The guards left before he'd finished getting his bags out of the carriage.
Not rudely, exactly. One of them said something about returning to report to Lord Ashford and the other one nodded along and then they were both on their horses and moving back up the hill at a pace that stopped just short of a gallop. The one with the egg breakfast hadn't even finished it. He'd left the cloth wrap on the carriage seat.
He took it. Cold eggs, slightly squashed, wrapped in something that had soaked through. Best meal he'd had in this world so far.
Gren watched the guards go, looked at the estate, looked at the three large black wolves sitting in the overgrown driveway, and then picked up two of the bags and walked toward the front door with the energy of someone who had decided to simply continue functioning.
The tour took about forty minutes and the conclusion was that Gren had been generous with the word potential.
The west wing had lost most of its roof at some point, rain had done the rest, and now it was a sequence of rooms that were open to the sky in patches and smelled like wet stone and something that had been growing in the corners for a long time. He walked through it once. Tres followed him in and then sneezed at a pile of debris and came back out. He decided that was a reasonable assessment and moved on.
The main hall connected the two wings and was structurally intact, which was the best thing that could be said about it. High ceilings, stone floor, a fireplace that worked if you didn't look too closely at the state of the chimney, and a long table that had warped badly on one end and been propped up with a folded piece of wood someone had wedged under the leg at some point in its history. The fold had compressed over the years into what was now just part of the table's permanent personality.
He thought, while walking through the main hall, about how in certain games you'd start in a village that was supposed to feel lived-in and humble but the textures were too clean and everything was placed too deliberately and you could tell nobody had actually thought about what a real abandoned place looked like. This place had thought about it. Extensively.
The eastern wing was better. Six rooms, a proper staircase, actual intact windows with actual glass in them, which felt like a luxury after the west. The bedroom at the end of the hall was large and cold and had a bed frame with no mattress, but the frame was solid and the floor under it was dry. He put his bags down.
The kitchen was on the ground floor of the eastern wing, stone-walled, with a large iron stove in the corner and nothing else. No pots, no utensils, no food. Just the stove, and a hook above it that had once held something and didn't anymore.
Technically a kitchen.
Gren appeared behind him in the doorway and made a sound in the back of his throat. "I'll make arrangements in Millhaven. The town is four miles east. I can have supplies brought within two days."
"Two days."
"Yes, young master."
He looked at the empty kitchen and then looked at the cloth wrap from the guard's abandoned breakfast, which he was still holding. One cold egg left in it.
"I'll be fine," he said, with the specific confidence of someone who had eaten worse things at 3 AM and survived. Well. Mostly survived.
He sat on the stone steps outside the eastern wing in the afternoon with his back against the door and the three wolves arranged around him in varying states of alertness. Uno was watching the Wildlands tree line over the garden wall with his ears forward. Dos was watching Uno. Tres had found a patch of dead grass that was apparently interesting and was investigating it thoroughly with his nose.
He pulled up the status panel.
It came immediately, clean lines of text in the space behind his eyes like a menu he'd learned to navigate without thinking about it.
[Host Status: Kael Ashford]
[Crest: Sovereign Genesis (SSS-Rank)]
[External Classification: NULL]
[Rank: F-Rank (Early)]
[STR: 46]
[SPD: 34]
[VIT: 25]
[Active Marks: 3]
[Sovereign Mark Capacity: INFINITE]
[Marked Entities:]
- Uno | Shadow Fang Wolf | D-Rank | Loyalty: Absolute
- Dos | Shadow Fang Wolf | D-Rank | Loyalty: Absolute
- Tres | Shadow Fang Wolf | D-Rank | Loyalty: Absolute
He looked at the STR number for a second. Forty-six. He had the body's memories of what a NULL-classified sixteen-year-old was supposed to have in base stats, roughly ten across the board, and three wolf marks had pushed him to forty-six, thirty-four, and twenty-five respectively, which put him near the top end of F-Rank without technically crossing into E. The threshold was higher, but the gap was smaller than it should've been for someone who'd awakened nothing.
The ceremony examiner had marked him NULL in a book somewhere. The book was wrong.
He dismissed the panel and looked at his hands. Marking three wolves had given him numbers that most F-Rank fighters spent months building through actual combat. He'd done it in about ninety seconds while a carriage horse screamed next to him. The wolves were D-Rank, both of them significantly above the C-Rank guards who'd been struggling with the pack, and they were lounging in his driveway like large dogs waiting for dinner.
Huh.
He looked at Tres, who had moved on from the dead grass to inspecting a rock.
If three F-Rank wolves did that to his numbers, he wanted to know what marking something bigger would do. Something D-Rank to start. Something already stronger.
His eyes went to the Wildlands tree line, then back to his hand.
Later. He'd figure out where to start later.
The garden was a long rectangular space behind the eastern wing, bordered by a low stone wall on three sides and the Wildlands wall on the fourth. It had been a proper garden once, the bones of it still visible in the arrangement of the raised beds and the path that ran down the middle, but six years of neglect had turned it into a flat brown expanse of dead plants and compacted dirt, with some aggressive weeds along the edges that had outlasted everything else through sheer persistence.
He walked through it in the late afternoon because there was nothing else to do and Gren had taken inventory of the estate's contents and the inventory had taken eleven minutes, which said something about the contents.
