I Awakened the World's Worst Class, Then Became Unstoppable

Chapter 3: Forty-Eight Hours

Deploy Common Soil Plot.

The ground in front of Ethan rippled, like heat haze on asphalt, and then it was there—a rectangle of dark, rich earth, exactly one square meter, sitting in the middle of his dead-dirt yard like a secret. He knelt and touched it. Loose. Moist. It smelled like something alive.

He stared at it for a long moment. Then he got up and went inside.

Under the bed, in a gray canvas bag, he kept a roll of three-color plastic sheeting—the kind people used for makeshift greenhouses, back before the soil died. It was old. Brittle in places. But it still blocked light, and it still kept out rain, and most importantly, it kept out eyes.

He didn't want anyone knowing about this.

The neighbors were good people. He trusted them as much as he trusted anyone. But this was a world where a single Chef could charge a year's salary for one meal, where the Agricultural Consortium controlled every arable square meter with private security. If word got out that an E-rank Farmer in the Outer District could grow actual food...

He didn't finish the thought. He didn't need to.

He scavenged a few rusted iron rods from his scrap pile, drove them into the ground around the soil plot, and draped the plastic sheeting over them, weighting the edges with rocks. From the outside, it looked like a makeshift storage tent—the kind of thing half the Outer District had in their yards. Invisible.

When he was done, he sat back on his heels and pulled the seed packet from his inventory.

Ten seeds. Tiny things, barely visible in his palm. He tipped them into the soil one by one, spacing them as best he could across the single square meter, and pressed them half an inch deep with his fingertip.

Common Vegetable Seeds planted. Cultivation successful.

A progress bar appeared above the plot, visible only to him.

Time to maturity: 48 hours.

Forty-eight hours. In the old world, leafy greens took weeks. Here, apparently, the system compressed things. He could work with forty-eight hours.

He pulled out a bottle of Growth Nutrient, cracked the seal, and poured it evenly across the soil. The earth darkened, drank it in, and the progress bar jumped.

Growth Nutrient applied. Time to maturity reduced by 24 hours. Remaining: 24 hours.

He considered pouring a second bottle. The system said no stacking, but he'd always been the kind of person who tested the rules rather than trusted them. He pulled out a second bottle, tipped it—

Growth Nutrient already applied to this plot. Additional applications have no effect.

"Worth a try," he muttered.

And then the seeds sprouted.

Not slowly. Not over minutes. They pushed up through the soil all at once, ten pale green shoots unfurling into leaves, and Ethan found himself grinning because they were real. They were actually real.

As they grew, he could make out what they were. Not just generic leafy greens, either. Two heads of bok choy. Two lettuce. One napa cabbage. One sweet potato vine. One snow pea. One cucumber. One scallion. One ginger root.

Ten plants, ten varieties, all Common quality. No mutation, no higher-grade variant. The 1% chance hadn't triggered. He'd expected that—ten seeds, E-rank talent, the odds were terrible. But they'd all grown. One hundred percent success rate, just like the ability said.

And when they matured, he'd get ten times the normal harvest.

Ten plants. Tenfold yield. In a world where a single head of lettuce could feed a family for a week and cost more than Ethan's monthly rent...

He did the math in his head and stopped, because the numbers were getting ridiculous and he didn't want to jinx it.

He thought about the Spirit Cabbage seeds—the Uncommon ones, sitting in his inventory like a lit firecracker. He could plant them. They'd grow. They'd probably produce something extraordinary.

He didn't.

Not yet.

He was an orphan in the Outer District with an E-rank Class and a hoe. If he produced an Uncommon-grade crop and someone found out, the corporations wouldn't offer him a contract. They'd take him. They'd put him in a room with soil and lights and tell him to plant, and if he refused, they'd make him plant. He'd read enough history to know how this went. The first Chef had been found in a slum, too. She'd disappeared for six months before she reappeared as the face of a conglomerate's luxury food division. Nobody asked what happened in those six months.

So the Spirit Cabbage stayed in his inventory. The Common vegetables grew behind plastic sheeting. And Ethan went inside.

It was past six. Electricity was expensive—rationed, tiered, priced so that people in the Outer District used as little as possible. Ethan's routine was simple: when the sun went down, he lay down. No lights. No screens. Just the dark and the quiet and the faint hum of the city walls in the distance.

He lay on his bed—found, like everything else, the frame bent but functional, the mattress thin but clean—and stared at the ceiling.

Outside, the city hummed. Today was the Awakening. Every eighteen-year-old in every Walled City on the planet had stood in a gymnasium or a courtyard or a stadium and felt their Class ignite. The high-level ones—the S-ranks, the rare A-ranks—were already being tracked by intelligence agencies, by corporate headhunters, by foreign governments. A single S-rank Awakening could shift the balance of power between nations.

The people in charge were watching.

And somewhere in that system, a Farmer Class had appeared for the first time in history.

Ethan closed his eyes.

Twenty-four hours.