I pulled out a seed and handed it to Kai. “Just hold it, focus your mana into it, and then repeat after me.”

  Lithco summoned beside me and chanted. I repeated that chant aloud, giving it to Kai. I butchered the pronunciation, but we kept doing it over and over and over until the seed in Kai’s hand exploded.

  It was so loud I stumbled back with him.

  “W-What was that?” I asked.

  “The seed. It exploded!”

  I looked at mine. It was fine. The mana seed within its shell hadn’t even been stressed.

  I laughed. “Seems you’ve got your work cut out for you.”

  He brooded and shut his eyes. “Alright… let’s keep doing it.”

  I smirked and closed my eyes, and we did it again. Over the next six hours, forty-three of his seeds exploded, but they became increasingly less frequent. Mine didn’t do much better. I couldn’t make it past an hour without my seed exploding. The first time it happened, I stumbled back, and Kai stopped to laugh, only to destabilize his seed and have it explode.

  After that, we stopped and laughed for a few minutes straight, and it was hard to get back into it.

  Similar things happened over the session, and when it was done, Kai collapsed to the ground. “I thought you’d go easy on me because I’m recovering. If my sister knew I was threading this much, she’d burn your tree while you were sleeping.”

  I laughed and stood. “There’s nothing to heal. You’re at the peak state you were before you went off to kill yourself.”

  He cracked his eyes. “About that… What did you do? Kyro told me not to mention it to anyone. But—”

  “Anyone includes me. Now stop bringing it up.” I offered him a hand and he clasped it, allowing me to pull him up.

  “Okay, then,” Kai said. “In other news, what are you doing right now?”

  My mind locked into business mode again. “Just mental diving. But I’m free to do that whenever. What’s up?”

  He saw the seriousness in my gaze and put up his hands. “Whoa… nothing serious. I just heard that Wraithwood Cafe is selling eliqual tea. And—”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Well, yeah. Why not?”

  “We just spent six hours together.”

  “Yeah… so what’s another three?”

  I frowned.

  He cracked a smile.

  “No. Find another way to pay me back.”

  “Whoa. Who said anything about paying you back? I just want some tea. Can’t a guy want some tea?”

  “With me.”

  “With you. Can’t a guy want some tea with you?”

  I put my hands on my hips and looked up at him, only to scowl. Women are so short. You have to look up at the cheeky guy grinning at you as if you’re seriously angry. I felt like a damn ladybug.

  “No.” I opened the door with a huff. “4:45. Don’t be late.”

  “So you’ll do it?”

  “Here. Tomorrow morning. If you want to spend more time together, you’re going to do it here.”

  I’m not sure why I was acting like that. It was probably just backlash, a refusal to make snap decisions. But it felt silly, and for the rest of the night, I just thought about how good tea sounded.

  I never made any myself. I just delved into Dain’s mind, searching for magic.

  The next day wasn’t much different. Kai and I worked together, threaded, and joked. We still didn’t have tea. Then something frustrating happened. Kai started improving—and I wasn’t.

  “How are you doing that?” We could handle about two hours, but I realized that being able to hold the seed for two hours wasn’t actually helping anything.

  He lifted a seed. “I realized I was doing it wrong. It’s pretty pointless to use a spell for adding channels, only to send mana through the pre-existing channels.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell me?”

  “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re like… the perfect woman until you’re embarrassed?”

  I was offended in strange and complex ways by that statement. “Did anyone tell you—”

  “And then you transcend perfection.”

  I saw his cheeky, goading smile that told me that he was stabbing the dragon’s nest with the hero’s spear for the lulz. It made me internally furious, but it was just so damn hard to stay mad. He was too good-natured.

  “Okay, so here’s the thing,” Kai said. “These seeds are always going to explode. If there was a chance they wouldn’t, yours wouldn’t’ve.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Kai looked me in the eye. “Because your threading is gorgeous.” He looked back at his seed. “Seriously. It’s unnatural. I’ve seen a lot of people thread, and I spent like… six hours last night in the evolution skill you sent me trying to find any pattern that looks like yours, and I gave up.”

  I shivered.

  “You didn’t just ask it to find one that matched… oh, wait.”

  “Yeah, privacy skill. But the crazy thing is that I had my guide demonstrate the five hundred most powerful threading techniques for the second evolution, and what I realized is that while you didn’t use any of them—yours looked just as refined and beautiful as the top twenty. But it’s… weird. The other threading techniques all kinda had the same patterns—but yours doesn’t. It feels… specialized. Where’d you even learn to thread like that?”

