The botanical garden had not looked like this yesterday.
Zayden stood at the edge of the stone path and looked at what had become of it overnight.
The medicinal herb rows had pushed beyond their borders.
Thick, fresh coils of vine had scaled the eastern wall, dense and green, still growing with the unhurried certainty of things that had been at it for years rather than hours.
Blossoms that belonged to late spring were open and heavy, petals wide against the pale morning sky.
The air carried something underneath the familiar smell of earth and dried roots — something deeper, something that didn’t quite belong to any labeled bed in this garden.
Nobody was talking.
The students gathered around Professor Richard had been standing in silence for almost a minute.
Still processing what he had just said.
This is not growth at all.
Richard himself stood at the center of it, hands clasped behind his back, studying the overgrown vine on the eastern wall.
He didn’t look alarmed.
He didn’t look confused.
He looked like a man who had just seen something arrive that he had been quietly expecting for a long time.
Then he turned to face the class.
“I know the reason,” he said.
His voice carried without effort.
Every student leaned forward.
“It is, in fact, very interesting.”
He let that sit in the air for a moment, watching the effect of it move through the group.
The garden was silent except for the faint creak of the vine against old stone.
Then: “However.” He unclasped his hands.
“I have no intention of telling you directly. That would be a waste of a question this good.” His eyes moved unhurriedly across the gathered faces.
“What you are standing in right now — that is your assignment. The first student to bring me the correct, properly substantiated answer before my next session will receive full bonus marks on the final examination.”
He paused.
“And a personal gift from my private collection.”
That second part landed differently.
Nobody knew exactly what lived in Professor Richard’s private collection.
He had never described it.
Over the years, that specific silence had built its own reputation — the kind that made even students who didn’t care about bonus marks suddenly very interested.
Glances were exchanged.
The strange, off-season blossoms swayed slightly in the morning air.
The impossible vine gleamed along the top of the wall.
“One last thing,” Richard added, already beginning to turn.
“My next session is in two days. Use the time wisely. All the best to each of you.”
He said it the way a door closes — with quiet, settled finality.
The group stirred.
Low voices filled the garden.
Zayden didn’t move immediately.
He looked at the vine on the eastern wall.
It had crested the stone and was pushing over the edge, reaching further up and outward.
The colour was wrong in a way that was hard to name — a green that was too vivid, too saturated, as though something had turned the intensity of it up past what ordinary growth was supposed to produce.
It didn’t look sick.
It looked urgent.
Something drove this.
The thought settled clean and cold behind his eyes.
This didn’t happen on its own.
He crouched at the nearest bed and carefully separated a handful of samples from the marked specimens.
Herb bundles, a few clipped segments from the affected growth, material for the practical record.
He tucked them into his bag with deliberate care.
When he stood and looked back toward the professor, the group around Richard had mostly dispersed.
A man stood close beside him who hadn’t been there before.
Young, perhaps early thirties — a neatly pressed brown waistcoat over a white-striped shirt, wire spectacles catching the morning light, several pens clipped neatly into his coat pocket.
He leaned toward the professor and said something low — shaped specifically not to carry, not to reach anyone standing two steps away.
Richard listened without his expression changing.
The man spoke again.
Something short.
Deliberate.
Whatever it was, the professor’s hands moved slightly at his sides.
A small, involuntary adjustment.
Zayden turned away before he was noticed watching.
Not faculty.
Not a student.
Someone else entirely.
An anomaly in the Bright Mountains above Amber City.
Impossible overnight growth in the academy’s botanical garden.
And a private visitor who couldn’t wait until after the session was over.
He walked at an even pace.
This is not a botanical problem.
Whatever the question is — it connects to the Aethernal System.
I can feel it.
He filed the thought and kept walking.
Professor Richard reached his office before the footsteps in the corridor outside had fully faded.
He had barely set his folio down when the knock came.
“Come in.”
The door opened.
The man from the garden stepped inside.
Up close, in the quieter confines of the office, he had the posture of someone used to carrying important information over long distances — and finally, with something close to relief, setting it down.
“Professor Richard.” He extended a hand.
“Elos Park. Research division, fourth branch. Thank you for seeing me.”
Richard shook it once.
“Sit.”
Elos Park sat.
He placed a leather document folder on the corner of the desk between them — not opening it immediately, but setting it there with the deliberateness of someone who wanted it visible before any words were exchanged.
“I’ll be direct,” he said.
“I wouldn’t have come in person if this could have been sent in correspondence.” His brown eyes were composed behind the wire spectacles.
“I think you already know what I’m here to discuss.”
Richard looked at him across the desk.
“Say it anyway,” he said.
“The Bright Mountains,” Elos Park said.
The room was quiet.
“I’m here to discuss what’s happening up there,” Elos Park continued.
“Not the version in the public reports. The real version. And based on your reputation, Professor — I believe you already know what that is.”
Richard said nothing for a moment.
Then he settled back in his chair and looked at the folder.
“Open it,” he said.
The classroom was different by late morning.
Warmer, with the pale light coming in through the tall arched windows.
The stone walls still carried the faint outlines of old decorative carving that had never been fully plastered over — the remnants of what the building had been before the academy took it, still visible along the upper corners.
The desks were arranged on a slight incline, heavy and dark-wooded, rows of them climbing back toward the rear.
