The goblin came back in forty-seven minutes.
Kenji knew this because his system—that stubborn, relentless, utterly useless machine—had kept a running timer from the moment the small figure disappeared behind the rubble. He hadn't asked it to. He hadn't wanted it to. But the system didn't care about what Kenji wanted. It never had. It recorded, it processed, it monitored. It was a journalist's worst nightmare and a dying plant's cruelest companion.
[TIME ELAPSED SINCE ENTITY DEPARTURE: 00:47:12]
[NUTRIENT RESERVES: 0.2%]
[ESTIMATED TIME TO IRREVERSIBLE CELLULAR COLLAPSE: 13 HOURS, 01 MINUTE]
Thirteen hours. The number hadn't changed much. It wouldn't change much, not without nutrients. Kenji had done the math on Day Four. His body—that grotesque, stolen hybrid of plant and corpse—consumed approximately 0.015% of its reserves per hour in baseline maintenance. Even if he did nothing, even if he just sat here like a statue in the gray waste, the reserves would hit zero in roughly thirteen hours. And then the cells would begin a cascade failure that no amount of water or sunlight could reverse.
He had calculated this with the same detachment he'd once used to calculate the optimal angle for a healing potion's injection. Numbers. Just numbers. The mathematics of ending.
But now the numbers wouldn't stay still. They kept jumping every time the wind—which didn't exist—carried a sound that might have been footsteps. They blurred every time his visual processing caught a flicker of movement at the edge of the rubble pile.
He hated it.
He hated that he was waiting.
The goblin appeared from behind the rubble carrying a container.
It was a miserable excuse for a container—a hollowed-out section of some kind of large, dried gourd, cracked along one side and sealed with what looked like tree sap and mud. It was maybe the size of a human skull, and the goblin was carrying it with both hands, hugging it against its chest like a baby, walking with exaggerated care so as not to spill a single drop.
As it got closer, Kenji could hear it talking. To itself, presumably, since there was no one else to talk to. The goblin seemed to have a compulsive need to fill silence with sound, as if the quiet physically pained it.
"Okay. Okay okay okay. Found the gourd. Found the water. It's not clean water, it's got stuff in it, but water is water and water is life and the plant-person needs life so... so this is good. This is a good plan. I am good at plans. I found a whole gourd of water. That's the best plan anyone in the Lily Domain has had in three years. I'm basically a genius. A forgotten genius. The genius of the forgotten. That should be my title. Rilo the Forgotten Genius. No. That sounds stupid. Rilo the—oh no, I'm talking again."
Rilo.
The goblin's name was Rilo. It had said it during its muttering monologue, buried between complaints about the ash and the cold and the lack of bugs to eat. A self-given name, probably. Goblins in the wild didn't receive names from their clans unless they were deemed worthy. To be nameless was to be nothing. So Rilo had named himself.
Kenji filed this information away and then immediately tried to unfile it, because filing it meant caring, and caring meant—
Don't.
He slammed the mental door shut.
Rilo reached the edge of the dark circle where Kenji's sap had stained the ash. The goblin stopped. Looked at the black stains. Looked at Kenji's cracked vessel. Looked at the severed nerve still dangling from the base of his body like a pulled tooth.
Its enormous yellow eyes grew even larger, which shouldn't have been anatomically possible but somehow was.
"You did that to yourself," Rilo said. It wasn't a question.
Kenji didn't respond.
"The... the root thing. You pulled it out yourself. I can see the... the tear marks. The bark is pulled outward, not in. Something from the outside would push in. You pulled out."
Kenji said nothing.
Rilo swallowed. Its throat was so thin that Kenji could see the muscles working beneath the green-gray skin, like a snake swallowing an egg.
"Why?"
There was that word again.
Kenji's core gave a single, hard thud that he felt in his teeth—Watabei's teeth, still embedded in the wooden jaw, still sharp, still wrong.
"Why would you pull out your own—"
"Stop."
The word came out before Kenji could stop it. His vocal cords screamed in protest—a dry, grinding sound, like two pieces of sandpaper being rubbed together. It barely qualified as speech. It was more of a vibration, a rumble that pushed through the wooden trachea and escaped through the cracked lips of Watabei's face like steam from a broken pipe.
But it was a word. A real word. The first one he had spoken since—
Since Goburo.
The silence that followed the word was so total, so absolute, that it had weight. Kenji could feel it pressing down on his shoulders, crushing the cracked bark, forcing the sap to ooze faster from his wounds.
Rilo had gone completely still. Not the stillness of fear—Kenji had seen that already, the flat-eared, hunched-shouldered stillness of a prey animal. This was different. This was the stillness of *recognition*. The goblin was staring at Kenji's mouth—at the wooden lips that had just moved in a way that wood should never move—as if it were watching the sun rise in the middle of the night.
