Chương 365: Plants And Zombies

Rhys stepped into the manor and got blasted in the face with a wave of heat and humidity. It wasn't cool or dry outside, but it was compared to inside this house. Even as a mage with a mage's resistance to temperature and environment, it still stopped Rhys dead, like a smack in the face.

"Woof," he muttered under his breath, waving a hand in front of his face.

"Anything for their health," Tooru called, already rushing ahead.

"Indeed, indeed," Rhys agreed, struggling not to keep waving air over himself. He was fine. He really was. His reinforced mage body could handle temperatures hundreds of degrees higher, and he barely felt this heat when he wasn't getting smacked in the face with it. It was just that old lifetime's worth of instincts telling him to cool down or else that kept his hand twitching toward waving himself off. The air from the door behind him was the only breeze left in the world.

"Shut the door behind you, would you?" Somewhat reluctantly, he closed the door, closing off the last breath of cool air in the building. The heat and humidity enveloped him, clinging to his skin and moistening his clothes. His hair felt wet immediately, and although his improved body didn't sweat this easily, the condensation began to drip down his back and chest. I hope whatever he's got is worth it, Rhys thought, knowing in his heart of hearts that such a thing was impossible.

There wasn't a plant in the world, not even a magical, impossible plant, that could make living like this worth it.

"They're just up ahead… my magnum opus. You see, I know my life is limited. That I have a due date. Most mages, they think in centuries… decades, at the least. That's not a luxury I have." Rhys followed him from the lobby into the main hall, and stopped dead. He looked up, forced to in order to track the prince. The hall was huge, and almost entirely empty. Sunlight poured in from above.

He couldn't call what spread overhead a skylight; instead, it was like an enormous greenhouse, with the entire roof constructed from glass panels. Tooru had climbed a staircase, one that wound around a large, round-topped enclosure of some sort. It was more than just large, in fact. The entire manor was hollow, and though the wings, from where he stood, appeared normal, the center space was nothing but a shell around this birdcage-shaped object. He couldn't see its interior.

A thick black cloth draped the outside of the thing, obscuring everything but its shape. The hairs on the back of Rhys's neck stood on end. I don't have the foresight of a spider, but my uh-oh senses are tingling.

"I want to live on. If not myself, then in spirit. I want what I created in this limited life of mine to go beyond me, and become something greater than I, with my limited time, can." Oh yeah, that's a big uh-oh right there. Tooru grasped the cloth. Rhys subtly spread his stance, preparing for… well, anything. Fighting, fleeing, screaming like a little baby, whatever. He didn't know what was under the cloth, but the situation would almost certainly call for one of those three.

Maybe all of them together, if he really hit the jackpot. Cloth rippled, sliding off the cage smoothly like chocolate pouring over a fountain in reverse. It revealed an enormous birdcage, with metal bars arcing downward and glass panels filling in the spaces between them. The entire inside brimmed with vegetation, like an enormous terrarium.

"There… do you see them?" For a moment, Rhys didn't. And then something shifted in the leaves, and he did. A woman curled up atop a thick vine. She was bare, all of her, and her limbs hugged around her body like a furled bloom. Long green hair hugged her body, masking most of her. Her eyes were shut and her head was bowed, but as the light filtered down onto her, she began to move, twitching, then looking up.

Her eyes opened, revealing pale-green eyeballs without pupils or irises, and her hair twitched, just as alive as any other part of her. It curled up, and he realized it wasn't hair at all, but instead layered petals, with curly edges to appear more hair-like. What the fuck. He turned, looking at Tooru.

"Are they not magnificent?" Tooru said, his eyes locked on the cage. They? He turned back to the cage to find it crawling with motion. Women of all sizes came awake within its confines, packed so tight that he could almost see nothing else. Holy shit, this guy's cooked, Rhys thought, full of revulsion. What, was this guy so afraid of women he decided to grow his own girlfriend? Gross. Not to mention… what the fuck? He'd heard of furries, but he'd never heard of… plant-ies. Tree-ees?

He didn't know, and he didn't want to know. If they existed in some dark corner of the internet—and he was sure they did—he would rather they kept their hobbies to themselves rather than share them with him.

"They're… amazing," Rhys managed.

"How, uh… how'd you…" Tooru beamed, excited to share.

"It took me years to figure it out. I've been working on it for my entire adulthood. It was easy enough to coax the plants to take on a sort of human form, but, well, ten percent of the work is ninety percent of the effort, right? I finally managed to craft a perfect form after years of trying, but they remained that: lifeless forms. I loved them, but they couldn't love me back. They didn't have that spark, that light in their eyes. A soul." I don't like where this is going.

Or the fact that Tooru just confirmed he's a plant-ie. Rhys beamed and nodded, prodding Tooru along. Luckily for Rhys, Tooru loved talking once he built up a head of steam. He gestured, proud of himself.

