After dragging myself out of bed and downing a poorly brewed cup of coffee. I went to the store with a few sets of seeds, bags of soil, pots, and tools. I was ready to tear up that decrepit garden.

Still, I felt strange that Grandpa had such strange secrets. I wonder if he wanted to tell me but never got the chance.

when I entered the garden I took another look around. In yesterday's excitement, I missed a lot of things. Decorations were scattered around the garden, bent, discolored, and shattered.

I have to admit... Grandpa... had poor tastes. I found gnomes, statues of Cupid, and... flamingos? How on earth did he think these fit together? This was going to be a pain to clean up. I piled all the broken pottery and decorations in a corner.

I tried to remove the bush but its roots burrowed too deep for me to pull even after I dug around them. I tore through the garden, mixed in the soil, planted seeds, and then watered and watered some more... the soil remained bone dry. I pushed away the soil and found roots. I tracked them back to the bush.

It was alive, vibrant, and looked more like a small tree. I stroked its leaves. They felt nice and I thought I could do this all day. Then a screen popped up startling me.

It was transparent white with a thin solid border with rounded corners. Establishing connection with root network. Welcome back, Mr.Potter... I don't know what's more shocking, a system interface out of a novel or discovering Grandpa's increasingly poor tastes. You haven't logged into the root network in ten Terran standard years. would you like to update your profile Y/N?

It feels a bit creepy to just take Grandpa's whatever account but I don't see a logout anywhere. Yes. A profile page opened. I changed the user and bio. scrap detected, Mr. Planter would you like to recycle scrap? Y/N. I'm just as bad as Grandpa with names huh. I hit yes and immediately regretted it.

The pile of broken pottery and decorations shrunk into balls of light and then flew into the tree. Along with my new pots and tools. 'Ding' Balance updated, you have 92,250 credits.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Root Network regrets to inform you that you have unpaid debts. You owe Rootabanking 273,900 credits. With Mr. Planters' inactivity and failure of contact, Rutabanking settled one outstanding contract in Mr.Planters' stead to prevent further incurred damages. Rutabaking has also resolved seven order disputes. would you like to settle your debt now? Y/N...

I don't know the value of credits. I don't know if I'll need to buy something and I don't know the consequences of going broke. I hit no. The screen opened to a desktop with several shop icons, a blog shortcut, and some chat icons. I wanted to snoop through the contacts and see what Gramps blogged about, but the accounts were frozen for inactivity. I likely won't get access to that unless Grandpa left a password written somewhere.

The shop icons all had a coin in the bottom right corner of their icons. There's a Leaf, a Pot, a Bottle, a bag. A cog? and a gem. then there was a coin on a coin which I opened and it showed more shop icons, some already on the desktop. It took me more time than I'd like to admit to figure out how to close the tab, much to my frustration.

I did figure out what the icons meant. Plants, pots, pesticides, fertilizer, and decorations that did more than sit still looking pretty. The gem was of course magic. I would have been more surprised if I wasn't already exposed to the weirdness this place had to offer.

After perusing the shops for a while I found some interesting plants I wanted to buy. I thought I'd grow them and sell them on the market page. They had brief descriptions and recommended conditions. How often they should be watered, and the amount of fertilizer, and things about their native climates. I saw a plant in there that preferred volcanic soil. Considering the soil glowed in the image I don't think I'm quite equipped for it.

Then the shop told me I didn't have enough credit. I checked the price a few times before a dumbfounded expression came to my face. Where ever you go you can't escape credit scores. I mean, to be honest, I was caught up in my own excitement, and trying to grow something so new to me would be bound to end in failure. So I bought some lilies instead.

A bag of seed spawned out of the air in front of the... bush/tree? Bah, semantics. The thought only occurred to me after I had already planted the seeds. Can I sell whatever I grow here in the normal shop? I don't think I should. I don't want the government or scientists showing up after I sold a burping orchid. That said, how will selling plants on the market work? will they go into the tree or will an alien show up asking about flowers?

I started imagining Grandpa stumbling across this place and asking the same questions. You left quite the surprise behind didn't you old man?