"You... you can talk," Rilo whispered.
Kenji closed his eyes. The brief spike of energy it had taken to produce that single syllable had cost him. He could feel his reserves dip—a microscopic drop, but a drop nonetheless. One word. One stupid word, and he had shortened his own death timer by several minutes.
Idiot.
"Go away," he said.
Two more words. Each one a small suicide. The bark around his jaw cracked a little further.
Rilo didn't go away.
Of course it didn't.
Instead, the goblin did something that Kenji had not anticipated. It sat down. Right there, on the edge of the dark sap-stained circle, cross-legged, placing the cracked gourd carefully between its knees. It sat the way a child sits at a storytime—hands on knees, back straight, eyes forward. As if this were normal. As if a dying plant-man telling it to go away was just part of the expected routine.
"I'm not going to go away," Rilo said.
"I can see that."
"Good. Then we understand each other."
"We understand nothing."
"See? Understanding. That's one thing. We're already making progress."
Kenji opened his eyes. He looked at the goblin—really looked at it, for the first time, pushing past the fog of PTSD and grief and self-destruction that had clouded his vision since the moment he'd heard that high-pitched voice.
Rilo was young. Very young. The facial structure was still soft, the cheekbones not yet fully developed, the jaw rounded in a way that would sharpen with age. If Kenji had to guess—and his journalist's instinct was still buried in there somewhere, beneath the ash and the severed nerves—he would put the goblin at seven or eight years old. Maybe younger. Malnutrition could mask age in goblinoids, stunting their development in ways that made them look younger than they were.
But it was the details that caught him. The details that a journalist trained himself to see, even when he didn't want to.
Rilo's left ear had a ragged notch missing from the tip. Not a clean cut—a tear, as if something had grabbed the ear and pulled. There were scars on the forearms, thin and white, old scars that spoke of repeated, deliberate harm—not the random violence of a predator, but the systematic cruelty of another goblin. Or multiple goblins.
The rags it wore were tied with knots that showed a surprising amount of intelligence—slip knots that could be released with a single tug, designed for quick removal. A survival adaptation. Someone had taught this child to be able to shed its clothing in an instant, either to escape a grab or to dive into water.
And the fingers. The fingers of both hands were stained dark at the tips—not with ash, but with something else. Something that Kenji's plant senses, even at 0.2% capacity, faintly recognized.
Soil. Fresh soil. This goblin had been digging. Recently.
What were you looking for in the rubble, Rilo?
The question surfaced unbidden, and Kenji crushed it. He didn't care what the goblin had been looking for. He didn't care about the notched ear or the scarred arms or the clever knots or the soil-stained fingers. He didn't care about the name it had given itself, or the way it had said "I'm the forgotten one" with the flat, practiced acceptance of someone who had repeated the phrase so many times it had lost all meaning.
He didn't care.
He was going to die in thirteen hours, and this goblin was going to watch, and that was just going to be a thing that happened, and then it would be over, and—
"You're doing it again," Rilo said.
"Doing what."
"Looking at me like you're reading a book. Nobody looks at me like that. People look at me like I'm a rock. Or a bug. Or a rock that a bug crawled under. You're looking at me like I'm... like I'm there."
Kenji said nothing.
Rilo uncrossed its legs and leaned forward, resting its elbows on its knees, its chin in its hands. The pose was so absurdly casual, so utterly out of place in the gray death of the Barren Land, that it bordered on the surreal.
"I brought you water," Rilo said, nodding at the gourd. "It's not great water. It's from the underground reservoir under the north rubble. I think it used to be a cistern. There's stuff growing in it—green stuff, slimy stuff—but I drank some yesterday and I didn't die, so it's probably mostly safe. Mostly."
" I don't want it."
"I know. You said that with your whole body before I even got here. Your roots are all curled up like dead worms. That's a 'I don't want water' body if I've ever seen one."
"Then why bring it."
"Because—" Rilo paused. Its brow furrowed. Its mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. For the first time since it had arrived, the goblin seemed to not have words.
It was a strange thing to witness. Rilo had been a torrent of noise from the moment it had thrown the first rock—a continuous, self-narrating flood of sound that had filled the silence of the Barren Land like water rushing into a dry creek bed. But now, faced with the direct question, the flood had hit a dam.
"Because," Rilo tried again. "Because I..."
The goblin looked down at its hands. The soil-stained fingers. The scarred forearms. The clever slip-knots on its rags.
"Because when I came to this place," Rilo said, very quietly, "I was going to do the same thing."
The silence that followed was different from any silence Kenji had experienced in the past eleven days. This silence had edges. It cut.
