Mav woke up alive, which he counted as 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 laid the problem out in his head, piece by piece.
Three bars to fill.
29 days to fill them.
And 10 Subjects at rank F-, who needed to be at rank E-.
He did not have much to work with.
That was nothing new.
Everything on a World ran on Essence.
That was the name people gave to the energy the Genesis moved around.
It was what a Heartstone had to be fed.
It was what Subjects grew on.
It was in the water and the rock and every living thing, and a creature that gathered enough of it rose a step.
That was all a rank really was.
An accumulation of Essence.
The steps were the same for every creature on every World.
There were 9 letters, from F at the bottom to SSS at the top, and three steps inside each letter: a minus, a plain and a plus.
A seaweed at F- and a dragon at SSS+ stood on the same ladder.
They were simply so far apart that the difference in power could not be measured.
His 10 seaweeds stood on the lowest rung there was.
It was the same for every starting species on a new World.
He needed them three rungs 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 the rest of the rule.
The price doubled at every step.
100, then 200, then 400.
Each of his seaweeds needed 700 Essence to reach E-.
There were three ways for a Subject to gather Essence, and every schoolchild could recite them.
Kill.
Train.
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.
That narrowed things down.
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 silt had settled on every blade, and small snails with shells like fingernails were grazing on the lower stems.
He wiped away the silt 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.
They were also food.
By nightfall, the Status had changed.
[Development: 1%]
It was not much.
He felt absurdly proud of it anyway.
On the third day, he started the training.
He had no idea how to train seaweed.
Nobody did.
So he treated them like recruits and gave them something to carry.
‘Coil.’
9 seaweeds wrapped themselves around the 9 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.
On the first day, each order had been followed by a pause, a moment of sluggish reluctance.
By the evening of the third, the pause was gone.
By the fourth, 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 am not going to think about what that means.’
On the evening of the fourth day, he sat down against the Heartstone and did the accounts.
[Day 4]
[Rank E- Subjects: 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.
Two.
Three days of walls and drills, and each of them had gained two points of Essence.
Mav was good with numbers.
He had never wished more to be bad with them.
700 points for each seaweed, at two points every three days.
1,050 days.
He checked the result twice.
It did not improve.
Almost three years.
He had 26 days, and he felt despair rise 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 was the worst of it.
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.
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.