The whole space had the feeling of a lecture hall that had been placed inside a fortress and told to make itself useful.
Most of the students were already packed and ready to leave.
Zayden gathered his things at a measured pace.
Around him, chairs scraped stone.
Conversations came back to life in the way they always did at the end of a session — plans, complaints, quick coordination.
Near the back row, two students were still debating the garden challenge.
“Has to be an elemental reaction in the soil,” one of them said.
“The soil doesn’t glow like that,” said the other.
Zayden said nothing and moved into the aisle.
Natasha fell into step beside him with the easy naturalness of someone who had long since stopped treating it as a decision.
Antonio joined on the other side, satchel over one shoulder, looking considerably more present than he had during most of the session.
“Did you collect samples?” Antonio asked.
“This morning,” Zayden said.
“In the garden.”
“You’re going for the bonus marks.”
“I’m going for the answer. The bonus marks are attached.”
Natasha glanced at him sideways.
She had a particular way of paying attention — not direct, something lateral, as though looking at people from angles they didn’t know were being used.
“The standard references won’t have it,” she said.
“Whatever caused that growth — it’s not in any field text I’ve seen.”
“I know,” Zayden said.
She held his gaze for a beat longer than necessary.
“Be careful with how far you take that question,” she said.
Gentle.
But it was still a warning.
They parted at the corridor junction — different classes, different directions.
Zayden walked the eastern hall alone, the samples solid and quiet in his bag, the image of that overgrown vine still sitting at the edge of his thoughts like something he couldn’t quite put down. The source of this chapter is NovelPing.
Two days.
He kept his pace unhurried.
Start tonight.
The folder was open on the desk now.
Elos Park had organized the pages carefully — field observation logs, dated measurement tables, diagrams drawn in precise ink with margin notes running in two different hands.
The work of multiple people, pressed into a single coherent record.
“What is occurring in the Bright Mountains cannot be classified as a natural phenomenon,” he said.
“It cannot fit within any current scientific or academic framework. The elemental readings from samples taken in the upper ridges are not consistent with anything the Aethernal System should be producing at ambient levels.” His voice was measured, but that measured quality had the unmistakable texture of effort.
“Based on the deepest historical archives the research council was able to access — not the standard records, the oldest ones — the last time anything comparable was documented was not within living memory.”
He paused.
“Not within the last century,” he said.
“The records suggest the last occurrence was considerably older than that. We don’t have a precise date.”
Professor Richard looked at the pages without reaching for them.
He did not look surprised.
He looked like a man hearing the official confirmation of something he had been sitting alone with for a long time.
“The primary concentration is still in the upper ridges,” Elos Park continued.
“The vegetation anomalies, the magnetic interference, the resonance signatures — all of it pointing upward, toward the peaks. But the secondary spread has already begun.” His voice didn’t change pitch, but something in it tightened.
“It is moving downward. Toward Amber City.”
“And the higher authorities?” Richard asked.
“Aware.” A short beat.
“They want it contained. Minimally documented. Not disclosed publicly until they determine how to respond.”
The professor was quiet.
“Whether that is actually realistic given the rate of progression,” Elos Park added, “is a question they have not asked anyone to formally answer.”
The office was very still.
From somewhere down the stone corridor, the distant sounds of students filtered through — footsteps, voices, the ordinary sounds of an ordinary afternoon at Sunlight Academy.
It seemed, at that moment, to be coming from somewhere impossibly far away.
Professor Richard said nothing for a long moment.
Then he turned to the wooden cabinet built into the wall to his left.
He opened the lower drawer.
It was packed with papers.
Layered deep and carefully ordered — personal field records, private observations, notes compiled entirely outside any official channel over many years.
The quiet, private work of a man who had been watching something approach from a long way off and had chosen, until now, to watch it alone.
Between the stacked pages — barely visible at first, nearly hidden in the weight of everything piled above and below it — a faint green light pulsed.
Low.
Slow.
Unbroken.
Quiet as a second heartbeat that had been living in the dark for a very long time.
Professor Richard looked at it.
He did not reach in.
“Seems,” he said, his voice entirely level, entirely quiet, “that it is finally time to use that.”
Elos Park had stopped moving in his chair.
His eyes were fixed on the glow between the papers.
The composure he’d carried into the room — the disciplined, organized presentation of a man who had come with everything prepared — had gone completely still.
His pen was no longer moving.
The green light pulsed again.
Patient.
Unchanged.
The way something is patient when it has been waiting long enough to stop counting.
Richard still did not close the drawer.
That light didn’t arrive today.
It’s been in that drawer a long time — and Professor Richard has been choosing, every single day, to leave it there.
Now he isn’t making that choice anymore.
What is it?
Why does it glow green?
What is the connection between that light, the impossible growth in the botanical garden, and whatever is moving down from the peaks of the Bright Mountains toward Amber City?
And why does Zayden’s instinct — that quiet, certain feeling that this is connected to the Aethernal System — feel less like a theory and more like a warning?
Something old is waking up above this city.
The people who know about it are not protecting anyone from it.
They’re protecting the information.
There’s a difference.
Zayden is going to find it.
Thank you so much for reading Chapter 16.
Drop your theories below — I read every single one.
See you in Chapter 17.