“G-Guuugh…….”
The sheer amount of money in my hand was enough to make my mind go blank.
It felt as though eight little eyes were staring back at me.
“C-Calm down! First, calm down!”
I put the check back into the envelope.
If I kept holding it, I felt like I would spend the entire day clutching it in my hand.
“First…… this.”
My sister had given me two gifts.
One hundred million won and a mysterious suitcase.
“She said I’d understand once I opened it…….”
I had absolutely no idea what to expect.
Still, I doubted there was anything strange inside.
Gulp.
With trembling hands, I undid the lock.
The case opened with a satisfying click.
“?”
And my head went numb.
What was this?
I picked up the object inside the case.
It was small enough to hold between my thumb and index finger.
“A bottle?”
A tiny glass vial.
I could not clearly see what was inside.
I carried the vial over to where the sunlight was shining.
Only then did I realize what it contained.
“……A seed?”
It looked like a tiny bean.
A small green sprout had already broken through its shell.
“Why did she give me a seed?”
No, I understood why she had given it to me.
She knew my ability was related to plants, after all.
But did she really need to go this far?
I did not know what kind of seed it was, but somehow—
‘This feels excessive.’
Click―.
I removed the cap from the vial.
“Oh.”
A fragrant, herbal scent drifted out.
It was somehow familiar, yet unfamiliar at the same time.
I placed the seed on my palm.
I wanted to examine it more closely.
Then—
[An eligible target for your ability has been identified.]
“There it is.”
The Status Window appeared just as it had when I planted the cherry tomato.
There was one difference, however.
[Target: ???]
“……Unknown?”
Before, it had clearly identified the target as ‘Jeong Sohyeok’s Cherry Tomato.’
This time, however, all it showed was that it was unknown.
“Is this some unusual seed?”
Whatever it was—
my sister had given it to me, so it probably was not dangerous.
“I guess I’ll plant it first.”
Seeing was believing.
I would find out what it was once it grew.
Unfortunately, I did not have anywhere proper to plant it.
So I took another washbasin from the house and transferred some of the cherry tomato plant’s soil into it.
‘Will this be okay?’
Well, I had already made a three-meter-tall cherry tomato plant grow in a single day.
It would probably be fine.
If it was not, I could always move it somewhere else later.
I buried the seed in the soil.
Then I watered it until the soil was slightly damp.
“Blessing of the World Tree.”
Light flew toward the soil.
“Just don’t let anything weird come out of there.”
It was only a plant.
What could possibly go wrong?
RUMBLE―.
“Mmm…….”
BANG! BANG!
“Mmmmmm…….”
THUD! THUD! THUD!!
“Aagh……!”
Noise.
More noise.
A lot of noise.
An unbearable amount of noise.
“Aaaagh!”
I woke up just before I lost my mind.
I had been in the middle of a nightmare.
A dream where I was trapped in a room surrounded by loudspeakers while upstairs neighbors made noise all day long.
“What is that sound……?”
There was no way I could be suffering from upstairs noise in a rooftop room.
And there should not have been anything downstairs capable of making that much—
“Student!! Come out here!!”
‘……Or maybe there is?’
I gathered the clothes scattered around me and put them on, then cautiously opened the door.
Standing outside was an angry tomato……
No.
It was my landlady, her face flushed red with anger.
“W-What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong? Are you playing games with me?”
She looked extremely furious.
I hurriedly searched my memory.
‘Rent? I’m not behind on it.’
‘Noise complaints? I spend all day lying in bed, so that can’t be it.’
Nothing.
No matter how hard I thought about it, I had not done anything that should have made my landlady angry.
Then why—
“If you don’t know, follow me and see for yourself!”
“Y-Yes, ma’am…….”
I covered my twitching mouth and followed her.
At times like this, opening my mouth would only make things worse.
Silence was golden.
We went down one floor.
And then—
“Urk.”
Once again, I learned the importance of silence.
“This…… Can you explain this?”
My landlady’s voice was filled with anger.
And sheer disbelief.
The moment I came down the stairs, I saw—
some kind of stem.
‘No, is that a root?’
Yeah.
It looked more like a root.
Either way, it was some part of a plant.
It had forced its way through cracks in the building and spread down across the wall.
Literally—
the building’s exterior had been swallowed by it like creeping ivy.
