Chapter 1: Chapter 1: Death by Delivery
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The vine inside my arm pulsed. Not like a heartbeat—like a breath. Slow. Patient. Waiting.
My own heart tried to catch up, hammering against my ribs like a caged bird. I could feel every tendril of the crimson growth threading through my veins, not invading but *settling*. As if it had found its home and had no intention of leaving.
"Li Wei!" Xiao Bai's hands gripped my shoulders, her face swimming into focus. She was pale—paler than usual for a Half-Light girl—and her amber eyes were wide with something between terror and wonder. "Can you hear me?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"I think," I said slowly, "I made a mistake."
The ground beneath us groaned.
I looked down. The Watcher Stalks weren't just shriveled husks anymore. They were dissolving. Their black, thorny bodies crumbling into fine gray dust that the wind carried away like funeral ash. The wheat I'd grown—my first real crop in this hellish world—lay flat, its golden heads pressed to the soil as if bowing to something.
To me.
"You didn't make a mistake," Xiao Bai said, her voice tight. "You made an enemy. A very old enemy. One who probably isn't dead."
"He's not dead." I could feel it, somehow. Not through the vine—through the *soil*. An absence like a missing tooth. "He's gone. But not dead."
"Even worse."
The sky was still wrong. The blackness the ancient man had summoned was bleeding away, revealing the abyss's perpetual twilight—that sickly purple-green glow that never quite illuminated anything. But the color was different now. Thinner. Like watered-down ink.
I took a breath. Then another. The vine pulsed with each inhale, and I felt something shift in my chest. Not pain. Not pressure. Just... *space*. As if a door I hadn't known was locked had just swung open.
"The book," I said. "Where's the book?"
Xiao Bai's eyes darted around the ruined field. "You had it. Before—when you crushed the seed—"
I was already moving. My great-grandfather's book—the weathered, water-stained journal that had started all of this—wasn't in my hands. Wasn't in my pockets. I spun in a circle, scanning the carnage.
There. Half-buried under a collapsed Watcher Stalk. The leather cover was singed, but intact. I lunged for it, snatching it up before the wind could scatter its pages.
The book felt warm. Alive. The same way the vine felt alive.
"You need to sit down," Xiao Bai said. "Before you fall down."
She was right. My legs were starting to shake. The adrenaline that had carried me through the confrontation was draining away, leaving behind a bone-deep exhaustion that made my thoughts feel like they were moving through honey.
I sat. Hard. The soil welcomed me, soft and dark and strangely... content. As if I'd returned to a bed I'd been away from too long.
For a moment, neither of us spoke. The abyss hummed around us—that constant, low-frequency drone that I'd grown used to in the weeks since I'd been pulled here. But even that sounded different now. Less hostile. More... curious.
Xiao Bai crouched beside me, her hand hovering near my arm but not quite touching it. "Does it hurt?"
I looked down at the vine beneath my skin. It was beautiful, in a terrible way. Crimson and pulsing, tracing the paths of my veins like rivers on a map. I could see it winding up from my wrist to my elbow, coiling around muscles and tendons.
"No." I flexed my fingers. The vine moved with them, natural as breathing. "It feels like it's always been there."
"That's not creepy at all."
I laughed. It came out hollow. "I killed a god. Or... whatever he was. I think. And I absorbed his garden." I gestured at the field around us—the dying crops, the dissolving black vines, the strange new stillness that had settled over everything. "What am I supposed to do now?"
Xiao Bai was quiet for a long moment. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out something small and gray.
The seed.
The one I'd crushed. The one that had reformed in my hand after the light faded. It was smaller than before—no bigger than a grain of rice—but it pulsed with the same crimson light as the vine in my arm.
"You dropped this," she said. "When you went for the book."
I took it from her. It was warm. Alive. And when I held it, the vine beneath my skin stirred, reaching toward it like a child grasping for its mother's hand.
"The ancient man called the abyss his garden," I said slowly. "He said the corruption was sustained on stolen life. He was growing things here. Using them." I turned the seed over in my fingers. "But he wasn't the gardener. He was just... tending someone else's plot. I saw it. Before the light. He was one of thousands. Millions."
"Millions of what?"
"Seeds." The word tasted strange in my mouth. "He said I was a seed. One of many. Planted in this world to grow."