"I didn't have a reason," Rilo continued, still looking at its hands. "I just... didn't have a reason *not* to. My clan left me behind when I was five. I was too small. Too weak. I couldn't carry enough. I couldn't fight. I couldn't even run fast enough to keep up. So they left me in the dust and I walked and walked and walked and I ended up here and I thought, 'Well, this is a good place to stop.' And I sat down. Right over there." It pointed to a spot near the rubble, maybe thirty yards away. "And I sat there for... I don't know. A long time. I didn't eat. I didn't drink. I just sat."
Rilo looked up. Its yellow eyes met Kenji's.
"And then a bird landed on my head."
A beat.
"A bird," Kenji repeated flatly.
"It was a gray bird. Ugly thing. Looked like it was made of the same ash as everything else. It landed on my head and it just... sat there. And I thought, 'That's weird. Why would a bird land on my head?' And then I thought, 'Maybe it's because I'm not moving. Maybe it thinks I'm a rock.' And then I thought, 'I don't want to be a rock. I want to be a thing that birds land on but then fly away from because I'm alive and I move and I'm annoying.'"
Rilo picked up the gourd.
"So I got up. And I found the cistern. And I drank the slimy water. And I threw up. And then I drank more. And here I am. Three years later. Still annoying. Still alive."
The goblin held out the gourd toward Kenji with both hands, like an offering at a shrine.
"I'm not saying it's going to fix whatever broke you. I don't know what broke you. I'm not smart enough to figure that out. But I know what dying on purpose looks like, and you're doing it, and I think..." Rilo's voice wavered for the first time. The confident, chattering mask slipped, and beneath it was just a child. A scared, lonely, forgotten child. "I think maybe the bird didn't land on my head because I was still. I think maybe it landed on my head because it knew I wasn't done yet. And maybe I'm supposed to be the bird for you."
Kenji stared at the gourd.
The cracked, mud-sealed, ugly gourd full of slimy, questionable water from a ruined cistern in a dead land, held out by a scarred, notched-eared, self-named goblin who had once sat down to die and been interrupted by a bird.
His core thumped.
*Thump.*
*Thump.*
*Thump.*
Not slower. Not fading.
Steady.
[NUTRIENT RESERVES: 0.2%]
[ESTIMATED TIME TO IRREVERSIBLE CELLULAR COLLAPSE: 12 HOURS, 38 MINUTES]
The system hadn't changed. The numbers were still there, still counting down, still indifferent. But something else had changed. Something the system couldn't measure. Something that didn't have a percentage or a timer or a recommended action.
Kenji didn't take the gourd.
He didn't move toward it. He didn't extend a root. He didn't say thank you.
He just... looked at it. For a long time. He looked at it the way a man dying of thirst in a desert looks at a mirage—with the full knowledge that it might not be real, that it might be a trick, that reaching for it might be the most foolish thing he could possibly do.
But he looked at it.
And he didn't look away.
Rilo, apparently taking this as a victory of some kind, carefully set the gourd down on the ash in front of Kenji, equidistant between them, like a chess piece on a board.
"I'll leave it there," Rilo said, standing up and brushing ash off its rags. "You can drink it or not. I'm not going to force you. I'm not strong enough to force a plant-person to do anything. I couldn't even force a cat to move out of my sleeping spot last week and it was literally the size of my hand."
Kenji said nothing.
"But I'm going to come back tomorrow," Rilo continued, taking a step backward. "And if the gourd is empty, I'll know you drank it, and I'll bring more. And if the gourd is full, I'll know you didn't, and I'll..." The goblin faltered. "I'll bring more anyway. And I'll keep bringing more until you drink it or until I die, and I'm really good at not dying so you're going to get really tired of looking at this gourd."
Rilo took another step back. Then another. Its large yellow eyes never left Kenji's face.
"And for the record," the goblin added, "talking to you was the most words I've said to anyone in three years. So if you die, I'm going to be really annoyed that I wasted all those words on a dead plant-person."
Then it turned and walked away. Back toward the rubble. Back toward whatever shelter it had built in the ruins of a dead place.
Kenji watched it go.
The goblin's footsteps were light—almost silent—despite the ash. It moved with a natural stealth that wasn't learned but born, the kind of movement that kept small things alive in a world full of large things that wanted to eat them. It was the way Goburo used to move.
Don't.
Kenji closed his eyes.
Don't think about Goburo.
But the thought was already there, planted like a seed in the fertile darkness behind his eyelids. Goburo moving through the forest. Goburo building the shack with hands that were too small for the tools. Goburo curling up next to Kenji's pot on cold nights, pressing his green forehead against the ceramic, because the plant was warm and the world was cold and that was enough. That was always enough.
Goburo's eye, empty, looking at him with the hollow absence of everything they had built together.
Kenji's vessel convulsed. A crack ran from his collarbone to his sternum, splitting the bark with a sound like a breaking branch. Sap welled up in the fissure, dark and thick, running down his chest in lines that looked like black tears.
[STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY: 34% AND DECLINING]
[RECOMMENDED ACTION: ABSORB NUTRIENTS IMMEDIATELY]
The gourd sat in front of him. A foot away. Maybe less.
He could feel the water inside it. Not through his roots—they were dead and curled beneath him—but through something deeper. Something that predated systems and ranks and otherworldly transmigration. The cellular memory of a plant. The ancient, primal knowledge that water was there and it was close and it was available.
His body wanted it. Craved it. The cells that were still functioning were screaming for it, each one a tiny mouth gasping in a desert.
But Kenji Mori—the mind, the soul, the journalist, the murderer—sat with his eyes closed and his hands limp and his severed nerves dangling and chose not to reach for it.
Because reaching for it meant living.
And living meant feeling.
And feeling meant carrying Jaeja's ghost and Goburo's emptiness and Hana's death and Watabei's stolen body and the Vial of God arriving one moment too late and the blue screen of Reintelligence and the bandits and the fire and the blood and the screaming—
His core skipped a beat.
Then another.
Then it stopped.
For three full seconds, Kenji Mori's core did not beat.
[CARDIAC EQUIVALENT: ARRHYTHMIA DETECTED]
[NUTRIENT RESERVES: 0.1%]
[ESTIMATED TIME TO IRREVERSIBLE CELLULAR COLLAPSE: 12 HOURS, 12 MINUTES — ACCELERATING]
The system's calm, gray text pulsed in his fading vision.
12 hours.
12 hours and then nothing.
12 hours and the ash wins.
12 hours and the silence becomes permanent.
12 hours and—
A drop of water slid out of the cracked gourd. Just one. A tiny, perfect sphere of slimy, green-tinted water that escaped through the mud seal and rolled down the outside of the gourd, catching the flat gray light of the Barren Land like a small, dying jewel.
It fell.
It hit the ash directly in front of Kenji's crossed legs and made a sound so small that it shouldn't have been audible at all.
*Plop.*
And Kenji Mori—who had survived being murdered in Tokyo, who had survived waking up as a seedling, who had survived a cave salamander, who had survived captivity, who had survived the creation of Reintelligence, who had survived the fire, who had survived the massacre, who had survived the severing of his bond with the only creature that had ever truly loved him—
Kenji Mori opened his eyes, looked at the tiny wet spot in the ash where the drop had fallen, and thought:
That was a waste.
Not profound. Not poetic. Not the epiphany of a man finding God. Just a small, irritated, fundamentally alive thought, born from the same part of his brain that had once gotten annoyed at copy editors for misplacing his semicolons.
That was a waste of water.
The thought sat in his mind like a pebble in a shoe. Small. Irritating. Impossible to ignore.
Because it was true. The water had escaped the gourd. It had fallen on the ash, where it would evaporate within minutes. It would serve no purpose. It would nourish nothing. It would simply cease to exist, having accomplished nothing, been nothing, meant nothing.
A waste.
Like him.
Like sitting here for eleven days, letting 0.2% of his reserves burn away for absolutely no reason. Not for a cause. Not for a purpose. Not even for a good death. Just... bleeding out in the gray because he was too cowardly to do it quickly and too guilty to keep living.
A waste.
The word echoed.
Waste.
Goburo would have said it differently. Goburo didn't use words, not then, but Kenji could imagine the look on his face—that furrowed brow, that tilted head, that quiet, patient judgment that said you're being stupid without ever opening a mouth.
You're being stupid, Kenji.
Rilo's voice overlapped: "Dying when you can breathe is stealing. You're stealing the air from people like me who have to fight for it."
And the system, at the bottom of everything, in its smallest, quietest font:
[WHY?]
Kenji looked at the gourd.
He looked at the tiny wet spot in the ash.
He looked at his own hands—Watabei's hands—resting on his knees, gray and cracked and empty.
He did not pick up the gourd.
He did not reach for it.
He did not drink.
But he also did not look away.
And deep beneath him, in the dark, in the ash, in the grave he had dug for himself, a single root—one that he had missed during his systematic self-mutilation, one that was so thin and so brittle and so deeply buried that it was barely alive—twitched.
Not toward the gourd.
Not toward the water.
Just... twitched.
A tiny, involuntary spasm of cellular activity. A muscle memory of growth. A reflex of life.
The system recorded it.
[ROOT ACTIVITY DETECTED — SECTOR 7, DEPTH 0.3M]
[NATURE: INVOLUNTARY]
[SIGNIFICANCE: NEGLIGIBLE]
Negligible.
But present.
The ash settled. The gray light faded slightly as the sun—hidden behind the perpetual haze of the Barren Land—began its imperceptible descent toward a horizon that didn't exist.
Kenji sat in the silence.
The gourd sat in front of him.
And beneath him, a single, negligible, stubborn root refused to die.
To Be Continued...