"My time is limited. I don't have centuries to study the arts of the soul. But even then, I refused to give up. I spent all day and all night pondering. What could I use? How could I give these perfect ladies heart and feeling, just as much feeling as I poured into them?

"The answer, it turns out, was right in front of my nose. If I couldn't craft a soul, then why not acquire one instead? There's people all around me. Mortals. Weaker mages, who have no chance of climbing higher or growing more powerful. Why not grant a few of them greatness, and a new life as a beautiful plant?" Tooru approached the birdcage, pressing his hand against it. The closest plant woman stretched out her hand, putting her hand on the glass from inside.

He smiled at her warmly, something like a fatherly love in his eyes.

"And here they are. All those wastrels put to good use at last, fueling something greater. Something that can live on without me." This whole time, the plant woman had had a neutral expression, her face lifeless, expressionless. The second her palm met Tooru's, her lips gaped in a soundless scream, her whole face twisted in wrath. She curled her hand into a fist and beat on the glass, trying as hard as she could to break free and attack Tooru. Her pupil-less eyes gleamed with bloodlust.

Clawing at the glass, beating at it, she desperately struggled to reach Tooru, and not in a loving kind of way. Uh… yep. As expected, this is a horror movie waiting to happen. Rhys licked his lips, not sure how to proceed. Obviously, Tooru needed to die. He no longer worried about having the moral right or sliding down a slippery moral slope. He was perfectly justified in wanting to kill Tooru. The guy deserved it, the piece of shit.

Rhys had killed his fair share of people, but until this moment, he had never deliberately hunted down someone weaker than him to use their strength as his own, nor had he ever used mortals as experimental fodder. Even considering his plan to kill Tooru, he still had the moral high ground, because he was just going to kill the guy.

Tooru had killed, and then consigned dozens to torturous existence, caged against their will in bodies they couldn't recognize, packed into a tiny space they couldn't escape by someone impossibly more powerful than them for reasons beyond their comprehension. It was horrific. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. The real thing that gave him pause was the plant people. What did he do with them? Kill them? For that matter, did they want to live?

On the other hand, did they want to die? Did he set them free? Could they survive on their own? Was it more torturous to set them free to suffer the prejudices and disgust of their fellow mages for the rest of their life, or to kill them assuming that they would suffer? He couldn't ask them. The plant girl clawing at Tooru couldn't even scream, let alone speak, and none of the writhing, silently-screaming, clawing, biting, punching mass seemed more coherent than her.

Tooru was no longer his moral conundrum; the greenhouse was.

"What do you think?" Tooru asked. Rhys looked at him dismissively.

"Shut up. You're already dead. I'm just trying to figure out what to do with your mess."

"What?"

"I said, you're already dead," Rhys said. In one gesture, he drew The Hunger and plunged it into Tooru's gut. Tooru gaged and gurgled, clawing at the blade in his stomach. Rhys pushed impurities through it, corrupting his body from the gut outward. The two of them were nearly matched in raw power, and Tooru should've put up more of a fight, but the prince had clearly never been in a serious battle in his entire life.

Tears welled up in his eyes, and he kept clawing at The Hunger rather than attempt any spells or attacks. He was a mage, so the single blow shouldn't have been enough to totally incapacitate him, but the spoiled man had never dealt with pain like this before, or Rhys's kind of sinister, debilitating attacks. His blood splashed over the floor, his body blackened, and his eyes rolled up in his head as he slumped over, unconscious and a hair from death.

Rhys yanked The Hunger free before the ravenous sword sucked the impurities back out of the stricken prince. Tooru was out of the fight; that was the easy part. Now came the hard part. Rhys gripped him, his whole self, every inch of the dead prince, in his mana field, refusing to let anything escape his body yet. He had to extract the prince's potential before the man died and his potential fled along with his life. There was no time to waste. He didn't know if this prince had servants and bodyguards or not.

He didn't sense anyone else aside from them and the plant people, but that didn't mean no one was coming. He sent The Hunger back into his core and rested his hand on Tooru's ruined chest, plunging himself into the man's inner space. Unfamiliar mana surged all around him. It instantly rushed at him, trying to shove him out, but he simply extended some impurities, and it flinched back in fear and pain. Rhys pushed past it, instantly burrowing into the man's core.

Potential was an ephemeral thing, without a solid form, but he'd grasped it before when he'd yanked it back into Bast. He extended his impurities, searching for what he'd sensed before. Last time, Bast had cooperated with him, more or less; his potential had also been getting dragged out of him, which had given it a more solid form and made it easier to grasp. This time, Rhys found himself confronted by all kinds of shapeless energy. He let it wash over him, searching for a strand of potential.

