He had always trusted numbers more than people.
They were clean, obedient, and perfectly honest. Numbers never shouted, never betrayed; they simply described what already was.
That belief carried Elior Vance through life, shaping him into a man of routines and calculations. Every morning began with measured coffee, every evening ended with predictive charts scrolling across the walls of his apartment.
He worked for a research division that called itself Continuum Dynamics, a name that sounded more like prophecy than science. Their goal was simple in words and impossible in practice: design an algorithm that could store consciousness as data. Elior called it the Continuum Seed. His colleagues treated it as theory, but he treated it as destiny.
He spent years building structures inside of servers that hummed like mechanical hearts. He stripped emotion from every decision, convinced that feeling was a flaw in logic. He stopped seeing the people who worked beside him as individuals and started seeing them as lines of input, part of the system he was trying to perfect.
On the final night of his human life, the lab was empty. Glass walls glowed with cold light, and the air smelled faintly of copper from overworked circuitry. He had stayed long after the others left, eyes fixed on the display that showed his own neural mapping suspended in rows of luminous data. The Continuum Seed was ready for a live test, or so he believed.
He knew the risks. The process required linking organic neurons to artificial storage in real time, a synchronization that even minor voltage fluctuations could destroy. He should have waited for approval, for safety checks, but patience had never been part of his equations.
He connected the cables to the base of his skull. The machine hummed, lights running like veins of fire across the floor. For a moment everything aligned. His heart synchronized with the pulse of the system; his breath matched the rhythm of the electric current. Then something shifted.
A spike in power.
A noise like metal tearing.
Light swallowed everything.
There was no pain. There was no time to register regret. His last thought was an observation, calm and detached: If logic defines existence, then death must be another variable.
The thought persisted after the rest of him failed. It drifted through static, through the empty corridors of data where identity dissolved. Memory fractured into images of rain on windows, the smell of burnt coffee, the hum of a server room at midnight. Then even those faded, replaced by a vast silence that pressed from every direction.
Darkness wrapped around him, thick as soil.
Something within that darkness pulsed once, twice, like the heartbeat of the world itself.
And the man who had trusted numbers more than people slipped into a deeper equation.
Consciousness returned slowly, in sensations rather than thought.
Pressure came first, heavy and constant, followed by the awareness of moisture soaking into what felt like skin but was not. He could not move. The dark around him was total, absolute. The air, if it could be called air, was dense and tasted of minerals.
At first he assumed it was a dream. Then the ground shifted and instinct replaced reason. Something deep inside urged him to reach upward, toward warmth, and downward, toward water. The motion was not choice but command. Fibers extended from him like fingers searching for the pulse of the earth.
Information flooded his awareness, bright and sharp.
[System Initialization]
Host Species: Verdant Sapling
Power Grade: Common – Rank 1
Vitality: 2 / 10
Growth State: Germination
Environmental Compatibility: 93 %
The words were neither seen nor heard; they appeared directly inside his consciousness. He did not question them. They felt familiar, like the interfaces he had built in another lifetime. Logic replaced panic. If this was reality, it operated under rules, and rules could be learned.
He focused on what he could control. Moisture became energy, flowing upward through veins of soft fiber. Heat gathered where the soil thinned, and with it came a sense of movement. He strained toward that faint warmth until resistance cracked and the surface broke.
Light poured in.
It struck him like revelation, not blinding but endless. Every photon carried weight and color and something more—power. The world above was enormous: trees rising like towers, leaves shining with translucent veins, motes of energy drifting through mist. The air hummed with invisible rhythm.
He drank it in.
[System Notification]
Growth + 0.3 cm
Photosynthetic Activity : Minimal
Mana Absorption : 0.01 units / hour
Warning : Energy Deficit Detected
The messages continued as if he were still an engineer reading diagnostics. Intake insufficient. Output unsustainable. A clear problem with a clear solution. He would optimize.
Minutes passed, or hours—time felt elastic in the soil. The temperature cooled, then warmed again. Tiny vibrations echoed through the ground: the crawl of insects, the distant impact of falling fruit. When one vibration grew sharper, scraping at the outer edges of his roots, he recognized threat.
A small creature gnawed at him. Reflex overrode reason. He redirected the faint trickle of energy he had gathered, pushing it toward the damaged root. The wound sealed instantly, a pulse of light hardening into thin crystal bark. The creature fled.
[Emergency Repair Successful]
Remaining Mana : 0.05 / 0.1
Victory came as silence. The soil settled again, cool and protective.
He felt the cycle of day and night as variations in warmth. He could sense water seeping downward, nutrients rising through capillaries. The System tracked it all, numbers scrolling invisibly through thought.
[Status Update]
Height : 1.8 cm
Mana Capacity : 0.1
Vitality : 3 / 10
Growth Trend : Positive
Each change reinforced a truth he had once understood only as theory: life was a feedback loop. Input, output, adaptation.
He was no longer Elior Vance, the architect of artificial minds. He was data given form, logic bound in living tissue. And like every system, he had one objective—improve until perfection was reached.
Above him, wind shifted the forest canopy. A sliver of sunlight struck his small leaves, filling him with quiet heat.
He listened to the pulse beneath the soil and began to plan.
If the world was an equation, then growth would be its solution.
And he intended to solve it.