Days bled into a rhythm of dirt, water, and the quiet hum of spiritual weeds. Long Hu's hands, though still calloused, had grown accustomed to the silver shears. He moved through the Weeping Moon Orchid section with a practiced efficiency, his senses, once dulled by amnesia, now sharpened by necessity. The 'thrum' he felt when severing Night Creepers had become more pronounced, a faint but distinct resonance that seemed to vibrate within his very core.
He discovered that not all Night Creepers were alike. Some vibrated with a rough, insistent hum, while others pulsed with a sluggish, sickening rhythm that seemed to actively drain the light from the air. He began to differentiate them, instinctively choosing to target the latter, the more virulent parasites, first. When he cleanly severed one of these, the thrum was almost a joyous sigh, a ripple of purified spiritual energy that warmed his fingers for a fleeting moment.
One afternoon, as he meticulously cleared a particularly dense thicket of Night Creepers, a different kind of sensation prickled at his skin. It wasn't the usual draining feel of the weeds, but a faint, almost melodic hum coming from deep within the earth itself. He knelt, pushing aside a clump of moss, and saw it: a small, unassuming patch of withered green, barely discernible amidst the thriving orchids. It looked like nothing more than a dying patch of grass, yet it sang with that strange, subtle melody.
He instinctively reached out, his fingers brushing the withered blades. A faint tremor passed through him. This was not a creeper, nor an orchid. It was something else. As his touch lingered, a fragmented image flickered across his mind – a vast, ancient library, filled with scrolls and tomes, then a single, illuminated page detailing... *spiritual soil composition*. The image vanished as quickly as it came, leaving him disoriented and confused.
Empress Xianxia, observing from her private study above, narrowed her eyes. She had noticed his peculiar focus in the garden. This morning, she had secretly introduced a few 'Shadow-Vein Weeds' – a rare, virtually invisible parasite that even seasoned elders struggled to detect without specialized spiritual sense. They mimicked dying foliage, but were incredibly potent drains. She wanted to see if his 'intuition' was merely luck.
To her surprise, Long Hu had moved unerringly towards them, not only detecting their presence but demonstrating an almost surgical precision in their removal. And now, he was touching that patch of seemingly dead grass. She knew that patch. It was the dormant residue of a long-extinct, lesser spiritual root that had withered centuries ago. No living being should be able to sense its faint, ancient spiritual signature, let alone derive any resonance from it.
"He does not cultivate spiritual energy, yet he interacts with it," Master Tian, who had joined her, mused, his own interest piqued. "A curious phenomenon."
Xianxia merely hummed, her eyes gleaming with a new, speculative light. "Indeed. A broken husk, yet sensing the resonance of forgotten things. Perhaps his shattered Dao has opened a different kind of perception." She had set out to humiliate a fallen Harem Lord. Instead, she seemed to have acquired a unique spiritual diviner disguised as a gardener.
Long Hu spent the rest of the day carefully nurturing the withered patch, pouring the purest water from his cleaning bucket onto it, instinctively understanding its needs. He couldn't cultivate, but he could *feel*. He could sense the desperate thirst of the dying roots, the faint longing for life.
As dusk settled, casting long shadows across the garden, a tiny, almost imperceptible green shoot, no bigger than a needle, poked through the withered patch. It was vibrant, almost glowing. A tiny, insignificant miracle born of his weak hands and newfound intuition.
He gazed at it, a profound sense of accomplishment filling him – a feeling he hadn't known since his awakening. He had cleaned a fountain, and now, he had coaxed life from dormancy. The Empress intended his apprenticeship as a punishment. But for Long Hu, the former Harem Lord with no memories, these mundane tasks were becoming a strange, unexpected journey of discovery. He was learning the silent language of the world, and in doing so, perhaps, finding the first fragmented whispers of his own lost power. And the Empress, unknowingly, was fostering a unique monster in her very own garden.