Instead, something blasted him right in the face. Rhys paused, taken aback, and focused on it. He frowned. No way. Him, too? Fierce mana. A powerful skein of fierce mana roiled under the prince's ordinary mana, hidden by the force of the man's signature. It was stronger than any of the mortals'. and there was something about it that reminded him of Ryota. Rhys peered closer at it, examining it from up close. The fierce mana spat and flickered like a flame, but that implied it wasn't just…

there, but that it was burning on something. That the fierce mana was a reaction to something else, or maybe… flickering through a gap in something, like Ryota's hole? No—no, it is burning! There's something there. Rhys parted Tooru's mana. It clung to the thing, whatever it was, reluctant to reveal it. He reached out with his impurities and burned the remaining mana away, in no mood to fight a battle of attrition. A crystal grew at the bottom of Tooru's core, flickering with fierce mana.

As he watched, it ignited again, but rather than burning away, the flame condensed more crystal there at the bottom of his core. What the… The mana around him retracted in shock, and Rhys glanced at it. Did Tooru himself not know about this? It had been hidden under his signature, and he'd admitted to not being much of a mage, disinterested in anything but his plants. If he hadn't done any devoted core-building or self-reflection, it was very possible for him to have missed it.

The fierce mana was itself powerful, but it was far, far weaker than Tooru's mana, and if he hadn't known what fierce mana felt like and hadn't been thinking about it in the back of his mind, Rhys might've missed it. It was only because he was searching for something hard to sense that he'd noticed it at all. Does this fierce mana thing extend to all the princes? How deep does this conspiracy go? Gently, he nudged the crystal.

The second he touched it, the crystal burst out of Tooru's core, out of his body, and out into the world. It was only about a millimeter in length, truly tiny, and the fierce mana associated with it was likewise faint, and it was moving at speed. Rhys extended his mana senses, meaning to track it, but it fled too quickly. He would have to abandon stealing Tooru's potential to follow it. Dammit. Rhys hesitated. Go after the tiny crystal, or focus on Tooru? Would Tooru survive until he returned?

Would— Fierce mana burst out of the hole where the crystal had been, raging through his body, searing everything to ash. The tiny crystal had been the dam holding back an ocean of fierce mana, and without it, fierce mana tore through Tooru. It was an advanced version of the self-destruct he'd seen on the mortals, but it gushed fierce mana into the world at the same time. Is this their plan? Is this what they want to accomplish? But why? There was no time to wonder, and no time to chase the tiny crystal.

Rhys turned all his focus back to Tooru, locking in on the man's mana signature. He knew what potential felt like. And Tooru had thrown his away. It was trash, and he knew what to look for. He could find it! Time slowed to a crawl. Tooru's body blackened in slow motion. The fierce mana consumed his mana, his being, his everything. It didn't corrupt the way impurities did, transmuting the existing mana into filth that propagated outward. It burned.

It raged like a fire, eating Tooru to ash, destroying everything he'd been to grow itself. On the other hand, it burned, and as it burned Tooru up, it destroyed its footing out from under it. In a few moments, there'd be nothing left of either Tooru or the fierce mana. Rhys focused harder than he ever had before, holding his breath, his whole body tense. Where was it? It had to be here. He'd found it before. He knew what he was looking for. It was trash. Trash… trash! It was trash! He didn't need to find it.

It could find him! Rhys called out, reaching out to any part of Tooru he could still reach. Come to me, trash! Thrown-away potential, come! Tooru continued to burn away. The man shuddered and ceased to breath, and his life trembled, rapidly waning. His mana flickered, on the verge of fading entirely. There was precious little left of him at all. Fierce mana closed in on Rhys. He retreated to the very last scraps of Tooru's body. Was I wrong? he wondered, then dismissed the thought. He refused to be wrong.

He'd make this work, even if it couldn't work. Tooru is being thrown away by whoever left that fierce mana trap in his body. He's nothing but trash! Surely I can absorb him. Surely! As if Tooru's body had been waiting for him to realize it, at that very moment, Rhys suddenly felt Tooru's potential. His eyes widened, and he gripped with all his might, dragging the man's potential out of his decaying body. A well of potential sprung forth, swooshing into his body.

Rhys felt something he'd never felt before grow inside him, and at the same time, a huge flood of trash-mana filled his core, swirling around the black hole. Rhys retreated from Tooru's body, letting it burn out, then absorbed the ashes. On one hand, he wasn't going to leave trash behind. On the other, he needed to study Tooru more yet. There was almost certainly nothing left, but he shouldn't dismiss the chance that the booby-trapper left some hint behind in Tooru's body that still lingered after he'd burned down.

He reached after the tiny scrap of crystal with his senses, but it was long gone, vanished into the bustle of the city's mana signatures. There wasn't even a trace of it left behind. If he hadn't been searching after Tooru's potential, maybe he could've chased it, but the only way to obtain his original objective was to give up on the crystal. Next time. Next time I encounter one of those, I'll go after the crystal instead.

This time, he'd wanted proof of concept that he could tear out someone's thrown-away potential. He now had that proof. Next time, the crystal would be his top priority. He turned, looking at the greenhouse and the writhing masses within. That's Tooru taken care of. Now… what do I do with you?