He crouched at one of the raised beds and pressed his hand flat against the soil. He'd been thinking about the carriage seat, the bag, the wall he'd poked. None of those had worked. The wolves had worked. He wanted to know if the land itself was alive enough to count.
The sigil appeared in the dirt under his palm.
It spread outward from the point of contact, not a feeling but a visible thing, golden lines tracing through the soil in branching patterns the way frost spread across glass, faster at the edges, covering the first raised bed in about three seconds and then jumping to the path and the next bed and continuing outward until it covered the full garden and hit the walls and stopped.
Then it sank in.
The soil darkened first, the brown going rich and deep and wet-looking without any water. Then the dead plants straightened, not slowly, fast enough to watch, stems going from collapsed to upright in the time it took him to stand up. The weeds along the edges did something stranger, shifting shape as they grew, leaves broadening and changing color, becoming something that didn't look like weeds anymore.
Within ten minutes the raised beds had green in them. Within twenty the garden had plants he didn't recognize growing in organized rows as if they'd been planted that way, flowering things and leafy things and something with a faintly luminous quality to it in the spots where the afternoon light hit it right.
Text appeared.
[Sovereign Mark placed on: Ashford Estate Gardens (Barren)]
[Territory Evolution triggered]
[Barren Gardens → Verdant Essence Garden (D-Rank Territory)]
[Effect: All flora within evolve at 10x rate. Essence generation: 40 units/day.]
[Host power absorbed: VIT +8, passive Essence gain active]
He read it once. Passive Essence gain meant his rank would tick up without him having to kill anything, which was convenient, and forty units a day was a number he didn't have context for yet but intended to get context for. He'd figure out what the plants were worth and whether Millhaven had anyone who'd buy them.
Within an hour the garden was fully green and growing and smelled like something between rain and something sharper and cleaner than rain, the specific smell of plants that were doing better than plants were normally supposed to do.
Uno padded in from the side yard and stopped at the garden entrance. Sniffed. Walked in slowly. Dos followed. Tres came in at a jog and immediately put his nose in a flowering plant and pulled back sneezing, then went back and did it again.
A notification appeared.
[Shadow Fang Wolf (Uno) — Evolution progress: 12%]
[Exposure to Evolved Essence Flora accelerating growth]
He dismissed it. Looked at the garden. Looked at Uno, who had found a clear patch of soil between two rows of plants and was turning in a circle before lying down, which was apparently a thing wolves did too.
He hadn't meant to mark the garden. He'd been curious. The mark had worked, the garden had transformed, and now he had an estate property that generated resources and doubled as a bed for his wolves, none of which had been the plan because there hadn't been a plan.
He was starting to think plans were probably not going to be the primary operating mode here.
Gren came out to the garden as the light was going.
He stood at the entrance for a long moment, looking at the rows of luminous plants and the three large wolves distributed throughout them and the path through the middle that was now lined with something that was definitely not what had been growing there before.
He went back inside without saying anything.
That was fine.
That night he sat on the eastern wing steps with the garden visible from the doorway and went through what he knew. Three wolf marks, one territory mark. Living things worked. Objects didn't, or at least hadn't yet. Marking something pushed it up two full ranks. The power came back to him as stat increases. The territory had done something different, generating passive resources instead of loyalty, which meant the mark worked differently on land than on creatures. He wanted to know what the ceiling looked like, or whether the notification had meant it when it said NONE.
He also wanted to know what was in the Wildlands.
Not urgently. More as a background question he intended to get to eventually, the way you'd note that a game had side content you hadn't touched yet and weren't actively avoiding, just getting to in your own time.
Uno was asleep in the garden. Dos was asleep near the garden wall. Tres had found somewhere inside the east wing to sleep, probably in one of the empty rooms, probably on the floor, probably fine.
The night was quiet in the specific way that places with no traffic and no electricity were quiet, which was a lot quieter than he'd realized silence could actually be. Stars visible through the gap above the collapsed west wing. An actual moon, large and close-looking, which was either this world being different from Earth in a specific way or just what a moon looked like when you weren't looking at it through city light.
He was thinking about whether the forty units a day of Essence from the garden would be enough to push his rank up passively without combat, or whether he'd need to start hitting things in the Wildlands to speed it up, when the boom came from the trees.
Not thunder. Not a falling tree. Something that hit the ground with weight behind it, deep in the Wildlands, far enough away that the sound took a second to reach him but close enough that he felt it in the stone step under him a moment after.
The ground didn't shake exactly. More like it remembered the impact and reflected on it briefly.
Uno raised his head from the garden. Both ears up, shadow wisps curling off his fur, the focused attention he got when something had crossed from background noise into active threat assessment. He was looking at the tree line over the wall and he wasn't looking away.
He looked at the forest. Dark and still now, nothing visible, just trees going back into more trees.
He looked at his hand.
Whatever that was, it was bigger than wolves. Considerably bigger. And it was somewhere past that wall in whatever passed for a backyard in this particular exile property.
He looked at the forest. Dark and still now, nothing visible, just trees going back into more trees and whatever was in them.
He looked at his hand.
Uno was still watching the tree line, shadow wisps off his fur, not blinking.
He then stood up.