While the kursi arc ship had always been fairly quiet, once the arc crossed the threshold onto the final planet, planet 39309, or Emerald Lash, the ship fell completely silent.

It wasn't because the planet was especially strange or beautiful. Eyrin wondered if the silence was due to the circumstances: this was the final destination before reaching planet 39123--Earth. Since Earth was as foreign a planet to him as any other, he hadn't anticipated the pensive looks that came over the countenances of the human kursi. While all the kursi were shielding their shells from one another--nobody liked to wear emotions on their metaphorical sleeve--Eyrin had been practicing reading human expressions. It had been one productive way of passing time while traveling for hours on the arc.

Especially when they played the human game of poker. Especially then.

How long have they been gone? he wondered. Based on Juserin's intelligence briefing, they couldn't have left Earth more than two month's previous.

Eyrin cleared his throat. "This is the swamp planet," he stated. "What kind of city-seed do you all expect will grow in this environment?"

Zhou yawned. "We had at least one swamp city-seed on Earth," he commented. "Anybody care to look it up on the chip reader?"

Nobody replied.

He shrugged. "We'll see in an hour or so first-hand."

Zhou Wang had a good point: this planet was smaller than the others, and its relatively flat surface made for smooth gliding over its surface.

Eyrin felt himself growing somewhat restless on the needle-shaped ship. He much preferred running, gliding, or flying on Clarissa to sitting still in the control room. It wasn't because of anything as trivial as adrenaline withdrawal. Rather, it came out of a strong desire to use and develop his boons.

Even as he looked out the window and peered down on the endless mass of coiling green characterizing Emerald Lash's surface, he attempted to improve his mastery of the artist profession. He tried to find inspiration in the designs and shapes in the overgrowth, though wasn't having much success. Everything below was a shapeless mass of green. He hated to admit it, but he'd been making fairly slow progress. As the artist profession was the only one he had yet to elevate to the expert level, he couldn't help but see the artist profession as an annoying bottleneck.

He frowned. Seeing it that way definitely isn't making progress any easier.

While Eyrin recognized that he was only second to Thaddeus in his boon advancement, every second he spent fruitlessly working on the artist profession felt like wasted time. It had only been eight days since Thaddeus had magically attained all the basic boons and began to amass path points, and Eyrin knew that he wasn't that far behind, but even so...He'd taken on Thaddeus as his protege: lagging behind despite his age advantage and experience irked him.

A few minutes later, one of the kursi, Lisa, walked over to him. Eyrin turned around and nodded his head. She gave him and smile and clasped her hands behind her back as she stood by the window-screen.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Finding inspiration," Eyrin sighed.

Lisa studied the terrain outside the craft and made a face. "Honestly, I have no idea how you're supposed to get any inspiration from that."

Eyrin blinked twice, smiling wryly underneath his veil. "How encouraging."

"It's like someone was lazy and just copy-and-pasted the exact same patch of land over and over again."

Eyrin coughed. "That is exactly what it feels like."

Lisa cocked her head, expression thoughtful. "Honestly, it is a little suspect."

Eyrin's brow ridges rose up. "What?"

"You've never been able to sense plant shells, right?"

Eyrin blinked once. "Plants are incapable of intelligent thought," he said. "So no, never. Why?"

"Hmm...nevermind," she said. She furrowed her brow. "I have an idea, but I won't be able to test it until we touch down."

What is she talking about? Eyrin wondered, now curious. "Regarding the swamp?"

"Yeah. I have a hunch that the swampland is all interconnected."

What? Why? Eyrin was surprised by the woman's assertion. Eyrin didn't think much of the swamp's uniformity, given that all plants of the same species tended to adopt a uniform appearance.

"What leads you to this conclusion?"

Lisa shrugged. "Like I said, just a hunch. I'll have to wait until we actually get off this ship to test my hypothesis."

"You do realize this is a swamp," he said, giving her a confused look. "Don't you?"

"...Yeah...?"

"It's supposed to be uniform."

Lisa's mouth hinged open. "Not like this," she insisted. "It's like this is all one giant plant."

Is she daft? "Exactly."

"What!?"

---

Dean had gone ahead this time, though he'd taken Fartuun with him and forced her to found the new city-seed.

"I still don't understand why you're passing the seed off to me," she stated, giving him a look. The two of them were currently in the Anima, the central building at the base of the Spire. Because of the relative lack of administratively-oriented quasi-sapients, Dean decided to go ahead and start setting up the city-seed's residential records.

The process was fairly easy: He and Fartuun simply copied the names of the three-hundred or so remaining sapients/quasies into the residences ledger. First, back in Brickwood, he'd cloned the dragonleaf ledger sheet containing everyone's housing information. Afterwards, he'd manually blanked-out the names of all those who had stayed behind. All that they needed to do was sync this city-seed's blank ledger with the modified one from Brickwood.

"You're head of technological innovation for COTD," Dean pointed out. "And you only have one city-seed."

"Isn't one already a lot?"

Exactly! "Yes, but better you than me."

Fartuun gave him a coy smile. "You could've asked other people to found the seed," she said.

Dean's face began to slightly redden. "Well, it's too late for that now. Besides, you're the one with the V-Tap; if anyone's cut out to manage multiple city-seeds and do it well, it's you."

She laughed. "That's true," she acknowledged. "Though I'm not sure how much the V-Tap will help in running a city-seed."

"What do you mean?"

