DC 2.5 (New Chapter 3)

As a part of my new editing mission, I mentioned that you could expect to see new chapters to fill in things/plot holes/personifications that I glossed over in my rush to get to the sect arc in my first write-through. This is the first of a few chapters I expect to write that should give more character as well as background to young Feng Jiao and his family. 

For now, I'll label such chapters as .5, I don't feel like redoing all of the chapter numbers until I'm fairly confident I'm done with the backfill chapters.

* * *

After speaking with his father, Feng Jiao realized he wouldn’t be able to begin experimenting with the mana, or rather essence, of the world he found himself in for some time to come. With any luck, his body would still adapt to the ambient energy at a younger age like most females did. That is, after all, the original gender of the body he ended up inhabiting.

Still, he didn’t know what would result of the changes he made to the body. He hadn’t even really considered it was that big of a deal until years after he’d been reborn. As a tree, gender wasn’t really a concept that applied to him as he’d had both reproductive parts necessary to self-propagate. The fact that he’d had the knowledge at all to understand the intricacies of human gender or how to heal his mother at all had come as a surprise, like something you knew but forgot until it was brought up again.

There were a lot of things like that, when he thought about it. His previous life was a tree, and he didn’t remember being a human before that but everything around him felt so uncomfortably familiar. He wondered if the same thing would have happened had he been reborn a dog, but somehow, he doubted that. The haunting memory of the burnt, bleeding, husk of a creature he now knew to be human lording over his freshly sprouted sapling had always filled him with a sort of melancholy.

Feng Jiao shook the thoughts from his head. As much as he’d love to know the truth, speculation wouldn’t make him any stronger in this lifetime. What was important, really, was that he had the memories and skills in the first place, not where he’d gotten them from. In that same vein of thought, Feng Jiao intended to exploit his knowledge to the limits, which led him to his current situation.

“Gently massage the leaves in a triangular motion, little Jiao’er. You’re doing circles right now and that will inhibit the herb’s growth potential.” Weifeng Xue patiently explained to her son. Feng Jiao could tell that she was genuinely surprised by his botanical ability and how quick on the uptake he was. “Perfect, just like that. Most people will tell you that such low-class herbs aren’t worth the effort to grow correctly, but I disagree.

“Sure, blistmint wort isn’t a cultivator’s herb, but why bother trying to grow anything if you aren’t going to do it correctly? The plant didn’t choose to be planted, so you should give it your wholehearted effort. If you bring a child, pet, or plant into this world, it is your obligation to give it your all.” Weifeng Xue gently massaged the stalk of a fruit sapling as she spoke.

The fruit was not local to their religion or climate, but she’d be nursing it since it was a pit to add to her own little fruit grove. It was one of the many things that endeared her to Feng Jiao, her dedication to treating plant life with the same love and care she would a pet animal. Most did not share her view, he discovered, but she was extraordinarily talented at eking out the potential of everything she touched, a natural green thumb. It was one of the reasons she was so well looked upon by the rest of the village, her herbs and plants had saved many a family from disease.

That and the fact that she was currently being groomed to help her daughters take over the village in the unlikely event that his grandmother had an untimely death, having given birth to not only the first female heiress they’d had in 2 generations, but two of them at that. After the stressing about their line of succession for so long, it had been a welcome reprieve and cause of celebration for all. His grandmother was loved by her people and nobody wanted to see her replaced by someone from the main family, as they were likely to try and impose their claim on the land regardless of the fact that she’d had 3 sons. It had something to do with the original village head declaring there’d never be a male leader there

It was also apparent that his family was not familiar with the heir-bearer weed, if that's even what they called it in this world. Although they knew his mother had been poisoned, they’d never figured out what the poison itself was. The process he went through absorbing the medical potency of the toxic in the womb had apparently diluted what was left of the poison to the point that they did not recognize it, not even the alchemist they’d brought her expelled blood could identify it as anything more than medical dregs. Still, they weren’t stupid and knew there was some sort of conspiracy afoot.

Feng Jiao continued to massage the plant that he’d discovered was sort of a variation on the aloe vera of his life past. Keeping his eye on his mother as she hummed to herself, he palmed a bit of leaf from another herb to his left. He’d been working in the greenhouses with his mother and had decided to expand his botanical knowledge with a little bit of self-study.

