The Seed of Doubt
The bright morning sunlight leaked through the window and struck my eyes. I glanced at the clock—seven in the morning. It felt like the first time in ages I’d slept more than three hours straight. I scratched my head and sat up in bed, only to realize that Chae-yun, who had been lying right beside me the night before, had vanished. Seo-hee was nowhere to be seen either; she’d disappeared sometime after dinner yesterday evening.
Seo-hee was one thing, but where the hell had Chae-yun gone? The question gnawed at me, so I reached for my phone to call her. Before I could even dial, I saw she had already left a message.
“What the… if you were going to do this, why did you even go back to the dorm?”
It was the weekend anyway. She could have just stayed here and slept in without a worry. Or maybe she’d gotten embarrassed by all the affectionate things I’d said to her last night? With that thought in mind, I opened her message.
The very first line seized my attention with its sheer intensity.
Oppa! I'm pregnant!
…Huh?
Fuck?
I sat across from Chae-yun inside a quiet café, the two of us facing each other. I had tried to call Seo-hee since the situation obviously concerned her too, but she wasn’t picking up and didn’t seem interested in reading any messages. So it ended up being just the two of us meeting to talk this through.
Chae-yun must have liked coffee; she’d been sipping away at hers since we sat down. On the other hand, I was still too stunned to function. I pressed my fingers against my furrowed brow, trying to ease the headache, and kept my cap pulled low with a mask over my face. I’d ordered a coffee but had completely forgotten about it, my mind drifting somewhere far away.
“…Oppa, if you’re not going to drink that, can I have it?”
“Go ahead. God, my head…”
Chae-yun happily slid my cup over and started drinking it too, looking delighted.
“Can I talk now that you’ve calmed down a bit?”
She set the cup down and looked at me. It seemed she had been patiently waiting, sipping coffee while I gathered my thoughts.
“Ah, yeah. Sorry. Go ahead.”
“If Oppa wants, we don’t have to have this child.”
“Hey, wait, when you say it like that…”
I could feel sharp, disapproving stares coming from every corner of the café. I tried to correct her wording, but the damage was already done. There was no point trying to fix it now.
“…Did I say something wrong?”
“…No, it’s fine. Keep going. It’s too late anyway. You don’t mean abortion or anything like that, right?”
“I am pregnant, but it’s not a human child.”
Chae-yun lowered her voice compared to before. I remembered something she had told me once. The bodies of women who became their hosts could conceive normal human children if they wanted, but they could also choose to nurture only a Seed meant to bloom their own flower.
They took the nutrients from their mated male—semen, in other words—and cultivated a Seed inside the womb.
“You could’ve led with that part…”
“Sorry.”
Seeing her playfully smile as she drank the coffee finally let me breathe a little easier. Becoming a father at twenty was something I desperately wanted to avoid.
“Still… someday, I’d like to have a baby with you, Oppa, and live like a real married couple.”
“…………”
If she wanted, she could definitely have a human child. These creatures could freely reshape the bodies of their hosts however they liked. Choosing between a baby and a Seed should be well within their power. Yet she had chosen not to carry a child. It might have been for her own future. From now on, whether she liked it or not, she had to live as the human named Lee Chae-yun. Maybe she had considered the burden of becoming a young mother in her early twenties. But I could also feel a small consideration for me in her choice, which made me feel both sorry and grateful.
“…Then how long until the Seed comes out? If anything feels wrong with your body, tell me immediately.”
“Hm? There’s nothing like that. It’ll probably come out tonight?”
“…………”
Right. Of course these things were like this. They completely defied human common sense. I had assumed there would at least be some physical change—like a swollen belly—but she said there was nothing. I let out a hollow laugh, completely floored.
“It’ll just pop out cleanly in the evening with no problems at all. Then we just plant it in a flowerpot and we’re done.”
“Simple, huh.”
“Isn’t there a saying? Simple is best?”
Watching her speak so casually, as if there were truly no issues, made me laugh again. She smiled back at me, set down her empty cup, picked up her bag, and asked,
“Oppa, you don’t have a flowerpot at home, right? Let’s go buy one together.”
