Marcus Webb died at 11:47 PM on a Wednesday night.
He remembered driving into the wrong lane and being greeted by fast approaching headlights. The sound of his own windshield caving in as his consciousness drifted into darkness.
His soul drifted across the stream of reincarnation and settled into a new body.
Then the feeling of being buried in the dirt engulfed him.
the physical pressure of soil packed around every inch of him, dense and cold and wet, compressing from all sides with a uniformity that didn't make sense until he stopped trying to move limbs he didn't actually have and started paying attention to what he actually did.
He had a trunk. He had roots. He had, by rough internal estimate, somewhere between forty and sixty individual root tendrils extending outward from his base through the surrounding soil, each one feeding him low-resolution data of moisture levels, soil density and the faint vibration of weight moving somewhere above him.
He had a canopy. Small. Six or seven branches, thin and flexible, each carrying a handful of young leaves that were currently doing nothing because it was dark.
He had become a tree. A small one.
Then a System notification appeared in his field of vision, which was also not vision in any normal sense. It was more like an awareness that hovered in the space where vision used to be, a crisp white text against the dark.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION]
Entity Type : World Tree [Seedling]
Classification: Unique / Singular
Location : Lincoln Park, Chicago — Sector 7
HP : 50 / 50
MP : 10 / 10
EXP : 0 / 100
[STATS]
VIT: 4
ROT: 2 [root spread rate]
ABS: 1 [absorption efficiency]
SYN: 1 [photosynthesis output]
ADT: 0 [adaptation points — unlocked at Tier 2]
[SKILLS]
[Passive] Rooting Lv.1 — Root range: 3m
[Passive] Absorption Lv.1 — Absorbs organic matter within root range
[Active] Pulse Lv.1 — Sensory signal through root network. Cost: 2 MP
[ACTIVE QUESTS]
[System Quest] Survive 30 days. Reward: Tier 2 Evolution, +10 ADT
[WARNING: This entity cannot relocate.]
Marcus read it twice.
Then he read it a third time because he was hoping the WARNING line would change. But It did not change.
He spent the next several minutes doing a full inventory of his situation. He was in Lincoln Park. He knew this park because he had worked two blocks from it for six years, ate lunch on the benches near the south lagoon when the weather was decent. He recognized the soil composition through his roots, the slight downward slope of the terrain toward the lakefront, the faint chemical signature of old park maintenance fertilizer still presents in the deeper soil layers.
The Park was dark and cold. His root data put the season as early spring, soil temperature hovering around 8 degrees Celsius, recent rain, frost-thaw cycles evident in the soil structure. The world above his immediate root range was feeding him almost nothing in terms of vibration data. Distant, irregular thumping. Wind in structures that should have been blocking wind. The low creak of something metal swinging on a hinge somewhere to the northwest.
No traffic. No distant highway drone. No aircraft.
He had heard about pandemics in the news before his accident. Everyone had. But He hadn't known it had gotten this bad.
He ran a quick test on his Pulse skill, spending 2 MP. The sensation was immediate and strange: a compression wave pushed outward through his root network in all directions, bounced off every solid object within three meters, and returned with a detailed map of the immediate area. He could feel the root zone in three dimensions. A concrete path two meters to his east. A park bench one meter north of that. A chain-link fence at the edge of his range to the west.
And three distinct weight signatures moving in the open ground to his south. Each one was approximately 160 to 180 pounds. They moved with an irregular, shuffling cadence: no consistent rhythm, no deliberate weight distribution, just constant low-frequency thumping against the soil. One word came to mind: ZOMBIES.
Before he died, there were a lot of conspiracies and videos on the internet about zombie sightings since the pandemic began. He didn't want to believe it, but becoming a tree sapling was even more unbelievable.
Marcus had 8 MP left and no ability to attack anything.
He watched the three signatures move. Two of them drifted north, then east, then northeast, following some internal gradient he couldn't map. They left his Pulse range within four minutes and didn't come back. The third circled the perimeter of the open grass area between his position and the path for eleven minutes before it also drifted east and disappeared from his range.
He hadn't been detected. He was a small tree in a park. He didn't make any noise. He was, in every immediate sense, invisible to whatever was walking around out there.
This was, he decided, probably his most significant advantage.
He spent the first night taking stock. His Absorption skill was fully passive: he was already drawing nutrients from the soil and from three dead earthworms within root range. The EXP gain from the earthworms was: zero. Apparently, the system didn't count invertebrates as an EXP source. Good to know this wasn't a basic farming system.
At dawn his SYN stat activated for the first time and he understood what photosynthesis felt like from the inside: a slow, cellular warmth that started at the leaf surfaces and moved inward, his MP bar ticking upward at a rate of roughly 1 point per forty minutes in full sun.
He had no immediate threats. He had no food source that the system recognized. He had three meters of root range and a park full of zombies somewhere beyond it.
He started thinking.
The first problem was level progression. He had now assumed his Absorption skill consumed organic matter within root range, but the System wasn't going to give him EXP for dead leaves and earthworms. It was going to give him EXP for something else. But His only currently available path to a kill was if something walked into his root range and died there.
His roots couldn't grip. They couldn't spike upward through soil on command. They were passive, slow-growing, nutrient-seeking structures. An attack skill didn't exist yet. His only active skill was Pulse, which was practically a sonar.
He spent the entire first day mapping every zombie movement pattern within his Pulse range by sending out a burst every time his MP hit 10. By sunset he had a rough behavioural model. The zombies in this section of the park were drifters: no direction, no pattern, just constant low-speed motion across the open grass. They changed direction when they hit obstacles. They slowed when there was no audio stimulus. Three of them had passed within four meters of his trunk over the course of the day without registering him.
Two of them had walked directly over his root zone.
His roots were three centimetres below the surface in those sections. He had felt the full body weight pressing down through the soil: one signature at roughly 175 pounds, one at approximately 140. His root tips had registered the compression and flexed slightly under the load the way any root would. Natural behaviour.
What was the difference, he thought, between a root flexing naturally and a root flexing with intent?
He spent the next three days on that question.
On day four, he had an answer. The difference was timing. A root couldn't suddenly grow upward faster than soil physics allowed without tearing through the soil and announcing itself. But a root that was already at the surface, already partially exposed by erosion or natural pressure could angle itself to create a lateral ridge, a two-centimetre hump of root running across a walking path.
He spent eight hours on day four doing exactly that. One root, along the concrete path to his east where the soil had already eroded away from the path edge, leaving a thin gap between concrete and dirt. He pushed that root into the gap. Millimetre by millimetre. His MP drained and recharged and drained again. By midnight he had a root running three centimetres above ground level along a twelve-centimetre stretch of the path edge, positioned at the most natural approach angle based on his movement data.
A trip hazard. Passive, structural, deniable.
Then he waited.
On day six, a zombie hit it.
The signature came in from the south: 170 pounds, irregular shuffle, slight leftward drift in its motion pattern that his five days of data had identified as consistent with zombies that had suffered leg injuries before turning. The drift put it directly onto the concrete path. Its foot caught the root ridge at the ankle. The body's momentum carried it forward.
It fell face-first into the concrete path with a force Marcus felt through his root network as a sharp spike of vibration. Its skull meeting concrete at a fast speed. 180 pounds of dead weight, no reflexive bracing, no hands coming up in time.
Then the vibration stopped. And the signature went still.
Marcus waited ten minutes. The signature still didn't move.
[ZOMBIE ELIMINATED]
[EXP GAINED: 10]
[Total EXP: 10 / 100]
He had killed a zombie by building a speed bump.
He got to work on the second one immediately.