He’d realized relatively early on that although he could no longer feel and manipulate his mana/essence, he could sense what happened within his body and through the consumption of a few of the more expensive herbs they grew there, manipulate the way it grew. It was how he’d managed to deal with the flare ups and side effects of his body changing forcefully. He had also developed some semblance of immunity to the mundane poisons that grew around him, either from the poison bath he’d taken in the womb or his repeated consumption of them in small increments since then.

Of course, his mother kept her eye on her young, specifically to make sure he didn’t ingest any poisons. He wasn’t even allowed in the truly dangerous greenhouses. Feng Jiao, however, knew that all medicines could be poisons on their own should they be used without any ailment to cure. It wasn’t that he was masochistic or anything either, he just decided that the fastest way to discover plants with similar traits to those he already knew would be to eat them himself. There’s only so much he could learn through observation alone, and finding similar reagents to what he already knew would save him a lot of time when he got his magic back.

“Jiao’er,” his heartbeat skipped as he thought he was caught skimming herbs again momentarily, “it is getting late and we need to get back and start dinner. Your father is probably running up the wall by now, dealing with your sisters all by himself.” Feng Jiao exhaled the breath he didn’t even realize he was holding. There were only so many times he could get away with feigning ignorance when swiping herbs from the greenhouse.

He gummed the leaf he’d swiped, relishing its numbing sensation in his mouth. With a simple ‘mm-hm’ to his mother as affirmation, he followed her back toward their home. It was lucky that he wasn’t considered a talkative child in the first place, as it let him get away with non-verbal responses frequently. The specific plant he’d pilfered a piece of that day tasted a bit like onion but had more properties of ginger root, he made sure to make a mental note of that.

He helped his mother bundle up a collection of herbs to boil into a tea for the old spinster that lived down the way, she'd had a fairly bad fever for a few days and was now trying to get over the sore throat it left her with. Thankfully, his mother didn’t intend for him to go with her over there and sent him on ahead by himself.

He rushed out of the fields, he’d found that most children his age loved to run places when given the chance and therefore did so to blend in, and ran straight up the hill toward his home.

His house wasn’t much to look at, in his opinion, but was also one of the grander dwellings on their mountain. It was three stories tall, with the first floor being living areas, the second bedrooms, and the third floor ‘off limits to children’, made of an apparently expensive type of imported hardwood. There were several windows that looked out over their village, his house was set higher up the mountain and away from most, and a river within walking distance that Feng Jiao and his family would use for their water needs.

Even with the five of them living there, his two sisters, himself, his mother, and his father, the house felt far too substantial for just them. He found out later that after the maid incident, many of the staff that had lived with them were either fired or relocated off the estate. A few thought it was an overreaction, but most understood and approved of the decision. Either way, all the rooms that the servants had previously lived in now stood vacant, along with the few standalone single pen homes.

He slowed down to check on his own personal herb garden, his mother had finally let him start growing his own. Along with his taste testing herbs, he’d started cross pollinating some of the more common ones in an attempt to create plants closer to what he remembered from his home world. He’d already found a few that tasted and looked almost identical, as weird as that seemed to him, but without their medicinal properties. He had had minor successes so far, but his mother had only let him start experimenting with a garden of his own a year ago. Before that, she’d separate any plants he was trying to cross pollinate to prevent contamination, as if that wasn’t his entire goal. After a bit of weeding, he managed to get inside before his mother caught up anyways.

“Big bro!” a blonde-haired blur tackled Feng Jiao as soon as he opened the front door, nearly knocking him backwards out of the threshold and back into the yard. Although his younger sister, Feng Chuju, wasn’t as smart as her older brother, she had picked up talking in full sentences around the time she hit 1 year of age. Even now, at three years old, she acted closer to the children his age in the village than her own.

“Hey there, Chuchu. Go wash up and get ready for dinner, mom will be home soon.” Just like that, his sister was off like a lightning bolt, sprinting toward the river shallows. He knew that he should probably watch her to make sure she wasn’t washed away, but his sister seemed to be an even stronger swimmer than he was.

His father greeted him with one hand as he used the other to bounce his crying baby sister, Feng Binglie. Feng Jiao gave him his courtesy greeting before walking up to his room to write down notes from his research that day.