“The most dangerous things don’t look broken. They look perfect.”

The tram hummed along the elevated line, its glass sides flashing reflections of morning light. Below, the city stretched outward like a mosaic—tiers of steel, hanging gardens, and the slow shimmer of irrigation pipes snaking across rooftops.

The closer the tram climbed to the upper district, the cleaner everything looked. Street banners rippled with the crest of the Agri-Guild Council: a stylized leaf embedded in a circuit. I hugged my satchel to my chest, notebook wedged under one arm, pretending to admire the view. Really, I was listening. Two office workers across the aisle were deep in their morning debate.
“Tier gossip again,” one said, tugging her scarf tighter. “They claim Tier One worlds have cities built entirely of light. You believe that?”

“If they do, why would they waste their time watching us?” her friend replied. “We’re barely holding on at Tier Five pending. Half our systems still rely on manual pollination.”

A third passenger leaned forward, voice low and tired. “No wars, no unity, no recognition. We’re a house calling itself a city before the roof’s even nailed.”

Their conversation flowed into politics, guild taxation, and orbital housing schemes—rumors of “space villas” sold to investors who’d never left the ground. I took notes anyway. Gossip revealed what people feared. By the time the tram glided into the World Agriculture Exhibition Plaza, my page was filled with fragments: Tier whispers. Budgets. Mars villas. False pride. All of them said the same thing—our world was small, and everyone was pretending it wasn’t.

A pang throbbed behind my eyes—the shard reminding me of its price. I breathed slowly, sipping from my flask of fountain water. The ache dulled, but faint threads of meaning lingered in the voices around me, almost as if words wanted to rearrange themselves into patterns only I could see.

---

Arrival

The exhibition complex loomed over the plaza. Its walls shimmered with curved glass, panels refracting sunlight into shifting bands. A pair of security drones hovered at the entrance, their lenses blinking in sequence. When I stepped through the main gate, a warm pulse brushed against my wristband.

“Identity verified,” a pleasant synthetic voice said. “Student pass authorized. Welcome to the World Agriculture Exhibition, District 14-North.”

The air inside hit me immediately — humid, clean, almost sweet. A thin mist hung in the air, carrying the scent of soil and ozone. The hall stretched wider than any greenhouse I’d ever seen, its ceiling lost behind layers of light diffusers. Rows of displays gleamed under careful light, each rare specimen sealed behind glass with glowing panels scrolling their information: origin, care, difficulty ratings.

[ Official source: http://www.betwix.co — © JL Chee ]

People moved in quiet reverence, murmuring to one another as if walking through a cathedral of the living. Security scanners framed every corridor—smooth silver arches humming softly, mapping temperature changes and scanning for unregistered samples. At the center of the atrium, a holo-banner proclaimed:

<The Future Of Sustainable Earthlife: Curated By The Agri-Guild Council.>

I barely knew where to start. My satchel bulged as I stuffed it with pamphlets, scanned every QR code I could, sketched rigs and mist columns that looked half like machines, half like daydreams.I caught myself whispering,

“If it’s the future, why does it smell so sterile?” A middle-aged man beside me laughed politely, assuming I was impressed.

“Ah. The passion of youth,” he said. “Always chasing miracles.” He moved on without waiting for a reply. But I hadn’t meant it as praise. I meant it as an accusation.

---

The Displays

Rows upon rows of glass pods lined the exhibition floor, each housing a plant species either endangered or long restricted. Small placards hovered beside them, glowing with animated data—origin, ideal humidity, harvest cycles, yield scores. Every detail looked immaculate. Too immaculate.

“So clean,” I muttered. “So… dead.”

I leaned closer to the nearest pod. My nose nearly touched the glass. I touched the pod’s display rereading the fine print. My Second Sight pulsed weakly — the lingering side effect of the shard I’d swallowed weeks before. At first, it had only given me headaches and flashes of color. Now, the flashes carried meaning. As I walked, faint overlays flickered across my vision: percentages, micro-fluctuations, the soft pulse of photosynthetic rhythms. Some displays shimmered with stable hues. Others bled faint warnings—light too cold, soil too dry, nutrient lines too weak. It was knowledge. A grower’s instinct that had found a way to communicate.

“Careful,” a voice murmured nearby. I straightened too fast. A young man stood a few steps away. A staff exhibition badge clipped to his collar, hands folded behind his back like he was waiting for someone else. His gaze flicked from the placard to my notebook, then back again.

“They don’t usually like people touching the displays,” he added lightly. Curious, not accusing—but attentive in a way that made my skin prickle.

“Sorry,” I said, forcing a smile. “Just… reading.” He nodded, already losing interest, but not before I caught him glancing once more at the plant. At me. I stepped back, heart ticking faster. I walked further into the exhibit.
I stopped before a towering glass cylinder labeled ALPINE WHISPERLEAF — Category: Restricted Hybrid. My breath caught. Families grew rough Lacelife on sills for burns and fevers, but this—this was the rare kind that legends spun around. The one whose threads, coaxed right, could knit skin or even touch deeper wounds.

The plant inside the glass trembled faintly under a misting rig. Its thick leaves gleamed like jade. And near the base, I saw them: the beginnings of thread filaments, pale as spider silk. The placard read:

Soil: Synthetic composite (Sterilized)
Nutrient System: A-Series Hydroline
Humidity: 65% Optimal
Light: Regulated 12-hour cycle

“Sterilized soil?” I murmured. “You might as well plant them in ash.” The mist hissed again, too frequent, and the leaf tips wilted slightly. The data on the screen stayed green—perfect metrics—but I could feel the imbalance pulsing like static. The plant was starving while being doused in premium nutrient liquids. I leaned closer, scanning the text, until my eyes blurred. For a moment, faint glyphs shimmered behind the printed letters—formulas, ratios, subtle notes written in a hand that wasn’t mine:

micronutrients depleted / humidity mismatch / root pulse 4% below norm.

