Like me. The only one that survived this far.
Along my expansion journey through this treacherous world, I met 2 more plant lives that were just like the first, trial candidates but like the first, they were already terminated by the time I met them.
This plant, this guy... it was the only survivor besides me.
I extended my senses, then I saw him. There he was; naked, skeletal, a plant but barely formed, still alive. His aura flickered like a candle lost in a storm.
I could have left him.
Something in me recoiled, but something else surged forward.
Not compassion. Not yet.
Just... memory. Fragmented, echoing memory. Screams. Jets in the sky. The last faces of Earth.
By now, it's been more than 2 weeks already since I got trapped in the Genesis Protocols. The concept of human, it felt like such an alien term already that meeting a human again triggered the fragmented memories in my head again.
A human. An actual human just like I am, reborn, twisted to become a plant.
I didn't just absorb the territory of the plant. First, I extended a part of my territory toward it, probing it, trying to communicate with it.
As a plant, I couldn't really communicate, I could only express how I felt.
And the words I was conveying?
Safe. Peace. Kin. Cooperation.
The plant seemed to understand. I was not surprised, after all, this guy was once a human just like me.
As my vines crawled out like veins across the land, reaching the pit where it had taken root, I felt it, an enemy. A hostile plant life.
This enemy was engaged in a territorial battle with the trial candidate, and it was winning. It was strangling the plant life out of it.
As soon as I detected it, I froze for a moment, then...
I felt it; a deep, primal, smoldering rage igniting within me.
'You dare, you insufferable sunblind slugweed!'
My roots erupted, attacking without hesitation.
Against a plant that barely ruled over a territory of 8 meters, I was like a giant. An unstoppable, inevitable giant.
I crushed it to death, feeding on its essence, sucking its evolutionary fragments.
This new guy, he enjoyed something that I never got the privilege to enjoy... help.
It may seem small, but it meant the whole world.
Here in Echoterra, it was the difference between life and death.
[You have integrated the territory of a Dormant Trial Candidate!]
[Territorial Domain expanded!]
[Current Size: 44 square meters.]
My territory was close to 50 square meters than ever before, halfway to my intended target.
But at the moment, I didn't pay attention to that at all.
Rather all my attention was on him, the little me. My kin.
A human, just like me.
The moment I sensed it, I knew it wasn't a beast.
It was something... like me. Something once human.
A trial participant. Still alive.
Still breathing in Echoterra.
The system notification already confirmed it. Besides, I already saved its life by killing its rival and it acknowledged me already by willingly submitting to my rule, under my territory.
But still, I didn't hesitate.
I extended a vine through the underbrush, coiling it through fallen leaves and fungal bloom, parting layers of moss until I saw him.
A plant; no, a kin. Not one of the native flora of Echoterra, but like me.
One who had awakened. One of the Trial candidates.
He stood no taller than a meter and a half. His stalk was lean, lined with fibrous cords and faint ridges of pale bark, his outer foliage bruised and dark from exposure. His canopy was small but structured; his leaves arranged in a spiral pattern, edged with thorns, though not nearly as vicious as mine.
From his roots sprouted tiny nodules; warped sensors, I realized were evolved to detect vibrations and hostile movement.
His territory had shriveled, signs of retreat and abandonment heavy in the air. Five square meters. A respectable amount for someone without allies, even more respectable since I knew how much I suffered to grow my own territory.
But now, he'd relinquished it all.
By now, I was no longer just a sprouting weed clawing at sunlight. I had become a monarch of thorns.
My primary stalk had thickened to the width of a tree trunk, bark-like in density but glistening with slick green veins and laced with black thorns that curved like blades. I towered above the forest floor, nearly four meters tall, a sentinel of writhing foliage and battle-hardened roots.
My crown stretched outward, with vines and tendrils blooming into thorny petals that pulsed with bioluminescent veins like a grotesque halo of war.
Every vine I extended was barbed and purposeful, capable of slicing through meat and bark alike. Moss grew like armor across parts of my stalk.
My roots had grown aggressive, thick with pulsing strength, coiling and uncoiling like muscle beneath the soil.
A growing, intelligent ecosystem of malice.
In contrast, the one I found, my kin, he looked pitiful.
He looked up to me, if he could look at all, as one might stare at the sun from the bottom of a well.
He had no significant defenses, no heat signatures, no aura of presence. If there was before, it was already erased by the cruel crucible of this world.
There was just the faintest whisper of the Genesis Protocol. Weak, unsynchronized; a flickering flame in a storm.
I couldn't help but think.
I'd once been that small. That helpless.
But now? I was no longer just a plant, I was a monster. A monster plant.
I towered above him, a wall of pulsing green and black, my vines interlocking like armor. Thorned petals shivered as my war-pulse beat stronger. My presence smothered his like a storm cloud.
I expected fear, but there was none. Only stillness. Fatigue. Wariness. Acceptance.
His leaves fluttered, a signal. An attempt at communication.
But I couldn't understand it.