Xiao Bai's face went carefully blank. That was worse than fear. "Li Wei. What did you see?"
I closed my eyes, trying to summon the image. It was fragmented—shattered by the blinding light and the pain and the sheer impossible scale of it. But I remembered the garden. A garden that stretched across dimensions, filled with seeds just like me.
And I remembered the gardener. Not the ancient man. Someone else. Someone vast and patient and endless.
"I saw the truth," I said. "The abyss isn't a prison. It's not a garden. It's not even a place." I opened my eyes. "It's a farm. And we're the crops."
The seed pulsed in my hand. The vine pulsed in my arm. And somewhere in the distance, I heard it—a sound I'd never heard before in all my weeks in this world.
A rooster crowing.
Xiao Bai heard it too. Her head snapped up, eyes fixed on the horizon. "That's not possible. Nothing living survives out here. Not real animals."
I stood. My legs held. The vine in my arm hummed with something that felt almost like excitement.
"Maybe things are changing," I said.
The sky was still that sickly purple-green. The ground was still barren in every direction. But the sound was real. It came again—closer this time, or maybe just louder. A rooster's crow, defiant and absurd in this dead landscape.
I looked down at the seed in my palm. It was glowing now, pulsing with light that matched the vine.
What have you done? The ancient man's voice echoed in my memory. Not a god. Not a prisoner. A gardener.
I closed my hand around the seed.
"Let's find out what I've harvested."
---
We walked toward the sound.
It took us an hour to reach it. The abyss stretched endlessly in every direction, all dying vegetation and cracked earth and that oppressive purple-green sky. But the rooster kept crowing, steady as a heartbeat, guiding us forward.
Xiao Bai walked close beside me, her hand never straying far from the knife at her belt. She'd been a scout for a surface expedition before she'd fallen into the abyss—one of the few humans who'd survived the descent. She knew this world's dangers better than I did.
Which was why she stopped dead when we crested the final ridge.
"No," she breathed. "No, no, no."
I understood why.
Below us, in a valley that shouldn't exist, was a farm.
Not the patchwork fields I'd painstakingly cultivated from abyss soil. Not the desperate, half-starved crops that had barely kept me alive. This was a *farm*. Rolling green fields that stretched for miles, bordered by stone walls and crossed by irrigation channels. Wheat swayed in a wind that smelled like rain. Corn stood tall in ordered rows. Fruit trees lined the far edge, heavy with apples and peaches and something I couldn't identify.
And at the center of it all, a farmhouse. Whitewashed walls. A red tile roof. Smoke curling from a stone chimney.
The rooster crowed again. Perched on the farmhouse's weather vane, a massive red rooster surveyed its domain with regal indifference.
"This isn't possible," Xiao Bai said. "This isn't—this doesn't exist. Not in the abyss. Not anywhere."
I felt the vine pulse beneath my skin. Felt the seed warm in my palm. And I knew, with a certainty that bypassed logic entirely, that this was mine.
"I think," I said slowly, "it exists now."
We descended into the valley. The path was worn and well-tended, lined with wildflowers that shouldn't have been able to grow in this dead soil. As we walked, I felt the ground respond to my steps—not in the reluctant, grudging way it had before, but eagerly. Welcoming me.
The farmhouse door was open when we reached it.
Inside, a fire crackled in the hearth. A pot of stew bubbled on the stove. A table was set for two. And on the table, next to a loaf of fresh bread, lay a note.
The handwriting was old-fashioned. Precise. Familiar.
*You've done well, grandson. The first harvest is the hardest. But the soil remembers what it's supposed to grow. Now you must remember too.*
*Your great-grandfather planted the first seed. You've grown the second.*
*The third is still out there. Find it before the darkness does.*
*—The Gardener*
The seed in my palm pulsed so hard it nearly jumped from my grip.
I looked up. Through the farmhouse window, I could see something on the far edge of the fields. Something that hadn't been there when we'd arrived.
A single tree, black as night, with leaves that drank the light around them.
And hanging from its branches, glowing faintly in the twilight—
A seed. Larger than mine. Pulses with a light that was all wrong.
The rooster crowed. The vine in my arm tightened.
And I heard, from somewhere impossibly far away, the sound of the ancient man's voice raised in song—a gardener's lullaby, sung to something that wasn't ready to wake.
