1 The simple days

People are generally of the common misconception that being at the bottom of the food chain means you are without ways of fighting back. Well.... that is mostly true, I would know coz I am a plant you see. my days were wrought with fear and danger from those heathens that you call herbivores. Those beastly creatures without souls or morals were always trying to munch on little old me. What did I ever do to them? The sycophants, not like their more reasonable counterparts those carnivores, now there's a creature with great majesty to them, plus they don't eat plants damnit. I usually spent my days trying to survive the onslaught of those sap-thirsty monsters who wanted to suck the juices from me. man, I thought life was harder as a nerd in an earthen high school but boy was I wrong.

I had my ways of avoiding the eye of the more basic grazers (you can feel my disgust for those bastards) though not full proof they had worked enough for me so far. Since the day I awoken in that form (god knows how long ago) I had learnt I could only do one of two actions, either bend forwards or bend backwards. Those were the limits of my control of that body of mine and I had made the most of it. Whenever I sensed that a potential enemy was headed my way I usually just lied back and used the little bit of sense I had of my next-door neighbors (who never talked to me, rude!) to check if it was a hostile one or just passing through.

As I lied back down and felt the earth on my back or what I considered my back I sensed as those monsters munched upon the bodies of my comrades and felt their pain, my anger, my despair, my weakness. I was left to suffer all those in silence as I let them fall around me while clinging to my pitiful life as that was all I could do at the time. as I felt them fall with small reprieves to allow to grow a bit I finally came to an understanding and empathized with Eren Jaeger from my past life. titans are just like those thoughtless herbivores. to think I pitied them in my past life, they were undeserving of pity. I now went through each second surviving with the simple desire for more.

For the most part I had done better than my other compatriots in surviving, and as such had gone on without experiencing the (I assumed) painful feeling as my body being torn out of the ground or bitten off in an effort to satiate their greed (the bastards) day in and day out. unfortunately for me, avoiding them had also been slowly making me a bigger target as I kept growing taller while those around me were cut down and thus removing even more of my camouflage. now I was forced to find other ways of avoiding them. my struggles never ended; they simply became worse.

well, it was not all bad in plant town if I really bog down and think about it. I mean we had a lot stacked against us I'll admit but we also had a lot to be grateful for. I know the world I am in is pretty magical and there is not as much pollution as my previous life (now that was a crapshow). the soil here is so good you could just eat it, which I guess is exactly what I did as a plant. it was so good that it even left me euphoric if I absorbed too much which is why I left all the nutrient taking to the night-time when I didn't have to be as alert. man, who knew a blade of grass could get high, that would blow a lot of minds on earth. anyway, soil induced inebriation aside, there was also the feeling of the sun on my face as I photosynthesized the heck out of that energy. I sucked it in and swirled it around in me like a sip of the juiciest, sweetest and freshest sunlight ever and man that just left me feeling soooooo good that you don't even know.

Then aside from these two daily pleasures I experienced on the regular there were other rarer and also more precious feelings in this new life I experienced. There was the occasional breeze that blows in and softly brushed against me like a caress from a loved one that I got to enjoy whenever there was a cool wind. I felt it roll over me and as I gently bent to it and it washed over me and passed onward to spread its general good vibes and I was just like 'heck yea' to nature. Then what's even better is when it started to rain. The rain drops would fall around me and gently soften the ground around me and give me this feeling as if I was sprouting out of the ground and about to shift my legs after months of inactivity and then that mushy feeling as the soft and wet soil hugged me (so good). The feel of those water droplets as they glided down my skin cooling me down as a very tiny amount of the water seeped through my pores making me stronger and happier was amazing.

There's also a song I would hear that glided through all things in the natural world almost like magic unseen by the naked eye. It was a beautiful symphony with the lead from the sun as it beat down upon all the all creation on the ground and the rivers and water sources as they came in with cool voices with the accompaniment of the sweet insects that spread the love from plant to plant. Then animals with a violent and cruel refrain that seemed like that of an intruder but was oddly a perfect blend to the whole song. The beauty I truly found in the plants that each gave a sound that was unique to them and which fit in the greater symposium pushing it on and onwards. I call it the song of survival.

Those are beautiful things I enjoyed in the days of my existence before I grew too tall to avoid danger using those simple ways and finally learned about evolution. I finally grew my thorns and destroyed my first enemy and that led to my first level up and began my path to the true isekai life I thought I wanted. If given the choice though, I would go back to those simple days where I to survived and truly lived through each day with the song of survival as my theme song.

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