Spring hit Planet Aradne and like everything else, it was too hard and came with no warning.
One week the forest was wet and grey and the next it was loud with growing. Vines that had been dead brown sticks all winter pushed out leaves the size of dinner plates overnight. Flowers opened in colors Eren had no names for. The whole western half of the forest smelled like wet earth and sap with something sweet underneath that made his Poison Resistance twitch every few hundred meters, just to remind him that pretty things here usually wanted to kill you.
He spent most of that month carrying a backpack full of empty jars.
The routine was simple. Wake up on the farm, eat whatever Selena had left out the night before, charge the Fragment in Evon air overnight, open the portal in the morning and step through into the forest with Fury padding along at his hip. Then he walked a loop he'd mapped over the last few weeks and dug up anything that looked like it might grow somewhere safer.
