Filling the air with her own type of curses, the hallway that had previously seemed like an impenetrable mass becomes much less threatening. All around her, the wild writhing and strikes of sharpened leaves devolving into a drunken stagger as plant vines and roots twitch every which way.

  “Zan Xinyi, I think you hurt the plant’s feelings...” Jiang Jin says.

  She’s done more than hurt its feelings. All around Wei Shengyuan, the plant is loosening, shaking and weaving. Weakened. Exactly the way Vicious Curse should work. She’d even done the stupid hand gesture that she’d animated, jerky straight elbow and all.

  So that’s not what she’s focused on.

  What she really wants to know is why her broom is glowing. The stupid thing has done nothing in the weeks since she got it. What’s different now? Her only theory-- that it’s acting as a repository for the “sparkles” produced as a result of the curse’s effects-- just brings in more questions.

  She’d been worried, when the system had told her about dimensional conversion.

  Because she’s someone who can’t use cores, and who can’t use sparkles.

  Even if she received the more powerful ability, Skies beyond Skies, wouldn’t it be completely worthless in her hands? The same as the Siren having Dance on Hot Coals uselessly sitting in his options for four turns before anything can happen.

  That’s why she desperately needed Vicious Curse, because it had no casting cost. Does she need to risk it all hoping that Skies Beyond Skies will work anyway? No.

  Because she has her own Siren already.

  “Wei Shengyuan!” Zan Xinyi yells. “Stop moping around and kill this thing!”

  When she was a kid, she was never allowed to have any pets.

  Even though she really wanted a dog.

  Zan Xinyi pauses. Which relative was she living with back then? It’d been the same one all through middle school, and then a few more in high school. It doesn’t matter. An aunt of some kind.

  Even though that aunt had let her own kid have a dog, Zan Xinyi couldn’t even have a plant of her own. And then when her girlfriend had kept plants, they’d die if Zan Xinyi even looked at them wrong.

  Is that fair?

  “It feeds off of my water!” Wei Shengyuan yells back. “It’ll just heal!”

  There’s a long silence before he adds the second sentence.

  “And we shouldn't kill it. It’s protecting us from the green mist. If it dies...I won’t be able to work on your game anymore.”

  She can barely make him out in the distance, the wheelchair completely overgrown and halted right in front of the dead woman’s room.

  Zan Xinyi brutally beats down a root that had been creeping too close to her feet. It flinches away from the broom, but starts returning as soon as she halts the arch of the sweep. And every time she hits it, the broom’s glow pulses, and she hears something.

  “Wei Shengyuan?” she says. “Are you crying?”

  “I am not.”

  Despite how he’d just said it would heal the plant, he still gets so offended that he does take advantage of its weakened state to cut a small swathe through it.

  Just enough so she can see his face, and see that while he does, in fact, look very upset, there’s absolutely no sign of tears.

  But she’s hearing someone crying. The more she clutches at her broom, the louder it is. And beyond the weeping, the search.

  Why were the children sent away? Where are they? Where?

  “Do you hear the crying?” she asks Jiang Jin.

  Jiang Jin has not left the apartment doorway, and the clang of a metal lid hitting pavement echoes behind her words as an accent when she speaks up.

  “Please, just rescue him, Zan Xinyi!” she yells down the hall. “Don’t start saying the same things he said before he went out! Please don’t go insane and leave me behind!”

  So she can’t hear it.

  Zan Xinyi looks at her broom, and then she looks at Wei Shengyuan. What does Wei Shengyuan have in common with a broom?

  “It’s because he ate that zombie core,” Zan Xinyi says. She looks back at Jiang Jin. “No one is going insane. The plant that grew out of the woman who used to live down the hall is trying to communicate. Badly.”

  She raises her voice.

  “Wei Shengyuan! The plant’s wrapping you up because you ate its core!”

  “You told me to do that!”

  Did she? Well, either way, it’s not like he can vomit it back out. But...

  “It thinks you’re one of its kids! Probably!”

  Zan Xinyi bashes another tendril and steps further down the hall so she can talk at a more reasonable volume. She hates yelling, it hurts her throat.

  And also, it makes it easier to see him. She’ll be the first to say it: he looks bad. That stupid polo shirt he’d been wearing has been completely shredded by roots attempting to grow into his skin, and blood seeps down from where he’d cut a root out of his chest, and there’s more and more lacerations and cut roots that are concealed by blood and the ruined fabric. His green hair is completely covered in leaves, with the occasional black, glossy thorn poking through.

