People say your life fshes before your eyes when you die.They’re wrong.

  It doesn’t fsh. It doesn’t rewind.It just… ends.

  A horn. Headlights. Screeching rubber against wet asphalt. I remember the smell of rain more than anything. Not fear. Not pain. Just petrichor and the cold knowledge that I was already too te to move.

  I didn’t get a st word. No dramatic exit.Just darkness.

  Then—Air. Earth. Light.

  I opened my eyes to a wooden ceiling. Rough beams. Mismatched nails. A flickering ntern hanging from a chain that looked one good gust away from snapping.

  Everything was… wrong. Too big. Too loud. Too real.

  My body felt smaller. Softer. Useless.

  And when I tried to speak, all that came out was a confused, high-pitched cry. My mouth betrayed me. My lungs shrieked. A woman rushed into the room and scooped me up in trembling arms.

  She was young—maybe mid-twenties—with skin like burnished cy and long bck hair tied in a fraying braid. Her green eyes welled with tears the moment she saw me.

  "You’re safe," she whispered, holding me to her chest like I was made of something more than blood and bad luck. "My little Vriksha..."

  Vriksha.That was the name this world gave me.

  I don’t remember much from those early years, but I remember her—Mina. My mother. Once a maid in a minor noble household, now exiled with the stain of a bastard child.

  She never told me the details. But I saw it in the way she flinched whenever a noble caravan passed our vilge. Heard it in the way the other vilgers whispered when she walked by. The Rhoswen family—a name I’d come to loathe—didn’t kill her for getting pregnant. They just did the next cruelest thing: sent her and her child to rot in Houter.

  A vilge so small it didn’t exist on most maps. A breath away from Hage, yet worlds apart.

  We lived in a crooked shack on the vilge’s edge. The kind of pce that moaned in winter and bled in summer. Most of the floor was dirt. The roof had more holes than tiles. The chimney leaned like it was trying to escape.

  But Mina made it feel like home.

  She sang lulbies from another life and grew herbs in the shade. She stitched soap from ash and oil to barter for bread. She taught me to read using scraps of ruined books, and when she thought I wasn’t looking, she’d cry into her scarf after the market turned her away—again.

  She never bmed me.Not once.Which made it worse.

  The first time I saw magic, I was four.

  A drunk in the vilge square snapped his fingers and lit a barrel on fire just to prove he still could. The fmes danced green. The crowd cpped. No one noticed the child in the corner staring wide-eyed, heart pounding.

  I knew what it was. I knew what this meant.This wasn’t Earth. This was something else.

  I didn’t know the name yet.Didn’t understand the rules.But the world had changed—and I had changed with it.

  At six, I heard the words Clover Kingdom for the first time.

  Two boys from Hage passed through with a merchant. One shouted too loud and had no mana. The other barely spoke and had eyes like frost.

  Yuno, someone called him.It tickled something at the back of my skull. I knew the name, but it didn’t click. I wasn’t a fanboy. Never watched Bck Clover. I preferred physics over fantasy. Fungi over fireballs.

  So I filed it away and moved on.

  At seven, my magic finally surfaced.

  I was pying with a broken stick in the yard—half pretend sword, half tantrum outlet—when it twitched in my hand. Then again. Then curled like a sprouting root.

  I fell backward into the grass, heart hammering. The stick slipped from my hand, but the sensation lingered—like my blood had hummed for just a moment.

  I tried it again. Nothing. Again. A flicker.Not much, but… enough.

  “Wood affinity,” I whispered ter that night, staring at my palm under moonlight. “Of course.”

  Not fire. Not lightning. Not wind.Just trees. Roots. Leaves.

  Great.

  Mina cried when I told her. Not from pride. Just relief.In the Clover Kingdom, not having a magic affinity was worse than poverty—it was erasure. Even bad magic was better than none.

  She kissed my forehead and whispered, “You’re still special.”

  I believed her. For about five minutes.

  The older I got, the more I understood where I stood.Not noble. Not commoner. Bastard.Low magic. Wood affinity. Minimal mana capacity.

  I was, by every metric in this world, a waste of space.A weed.

  And yet—there was one advantage I had over all of them.

  I remembered my old life.

  My name had been Arun before. Arun Varma.Third-year biology major. Undergraduate researcher in pnt neurobiology. I studied root systems and vascur networks. I knew more about trees than half the druids in fiction.

  And now I was a tree.

  Or, close enough.

  Wood magic was ughable to most, but I saw possibilities. Roots that formed traps. Vines that mimicked circuits. Bark that hardened like armor. My mana was low, yes—but I didn’t need brute force.

  I needed precision.

  By the time I was twelve, I had created three spells.Not taught. Not copied. Invented.

  The first was Rootce—a mesh of woven roots that could bind a target’s ankles in under two seconds.

  The second was Hollow Branch—a thin, whip-like tendril that could channel sound through trees like a living communication line.

  The third… I kept to myself. It was still unstable. A trick that let me draw sap into hardened spears. Dangerous. And draining.

  No one in Houter cared. They saw me carrying firewood and fixing fences. They muttered “bastard” under their breath. They ughed when I passed.

  But they didn’t see the trees watching with me. Listening. Growing.

  And now—I was fifteen.

  Which meant one thing:The Grimoire Ceremony.

  Every year, all fifteen-year-olds were summoned to receive their grimoires. Magical books that chose you—not the other way around. A rite of passage. A branding of your worth.

  I’d waited my whole life for this.

  Not with hope.

  With calcution.

  That morning, Mina packed my satchel in silence. Rice cakes wrapped in cloth. Dried sage. A lucky pendant I’d seen her sew a dozen times and never once wear.

  “You don’t have to go if you’re not ready,” she said, brushing a strand of grey from her braid.

  “I’m ready.”

  “Even if… it doesn’t go the way you want?”

  I shrugged. “I’m not expecting fireworks.”

  She looked down. “I just don’t want them to hurt you.”

  “They’ve already hurt me, Ma.”

  I kissed her cheek and turned toward the path leading out of Houter. The fields beyond were gold with dying wheat, and the mountain spire where the grimoire tower stood shimmered faintly in the haze.

  The vilge bell tolled.

  The time had come.

  Most kids walked to Hage in groups, ughing nervously or showing off st-minute spell tricks. I walked alone. Quiet. Focused.

  Every step hummed with a question:

  What if I get nothing?What if the book rejects me?What if they all stare and no one cps?

  But louder than all of that was one other thought:

  What if… it chooses me anyway?

  I reached the outskirts of Hage by midday. The vilge was more polished than Houter, but just barely. Cobblestone roads. A proper chapel. Kids milling around in front of the tower—boys flexing, girls whispering, all waiting.

  I spotted the spiky-haired kid from before—Asta, I think. He was shouting something about becoming the Wizard King. Idiot. But determined.

  Beside him, Yuno stood like a bde. Silent. Sharp. Untouchable.

  I kept to the side. Let the crowd form around me. No one noticed the boy with grey-brown hair and dirt-stained sleeves.

  Perfect.

  I looked up at the tower—its stone spine rising like a giant’s finger toward the sky. The top fred open like a flower, glowing faintly with suspended magic.

  Inside those walls, books would soon fly.

  Some children would cry. Others would roar.

  And me?Well… that remained to be seen.

  Let them call me a weed.Let them look past me. Laugh. Forget.

  Because weeds don’t bloom.We creep.We dig deep.And when the garden walls fall, we’re the only ones left standing.