On the muddy ground, a man was lying. He stared blankly at the gloomy sky, eyes unfocused as if he was in a delirious state. His face was pale and smudged from the dust. Around him, corpses scattered in all directions; the ground had deep holes, and a few meters away, there was a big, tortoise-like, metallic vehicle turned on its side.

     A big battle had taken place here. Some of the enemies’ bodies mixed into the human corpses – insects’ carcasses rotting around the destroyed area.

     Right next to the man was a skeleton in a military uniform. The bones were cleaned as if they had been there for years, but the clothes were too tidy and colourful, and the bones were too white under the grey sky to be that old.

     The man seemed to be the only living being there. For kilometres, there was not a single plant, animal, or any other entity on the flat, vast landscape.

     The man was not blinking, even when raindrops fell on his pale face. However, for the impact, something flickered in his cold, green eyes.

     Rain.

     He knew rain. He knew the feeling of getting wet, the drops falling off his petals and leaves, running down on his stem, and in a rainy season, the soil around his roots was so moist and full of nutrients as if he had been offered a big feast.

     Now, it was very strange. His roots weren’t connecting to the soil. His stems were heavy. He never felt his body this heavy. Only when his buds were too big and his newly grown branches would break from the weight he would feel similarly.

     Having visual senses was something entirely odd too. He never had that. He only had other feelings – his roots reached so deeply, that he was able to connect to the roots of mushrooms, and short, but clear bits of information were delivered through them. If it had to be described with words, they would sound like this: “dry, it is dry, too much sun here”; or: “this place, come to this place, it’s fruitful”, or there was silence as if a huge chunk of the network had been suddenly cut off.  

     Now, he not only felt like his body was not reaching the soil and nutrients, and that his beloved raindrops felt snow or ice on his skin, causing him to shiver, but an overwhelmingly strong light covered his whole being.

     He didn’t know he was supposed to blink, or that he could freely move any parts of his body until his auditory senses woke up.

     Hearing was familiar to him; he felt vibrations. This time, as his body wasn’t under the soil anymore, the vibrations under him seemed weak and disturbed. However, he was able to pick up other vibrations – sharp noises, short, but impactful ones.

     Just then, seeing the thick clouds and the filtering light, feeling the cold rain, hearing those droplets coming to the ground, and knocking on the metal vehicle, he started to see pictures. These pictures were also new to him. He didn’t even know, what they were for a while.

     In those pictures, he saw a similar and detailed environment.

     He was a creature, standing on two stems, covering himself in weird, soft and hard leaves, and moving on its own. Moving… Suddenly, he understood that he was the same now. He had two stems. From this piece of information, his new brain connected the nerves with his legs, he felt the electricity running through his body, and he instinctively drew them up by his knees.

     He moved his head, and finally saw his new legs – which he thought were stems. Then, he noticed two wrinkly, sprout-like thing between them. Then, his arms. Then, slowly, but surely, he looked sideways.

     The skeleton’s skull was looking at him with its empty eye pockets. There was a hole in his temple.

     The man stared into the eye pockets, and another picture flashed in front of him.

     Lu Feng was hiding behind a rock, shooting at the swarm of insects, when one of his comrades fell back from the recoil of a launcher. The unfortunate move caused chaos – the bomb hit the rock Lu Feng was hiding behind.

     Then… pain. Excruciating pain came from his legs, which had been blown off. He flew a few meters backwards, landing hard on the muddy ground. His blood was flowing continuously from his fresh wounds, and his mind was not completely clear for a while.

     He also felt increasing coldness. The chill came from inside, not from outside. He knew he was going to die in a few minutes. His mind was slow. He didn’t expect a death like this, but at the same time, it didn’t bother him much. He couldn’t think of any last words or any memories from his life as people claimed they see when they are about to die. He’d been just thinking: ‘I can’t submit that paper.’ The base won’t send people out to look for missing soldiers. There were no manpower and resources for that.

     He was calm. But before he could close his eyes, he heard an incredibly faint rustling noise, climbing through the ringing of his ears.

     He turned his head, and saw a flower.

     It was probably a large bush once. Lu Feng knew this area very well. He often brought home flower seeds to his mom. Nevertheless, because of the increasing infection rate, they destroyed plants and flowers so much recently, that there were not many left.

