When Lucas woke on his tenth day in this place, a biting chill lanced right through him, and his muscles were sore from shivering through the night. Rain was hissing static on the domed roof and a steady deluge of water was streaming down from the gaps in the ceiling, pouring onto the mass of plant life and dampening the ground. There was a frigid chill in the air, biting at the already-stinging cuts that criss-crossed his skin. After yesterday’s incident, his chest felt like one big bruise.

The floor squelched beneath his feet and stung his soles when he stood, colder than anything he’d felt so far. Instantly, he knew it was going to be a bad day. The events of yesterday had left him in a dark mood before bed, and it seemed it was going to carry over to this morning.

Yesterday. Just the memory of it had his stomach dropping. Such a fucking ridiculous unforced error.

After he’d calmed down enough to think straight, he’d retreated to the circle of safety as fast as he’d been able, pushing his vitality into the nearby plants to force them back, not bothering to retrieve his trusty stick. He’d performed no more magic for the rest of the day. He hadn’t done much of anything.

Lucas wasn’t an inactive person, but neither was he an adrenaline junky. The closest he’d come to death before yesterday was when he’d fell off his bike into the path of an oncoming car in primary school, and even in that situation the car had been able to slam on the brakes before even getting close. He hadn’t even broken a bone before; he often jokingly bragged about it.

The incident in the corridor hadn’t unlocked some hidden thrill-seeking fetish within him. Quite the opposite. Regardless of the discovery of a new aspect of his plant magic (which was still a surreal thing to be thinking) he wasn’t keen to jump back into the fray.

The danger of the situation had been clear from the start, but a part of him must not have been taking it completely seriously. He’d grown overconfident in his ability, gotten high on the feeling of casually performing superhuman feats. Bulling ahead with no real plan had been reckless. Idiotic. Had almost got him killed.

There was some silver lining, though. As he ate his usual sweet berry breakfast and desperately wished he could find something else for sustenance, he regarded the mass of plant life with both his eyes and his vitality sense.

With a flex of will, he pushed his vitality, projecting it out of his body in an omnidirectional wave. It pinged the plants like a sonar, lighting them up in his senses where they’d previously been a dull impression.

He was standing at the edge of the circle, facing outwards with a hand hovering millimetres from a branch, and his vitality radiated out in a sphere around him until it could go no further, like he’d exhaled until he’d run out of breath. It expelled the other vitality signature, granting him dominion over the plants within around five metres of his person. Yesterday it had been a struggle to hold three. Though admittedly he’d been moving then, rushing back to safety.

The greater mass fought back, to the point he could feel it like a physical weight, adding to the strain. But he was determined, and he had stamina to spare. It was an ongoing battle, and he had to constantly focus conscious effort on it, but he was successfully keeping his hold.

Triumph surged through him. He might have jumped up and celebrated, if the technique wasn’t already using up so much of his mental bandwidth. As it was, he mechanically chewed on his berries and willed his vitality to hold the plants in place.

Instinct and desperation had revealed to him a new aspect of this vitality he hadn’t considered, but should have. Probably would have in due time, if he’d just sat down to think about it and experiment.

That was what he was going to do now.

Focusing, he could feel the properties of the plants under his command. His vitality filled them up to the brim, and it gave him an understanding of where they were strong, where they were damaged, how they could grow, the adaptations they could make, and more.

They had a rudimentary database of genes in them. A memory, of sorts. Plants had to adapt to survive, growing where and when and what they needed to or they’d wilt, and whether it was an actual physical thing or a quirk of vitality, Lucas found he could tap into that bank of knowledge, somewhat. Possibilities unfolded in his mind’s eyes like blueprints, and he put a mental pin in that to come back to.

There was also something like intent in them. Will, maybe. They were plants, so their desires were entirely primitive, instinctual, and rather uniform, despite the ostensible variety in their species. They wanted nothing more than to absorb nutrients and grow, and they held instincts that told them how they could do it.

Right now, that manifested in a thirst to suck up water through their roots, which they could then convert to energy and sustenance.

But he knew something the plants didn’t—couldn’t possibly—know: his vitality could do more for them than anything natural ever could.

This was less instinct on his part and more inference. He had deep experience with feeling the way the mass of fey vitality flowed through the greater whole over the last few days, and he’d seen how fast plants could grow under its influence with his own eyes. He wouldn’t be anywhere near as adept with the technique, but he figured he could do something similar.

To what end, he didn’t know yet. But it was worth testing.

Thus, he passed the morning playing with his power, moving vitality around and seeing what it did. He was cold, wet, and hungry for something, anything other than fucking berries—sweet food was going to be his nemesis by the time this was over—but somehow he found he wasn’t miserable.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

It was hard to get too down in the dumps when you were playing around with magic, no matter the circumstances.

Elation filled him the first time he managed to coax some thorns into growing along a branch, and there was nothing the cold could do about it. Childlike wonder overwhelmed him when he managed to take control over a vine and make it wriggle like a snake, and for a while his damp feet were a secondary concern. It was all he could do not to cackle in delight when he figured out how to encourage a part of the bush to secrete silk-thin threads he could hopefully weave into warmer clothes later, his hunger long forgotten.

At a point, he started mixing and matching genetic codes from different plants, imbuing traits that shouldn’t have been possible in their species. Bark grew on flower stalks; serrated thorns pricked on petals; berries started blooming on solid wood. He turned plants into strange colours, painting a fascinatingly awful picture in defiance of nature, and grew and shrunk them beyond their ordinary forms.

