leaned back, unimpressed. Sora, however, was looking at Haruto with a slightly different expression now. The expression of someone who had noticed something that didn't quite add up.
She'd ask eventually. People like her always did.
For now, Haruto settled into his seat and looked out the window. The ornamental hedge that hid Class F from the rest of the Academy swayed gently in the breeze. One branch had turned almost imperceptibly in his direction.
Hello, he thought at it, not really expecting anything.
The branch swayed again. Warm. Welcoming.
Hello yourself, it seemed to say.
Instructor Chen arrived eleven minutes late, which Haruto clocked not because he was impatient but because he automatically timed things. She was a short, sharp-eyed woman somewhere between forty and a hundred years old, with iron-grey hair pinned back with two cultivation needles and an expression like someone who had been given a task they found faintly insulting but were going to complete with full professionalism regardless.
She stood at the front of the room, looked at her twelve students, and sighed in a way that contained an entire autobiography.
"Welcome to Class F," she said. "You are here because your talents are either unstable, unconventional, or " her eyes found Haruto " categorically unprecedented in the Academy's four hundred year history."
"Is that good?" one of the paperwork boys whispered.
"It is not a compliment," Instructor Chen said, without looking at him.
She began pacing slowly. "The rest of the Academy believes that the students in this class are liabilities. Accidents waiting to happen. Dead weight. They will not say this to your faces mostly because some of you have launched people across courtyards " a brief nod to Sora " but they think it."
She stopped pacing.
"I don't think that."
Silence.
"I think you're difficult. I think you're unpredictable. I think half of you don't understand your own abilities yet and the other half understand them too well and neither group has any control whatsoever." She paused. "But I have also, in thirty years of teaching, never once seen a prodigy change the world. Prodigies are expected. Expected things are accounted for."
She looked across the room.
"Unexpected things," she said quietly, "are not."
The class was very still.
Then the very tall boy in the back, who had been asleep across three desks the entire time, snorted, shifted, and fell off all of them at once with a crash that rattled the windows.
Eleven people looked at him.
He sat up, hair at a forty five degree angle, entirely unbothered.
"Sorry," he said. "Did I miss anything important?"
Instructor Chen pinched the bridge of her nose.
"His name is Bohai," Sora whispered to Haruto. "He has earth affinity but he can't stay awake for more than an hour at a time. Apparently his qi core runs itself in his sleep."
"So he literally trains in his sleep?"
"Best cultivator in the class," Sora said, sounding personally offended by this fact.
Haruto looked at Bohai, who had rearranged himself across only two desks this time and was already closing his eyes again.
I like this class, Haruto thought.
The afternoon session was their first practical cultivation lesson, held in a small outdoor courtyard behind the Class F building. The other classes, Haruto noted, had large dedicated training grounds with specialized equipment, spirit stone arrays, and what appeared to be an actual waterfall for the water-affinity students.
Class F had a courtyard with some cracked paving stones, a single old oak tree, and a wooden board nailed to the wall that said: PLEASE DO NOT DESTROY THE COURTYARD AGAIN. The word AGAIN had been underlined three times.
"Basic qi circulation first," Instructor Chen said. "You've all done the theory. Now we apply it. Sit, close your eyes, find your core, and circulate."
Everyone sat. Everyone closed their eyes.
Haruto closed his eyes and reached inward.
The qi core was easy to find it was the warmth he'd felt the previous day when the grass touched his hand, now settled permanently in the center of his chest like a small, steady heartbeat. Green-tinged. Earthy. It smelled, somehow, like rain on dry soil.
He pushed it outward slowly, the way blood moved through veins, and felt it travel down through his body into the ground below. The moment it hit soil, something extraordinary happened.
The whole courtyard lit up.
Not visibly not to anyone else. But to Haruto, it was like suddenly being able to read a book he'd been staring at without understanding. The oak tree's root system exploded into his awareness like a map, stretching twenty feet in every direction, deeper than the foundations of the building. The moss between the cracked paving stones was a network of tiny communications, passing chemical signals back and forth like a slow, green internet. Even the weeds pushing through the gaps in the walls had opinions stubborn, contrary, deeply committed to existing regardless of what anyone thought about it.
Haruto identified with the weeds immediately.
He breathed. Pushed more qi outward. The roots of the oak tree trembled and then, slowly, the tree grew. Not dramatically. Not explosively. Just a single new branch, curling upward from the canopy with a soft wooden creak, unfurling three new leaves that caught the afternoon light.
He opened his eyes.
Instructor Chen was standing in front of him with an expression he couldn't quite read.
Around the courtyard, the other students were still sitting with their eyes closed, concentrating. Sora had accidentally created a small windstorm around herself. Bohai had fallen asleep and was, apparently, causing small stones to orbit him while he snored. The paperwork boys had achieved basic circulation and looked very pleased with themselves.
Nobody had noticed the new branch.
Nobody except Instructor Chen.
"How long have you been circulating?" she asked, voice carefully neutral.
"About two minutes."
She glanced at the new branch. Back at him.
"Do it again," she said quietly. "But slower this time. And don't let anyone see."
Haruto blinked. "Why not?"
Instructor Chen looked at him with the expression of someone who had just realized they were standing at the beginning of something very large and very complicated.
"Because grass-grade plant cultivators," she said, "do not grow new branches on sixty-year-old oak trees in two minutes of basic circulation. And if the other instructors find out what you just did before you have any control, they will either try to re-rank you, recruit you, or make your life very difficult."
She paused.
"Possibly all three, in that order."
Haruto looked at the branch. The branch had, in the last thirty seconds, sprouted two more leaves.
"Is it possible I'm just a fast learner?" he tried.
Instructor Chen's expression did not change.
"Right," Haruto said. "I'll be subtle."
"I sincerely doubt that," she said. But something at the corner of her mouth might have been, for just a second, almost a smile.
After class, walking back toward the dormitories, Sora fell into step beside him.
"So," she said.
"So."
"Grass grade."
"That's me."
"You grew a branch."
Haruto looked at her sideways. "I thought nobody noticed."
"I noticed. I also noticed Instructor Chen telling you to hide it, which means it was more impressive than it looked." She paused. "How'd you do it?"
Haruto thought about how to explain it. In the end he went with the truth, because lying to perceptive people was a waste of everyone's time.
"Back home where I'm from I spent a lot of time studying plants. How they grow. How they communicate. How they fight."
"Plants fight?"
"Constantly. It's slow, so people don't notice. But they compete for light, for water, for soil nutrients. They poison each other's roots. They strangle each other. They use insects as weapons, fungi as networks, chemical signals as alarms." He paused. "Some of them dissolve insects for food."
Sora stared at him.
"They're basically tiny, rooted, incredibly patient predators that have been winning a war against everything else on the planet for three hundred million years," Haruto continued. "Grass-grade is only the lowest rank because nobody in this world has ever taken plants seriously."
Sora was quiet for a moment.
"That is simultaneously the most interesting and most unsettling thing anyone has ever said to me."
"I get that a lot."
"You really don't, because you just got here."
"I get it back home a lot."
They walked in silence for a moment. Above them, in the canopy of trees lining the dormitory path, leaves rustled in a breeze that wasn't blowing anywhere else. Haruto didn't point this out.
"For what it's worth," Sora said finally, "I don't think you're dead weight."
"High praise from someone who's launched two people across a courtyard."
"Three," she corrected, "but the third one was on purpose so it doesn't count."
Haruto decided then that he'd found at least one ally in Azure Cloud Academy.
He looked up at the trees as they walked. Every single one of them had shifted slightly so slightly it was invisible unless you were looking for it to face him.
He was going to have to work on that.