  Judging by the pulsing of the roots still sucking blood out of him, the blood, like his water, also seems to nurture the plant. But you know-- she isn’t someone whose girlfriend didn’t trust them to keep a potted plant alive for nothing. There’s millions of ways to hurt plants. Starve them. Drown them.

  But she hates proving her ex right about anything. She totally would have kept that succulent alive. She’d learned from the previous one.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  “It has kids!?” Jiang Jin says.

  “The plant has children?” Wei Shengyuan also seems shocked.

  The hell, he went into the woman’s bathroom and ate her core and he didn’t even check the living room walls for who she was? Ah. Because he’s in a wheelchair and the bathroom is actually near the entrance. She’d just left the room for last because it was making a scary noise.

  But seriously...the woman herself is dead, and the core is gone. Even if the kids are still alive, the plant is the parasite that killed their mother. It’s just a weed with memories.

  Zan Xinyi’s thoughts churn inside her head.

  Is that how mutations work? If the woman was mutating into a plant, then the plant is her, but since she was dead and the plant is still alive, clearly the plant isn’t her.

  “Tell the plant you want to go be with the other kids.”

  “Not another parentage battle,” Wei Shengyuan mutters. “I’m never going back to family court, and I don’t want more siblings.”

  He rips a vine away from one of the wheels, which makes the wheel scream in a way that’s ominous for that wheelchair’s longevity.

  Okay, pure conversation was a long shot anyway. It’s better to be forceful.

  “Jiang Jin,” Zan Xinyi says. “Can you copy plant sounds?”

  “I mean, yes,” Jiang Jin says, straightening up as her feathers fluff. “But if you want me to talk to the plant, then I’m sorry, I don’t know what any plant sounds mean. I’d just be repeating gibberish. What type of language would plants even have?”

  Excellent.

  “Make the screaming rhubarb sound you mentioned.”

  A truly horrific chorus of small cracks and screams echoes in the corridor.

  Zan Xinyi sets her broom down, pinning a small root.

  “This is what you’re doing to Wei Shengyuan,” Zan Xinyi says. “You’re making him suffer. You shouldn’t do that to your precious sprout, yes? It’s sad.”

  The greenery is so thick around this part of the hall that she’d believe she stepped through a portal into a jungle. Is one type of plant supposed to have this many varieties of leaves, roots, and thorns?

  “You should sound sadder,” Wei Shengyuan says.

  He’s in a bitchy mood because he almost died. Well, she’s in a bitchy mood because her hands hurt from how much code she was typing without a wrist rest.

  “It’s very sad,” Zan Xinyi repeats again, trying for more emphasis. It is sad.

  She hates trying to convey emotions through voice. People just can’t hear what she’s saying to them.

  A six inch long thorn rakes down Zan Xinyi’s left arm, making her angry for a different reason. Maybe they should just kill it and then find out how bad the green mist is.

  No more trying to sympathize with this thing. Even if is probably carrying the memories of the woman down the hall.

  “I know where the children are,” Zan Xinyi says, and every single vine goes still. “If you keep attacking us, you’ll die alone in this building, and you’ll never see them again, and that’s good. Because they wouldn’t recognize you as their mother if they saw you, they’d call you a monster. You’re the one who took their mother from them. It’s all your fault that they don’t have anyone to rely on in an apocalyptic world.”

  The broom glows even brighter, as if she’s cursed the plant again.

  All around her, leaves visibly brown and fall to the ground as anything too close to her withers.

  Is stating facts a curse these days?

  But at least the crying has stopped.

  “Now pull away from Wei Shengyuan,” Zan Xinyi says.

  The plants tighten a little further.

  “Look,” Zan Xinyi says, starting to lose her temper. “You--”

  “Zan Xinyi,” Wei Shengyuan interrupts hastily. “You said you knew where the kids are. So you could help the plant not be stuck here.”

  This sounds a lot like giving in.

  “You want me to help a plant that tried to kill you to meet three kids?”

  “Not meet,” Jiang Jin cuts in with a yell. Wow, she’s being ganged up on again. “You could speak for the...plant. Tell them what’s happened, leave the choice up to them to come back here.”

  “This is sounding like a lot of work when we could just kill it and face the mist.” Zan Xinyi is half bluffing. She is, in her own way, aware that living directly in the mist will likely not end well.

  But she also thinks that finding the kids is a bad idea and a waste of time.

  The plant goes still.