None of this was a fast process. Even with his vitality pumping out double-time, he couldn’t get things to grow as quickly as he’d seen them do. His skill was amateur compared to whatever mind was controlling the enormous mass that spanned miles and miles all around, but he had advantages. Anything that went against the plant’s individual nature was both more taxing and even slower than an already sluggish process.

But frankly, he didn’t give a shit if it was slow.

Magic. He was a goddamn wizard.

It was almost enough to make him forget his situation entirely.

But not quite.

Hours flew by, his dexterity with his new skill increasing by the minute, and soon enough the initial excitement wore off. It never went away completely; he didn’t think he could ever lose the joy of performing magic. But dark thoughts started to creep back in, anxieties and worries digging their talons into his brain.

He was still trapped in a strange place with no idea how he got there. He couldn’t forget that.

After lunch (more berries, which he had to force himself to go through) he started to focus on the vitality of his own body. He’d noticed a marked increase in athleticism when he was battling the foliage with his trusty stick. Manipulating plants was exciting, but was there anything he could do with his own body? The question was worth answering before making any further plans.

Closing his eyes, he let his vitality draw back from the surrounding plants, the tide receding. Almost immediately he felt warmer, stronger, more alive. He lit up like the aurora borealis but golden. Little flecks of vitality from the plants were drawn into him too, like flotsam on the tide, and he mentally prodded at them, seeing if they’d do anything. There was nothing he could discern.

The vitality flowed naturally through him unprompted, just as he didn’t have to consciously tell his heart to keep pumping his blood through his veins. It moved sluggishly by nature, but he could somewhat affect it if he wanted to. When he squeezed and compressed it, it would go even slower, and his body started to feel physically heavier. When he pushed, it would go faster, and he got a heady feeling akin to an adrenaline rush.

Strangely, he found it didn’t fill him to the brim like the vitality that suffused the plants at times. In fact, his vitality only really flowed through a small portion of his body, though it covered every section generally. It shone bright enough that his ‘aura’ looked like a golden silhouette when he wasn’t concentrating, but a more discerning eye showed him that the flow of his aura was really only moving through a much smaller circulatory system, mostly sticking close to his skeleton.

Something told him he should’ve been able to push it further, but he couldn’t figure out how. Inspecting the plants didn’t help, their vitality and the way it moved in them was too different to his own body, simple enough in comparison that he could overwhelm them with little finesse.

Concentrating harder than he ever had in his life, he mentally zoomed in on a tiny part of the channels the vitality flowed through and spent god knows how long watching the way it moved. It was like water steadily flowing through a pipe, constantly in motion, but what was moving it? He’d seen no indication of any force acting on his vitality, and he didn’t know what was actually happening when he commanded it to speed up or slow down, just that it did.

Mere observation wasn’t helping. Instead, he found one of the tiny specks of plant vitality and assumed direct control over it. He commanded it to move at the same speed as the rest, following it along as it flowed through his channels, starting at the base of his skull. He watched it like a hawk as it flowed down his neck, curved across his shoulder, flowed down his arm and back up, spiralled between his ribs before aligning on his spine and plunging down past his hips and down one leg, then back up, and then repeated the whole process in reverse on the other side of his body.

Nothing jumped out at him, but he didn’t give up. There had to be something. If plants could be filled to the brim despite their even more basic vitality channels, it stood to reason that he could too. He just wasn’t seeing it yet.

The speck made four full circuits of his body before he noticed something unusual.

It happened as the speck was travelling along his left arm, following a channel that clung to his humerus. Just as it was reaching the elbow, there was a brief moment, so short he almost missed it, where the speck deviated from the flow without his command, like it had hit a tiny, tiny irregularity in its path.

Lucas instantly zeroed in on the area, dismissing the speck back into the regular flow, its job done. With intensity he never knew he was capable of, he focused deeper and deeper on the spot where the speck had moved and, sure enough, there was a minute hitch in the flow of his vitality, a bump he never would have noticed otherwise. He took conscious control over all the vitality flowing through the zone, slowing it down when it reached the bump, then letting it go once it was passed. It made the area feel sore, but he ignored the pain.

Time lost all meaning. Some part of him hurt like he was staring wide-eyed, unblinking at the spot, narrowing down the cause of the bump moment by moment, until his attention was on an area no larger than a few microscopic specks of vitality.

And there, impossibly small, was a gap in the wall of his channel. A sub-channel, its opening so small it was functionally shut. A trickle of vitality could have forced its way in, but before anything substantial could make it past the entrance, the pressure behind would push the flow on. That was why there was a slight hitch. It was minutely disrupting the overall flow, but not so much that it was noticeable unless one was going to obsessive levels to search for something that they couldn’t know for sure was even there.

Lucas’ grin was probably feral. Victory felt good.

Unfortunately, engaging his muscles for the first time in god knows how long brought him back to awareness. His body was apparently desperate for his attention, and that did not feel good. A groan of pain escaped him, and he stumbled back to his bed, wracked by shivers.

Every inch of him was sore. His skin was tender like he’d been sunburned head to toe. He was light-headed and weak, his stomach was growling furiously, his throat was dry as sandpaper, he was feverish, he was cold, he had a headache, and his hands and feet had gone numb.

But even despite it all, he didn’t stop grinning.

How could he, when there was more magic to discover?