     This flower was a rose. It had one, wretched head, with wrinkled petals; a few thorns, scattered on its stem, and only one branch with leaves on it. It seemed like the sole survivor of a big extinction, on the verge of death.

     The rose was moving towards him. No, not really moving – more like bending by the strong wind, that was howling relentlessly over them. It seemed like it tried to reach him.

     Lu Feng’s heart hardened. Struggling, he reached out for the flower’s stem, and tried to break it to kill the creature. It was probably some kind of xenogenic, otherwise it could’ve not survived this place alone.

     He must not let other creatures get his DNA.

     The blood loss and the approaching death weakened his strength. He looked at the rose, its tiny head, and its sad, red petals. It didn’t even have two layers of petals, only one.

     So pitiful.

     Lu Feng withdrew his hand, and sighed, before reaching towards his belt. There was only one thing he could do. In fact, it was better to let this rose eat him, than letting another, more complicated creature find him, and win human intelligence. He still hated the idea, but he couldn’t avoid this outcome – the ground already absorbed his blood. At least, he would not turn into a xenogenic.  

   “Eat me, if you want, before others find me. There is nothing else for you. You will die too.”

     His voice was hoarse, and just these short lines made him so tired, he couldn’t say anything else. He looked at the rose again, which still tried to reach him and slowly but surely came closer.

     Then, he put the muzzle of his pistol to his right temple, not feeling fear or sadness, and pulled the trigger.

     The rose – the new man, lying naked in the rain – now understood. These were memories from a complicated creature. As he saw and heard him, he instinctively recognised the scene: he was the flower that the human creature – named Lu Feng – tried to kill yet decided to spare; he was the last witness of Lu Feng’s existence, and the skeleton on his side was his corpse. Many kinds of stimuli ran through his new nervous system after the realisation, it made him smarter and smarter, as if the strange thing, called knowledge, brought spring into his head, and made his brain bloom. Other memories flashed by in his mind, and as he looked at them, he understood them as well, without making any effort to do so.

     He didn’t have the same type of memories about Lu Feng, but he briefly remembered the sensations before the sky suddenly lit his world up. He felt the ground tremor, the fight over his flower head, and the thick, warm liquid around his roots. It was just as nutritious as the water droplets, but it had a very unusual aftertaste.

     He probably ate all of that. His roots and stem sucked up the blood that was creating a pool around Lu Feng, and eventually, he reached the body too. He began to grow, but as a rose, he didn’t realise, what that meant.

     He couldn’t recall his feast, because his transformation was too shocking, and he was still not completely used to his new senses. Humans had much more… tense senses, than flowers. Everything he experienced was very sharp, almost painfully – the light, the noises, the feelings on his body.

     The rain made him wet everywhere, yet, he didn’t feel like he was able to absorb the drops. Then, he slowly sat up, getting accustomed to the body. This was his first time moving himself by force; he never had to do this in his rose-life.

     He gradually found out, that he was supposed to wear those thick leaves, which humans called clothes. He had to do precise movements with his arms and hands, and the primal instincts from the DNA began to teach him everything, but it was still quite a lengthy process before he removed the military uniform, and another big chunk of time had passed until he put them on.

     Now, it was a different feeling. The icy rain did not reach him anymore, and he began to warm up, but the clothes turned out to be rough and even heavier than the body itself. He felt the same as when the bush was too tight around him once, and he and his family had to decide to get rid of a few branches to survive.

     He froze.

     He looked at Lu Feng again.

     Family.

     Alone.

     He was alone.

     Before Lu Feng died, he saw the flower – he called him a rose, which felt like a pleasant name – but there were no more others.

     Suddenly he understood everything.

     He did feel it. He felt it when it happened in the past. More and more branches of his species had been cut off the network of the roots. There were less and less connections between him and his family.

     For some reason, it seemed like everyone else had been wiped out.

     That cannot be true.

     There have to be other flowers. He needed to be around other flowers. He had to find them.

     He was about to gather all the accessories Lu Feng had around his waist when he heard a vibration in his ears and a small, continuous noise. He looked up, and after some searching, he saw something in the distance through the rain’s curtain.

     It was another weird-looking thing, a black dot that expanded, as it got closer. Soon, he got the answer from a memory: it was an armored vehicle.

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