Only then did I understand why she was angry.
There was only one thing I could say.
“I’ll take care of it somehow…….”
“You’d better.”
Perhaps it was because we had known each other for so long.
Or perhaps she assumed that even if something went wrong, she could demand compensation from my sister.
Either way, the landlady did not press me any further.
I was left alone on the fourth floor.
Silence settled around me.
I stood there blankly, staring at the cause of this entire disaster.
“Haha…… What even is this……?”
I muttered helplessly and reached toward the wall.
I had a pretty good idea what had caused it.
The seed my sister had given me yesterday.
Was it angry because I had planted it in a washbasin?
‘Even so, this is…….’
This was too much.
I had managed to accept a three-meter-tall cherry tomato plant.
But what was I supposed to make of this?
I did not even know where to begin dealing with it.
Should I contact my sister first?
“More importantly, what kind of plant even is this?”
Its roots were massive enough to consume concrete.
At least within the limits of my common sense, I had never heard of any plant like this.
“I really shouldn’t have planted something without even knowing what it was…….”
For the moment, I left the roots alone.
Then I climbed back upstairs to where the washbasin was.
My landlady had dragged me downstairs so suddenly that I had not had time to think.
But if the roots were that enormous, then the plant aboveground had to be equally ridiculous.
“?”
However—
when I actually checked the washbasin—
“……A sprout?”
There was only a single little sprout poking out of the soil.
It did not match those enormous roots at all.
“…….”
I cautiously reached toward it.
Then—
[???’s Sprout (Growing)]
―Rank: ?
―Freshness: Excellent
―Blessing Type: ?
“It showed up again.”
It was the same kind of description I had seen with the cherry tomatoes.
But perhaps because it was still only a sprout—
There was almost nothing I could learn from it.
“It’s practically all question marks.”
There was another description written below.
I carefully read it.
―A sprout. Characterized by enormous roots. Its identity remains unknown. Only one fact has been confirmed…….
“Huh?”
―It came from the Tower.
‘……The Tower?’
I looked away from the description and stared at the sprout.
It looked no different from an ordinary seedling.
“……This came from the Tower?”
Now I understood.
A mere seed had been delivered inside a special case, complete with a handwritten letter.
‘What are you giving something like this to an unemployed shut-in for……?’
I had heard about plants from the Tower before.
They were a type of item that occasionally appeared as rewards for clearing the Tower.
Cultivating them was impossible.
Even researching them was nearly impossible.
The only information that could reliably be obtained about them came from observing what happened after someone consumed them.
I had heard that most people either ate them immediately or sold them.
‘And someone managed to extract a seed from one?’
That was impressive in its own way.
Who would have thought Korean botany had advanced far enough to extend into the Tower?
‘And I actually managed to germinate it.’
Had anyone in the world ever cultivated a Tower plant before?
No—
had any country managed it?
Since Tower plants appeared as clear rewards, most of them were highly effective medicinal herbs.
If I could mass-produce them—
‘……Mass-produce?’
At that moment—
a brilliant idea flashed through my mind.
What if I mass-produced these plants and released them onto the market?
Could I become filthy rich without ever revealing my identity?
“Heh…… Hehehe.”
The moment I changed my perspective slightly, everything looked different.
The troublesome sprout of disaster—
had transformed into golden leaves.
“Blessing of the World Tree! Blessing of the World Tree!”
[The blessings are stacking.]
[The growth of ‘???’s Sprout has accelerated.]
So the blessings could stack too.
The sudden rush of money-induced dopamine had made me spam the skill without thinking.
The plant began growing before my very eyes.
Its stem thickened.
Its leaves grew larger and split apart.
In no time at all, it had risen to my waist.
“Would it grow even faster if I kept using the blessing?”
The question crossed my mind.
But I immediately discovered that it was impossible.
[Insufficient MP.]
MP.
Mana Points.
A value essential for using skills.
The higher an Awakened’s level and rank, the more MP they possessed.
There were also ways to forcibly increase it through equipment.
If I had to compare MP to something, it was like a person’s vitality.
Skills were activated by consuming that vitality, which flowed through the body like blood.
So if you ran low on MP—
“Ugh…….”
it meant your vitality was running low as well.
One of my knees buckled beneath me.
My vision spun.