  I laughed and shook my head, and then laughed again.

  “What?”

  “Would you believe me if I said I learned from a nature spirit?”

  He laughed sharply. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s mythical. The Wraith of Areswood Forest, mother of dragons, friend of pixies, was taught by spirits and nature gods.”

  I laughed and nodded. “Yep. That sounds about right.”

  He sighed and chuckled, and then his eyes widened. “Maybe it’s meant for plants. No, it’s obviously meant for plants. I mean… You learned from a nature spirit. Try it.”

  “Try… what?”

  “Oh, right. These seeds’ channels are too weak to handle a second evolution stream, so of course they’re going to explode. Here. This is why mine’s lasting longer.”

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  He threw me a seed, and I poured mana into it. Then, I laughed. “There’s no way this’ll grow.”

  The seed was carved with so many channels that it was basically a hollowed-out ball of mana.

  “Well, yeah, but I need to figure out how it works first, right?” Kai said. “I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. So I’m learning the… what do you say… ummm… I don’t know. I’m just learning what I can do. How the spell works. Maybe you can figure it out.”

  “What do you do?”

  “The spell carves new channels. So instead of using the mana to enter the existing channels, instead make your own. And I’m thinking, maybe, just maybe, if you just… thread naturally into that thing it’ll just work.”

  My heart thrummed like slapped guitar strings as I picked up a fresh seed and then practiced etching new spirit channels into the seed. Then, I closed my eyes, and then closed them further and further, like Yakana had taught me, and summoned his technique in the darkness. I visualized the seed, and it webbed in an intricate pattern that was vastly more complex than the mana seeds. It was… beautiful.

  And then it exploded so violently that Kai screamed when a piece hit his left eye.

  I flew forward under Moxle Dilation, grabbed his hand to remove it, saw his bleeding eye, and activated my basic healing skill to remove the seed fragment.

  “Guh…” Kai groaned as I stepped back. “That sucked…”

  “Yeah, sorry.”

  “No need to be sorry. That was my suggestion.”

  But you were right… I thought.

  “Well, guess we’re back to square one.” He laughed. “This’s gonna be a long year…”

  “Yeah… come on. I can only treat surface wounds, so we need to get you to a healer.”

  “Wait, you mean you healed me? When?”

  “I’m fast. Now let’s go.”

  I took Kai to a healer, and then went home while he wasn’t looking. I locked the door when I walked in and sat on the floor in a daze.

  “Lithco, did you see that?”

  “I did,” Lithco said.

  “Do you know what that was?”

  “Of course. You have a nature magic threading technique. It’s meant for tasks just like this.”

  I laughed and fell to the ground. “I really wish that you could just tell me stuff…” I rolled to my side. “So… Do you know what went wrong? I’m sure that’s in that skill somewhere.”

  “There’s no skill needed. You put too much magic into it.”

  “I barely put any in there.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. Do you remember what makes a Kyfer core special?”

  I shifted back to my back. “It allows a perfect flow through of mana.”

  “Correct. Normal cores must process mana and move it past its mana blockages. Not only is your core one hundred percent purifying, but it has no blockages, allowing you to theoretically siphon unlimited amounts of mana from the atmosphere into a base attack. It also allows perfect threading—which is why yours feels so natural and unhindered. But it also means that it’s going to treat other objects the same way. So, in essence, if you want to use this magic, you’re going to have to refine your threading even further and obtain absolute control over it.”

  “And once I do… how powerful do you think this will be?”

  “As powerful as a plant can handle. I think that with a threading technique like that, you could theoretically bolster plants at the eighth evolution. But once again, normal plants can’t even handle first evolution streams, let alone streams from a god. So, unless you want to collect seeds from an upper ring and modify them to be edible to weaker people, you’re still stuck with hard botany.”

  That was a brutal reality, but I was strangely relieved by it.

  I turned down work as a botanist because I didn’t want to be in a lab. I enjoyed horticulture. I enjoyed growing plants. I enjoyed finding better conditions to make them grow. I didn’t like modifying genes with CRISPR and breeding plants day in and day out in a controlled environment.

  Now, I enjoyed alchemy, which was extracting chemicals from plants and using them to create things.

  I loved plants.

  And yet, there was something soothing about returning to my own world, so I sighed a breath of relief in knowing that there was still a lot of work to do.

  I summoned the lurvine. It was time to get to work finding out their blueprints.

  The days passed quickly after that.