I blinked hard. When the letters settled, the placard was blank again.

“Why would the Guild think using sterilized soil is a good idea for endangered plants???” she muttered under her breath.

---

The Custodian

“The answer varies depending on who’s asking.” The voice was low, threaded with amusement. I turned to find an old man standing beside the display, rag in hand, wiping condensation from the glass. His uniform was plain grey, but his left sleeve bore a faint spiral insignia, half-faded with age.He noticed me staring and smiled.

“Investors love the shine, the drama, the theater. Makes them think the machines are smarter than the soil.”

“So this whole thing is an elaborate stage play?” I asked while sweeping my hand indicating the entire exhibition dome.

“It’s always been theater,” he said. “The Guild calls it transparency. But plants don’t grow under sterile spotlights.” I tilted my head, trying to read him.

“You sound like you don’t work for them.”

“I work around them.” He pressed a finger to the glass. He tapped the side of the display. “That one’s starving. Everything looks alive until it isn’t.You noticed what most don’t—the plants under these conditions are slowly wasting away. You’ve got good eyes.”

“A true grower’s instinct,” I said before I could stop myself. He paused and huffed a laugh.

“Ah. One of those.” He reached into his coat and drew out a folded pamphlet, the kind stacked free at the entrance. “You might like this display more than most,” he said. “It’s the Guild’s official story.” He turned it over, revealing faint writing on the blank side. “This one’s mine. Since you’re paying such close attention—keep it.”

Before I could ask, he produced a small vial, sealed and dusted with condensation. Inside lay a pair of seeds — small, veined, slightly dehydrated.

“This species refuses to wake,” he said, holding it up between two fingers. “Every lab, every guild farm, same result. But sometimes, something grows when it meets the right hands.”

“Why me?” I asked cautiously. He studied my expression, the corners of his mouth twitching.

“Because you saw beyond the prestige and saw the real problem.” I blinked.

“And if I can germinate them?” He smiled, folding his rag neatly over his arm. He met my gaze, calm but assessing. “If you can coax it alive, send word to the address printed inside. No tricks. No deadlines.” I hesitated.

“What happens after I do?” His smile barely moved.

“Then someone who listens might finally listen back. Oh, and you can keep the plants.” He placed the vial in my palm and walked away, vanishing into the drifting mist before I could think of what to say. When I looked down, the pamphlet’s blank side now held a faint spiral watermark—two seeds facing each other, one open, one closed.

[ Official source: http://www.betwix.co — © JL Chee ]

---

Departure

The tram rattled as it descended toward the lower districts, the crowd thinner now, looser. A cluster of boys about my age spilled into the seats across the aisle, laughing too loudly, shoulders bumping as if the space belonged to them by default.

“I’m telling you,” one of them said, boots propped on the rail, “if your SPACE isn’t at least four hundred plus square, don’t even bother applying.”

“That’s not official,” another scoffed.

“Doesn’t have to be. They say it’s about ‘capacity.’ About whether your environment can support advanced coursework.” He made air quotes with his fingers. “Which is just a fancy way of saying: big plots get priority.”

A third boy snorted. “My uncle says they don’t want students who can’t practice at scale. What’s the point of training a grower who can only work a balcony?”

Their laughter rolled over me, careless and unexamined.

“It’s not about whether your SPACE works,” one of the boys said, stretching his legs across the aisle. “It’s about whether it scales.”

“Scales how?”

“Horizontally. Simulation fields. Crop rotation zones. If your SPACE is just a room, they say you can’t run the full curriculum.”

“That’s garbage,” another scoffed. “My aunt grows better yields in a converted bedroom than half the guild kids with orchards.”

The first boy shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. The exams don’t test skill first. They test capacity.”

“So unless your family owns land—”

“—or rents guild acreage—”

“—you’re capped before you even start.”

They laughed, not cruelly. Just stating weather. I pressed my notebook tighter to my chest. My SPACE wasn’t small. It was precise. Tuned. Alive in ways wide plots rarely were. But precision didn’t count if the rubric measured breadth. I looked down at my hands, still faintly aching from the shard’s aftereffects. My SPACE barely cleared a hundred square feet – the size of my bedroom. Enough to grow life. Not enough, apparently, to be taken seriously.

The boys kept talking—about entrance exams, about provisional seats, about how “only a handful” were even worth chasing—but their words blurred into a dull hum. Not anger. Not despair. Just a quiet, familiar pressure settling in my chest. It wasn’t that education was forbidden. It was that the door was narrow, and the measuring stick had nothing to do with talent. My SPACE could hold a shed, several raised beds, a pond, and a tower of living things — but not the kind of empty width institutions liked to mistake for potential. I turned the vial over in my hands, watching the seed catch the light. It glow faintly — almost like a beacon. Ink shifted in my bag, chittering softly.

“Awake,” it said, clear as thought. Sprout rustled beside it, a low hum vibrating in the back of my mind. I smiled faintly, realizing I understood both. The shard hadn’t given me madness. It gave me ears. Outside, the city glimmered under a setting sun that made the glass rooftops blaze gold. I closed my notebook around the pamphlet, tracing the faint spiral watermark on the back. I closed my eyes as the tram dipped into shadow, the seed’s faint glow lingering on my mind.

==End of Chapter 6==

---

#Action, #Adventure, #AlternateWorlds, #ComingOfAge, #CozyFantasy, #Fantasy, #FemaleProtagonist, #HiddenPower, #Josei, #LightNovel, #ProgressionFantasy, #SciFi, #SUSH, #SliceOfLife, #SliceOfLifeFantasy, #SlowBurn, #WeakToStrong, #WebNovel