Cultivating Immortality by Raising a Cat (GL) Chapter 1

In this world, all things have spirit.
Many people had heard that saying. To Lin Mianmian, it had once been nothing more than a phrase people said and then forgot, nothing important at all.
That lasted until she went from being a person to being a blade of grass. Her roots sank deep into the soil. She fed on wind and dew and grew thick with leaves for nearly a hundred years. Only then did she understand the bitterness hidden inside the words, all things have spirit.
A human soul in a body of grass. She could not move, could not speak, could not eat. From body to mind, she was trapped in endless loneliness. For nearly a hundred years, Lin Mianmian had been a true “plant person.” The only good thing was that for most of that time, she was buried in deep sleep. Often she would wake for a few days, then fall asleep again. When she woke, years had passed. Sometimes more than ten. Sometimes several decades.
Because of that, though her years as grass were long, Lin Mianmian still thought of herself as human. Most of her memories were still from her life before crossing over. That life had been hard, tiring, and disappointing, but it was still better than being a blade of grass.
Her old life had begun plainly and ended in anything but plainness.
She had grown up in a family with no worries over food or clothing, with a stern but loving father, a gentle and caring mother, and Lin Mianmian herself, a good student who did what she was supposed to do. That calm, steady happiness was shattered just before she graduated from university. Her parents died in a plane crash.
Lin Mianmian had thought that would be the greatest blow she would ever have to bear. But less than a month after she finished handling their funeral and returned to school, a greater disaster came.
This time, the whole world changed.
Without warning.
Most of humanity turned into zombies. Mutated animals and plants appeared everywhere. The climate grew harsh, food became scarce, and the surviving humans gathered into small bases. They drove off zombies, hunted mutated animals, planted edible mutated crops, and struggled to survive in the cracks of a world filled with malice.
Lin Mianmian was lucky. She did not become a zombie. She gained a wood-type ability and joined a base team that researched and grew edible mutated plants. But she was also unlucky. In the seventh year of the apocalypse, Lin Mianmian became a level-five ability user. That same year, the base sent her to Central City.
She had never expected her parents’ sudden deaths. She had expected the world’s sudden mutation even less. But what she truly had never imagined was this: after seven years at the base, after researching and planting countless edible mutated plants, after spending day and night in the fields using up her ability to force plants to grow so more people could eat, the upper ranks of the base sent her to Central City as one of its human test subjects.
Seven years of devotion and effort had turned into a joke.
Lin Mianmian had thought her life would end on an operating table somewhere in Central City after she was tortured by experiment after experiment. Yet, less than two days after arriving there, before even a single experiment began, the dungeon where she was imprisoned exploded and ended her life.
More exactly… it ended the operation of her body.
The moment her body was blasted apart, before Lin Mianmian even had time to feel pain, she found herself turned into a hazy ball of light. She was thrown out of her body and flew upward, completely out of control.
Only when she reached midair did Lin Mianmian realize that it was not only one dungeon that had been destroyed. She did not know what had exploded, but almost half of Central City had fallen into a sea of fire.
At the same time, more balls of light like her kept springing out of the flames and flying upward.
Whether it was Lin Mianmian’s ball of light or the others below, they all rose at an astonishing speed. Soon, Central City, the largest base of the apocalypse, was only the size of an apple in her sight. In the end, even the whole Earth looked barely bigger than an egg.
At last, the flight stopped.
From the explosion to stopping at such a height, only a little more than ten seconds had passed. There was no time to understand what was happening.
The pause did not last long. It only gave Lin Mianmian enough time to glance at the balls of light in many colors that had risen and stopped with her before another sudden change came.
Unlike the fast but smooth upward flight from before, this time Lin Mianmian felt a huge force strike. It was as if her entire ball of light had been pinched in the palm of a giant hand, squeezed so hard she was about to suffocate and die.
When she had become a ball of light and left her body, the pain of being blown apart had vanished. But now it seemed to come back a thousand times worse. Lin Mianmian could not see what her own light looked like, but she could see the balls near her. Those colorful lights all dimmed at once and twisted into strange shapes. Several were already on the verge of scattering.
No… not just the balls of light. Even Earth…
Lin Mianmian could no longer bear the crushing pain and lost consciousness. In the last second before she blacked out, she saw Earth almost squeezed into a broken egg yolk, while the balls of light around her, the ones nearly crushed apart, shot back toward it.
Even if they were scattered, flying back there still counted as souls returning home, Lin Mianmian thought at the end. If only she could have held on for a few more seconds, she would have seen that she did not follow those lights back toward the blurring Earth. Instead, twisted by the force, she shot at high speed toward another blurred and distorted universe.
She had not scattered.
But in the end, she had not returned home either.
When Lin Mianmian woke again, she was on a mountain slope. At the foot of the mountain not far away, a group of people seemed to be building a house. They carried logs back and forth. Lin Mianmian instinctively wanted to move closer, only to find that she could not take a step.
Roots sunk deep in the soil. Stems and leaves swaying in the wind. A body that could not move. In the distance were people with tied-up hair, short work clothes, simple tools, and obvious differences from the people she knew. Lin Mianmian spent a very long time unable to accept that she had crossed into a strange place and possessed a little blade of grass.
That “very long time” was nearly a hundred years.
When Lin Mianmian first woke in the grass body, the building she saw those people constructing was an ancestral hall.
Perhaps some hidden force was guiding things. Every time Lin Mianmian woke from sleep, whether she had slept for a few years or more than ten, the ancestral hall always happened to be hosting some event. Weddings, funerals, birthdays, celebrations – none were the same, but they always made the area around the hall lively. Even the little slope where Lin Mianmian lived would gain a bit of human warmth.
If life had continued like that, then Lin Mianmian’s grassy existence, spent mostly asleep and rarely awake, would have been something she endured one day at a time.
But after who knew how many cycles of sleeping and waking, one time, when Lin Mianmian opened her senses, her surroundings were not lively like before.
It was quiet. There was only the sound of one human breathing.
A huge iron blade rose before Lin Mianmian and came down again. Her vision went dark. Her body, rooted underground for many years and never moved, flipped through the air along with the iron blade.
In midair, Lin Mianmian saw the young man swinging the shovel. She also saw where she was about to land: the cart of soil behind him.
Even after crossing into an age with backward tools and simple people, fate still could not be held in the hands of a blade of grass.
Would she be made into a mud brick? Used to repair a dirt road? Mixed with water and smeared onto a wall? Or would she be picked out early and thrown by the roadside?
For the first time since attaching herself to grass, Lin Mianmian began to worry about her future as a blade of grass.