After buying a suitable flowerpot and some soil from a nearby shop, I parted ways with Chae-yun and returned to my studio apartment. She said she would bring the Seed herself later, so I should just rest at home. She seemed a little embarrassed. For some reason, my own feelings were strangely unsettled too. In a way, wasn’t this basically my child? The thought left me a bit confused.
While I was lost in that haze, an idea I had been pondering for a while suddenly resurfaced when I looked at the flowerpot.
“…It’s a flower, obviously.”
What bloomed in such a small pot would surely be just a single flower. At least, that was what I knew. I wouldn’t know for sure until it actually bloomed, but among all the flowers I had seen in my life, even dandelions that spread by seed had dozens of petals at most. Yet that day, the number of petals that had rained down from the sky had been in the thousands at the very least—if not tens of thousands.
And Chae-yun had said she herself didn’t scatter that many petals.
“…No matter how I think about it…”
No matter how I thought about it, there had to have been a third party involved. That was the only conclusion I could reach.
I wanted to ask Chae-yun, but she had no memories from before she took over the body, and her intelligence had been nonexistent back then. There was nothing she could tell me. And since Seo-hee hadn’t been there either, asking her would be pointless.
Who had scattered the flowers, and for what purpose? Were they even human to begin with? How had they managed to scatter such an enormous amount of petals? Countless questions swirled in my mind.
My thoughts spun rapidly. Since my own neck was on the line, I racked my brain desperately. After all, I was already at the center of this incident. But there were simply no clues. The only clues—the petals—had probably already been swept away by the janitor.
“…The other side is an organization of at least several dozen people.”
That was what I believed for now. There was no way a single person could have scattered that many petals. It had to have been a planned operation carried out by dozens of people working together. I doubted they had handled such a dangerous flower without any precautions. At the very least, they probably knew far more about these flowers than I did.
I had been living too comfortably until now. This wasn’t a situation that allowed for any complacency.
“I let my guard down. Fuck.”
If they had already figured out my identity—or Chae-yun’s—the situation would become even more of a headache. I had no information on their strength or their resources. These thoughts kept chaining together endlessly inside my head.
While I was sitting there in a daze, lost in worry, the doorbell rang. Chae-yun’s voice came from outside.
“Oppa, I’m here~”
Hearing her voice snapped me back to reality. Looking at myself, I realized I hadn’t even changed out of my clothes since getting home. I had just been sitting here thinking the whole time.
“Yeah, just a second.”
I let Chae-yun, who had been waiting outside, into the apartment. As she stepped inside, she handed me the Seed.
“…Hmm. It looks like a normal seed.”
“What were you expecting?”
Chae-yun asked with an incredulous tone as she took off her outer coat and sat down on the floor.
“Now just plant it in the flowerpot and water it like you would a plant.”
“Even the way it blooms is ordinary.”
I shrugged at Chae-yun, then brought over the flowerpot. I dug a small hole with my finger just big enough for the seed, dropped it in, and covered it with soil again.
“Like this?”
“Yes. If you keep watering it steadily, it should bloom in about a week.”
“The growth time isn’t ordinary at all.”
I wasn’t surprised anymore, but the fact that it only took a single week for the flower to fully bloom still felt strangely fascinating. We both fell silent with the flowerpot between us. I had been about to tell her the thoughts I’d been mulling over alone, but she spoke first.
“Oppa.”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t you think what happened at school that day was strange?”
The usually playful and endlessly cute Chae-yun sometimes became strangely sharp. I nodded at her quick insight, impressed.
“I’ve been thinking it’s strange too. Ten petals per flower. But the number of petals scattered across campus that day had to have been in the tens of thousands, right?”
“It was probably the work of some group.”
“Yes. But don’t worry too much. It doesn’t seem like they know about us.”
“Why do you think that?”
“If we were being followed or watched, I would have noticed immediately. But I don’t sense any presence like that.”
She could sense people’s presence. Sometimes I wondered—if these creatures ever decided to harm humanity in earnest, would humans even be able to protect themselves?
“We don’t have any information on them, but they don’t have any on us either. I’m certain of that.”
“They’ll come looking for us.”
It wasn’t that the group was leaving us alone—they simply hadn’t found us yet. If that was the case, we were in a slightly more advantageous position. If they wanted to find us, they would eventually have to come here.
Chae-yun asked me with a serious expression.
“Oppa… if the time comes… can you kill people?”