Yet.
My own heart tried to catch up, hammering against my ribs like a caged bird. I could feel every tendril of the crimson growth threading through my veins, not invading but *settling*. As if it had found its home and had no intention of leaving.
"Li Wei!" Xiao Bai's hands gripped my shoulders, her face swimming into focus. She was pale—paler than usual for a Half-Light girl—and her amber eyes were wide with something between terror and wonder. "Can you hear me?"
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"I think," I said slowly, "I made a mistake."
The ground beneath us groaned.
I looked down. The Watcher Stalks weren't just shriveled husks anymore. They were dissolving. Their black, thorny bodies crumbling into fine gray dust that the wind carried away like funeral ash. The wheat I'd grown—my first real crop in this hellish world—lay flat, its golden heads pressed to the soil as if bowing to something.
To me.
"You didn't make a mistake," Xiao Bai said, her voice tight. "You made an enemy. A very old enemy. One who probably isn't dead."
"He's not dead." I could feel it, somehow. Not through the vine—through the *soil*. An absence like a missing tooth. "He's gone. But not dead."
"Even worse."
The sky was still wrong. The blackness the ancient man had summoned was bleeding away, revealing the abyss's perpetual twilight—that sickly purple-green glow that never quite illuminated anything. But the color was different now. Thinner. Like watered-down ink.
I took a breath. Then another. The vine pulsed with each inhale, and I felt something shift in my chest. Not pain. Not pressure. Just... *space*. As if a door I hadn't known was locked had just swung open.
"The book," I said. "Where's the book?"
Xiao Bai's eyes darted around the ruined field. "You had it. Before—when you crushed the seed—"
I was already moving. My great-grandfather's book—the weathered, water-stained journal that had started all of this—wasn't in my hands. Wasn't in my pockets. I spun in a circle, scanning the carnage.
There. Half-buried under a collapsed Watcher Stalk. The leather cover was singed, but intact. I lunged for it, snatching it up before the wind could scatter its pages.
The book felt warm. Alive. The same way the vine felt alive.
"You need to sit down," Xiao Bai said. "Before you fall down."
She was right. My legs were starting to shake. The adrenaline that had carried me through the confrontation was draining away, leaving behind a bone-deep exhaustion that made my thoughts feel like they were moving through honey.
I sat. Hard. The soil welcomed me, soft and dark and strangely... content. As if I'd returned to a bed I'd been away from too long.
For a moment, neither of us spoke. The abyss hummed around us—that constant, low-frequency drone that I'd grown used to in the weeks since I'd been pulled here. But even that sounded different now. Less hostile. More... curious.
Xiao Bai crouched beside me, her hand hovering near my arm but not quite touching it. "Does it hurt?"
I looked down at the vine beneath my skin. It was beautiful, in a terrible way. Crimson and pulsing, tracing the paths of my veins like rivers on a map. I could see it winding up from my wrist to my elbow, coiling around muscles and tendons.
"No." I flexed my fingers. The vine moved with them, natural as breathing. "It feels like it's always been there."
"That's not creepy at all."
I laughed. It came out hollow. "I killed a god. Or... whatever he was. I think. And I absorbed his garden." I gestured at the field around us—the dying crops, the dissolving black vines, the strange new stillness that had settled over everything. "What am I supposed to do now?"
Xiao Bai was quiet for a long moment. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out something small and gray.
The seed.
The one I'd crushed. The one that had reformed in my hand after the light faded. It was smaller than before—no bigger than a grain of rice—but it pulsed with the same crimson light as the vine in my arm.
"You dropped this," she said. "When you went for the book."
I took it from her. It was warm. Alive. And when I held it, the vine beneath my skin stirred, reaching toward it like a child grasping for its mother's hand.
"The ancient man called the abyss his garden," I said slowly. "He said the corruption was sustained on stolen life. He was growing things here. Using them." I turned the seed over in my fingers. "But he wasn't the gardener. He was just... tending someone else's plot. I saw it. Before the light. He was one of thousands. Millions."
"Millions of what?"
"Seeds." The word tasted strange in my mouth. "He said I was a seed. One of many. Planted in this world to grow."
Xiao Bai's face went carefully blank. That was worse than fear. "Li Wei. What did you see?"
