Shennong's Journal in the Withering Age

The year is 2125, ninety-five years after the Great Withering. The old world’s agricultural civilization collapsed. Mutated plants devoured cities, and humanity’s survivors built a new order on the ruins, relying on people with agricultural abilities to sustain it. Lin Shen, the bottom-ranked student at the Ninth Agricultural Base, is assigned to a contaminated zone certain to be fatal on the eve of graduation. His only companion is a battered journal he happened to find, with nearly invisible transparent roots growing from its page corners. He does not know that the journal’s author is his grandmother, the chief scientist of the old world’s Project Agricultural Deity. He knows even less that forbidden genes flow in his blood, allowing him to wield both rational agricultural knowledge and the dangerous power to fuse with plants. When iron-devouring vines tear his teammates apart and a warden points a gun at his forehead, Lin Shen completes his first fusion unconsciously in the depths of despair: He hears the plants’ anger and pain, as well as a distress signal that has been repeating for nearly a hundred years. “The Ninth Base sees him as a heretic who must be eliminated.” “The Wilderness Fusion Cult calls him the prophesied holy son.” “The Rebirth City-State only wants to dissect him and use him as a specimen.” And deep beneath the earth, the primordial mother plant responsible for the Great Withering gently trembles its leaves. It dreams of the child who was stolen away. It dreams that the key has finally come home.