  And then, for the first time, she hears something useful.

  Bargaining.

  The plant completely pulls away from Wei Shengyuan, leaving them in a green hallway that only rustles slightly as a new type of being experiences a new type of thought.

  Exchange. Offering. Hunger turned outwards instead of inwards.

  “What’s it saying?” Jiang Jin asks.

  “It’s promising protection,” Zan Xinyi says. “For the building as a whole. If we go track down the kids and--”

  This is where the plant not being good at communication gets really difficult. She thinks the plant probably doesn’t really know what it wants either.

  If it’s got enough emotions to want something back, surely it’s got enough emotions to be scared of the kid’s reactions.

  “It would be dangerous to bring the kids back through the mist,” Wei Shengyuan says. “Even if by some miracle they’re not mutated or zombified already...and how old are they?”

  “One’s high school, one’s middle school, one’s a toddler,” Zan Xinyi says.

  “That’s too young to escort anywhere, let alone here. We’re in the area where they’d send rescue missions to retrieve people from, not the other way round.”

  “We could cut the plant--”

  Instantly a lot more thorns protrude around Zan Xinyi. Hey.

  “--and bring a cutting of the plant with us when we finally locate them,” Zan Xinyi says. Perhaps she should have used a different verb. “But the kids are in the military base. So I think bringing a species as mutated as this plant could be tricky.”

  Wei Shengyuan groans.

  The plant also groans, which is a much scarier sound as the walls and floor groan with it.

  “We’ll figure it out!” Jiang Jin says, poking her head into the room.

  She approaches one of the curled up tendrils and grabs it, shaking it up and down as if doing a handshake. She even accompanies it with a slight bow, to show respect.

  “Miss Plantwoman-- do you have a name you prefer? I’m sorry that I can’t hear you properly.”

  All Zan Xinyi can feel from the plant is pure confusion.

  Wei Shengyuan looks over at Zan Xinyi.

  “What was the name of the woman in the room?”

  “How would I know?”

  “You knew she had kids!”

  While they’re arguing, Jiang Jin has blazed ahead.

  “Oh, then, I’ll name you then! How about ‘Qing’ since you’re so good at purifying the air and ‘Guang’ since you love the light? And then I can call you Qingqing for short!”

  Isn’t this name...kind of the same level as calling her Miss Plantwoman?

  “Maybe this plant doesn’t even need sunlight,” Zan Xinyi says.

  “Don’t be stupid, Zan Xinyi. It’s green. Of course it needs sunlight. And you should call it Qingguang now.”

  “The mist’s also green. Does it need sunlight?”

  “Wow!” Jiang Jin says brightly. “Do you think the way she’s curled around my wrist means that she likes the name?” She cups her hands around it. “Don’t worry, Qingqing! Zan Xinyi may seem unreliable, but she always comes through in the end. I promise.”

  What a burdensome thing to say.

  Starry-Eyed Hero

  by QuiteTheSlacker

  Ten year old Astra has always dreamed of reaching the stars.

  As a humble farm boy living in the countryside, Astra's been surrounded by forests and flowing rivers his entire life. It's a routine full of family fun, community, and good ol' hard work... but sometimes, he'd lay on the grass at night and gaze out toward those bright stars above.

  He'd reach out with his hands, and he felt a yearning to see them: to form a bond crossed in starlight, regardless of the vast space between. Thus was a wish sent to the cosmos. One day, he too would shine just as bright.

  That opportunity would soon come in the form of a galaxy-wide competition for the chance to enter the most prestigious school in the milky way, Excelsior Academy, where noble children from the kingdoms of the Twelve Constellations are raised to become leaders, trailblazers, and most importantly warriors against meteoric monsters from beyond the universe. The encroaching slither of the Constellars.

  Astra doesn't have a special bloodline, belong to a royal house, nor is he the chosen one. But against all these kids with powerful backgrounds and fated destinies, Astra has only one wish.

  To shine bright as a starry-eyed hero.

  Now! Second fun fact. 'Skies Beyond Skies' is from the chinese idiom 天外天. 'Beyond [this] sky there are [other] skies'. Think of it as a combination of always a bigger fish except instead of a bigger fish, there's the implication of 'always a bigger universe beyond the one you can see'. Many xanxia stories take this to the extreme and make the idiom literal.

  And for my thank yous...thank you all! 280 followers is crazy! If you'd like another bonus chapter, there's three more reviews to unlock that one, and if you can't wait even more second, my is 10 chapters ahead!