"They seem to run themselves," she said with a shrug, pushing a coil of hair behind her ear. "The Dragon has made them incredibly self-sufficient."

That's true; even though I knew nothing about running a city--nothing at all--Jerboaland turned out alright. He couldn't help but attribute most of the success to the numerous utilities of dragonleaf and the many quasi-sapients, such as the quasi-snakes, that helped transport people from tumultuous regions to the safety of Jerboaland.

Then again, some of the city-seeds had been complete failures, requiring violent intervention from Basalith's jaybirds as part of the "war on oppression." Dean recalled this being a particularly egregious issue in Russia, but even in the United States there had been a stream of jaybird-liberated refugees into Basalith.

Though it seemed like most victims weren't coming from city-seeds. Many people still lived in dragonleaf-refurbished homes. The proliferation COTD's physical boons, along with the introduction of mountable quasi-sapients, made commuting to far-off city-seeds a trivial affair. This being the case, the distribution of the population at large had remained fairly constant. Jerboaland had been the exception to the rule, though Dean attributed that to the war-torn, poverty-stricken region where the city-seed had arisen.

After they finished updating the ledger, the two of them exited the city-seed to clear a section of the swampland to serve as an airfield.

"I've never seen swampland before," Fartuun commented as she strutted out of the city-seed's gate.

"This isn't a swamp," Dean replied. "We don't even have a proper word for it."

"Oh?"

Dean gave her a look. "I spoke to Prince Eyrin about this planet a few days past. Apparently, the English translation for--" he paused, "actually, probably any Earth language's translation for this planet's ecosystem is incorrect."

"Swamp isn't right?" she asked.

Dean tsked. "We don't have anything approaching what this thing is."

Fartuun cocked her head, her hair draping over her shoulder. "Now I'm really curious...what do you mean?"

Dean held up his hand. "Watch." He slashed out into the thick grove bordering the nascent city-seed. As he did, the swamp began to thrash in the immediate area around them. Even parts of the swamp that hadn't been hit began to writhe like worms.

Fartuun grimaced. "The V-Tap says that this entire grove of trees is in communication with one another," she said, looking over at Dean. Actually...it seems like she's looking through me.

"It's trying to map out exactly how these trees are all communicating one another. It's drawing lines all over the place and drawing out red target boxes..." She stepped backward. "It's dizzying."

Interesting, Dean thought, rubbing his jaw. Fartuun was still a novice at utilizing the V-Tap; if COTD was serious about trying to disseminate similar, if less invasive, implants, it should definitely come up with a combat regimen. While the V-Tap came with a tutorial mode, it clearly hadn't prepared Fartuun for this kind of unexpected circumstance. The implant seemed to be tracking the movements of the trees like it would a team of hostiles.

I wasn't aware that the V-Tap had been made with combat in mind, Dean muttered internally. AI Ninety-Seven definitely never mentioned anything about it...Not that his silence was a surprise. Dean couldn't help but feel that the android was keeping information from them, especially after hearing about the android's cryptic remarks about "waiting for Bath's arrival" for thousands of years.

"Your V-Tap is on the right track," Dean said. "The trees are communicating with each other...but not in the way you think. They're actually all part of one organism."

The queasy expression on Fartuun's face disappeared. Her eyes widened and her mouth popped open in disbelief.

"That's absolutely amazing," she exclaimed. She began to turn in a slow circle, as though taking in every angle of the swampland. "This thing must be the biggest organism we've ever encountered," she said. "And just imagine if this were a bigger planet..."

Dean nodded and crossed his arms. "Yeah. Well, anyways, we should probably clear the airfield now."

"What's the organism called?" Fartuun asked.

Dean shrugged. "Not sure. Like I said, the technical translation for the official word is 'swamp,' which is clearly wrong."

Fartuun cocked her head. "I was just communicating with Vladimir," she said. "And asked him to do a search for me across his chip-reader."

Dean nodded slowly in understanding. Vladimir Sokolov, the vanguard's chief engineer, had been the second recipient of the V-Tap. The man wasn't on Dean's radar because he was always absent from leadership meetings, choosing to spend every waking moment working on replicating alien technology. Dean didn't begrudge the man, though; because of him, they had succeeded in reconstructing the Egdelek Arc in only a few days.

"The two of us both started from two different queries, but we came to the same conclusion: it's probably a species of giant tree fungus."

"Giant...tree fungus?"

Seeing his expression, Fartuun burst into laughter. "It's nothing like that fungus you found underneath Whitesun," she said.

Dean laughed nervously. "Good to know."

"The encyclopedia's biological life is actually classified by a different taxonomic hierarchy than we use on Earth. It's actually a lot more complicated than the one you're probably familiar with...not that we should be surprised. One of the major differences is the addition of a kingdom that's similar to both plantae and fungi."

"Sounds reasonable," he said. "So this thing is a completely different kind of organism than we're used to."

"It's exciting, isn't it?"

Seeing her glowing expression, Dean couldn't help but smile back. "Story of my life since COTD," he snorted. "But we really should get busy clearing the land; the ships will be arriving soon."

"What should we call it?" Fartuun asked as she followed him into the overgrowth.

"You're asking me?"

Fartuun smirked. "Fine; I'll name it after the city-seed."

"Isn't that redundant?"

Fartuun humphed. "The planet's called emerald lash, and it's capital city naturally called Emeraline."

"Naturally."

"So we can call this plant fungus 'Marsh Lash.'"

"Doesn't that sound kind of...violent?"

"Nope!"