Mav woke up alive, and that was a good start.
He was stiff, cold, and tied to a rock at the bottom of the sea. The seaweed that had bent over him in the night had straightened again, as if nothing had happened. He chose to believe that nothing had.
There was work to do.
He ate half a ration bar for breakfast and thought about his problem. He had three bars to fill and a month to fill them, and his 10 Subjects were at the lowest rank there was.
He did not have much to work with. That was nothing new.
Everything on a World ran on Essence.
Essence was the energy that the Genesis moved around. It was in the water, the rock and every living thing. A Heartstone had to be fed with it, and Subjects grew on it. A creature that gathered enough of it rose a step.
Each letter had three steps: a minus, a plain and a plus. The letters went from F at the bottom to SSS at the top, and every creature on every World stood on the same ladder.
His seaweeds stood on the lowest step, like every starting species. He needed them three steps higher: F, then F+, then E-.
He called up the Status, found the column of 10, and fixed his attention on the first entry. It unfolded a little further, the way the list had.
[Seaweed. Rank F-. Essence: 0/100. Host: none.]
100 to the next step. That seemed fair, until he remembered that the price doubled at every step. Each of his seaweeds needed 700 Essence to reach E-.
There were three ways for a Subject to gather Essence.
A Subject could kill, train or live well.
Killing was the fast way. Whatever a creature killed, it took a share of its Essence, and the stronger the prey, the bigger the share. That was why people prayed for wolves and drakes. Training was slower, and safer. And living well was the slowest of all. A Subject that was sheltered, fed and left in peace soaked up Essence from the World itself, a drop at a time.
His Subjects were plants.
-----
He started with the living.
The current came from one side of the World, steady and cold, and it had been dragging at the 9 seaweeds for as long as they had existed. So he built them a wall. He carried stones across the seabed, one at a time, and stacked them in a low curve on the side the current came from. It took most of the day. When it was done, the seaweeds behind it stood straighter, and he felt something ease in them at once, like a knot coming loose between his shoulders.
He cleaned them, too. A fine gray mud had settled on every seaweed, and small snails with shells like fingernails were grazing on the lower stems. He wiped away the mud with his sleeve and picked off the snails.
Then he looked at the handful of snails, and at his remaining ration bars, and ate the snails.
They were terrible, but they were food.
By nightfall, the Status had changed.
[Development: 1%]
It was not much, but he felt absurdly proud of it.
-----
The next day, he started the training.
He had no idea how to train seaweed. Nobody did. So he treated them like new soldiers and gave them something to carry.
’Coil.’
The nine seaweeds wrapped themselves around the stones he had set out for them.
’Lift.’
The stones rose off the seabed. Some rose a finger’s width. One, to his surprise, rose as high as his knee before the seaweed trembled and let it fall.
’Again.’
He drilled them until the light failed. It was the strangest work he had ever done, because he could feel all of it. When they strained, something strained in him, in muscles he did not have. When one of them managed to hold its stone for a full minute, he felt the effort of it like a held breath.
They were getting faster. That was the part he noticed most. At first, each order had been followed by a pause, a moment of sluggish reluctance. After two days, the pause was gone, and soon he had stopped forming the words at all.
He simply meant it, and they moved.
It was no longer like giving orders. It was closer to moving his own hands. He knew when a small fish brushed past one of them, because he felt a tickle on skin that was 10 meters away from him. He knew which of them the current troubled most. He had even started to tell them apart. The one nearest the wall was always first. The one that had bent over him in the night was the strongest, and the most stubborn.
When that one finally lifted a stone the size of his head, he caught himself grinning.
’I’m proud of a weed. I’m not going to think about what that means.’
-----
A few days later, he sat down against the Heartstone and checked his Status.
[Subjects at rank E-: 0/10]
[Development: 2%]
[Heartstone: 0%]
He opened the first entry.
[Seaweed. Rank F-. Essence: 2/100. Host: none.]
He opened the others, one by one. They were all the same. Even the one in his own neck.
Three days of walls and drills, and each of them had gained two points of Essence.
He did the math. At two points every three days, each seaweed would need almost three years to reach 700.
He had less than a month, and despair rose in him.
He sat very still for a while. Around him, the nine swayed gently in the calm behind his wall, glowing, content. They had done everything he asked. That made it worse. It was not their fault that they were what they were.
Living well was too slow. Training was too slow.
That left the fast way, and seaweed could not kill.
Far above, the daily swarm of fish went flickering past, thin and silver, too quick for his hands. He had tried to catch one for three days. He had tried with his seaweeds, too, but the fish had slipped through them like water through fingers.
Mav watched them go.
Then, slowly, he raised a hand to the back of his neck and touched the place where the tenth one went in.
That one had not waited to be fed. It had not trained. On the first day, with no orders from anyone, it had found something alive and taken root in it.
It had taken root in him.
He wondered, not for the first time, what else it could take root in.