I closed my eyes, trying to summon the image. It was fragmented—shattered by the blinding light and the pain and the sheer impossible scale of it. But I remembered the garden. A garden that stretched across dimensions, filled with seeds just like me.
And I remembered the gardener. Not the ancient man. Someone else. Someone vast and patient and endless.
"I saw the truth," I said. "The abyss isn't a prison. It's not a garden. It's not even a place." I opened my eyes. "It's a farm. And we're the crops."
The seed pulsed in my hand. The vine pulsed in my arm. And somewhere in the distance, I heard it—a sound I'd never heard before in all my weeks in this world.
A rooster crowing.
Xiao Bai heard it too. Her head snapped up, eyes fixed on the horizon. "That's not possible. Nothing living survives out here. Not real animals."
I stood. My legs held. The vine in my arm hummed with something that felt almost like excitement.
"Maybe things are changing," I said.
The sky was still that sickly purple-green. The ground was still barren in every direction. But the sound was real. It came again—closer this time, or maybe just louder. A rooster's crow, defiant and absurd in this dead landscape.
I looked down at the seed in my palm. It was glowing now, pulsing with light that matched the vine.
What have you done? The ancient man's voice echoed in my memory. Not a god. Not a prisoner. A gardener.
I closed my hand around the seed.
"Let's find out what I've harvested."
---
We walked toward the sound.
It took us an hour to reach it. The abyss stretched endlessly in every direction, all dying vegetation and cracked earth and that oppressive purple-green sky. But the rooster kept crowing, steady as a heartbeat, guiding us forward.
Xiao Bai walked close beside me, her hand never straying far from the knife at her belt. She'd been a scout for a surface expedition before she'd fallen into the abyss—one of the few humans who'd survived the descent. She knew this world's dangers better than I did.
Which was why she stopped dead when we crested the final ridge.
"No," she breathed. "No, no, no."
I understood why.
Below us, in a valley that shouldn't exist, was a farm.
Not the patchwork fields I'd painstakingly cultivated from abyss soil. Not the desperate, half-starved crops that had barely kept me alive. This was a *farm*. Rolling green fields that stretched for miles, bordered by stone walls and crossed by irrigation channels. Wheat swayed in a wind that smelled like rain. Corn stood tall in ordered rows. Fruit trees lined the far edge, heavy with apples and peaches and something I couldn't identify.
And at the center of it all, a farmhouse. Whitewashed walls. A red tile roof. Smoke curling from a stone chimney.
The rooster crowed again. Perched on the farmhouse's weather vane, a massive red rooster surveyed its domain with regal indifference.
"This isn't possible," Xiao Bai said. "This isn't—this doesn't exist. Not in the abyss. Not anywhere."
I felt the vine pulse beneath my skin. Felt the seed warm in my palm. And I knew, with a certainty that bypassed logic entirely, that this was mine.
"I think," I said slowly, "it exists now."
We descended into the valley. The path was worn and well-tended, lined with wildflowers that shouldn't have been able to grow in this dead soil. As we walked, I felt the ground respond to my steps—not in the reluctant, grudging way it had before, but eagerly. Welcoming me.
The farmhouse door was open when we reached it.
Inside, a fire crackled in the hearth. A pot of stew bubbled on the stove. A table was set for two. And on the table, next to a loaf of fresh bread, lay a note.
The handwriting was old-fashioned. Precise. Familiar.
*You've done well, grandson. The first harvest is the hardest. But the soil remembers what it's supposed to grow. Now you must remember too.*
*Your great-grandfather planted the first seed. You've grown the second.*
*The third is still out there. Find it before the darkness does.*
*—The Gardener*
The seed in my palm pulsed so hard it nearly jumped from my grip.
I looked up. Through the farmhouse window, I could see something on the far edge of the fields. Something that hadn't been there when we'd arrived.
A single tree, black as night, with leaves that drank the light around them.
And hanging from its branches, glowing faintly in the twilight—
A seed. Larger than mine. Pulses with a light that was all wrong.
The rooster crowed. The vine in my arm tightened.
And I heard, from somewhere impossibly far away, the sound of the ancient man's voice raised in song—a gardener's lullaby, sung to something that wasn't ready to wake.
Yet.