The eighteen turnip seeds Vesta had given him sat on the kitchen table, arranged in a perfect grid.
Leo wasn't just going to "plant" them. That was a chaotic, imprecise verb. He was going to install them.
He spent the morning conducting a survey of his small, cleared patch of land. He used a lengths of twine and wooden stakes to create a grid that was accurate to the millimeter. He tested the soil temperature with a thermometer he had salvaged from his old life.
14 degrees Celsius. Slightly below optimal germination range, but acceptable if compensated with shallow planting to maximize solar absorption.
He worked with the focus of a surgeon. He didn't just dig holes; he excavated micro-environments. He crumbled the soil by hand until the aggregate size was uniform. He placed each seed exactly 1.5 centimeters deep—the textbook standard for Brassica rapa.
He wasn't praying for a harvest. He was engineering one.
By the time he finished, the sun was high. The 3x3 grid looked less like a garden bed and more like a calibration test pattern. It was perfect. It was logical. It was defensible by every metric of agronomy he had ever studied.
Leo stood back, wiping dirt from his forehead. "Input complete," he muttered. "Now, we wait for the biological execution."
"You're doing it wrong."
The voice didn't come from behind him. It came from above him.
Leo looked up. Hovering about ten feet in the air, defying gravity with a casual disregard for physics, was a woman.
She was dressed in a way that screamed "historical reenactment gone wrong"—a dark dress with jagged hems, silver hair that seemed to move on its own, and an expression of profound boredom. She was peeling a mandarin orange, letting the rinds fall onto Leo's perfectly raked soil.
"Gravity is a constant," Leo said, his brain trying to reconcile the sight with his understanding of mass. "How are you doing that?"
"I'm rejecting the premise of falling," the woman replied. She dropped a piece of peel. It landed exactly on top of one of his seeds. "And you are rejecting the premise of fun. Look at this grid. It's so... sterile. It has no soul."
"It has structure," Leo corrected, stepping forward to flick the orange peel away. "Who are you?"
"I am the Witch Princess," she announced, as if that explained everything. "I live in the mansion next door. I saw you measuring the dirt with a ruler. It was so pathetic I had to come down and laugh."
She floated lower, her boots hovering inches above his seedlings.
"You're treating the valley like a spreadsheet," the Witch said. "You think if you do everything 'right,' the land owes you a turnip. That's adorable."
"It's cause and effect," Leo said, his irritation overriding his shock at the magic. "It's biology. If the conditions are met, the seed germinates. It's not a negotiation."
"In this valley," the Witch smirked, "everything is a negotiation. Especially since I control the weather."
She snapped her fingers.
The air pressure dropped instantly. The blue sky above the farm turned a bruised, violent purple. A localized cloud, no bigger than a house, formed directly over Leo's grid.
"Variable introduction," the Witch declared. "Let's see how your textbook handles a Micro-Typhoon."
Leo lunged forward. "Wait!"
Rain didn't fall; it hammered. A deluge of water struck the 3x3 grid with the force of a firehose.
Leo threw himself over the seedlings, shielding the mud with his body. The cold water soaked him instantly, chilling him to the bone. He could feel the carefully aerated soil turning into sludge beneath him. His perfect geometry was washing away.
"Stop it!" Leo shouted over the roar of the wind. "You're drowning them!"
"I'm testing them!" the Witch yelled back, her voice echoing with delight. "If they can't survive a little rain, they don't deserve to be vegetables! Survival of the fittest, pretty boy! Isn't that science?"
Leo scrambled in the mud, trying to build a dam with his hands to divert the water flow. He was calculating flow rates, drag coefficients, trying to save the integrity of the seedbed. But the water was too fast.
Then, just as quickly as it started, the rain stopped. The cloud evaporated. The sun came back out, hot and mocking.
Leo lay in the mud, gasping. He looked at his grid.
It was ruined. The seeds had been washed out of their holes. The soil was a compacted, muddy mess. The twine was tangled.
His perfect equation had returned a result of zero.
The Witch Princess floated back up to a safe distance, popping a slice of orange into her mouth.
"Disappointing," she critiqued. "I thought you might use that Cursed Tool you picked up. I felt the resonance yesterday. Why didn't you use it to shield the crops?"
Leo pushed himself up. He was covered in slime. He looked at the ruined seeds—the charity from Vesta, wasted.
"Because the tool eats life," Leo said, wiping mud from his eyes. "And I'm not ready to spend mine yet."
The Witch paused. She looked at him—really looked at him—for the first time. She saw the calculation in his eyes. He wasn't crying over the lost crop. He was analyzing the failure.
"You're not a farmer," she observed. "You're a scientist."
"I was," Leo said. He picked up a washed-out seed, pinching it carefully between his fingers. "Now, I'm just a variable in your experiment."
The Witch smiled. It wasn't a nice smile, but it wasn't bored anymore.
"Correct," she said. "Welcome to Forget-Me-Not Valley, Leo. Class is in session."
She flew off toward the mansion, leaving a trail of orange scent in the air.
Leo stood alone in the mud. He looked at the seed in his hand.
Marlin had told him the soil needed leverage. The Witch had shown him the sky was hostile.
Leo walked back to the shed. He didn't throw the seed away. He placed it on a paper towel.
"Hypothesis," he whispered to the empty room. "The environment is actively antagonistic. Conclusion: I need a control mechanism."
He looked at his bandaged hand, where the Cursed Hoe lay dormant.
"I need to study the Witch."