As Mark or should I say, Novus waited in a meditation induced comma like state, after all he had nothing to do other than let the time flow and let his seed grow.

In the Endless forest day turned to night, the hunters slowly started to look for prey but none crossed the small circular glade in the middle of nowhere, at its very center a gentle golden light pulsed over and over, it looked just like a little firefly decided to land and rest on the soft grass and wait for a mate to pass by.

On a closer look one would notice that the light is no bug, but a tiny seed the size of a pea. On its surface golden smooth lines like veins started to form and spread, those on the bottom slowly separated from the seed and slowly burrowed in to the ground. And those at the top weaved in to the veins of the blade of grass. It slowly protruded upwards until it reached about 2 cm in height and about 1/10cm in width, only then did the glow slowly recede back to the seed.

Next morning Novus, in the middle of his meditation had awoken by the feeling of a gentle breeze, like a mother slowly combing with her fingers her childs hair to wake him up for the day.

As his mind slowly loaded back to optimum he finally found out that he was feeling like something was gripping his arms and legs and left his 5th appendage to hang. With a bit of focus, he could feel out his body he looked like a lovely young glass blade if he ever saw one, just because he was the first one he saw it still counts. And just above the ground was a small round seed from which it all stemmed.

His blade long and thin reaching for the heavens preparing to steal the light from the world, most of his thin and beautiful roots were intertwined with those of the grass around him, and surprisingly he could feel what they could, like an extension of a limb, and a few free roots were almost 10cm deep in the ground greedily sucking minerals and water, and using the light on his skin to feed him. He felt both full and happy to be alive.

With a bit of probing and sharing of senses with the other grass he found why there was a glade here, sort of. On the edge of the clearing there were thin tree roots trying to encroach on the small grassland but they were slowly being sucked to death by the tens upon tens of small roots.

The grasses used their numbers to prevent the trees on the edge from growing too big and casting an unfavorable shade on every one and even stealing their nutrients. For all Novus knew this was his first day as a common piece of grass but he already felt like part of a community.

First things first, as this wasn’t his first rodeo he knew that all skills had a passive and active ability. So for instance the Mind Flay skill of the Mind Mage class is quite hard to train but its passives are worth it, passively it makes you mental attacks more powerful and allows you to just shred trough mental defenses.

Its active is a charged Mind Flay blast was the mind equivalent of a fragmentation grenade, it would go off and make a mess of your enemies mind preventing them from concentrating and mounting a proper offensive. And another active was to combine it with something else like Mind Blast which a simple are of effect of psi energy which is meant to stagger and confuse for a moment and with Mind Flay it’s even worse, It can easily disable multiple opponents especially those is close range, making the easy pickings.

So now he had to figure out how to control those skills, usually there are tips in their descriptions which is why a lot of people try to get the “Know thy self” trait instead of paying money every week to the church for them to do it for them and even then their truthfulness and your privacy leave more to be desired and its pretty obvious what Novus used.

The first tip is obviously from the Grass racial class, racial classes are something the monsters have instead of professions like humanoids, they aren’t as powerful but upon completion allow the individual to rapidly evolve in to something greater and maybe even something new never seen before.

And the tip being about collecting the light of the sun, and controlling the roots, for now they could only probably grow in a specific direction but if it is to be believed he could actually fully control the roots eventually, and this is Novus legendary optimism on display.

The roots themselves will need practice, maybe learn to wiggle some small one he would grow on the surface then slowly work his way down. As for the light he had no idea, it’s one of those things the more you know the harder it gets but he will figure something out, maybe treat it like mana?

Now to mention the elephant in the room, the crappy “plant” joke. It probably means he could plan out the development of his body with something, and the only thing is the growth skill, from his days as a farmer he could try to force his roots to grow tubes like a potato and eventually try to store some semblance of mana, turning them in to organic mana stones of some sort.

Work, work. At least if he is ever overloaded mentally he can just relax and sync in to the collective mind of grass, it’s quite pleasant and primitive, the only thing they do is enjoy the sun and dream of sunny days.

With all of his planning he never noticed when the warmth on his leaf cooled down and the temperature slowly started to drop.

Night was coming. And with it the unheard howls of wolves and beasts alike. And on the peaceful glade several creatures decided to try their luck to see what was here the night before, maybe they would gain essence or more commonly known as experience or some skill that would give them an edge in the fight for survival.

