The bag of grass seed was heavy, not with mass, but with the weight of delayed gratification. In a world that demanded immediate yield—where the tax collector watched the calendar and the stomach watched the pantry—planting something you couldn't eat felt like an act of madness.
Leo stood in the center of the grey, cracked field. The air was still, heavy with the humidity of the coming summer. He reached into the burlap sack, his fingers brushing against thousands of tiny, light husks.
"Fodder," Takakura observed from the fence line. He was smoking his pipe, the smoke drifting lazily over the barren ground. "You bought cow food. You don't have a cow."
"I'm not feeding a cow," Leo said, grabbing a handful of seed. "I'm feeding the dirt."
He cast the seed. It wasn't the precise, grid-based planting he had attempted with the turnips. This was broadcasting—a wide, sweeping motion of the arm that scattered the potential life across the hardpan like dust.
"The soil structure is collapsed," Leo explained, his voice falling into the rhythm of a lecture he had once given to an empty classroom. "The clay particles are bonded too tightly. Mechanical tillage—using the hoe—only breaks the surface. If I want to plant vegetables, I need deep aeration."
He threw another handful. The seeds settled into the cracks of the dry earth.
"Grass roots are biological drills," Leo continued. "They exert hundreds of pounds of pressure per square inch. They'll punch through the hardpan slowly, creating channels for water and air. When they die, they turn into biomass. It's not farming, Takakura. It's terraforming."
Takakura watched him for a long moment. He took the pipe out of his mouth.
"Vesta would have told you to plant potatoes," the old man grunted. "Potatoes break the soil too. And you can eat them."
"Potatoes need nutrients this soil doesn't have," Leo countered. "Grass is a weed. It's aggressive. It doesn't ask for permission to grow."
"True," Takakura conceded. He turned back toward his small hut. "But grass takes ten days to sprout and twenty to harvest. You won't see a single coin from this for a month."
"I know," Leo said.
"And you still have to water it."
Leo looked at the vast, dry expanse he had just covered. "I know."
The next week became a blur of monotonous, crushing labor.
Watering the grass was different from watering vegetables. There were no rows, no specific targets. Leo had to saturate the entire area. He walked back and forth from the well to the field, carrying two watering cans that strained his shoulders until his trapezius muscles felt like burning wire.
The Cursed Hoe, strapped to his right hand beneath the bandages, hated it.
The tool thrived on bursts of kinetic violence. It wanted to strike, to till, to expend energy in massive, destructive spikes. It did not understand the slow, rhythmic drip of water. It pulsed angrily against Leo's palm, a low, throbbing ache that felt like a migraine in his wrist. It was bored.
"Starve," Leo whispered to the tool as he refilled the cans for the fiftieth time that morning.
He was starving too. He was living on cheap bread and the water from the well. His body was shedding the soft, corporate weight of the city, replacing it with the lean, wire-tension of survival. He was constantly tired, but it was a different kind of fatigue. It wasn't the existential exhaustion of a spreadsheet that refused to balance; it was the honest, chemical exhaustion of glycogen depletion.
Nami passed by the field on the fourth day. She didn't stop, but she slowed her pace. She saw Leo, covered in mud, watering a patch of dirt that looked exactly the same as it had the day before. She saw the calculations in his eyes—he wasn't just dumping water; he was watching the percolation rate, timing how long it took for the puddles to vanish.
She didn't offer encouragement. She just adjusted her backpack and kept walking toward the excavation site. To her, he was still an anomaly, but at least he was a persistent one.
On the eighth day, the variable shifted.
Leo walked out at dawn, the watering cans heavy in his grip. The sun was just cresting the eastern mountains, painting the valley in a pale, gold light.
He stopped.
The field wasn't grey anymore. It was protected by a haze of green fuzz.
Thousands of tiny spears had broken the surface. They were microscopic, fragile things, barely visible against the clay. But they were there. The grass hadn't just grown on top of the soil; it had shattered the crust to get out.
Leo dropped the cans. He knelt in the mud, ignoring the dampness soaking into his jeans. He leaned down until his nose was inches from the ground.
He could see the cracks radiating out from each sprout. The "biological drills" were working. The hardpan was fracturing, millimeter by millimeter.
He reached out a finger—his left finger, the human one—and brushed the top of a seedling. It was soft, cool, and impossibly alive.
"Structure," Leo whispered.
It wasn't a harvest. He couldn't sell this. He couldn't eat it. But it was proof of concept. His hypothesis—that the land could be healed if approached with patience rather than force—was sound.
For the first time since arriving in the valley, the knot of anxiety in his chest loosened. He wasn't solving the equation of the farm alone anymore. The biology was finally cooperating.
He stood up, looking at the carpet of green potential stretching toward the river.
"Phase One complete," he said to the empty air.
The Cursed Hoe throbbed once—a sharp, stinging pinch—reminding him that while the grass grew slowly, the debt grew quickly. The grass fixed the soil, but it didn't fix the bank account. He had established the foundation, but he was still broke.
Leo picked up the watering cans. The joy faded into determination.
"Now," he said. "We need a cash crop."