  I met with Kai and we traded places. He was able to control the seeds longer before they exploded, while I had to set up a barrier because mine were exploding every minute.

  It was a joke and we laughed about it, but the days passed by quickly after that, and soon we were making great progress together.

  It was… comfortable.

  That’s why I felt dread when he said, “You know, I was thinking.”

  I didn’t immediately say, No. So I kept silent.

  I’m glad I did because what he said was nothing like I imagined.

  “Lurvines are faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar different than humans,” he said. “And—”

  “No.”

  “You have an exquisite skill for shutting me down mid-sentence.”

  “I’m not going to dive into your brain.”

  “Why not? If you’re willing to do it with Sina, it’s clearly safe.”

  “It is, but that’s not the point.”

  “Then why?”

  “‘Cause I’ll be able to see your memories.”

  He froze. “What?”

  “I can read your memories, your emotions, the way you feel. I can experience your sexual urges and see what you look like naked. I’m literally playing with the fabric of your thoughts, emotions, and entire personality. And while it’s uncomfortable with lurvine, it’s like, Great. They’re bathing in fur and grooming each other. And I can’t hear their thoughts. But with a human? Oh, fuck no.”

  He laughed. “Well, if it makes you feel better, I’ve never been to a whore house.”

  I glowered at him.

  “What? Okay, okay. I get it. That’s… weird. But still. If I’m threading while you’re doing it, and start shifting between stuff, it’ll probably light up. So if you find some way to do this without learning whether I fantasize about you, I think it’d be beneficial.”

  I blushed furiously. “Do you just toy with me on purpose?”

  “Toying with you? I’m not toying with you. I’m being dead serious. And I’m not going to stop hitting on you until you… I don’t know… stop smiling when I do it. I mean… why?”

  I turned and brooded.

  “Just saying. If you do change your mind, I’ll be your guinea pig.”

  “Fine.” I stood up.

  His eyes widened. “You’ll go to lunch with me?”

  “No, I’ll scoop your brains out, idiot. ‘Cause if I don’t, I’m just going to ruin my year thinking about it.”

  “Oh… But seriously, are you going to see me naked?” He sounded genuinely nervous.

  I sighed. “Not… really. I kinda exaggerated. It’s not like I’ll spend twenty years scouring your thoughts. I just… get a lot of images and emotions all at once, and I forget them like a dream unless I’m actually searching for something visual. But afterward, it’s kinda like… deja vu. You know certain things after, but you don’t actually know them. Or rather… you just… You don’t know things so much as everything… clicks. As if things just… make sense afterwards. Like, you tell me that you do something because your parents fought when you were younger, and I’ll get like… Guh this is so hard to explain.” I sat down again. “It’s like, I’ll get a flashback but it’s not a visual flashback. It’s more like an emotional flashback, and my brain visualizes it how I interpret it. It’s super… intimate. That’s the problem.”

  He groaned.

  “So you do want privacy,” I said.

  “Well…”

  “No. You don’t have to justify yourself. I wouldn’t let anyone do it to me under any circumstance.”

  “No… that’s not the problem, it's just… Whatever. Let’s just do it. If you hate me afterward, that’s fine. I vowed my life to you, so I’ll do it. Think of it like… a thank you.”

  I gulped. “You serious?”

  “Yeah…”

  “Why? Are you in a hurry to prove you’re grateful?”

  “No. It’s not like that. I mean… it kinda is. I’m not going to claim that doesn’t have something to do with it. But… it just sucks to see how frustrated you look every morning. I can tell that restoring their magic is super important to you, and if it doesn’t hurt me to help you… why wouldn’t I?”

  I swallowed hard. “But what if it does hurt you? I mean, I seriously might find you disgusting afterwards.”

  “And… that’d suck. But… I don’t know. I care about you. I actually care about you. And like I said, caring’s an action, not an emotion. So this is just… naturally what I want to do.”

  I winced. “You sure? Like really sure?”

  “Yeah. Come on. Let’s not drag this out.”

  I pressed myself up as if in a haze, pulse strained, lungs frozen. I walked over to him, closing my eyes as I touched his forehead as he threaded into a seed. I had immense fear that I was going to fuck everything up between us—and beyond—but still.

  Sina was special to me, and Ryn and Dain were family. If I could restore their magic and make them whole, I would take a risk with Kai.

  I gave Kai an elixir with borderline legendary effects—if he gave me the key to giving a soul army magical powers, we would be even—and that blockage between us would disappear forever.

  I closed my eyes and began the dive.