The Harvest

The orphanage's backyard was a graveyard of forgotten things,rusted bicycles, shattered clay pots, the skeletal remains of a dog that had died long before Zyris arrived.

but to him, it was something else.

it was a laboratory.

He knelt in the dirt, his hands still for once, eyes fixed on the cracked tile where a line of ants marched dutifully through the wreckage.

He had watched them for days,measuring their behaviors.

they moved without deviation, no fear, no awareness of what loomed above them.

and that made them ideal.

after ramit's death,after the boy's soul had collapsed and flooded into him,Zyris had begun to see things differently.

There had been a heaviness afterward, not emotional, but energetic.

A weight that settled in his chest,pulsed behind his eyes.

It wasn't grief.

It was absorption.

Ramit's essence hadnt vanished.

It had been transferred.

And in that realization, Zyris had found the seed of a theory,that the soul was energy, and energy could be quantified.

he started mapping it in his mind.

a soul couldn't be created or destroyed.

some were heavier than others.resistance scaled with will.

these weren't abstract ideas to him.

They explained why the ant before him trembled faintly when he reached out with his mind.

He pressed gently, forming an invisible thread of awareness between himself and the insect. The ant slowed and its legs stuttered.

Then it fell onto its side and went still. He felt it ,the flicker of something, a whisper of energy siphoned upward and inward. It barely registered. But it was real.

He also felt that the recognition that what he had done mattered.

The ant hadnt harmed him,hadn't known him.

And he had erased it,efficiently, precisely, without hesitation.

What sickened him was not the death, but his own indifference.

he spent hours afterward sitting in the dust, unmoving.

Not thinking, just listening to the silence around him.

was this what power cost?

he thought of the head-lady, of ramit, of the systems that had pressed him into corners since birth.

he didnt want to become like them.

but what choice did he have, if he wanted to understand?

One experiment bled into the next. He tethered to another ant, not to crush but to observe. He watched the shape of its soul,a flickering, twitching signal,and held it steady. There was something there. Not just mass. Not just weight.

But movement.

pulse.

energy.

he wondered,could it be used?

He found a dead moth, and without planning to, pressed a thread of that energy into a curled leaf. For a moment, nothing. Then the leaf twitched—its edge curling slightly as if stirred by breath. Not life. Not quite. But response. Zyris felt his own pulse spike. It worked.

He didn't know what to do with that.

That came later.

The shed behind the orphanage wasn't locked. No one cared about it. Inside, beneath slats of broken wood and rusted tools, Zyris made space for what he didn't name.

A corner cleared.

A few jars taken from the kitchen.

Matchboxes and tiny trays.

Not a lab,he was no scientist. Not a plan,he didn't have one. But it became a place.

The insects came easy.

He set up traps,nothing complicated.

Sugar trails.Crumbs. And soon he had ants. Lots of them. At first, he tried to draw evenly, taking just enough from each to avoid full death. But it didn't always work that way. Some resisted too little. Some gave too much.

There were no clean lines.

He learned more from the failures than the successes. Sometimes the energy felt sharp, almost volatile. Sometimes it just vanished before he could catch it. But over time, he could feel it pooling. A hum behind his ribs. A second pulse. His pulse.

The soul farm, if he'd been honest with himself, started not with an idea, but with boredom and need. He didn't write things down. He didn't build tools. He just came back every day and tested what he could take. What made his hands feel warmer. What made his mind sharper. He told himself he needed to understand. That it would lead somewhere.

But sometimes he stayed too long. Just sitting there, surrounded by the soft tap of crawling legs. Watching the trays. Listening.

He could tell when one of them died, now, even if he wasn't looking.

By the end of the week, his hands could hold a flicker—a momentary warmth like a breath of fire. It vanished quickly. But it came from him.

That night, he lay in bed staring at the ceiling. The silence wasn't silent anymore. It buzzed faintly inside him, not like thought, but like memory. Echoes. Footsteps. Things once alive.

He told himself it was necessary.

He wasn't sure he believed it.