No matter how much they waited nothing seemed out of the ordinary, other than the beasts surrounding a tiny grass meadow in the middle of a forest. As the moon and stars slowly rotated in the sky and dawn approached, the beasts were still standing, stuck in a limbo between a Mexican standoff and a Mexican wave, in the end none chose to start the slaughter as they slowly retreated with only one thought in mind, what a wasted night.

On his second day Novus was ready for action, well as much as he can anyway. First he checked himself and found no change even his roots didn’t grow longer, at this rate he would be stuck here for eternity, as for his neighbors roots looked a bit longer and thicker to him, you know the whole grass looks greener on the other side jig.

So he tried to get the whole “I am feeling full” feeling and direct it to the tip of his roots, because from what he remembers the roots grow from the tip not from the base. For the whole morning he tried to feed his longest root trying to make it even longer. With little success, which was more than the nothing for the whole night of growth, he was even starting to feel puckish.

So he kept going making it longer by a whole tenth, he even managed to split the root in four different directions before continuing straight down. He was elated and slightly peckish. From what he could tell he shouldn’t be able to grow that fast, and where does the material for it come from?

As night slowly came once again he decided not to sleep and instead focus on growing and if he was hungry he would try to actively use photosynthesis in the morning. So it was the same old same old, grueling focus and concentration with boring job equivalent of watching paint dry, but Novus isn’t bored in fact he is having fun. Exploring the sense his so called nutrients carried with themselves around his body from where they come and where they go and how they move and how they interact.

And even without looking he could tell that his skill has improved at least once, as for his roots it was closing in on its 16th centimeter and he decided to branch out the roots every 2nd cm, and so far other that the main root he was barely growing everything else and he was positively hungry, what a great way to start a day.

And now he had to properly eat. Going by the logic of the growth skill, which he used by supplying nutrients to the area he wanted to grow instead of telling it how to grow and having it use the needed materials itself. So he decided to use the things he felt again. The sun he could feel on his small blade of grass with the occasional moving cold spot which could only be the shadows of the other grasses swaying in the breeze.

So he locked his mind on the warm feeling, then he looked to his roots and felt around for something new, and soon he noticed a tiny trickle of something moving from his roots to his seed and then to the leaf, and finally an even smaller stream that he could only describe as tasty was moving down to his seed.

Those small feelings he observed for the bigger part of the day, he noticed two things. The stream coming in to his seed and the one going out were not the same and the tasty feeling was nutrients, it was slowly being supplied across his whole body at a rate that he would need a few days to notice a minor difference and it would take about a two weeks to achieve what he did in a day.

So he once again decided to force nature to work faster. He took the minerals with water stored in his seed and slowly increase the input to his leaves. When they seemed full he would circulate the warm feeling he got from the sun until the food was “baked and warm” then send it back down to his seed for storage.

He slowly repeated until he got a nice slow cycle going, just like a baking factory. From one end comes raw dough and the other comes out tasty baked bread. Simple but effective. And he managed to fill his hunger with just shy of peckish, he really needed to modify his status to show hunger. It would help a lot.

When night came he decided to rest his mind, even though he could probably last without sleep just because he is a meadow grass doesn’t mean he shouldn’t, after all, intelligent creatures need sleep, and he tries not to be an exception.

On the next day it was of the same, he took water with minerals from his roots directed it to his leaf then he slowly turned it into nutrients and then redirected it back to his roots to grow. By midday he found a logistics problem, he was getting too much input from his roots and too little output from his leaf, and his roots were getting harder to grow due to the increased density of the soil.

So he diverted half of his nutrients to the leaf for the first time and let it grow naturally, and the other half he used on the branching roots trying to make them longer and cover larger area.

From his shared connection he could tell that the longest roots of other grases were over 30cm up to 40 while the average for this patch of grass is around 20 with most branching roots going for depth rather than coverage, and due to their close proximity they form something between a cone and a net. Although it was quite sturdy, Novus found it quite inefficient as far as gathering nutrients goes. Thankfully his neighbors aren’t that aggressive so he was getting a steady supply of raw materials for processing and going for depth rather that width with his main root.

On a small meadow not too deep in the forest, if one stopped for a day and observed the life around they would notice that animals consider this a forbidden zone, and the moment someone curious animal tries to enter they would be assaulted by predators who lie in waiting for something in it, and each of them watch each other closely preventing themselves and others from entering.

But if one watched the middle the last few days they would notice a small blade of grass growing rapidly at a pace never seen before, outside of druid’s interference.