‘Even if it’s only E-Rank…….’
I had used the skill twice just now.
No.
Including this morning, three times.
And after using a skill only three times in a single day, I was already running out of MP.
I had heard that tremendously powerful S-Rank Skills could exhaust someone after a single use.
But—
‘A skill that just makes plants grow shouldn’t consume that much.’
My MP was probably just far lower than I had imagined.
‘……Would clearing the Tower help?’
Basically, levels increased by clearing floors of the Tower.
One floor, one level.
I had never even cleared the 1st Floor, so I might as well have been Level 0.
“The 1st Floor…….”
Memories from immediately after my Awakening suddenly resurfaced.
My heart had pounded with excitement as I gathered my courage.
I had cast the blessing on myself and entered.
I had heard that ninety percent of Awakened who entered the 1st Floor successfully cleared it.
And I had even been an athlete.
I thought clearing the 1st Floor would be a piece of cake.
At this point, you could probably guess how that turned out.
Yeah.
I had been wrong.
I was not special.
I was merely one more Awakened among countless others who had awakened a useless ability.
I could still vividly remember the scenery from the first time I entered the Tower.
A damp, unpleasant cave.
A stench so foul that it was difficult to breathe.
Darkness that made it nearly impossible to see my surroundings.
And most importantly—
the monsters.
“Ugh…….”
My shoulders trembled.
Yeah.
The Tower was not for me.
I might have finally found somewhere to use my ability—
but that did not mean I had become stronger.
When used on a person, it was still nothing more than an ability that slightly increased Regeneration.
“I’ll just figure out how to make money with this little guy.”
Oh, and as for the buff my sister supposedly received—
it had absolutely no effect on me.
When I tried investigating further—
[You do not meet the conditions.]
The System made that fact painfully clear.
I had already eaten at least a hundred cherry tomatoes too.
It felt terribly unfair.
‘I guess I was simply born to have nothing to do with the Tower…….’
Fine.
I was not going in there anyway.
Grow quickly, my little golden goose.
BANG! BOOM!
White Lotus’s Special Training Room.
Explosive sounds rang out one after another.
“Physical rhythm normal. Mana levels normal.”
“……And the readings?”
“More than three times her usual values.”
SMACK!
Baek Yulheon’s palm struck his forehead.
The crisp sound echoed throughout the measurement room.
“Be careful. You’ll make your hair loss worse.”
“……I know. But how am I supposed to contain myself?”
Beneath the broad forehead now marked with a red handprint—
was a radiant smile.
His expression was so carefree that he looked as though he did not have a single worry in the world.
His gaze remained fixed beyond the glass window.
On the other side stood the face of White Lotus.
Jeong Sohyeon.
“There’s no drug reaction, nothing abnormal about her mana, and it definitely wasn’t a Second Awakening.”
One of White Lotus’s employees looked at Baek Yulheon.
“How did you do it?”
“……Me?”
“Who else is here besides you, Guild Master? You did something to Ms. Sohyeon, didn’t you?”
“How would I possibly do that? If I had something capable of this, I would’ve used it ages ago.”
“……It wasn’t you? I thought you might have turned to the underworld because the guild was on the verge of collapse.”
“Even if the entire guild building collapsed, I wouldn’t go anywhere near that world.”
The employee seemed surprised by Baek Yulheon’s response.
Their hands left the keyboard.
“……Then are you saying Ms. Sohyeon simply became stronger on her own?”
“Who knows? What do you think?”
“There are no abnormal reactions, so no one directly altered her body. There aren’t any changes to her skills either, so in other words…….”
“In other words?”
“A highly effective buff?”
BOOM!!
Another air-splitting explosion rang out.
Baek Yulheon’s gaze shifted back toward the training room.
A greatsword larger than the person wielding it.
Cracks were visible all across the room.
Even with the naked eye, the aura of mana could be seen.
“…….”
Baek Yulheon fell silent and simply watched her.
BOOM! BANG!
The training room was gradually being destroyed.
The sight contrasted so starkly with how she had been a year ago that—
“……Just what did you do?”
he quietly asked from too far away for her to hear.
The core of the guild.
A pillar that could never be allowed to waver.
That pillar, which had already been half-broken—
had returned.
“Damage to the training room has exceeded eighty percent.”
“……Stop her first.”