Geno Tree

Lan Se brought Han Sen to a testing room. She wanted to test his fitness and see what sort of job he'd be eligible for.

Han Sen thought Planet Kate resembled a modern society, so the testing methods should also resemble those of the Alliance, where all tests were conducted through various apparatus.

When Han Sen went in, though, he quickly realized his assumption was wrong.

The test room only had one lobby, and there was no proper room full of equipment. There was a semi-circular table with a vase on it. A small tree was planted in it, and the bark of the tree was dark. It had no leaves and looked rather dead.

Dozens of people were queuing, and Lan Se told Han Sen to go and join them in line.

Han Sen watched a man up front step onto the table and extend his hand. With a dagger, he cut his finger to raise a drop of blood. He let the drop fall onto the planted tree, and when the liquid landed on the bark, it was as if the plant was a sponge.

It was quickly absorbed.

And then, an even stranger thing occurred. The dead tree that absorbed the man's blood came to life. It did not grow leaves, though. Across the tree, red flowers began to bloom. They grew rapidly like red bells, all across the boughs. It was rather beautiful.

Han Sen took a look and counted how many red flowers there were. There were twenty-three of them, and they were all red.

"A flower power of twenty-three. That's not bad for a commoner. Fire elemental sorts take up most jobs," Lan Se said.

"Officer Lan, how much is a decent flower power?" Han Sen didn't know much about the metric.

"One flower is one flower. What do you need to compare it to?" Lan Se looked at Han Sen.

Han Sen did not say anything. It looked like the Alliance, but it was different in certain ways.

Quickly, the bells started to die. Eventually, nothing was left behind, and the tree returned to its dead state.

After that, the other people in line tested it out, one by one. Just like the man, they would drop a smidgen of their own blood onto the bark of the tree. The tree would shortly bloom with a different color and a different number of flowers each time.

Only adults came to the clinic, and they each had around twenty flowers. The colors Han Sen saw included red, yellow, blue, green, purple, white, light green, and black. They were their elements.

It was Han Sen's turn for the test next. He went onto the table and cut his finger, just like the others had. He let a drop of blood fall onto the tree.

Han Sen was curious to see how many flowers he could make bloom. In the Alliance, his fitness had reached one hundred thousand points. But those numbers were different from the flower metric, so that figure wasn't very useful in comparison to this. The Planet Kate people had only managed to get around twenty flowers, so he didn't think he'd be able to bloom much.

Not many people had come to the test, though. Han Sen and Lan Se had gone to the crime scene, so they had arrived late. There were two more Planet Kate people behind Han Sen, so there were only four in the clinic now.

Lan Se looked at the tree. There weren't many people of a different race there, so she was curious to see what the little Han Sen would show.

When Han Sen dropped his blood onto the tree, there was no immediate difference between him and the others. The tree started to bloom.

The flowers were white, so the element was undetermined. But the number of flowers was quite depressing. He only bloomed eleven flowers, and that meant his fitness equated to eleven flowers. That was far worse than the average adult of Planet Kate.

Lan Se looked at Han Sen's fitness and merely shook her head. Letting him work with a fitness like that was like putting a kid in a sweatshop. It'd be very difficult to find him a job.

The eleven white flowers then started to open. They were really beautiful. The colors represented the element, while the number of flowers represented strength.

"Weak," Han Sen thought

He wasn't really upset, though. He was prepared for a low score, and it was much better than he expected. He thought he would die in there.

When Han Sen came off the table, he heard the sound of bells ringing. He looked underneath him, and the eleven flowers were shaking and chiming.

Han Sen did not know what was going on. When the people from Planet Kate had been tested, all their flowers had died when they stepped off the table. Han Sen thought he might have made a mistake, so he quickly turned to Lan Se.

Lan Sen's eyes were wide open, fixed on the ringing flowers. She looked to be frozen in shock.

When the two people behind them heard Han Sen's flowers ringing, they seemed to be in absolute shock. Earlier, when they only saw the lifeless eleven, they looked at him with disdain.

The tree for the test was called a geno tree. It used genes to survive. The flowers that bloomed upon it showed the strength and element of whoever put blood on it.

The colors were the elements, and the numbers were strength. Usually, that was all that happened. Very rarely, however, something else could happen: if the tree enjoyed the genes it was given very much, it might request more. That ringing was a pleading for more of Han Sen's genes and a proclamation that they were truly excellent.

Ordinary people could not make it ring. People said a Noble with a geno weapon could make it ring, but the Nobles never tested in front of commoners, and the validity of the claims could not be verified.

If a young man without a geno armor could make the flowers ring, there was a high chance he'd one day earn a geno weapon and become a Noble himself. It wasn't a 100% guarantee, but it was definitely a fifty-fifty chance. There was a higher chance than there was for commoners, at least