Jolie pushed herself off the ruined carpet. The mechanical voice in her head chimed again, more urgent this time.

[System Alert: Energy dissipating. Do you wish to absorb? ]

"Absorb," Jolie whispered into the dark.

Instantly, she felt a violent, rushing sensation. A torrent of raw, crackling energy was being siphoned directly from Aloys's unconscious body, traveling down the vines and flooding into her palms.

The exhaustion that had been crushing her bones vanished. Her stamina fully restored in a matter of seconds.

A translucent blue interface materialized in her field of vision.

[Arborgenesis Proficiency +500]

[Sylvan Soul: Basic Healing Attribute Unlocked]

Jolie's lips curled into a sharp smirk. She looked at the terrifying General pinned to the wall not as a threat, but as a massive, walking battery.

She walked over to him. The faint starlight caught the sharp, aggressive angles of his face. He was devastatingly handsome, but Jolie didn't care about his face. She cared about his pockets.

She reached out and patted down his torn military shirt. Her fingers brushed against a hard lump in his inner pocket. She pulled out a heavy silver ring engraved with a complex military crest. A spatial storage ring.

Drawing on the original Jolie's memories, Jolie knew these rings were locked with a mental signature. But Aloys was unconscious, his psychic defenses completely shattered by the feral state and the neurotoxin. Jolie pushed a sharp spike of her newly leveled mental energy into the ring, violently shattering his temporary seal.

She projected her consciousness into the storage space and gasped.

It was a treasure trove. Piles of high-tier monster cores glowed with raw power, sitting next to a stack of untraceable, bearer-bond credit cards.

Jolie didn't hesitate. She grabbed the entire stack of credit cards and a handful of the brightest, highest-quality cores, shoving them deep into her own pockets.

As an afterthought, she unbuckled the sleek, black military-grade stealth communicator from his wrist. It had anti-tracking tech. She needed it.

Her looting complete, Jolie looked at Aloys. His shirt was shredded, his chest bare. With a flick of her wrist, she commanded the vines to adjust his posture, leaving him bound in a highly humiliating, spread-eagle position against the wall.

She turned her back on him and walked straight to the suite's central control terminal. She pulled a microscopic hacker chip from her hairpin-a rare, black-market tool she had secretly purchased just days ago with her meager savings, a desperate last-resort measure she had planned to use to escape the Pennington estate-and jammed it into the console.

Her fingers flew across the holographic keyboard. She bypassed the hotel's basic firewall and accessed the security mainframe. She isolated the footage from the VIP elevator and the top-floor corridor for the past hour.

With a single keystroke, she permanently shredded the data. Every digital trace of her and Catina entering the floor was wiped from existence.

Jolie moved to the suite's dressing room. She found a spare black uniform meant for the hotel's cleaning staff. She stripped off her torn dress, pulled on the uniform, tied her hair back, and slipped on a surgical mask and a cap. She looked like a ghost.

She checked the clock. Three hours until dawn.

Jolie ignored the main door. She walked to the service corridor attached to the suite and pried open the heavy metal door of the laundry chute.

She summoned a thick vine, wrapping it around a structural pipe, and used it as a rappelling rope. She slid down the dark, narrow shaft, dropping dozens of floors until she hit the soft pile of linens in the basement laundry room.

The basement was empty. Jolie slipped out the back loading dock and into the damp, garbage-filled alleyway.

A beat-up hover-shuttle used for hotel procurement was idling near the dumpsters, the keys still in the ignition.

Jolie hopped into the driver's seat, slammed the door, and punched the accelerator. The shuttle shot out of the alley with a screech of repulsors, leaving the Sovereign Grand Hotel far behind.

As she navigated the dark, neon-lit streets of the lower city, her heart rate finally began to settle. She was rich, she was free, and she had power.

Suddenly, the military-grade communicator she had stolen from Aloys let out a deafening, high-pitched siren. The screen flashed a violent, blinding red.

Jolie slammed on the brakes. The shuttle skidded to a halt in the middle of an empty intersection. She stared at the holographic projection hovering above her wrist.

[Commonwealth Mandated Pairing System Alert: Your new mandated partner has been confirmed. Name: Keanu Robertson. Please report to the registry within 24 hours. ]

Jolie stared at the name. The original Jolie's memories provided the context instantly. Keanu Robertson. The most feared assassin in the Shadow Sector. A man who had literally torn his last three mandated wives to pieces.

Jolie gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. "Son of a bitch," she cursed into the empty cabin.

Jolie pulled the stolen hover-shuttle into the shadows beneath an abandoned mag-lev overpass. The dashboard lights cast a sickly green glow over her face as she rapidly typed Keanu Robertson's name into the stolen communicator.

The holographic screen flooded with red warning flags. Shadow Sector top-tier assassin. Callsign: Phantom. Extreme aversion to females. Suspected of murdering three previous mandated partners.

Jolie rubbed her temples, a sharp headache pulsing behind her eyes. "The Commonwealth isn't giving me a husband," she muttered bitterly. "They're handing me a death warrant."

Staying in the Core Worlds was suicide. Catina would keep trying to kill her, the military General she just robbed would hunt her down, and now a psychotic assassin was legally bound to find her.

She needed to vanish.

Jolie plugged Aloys's untraceable credit cards into the shuttle's terminal. Using the dark web routing protocols she had learned from the original Jolie's memories, she rapidly laundered the funds, scattering the millions of credits across a dozen encrypted offshore accounts.

Next, she accessed a high-end black market broker. For a premium fee, she purchased a flawless, forged identity matrix. Her new name was simply "Jo."

She pulled up the galactic map. She needed a place far from the military, far from the Shadow Sector, and perfect for her plant-based abilities. Her finger tapped on a dusty, green-and-brown planet on the very edge of the Commonwealth's reach.

Agri-World Prime.

She booked a one-way ticket in the cargo hold of an anonymous freighter leaving in exactly three hours.

While Jolie plotted her escape, the sun began to rise over the Sovereign Grand Hotel.

In the ruined presidential suite, Aloys Patterson's eyes snapped open.

The feral madness had receded, leaving behind a cold, crystalline rage. He realized instantly that he was bound to the wall. He looked down. His military uniform was shredded, his spatial ring was gone, and his secure communicator had been stripped from his wrist.

He had been robbed. By a female.

A terrifying surge of blue lightning erupted from his core. The sheer concussive force of his Thunder-attribute power blasted the dead, withered vines into fine ash.

Aloys dropped to the floor, his boots crunching on the ruined marble. His face was a mask of pure, murderous intent. He strode to the central console and punched the screen to bring up the security feeds.

Static. The logs were wiped clean.

Aloys let out a dark, humorless laugh that held no warmth. "Good. Very good. You have a death wish."

He tapped a secondary, sub-dermal comms unit behind his ear, connecting directly to his adjutant. "Issue an S-rank galactic bounty. I want every spaceport locked down. Find me a high-level Flora-Affinity user. I want them brought to me alive."

Miles away, Jolie walked through the chaotic, crowded terminal of the lower-city spaceport. She wore an oversized hoodie, her face hidden deep within the shadows of the fabric.

Above her, the massive holographic departure boards flickered. The flight times vanished, replaced by a glaring red S-rank military bounty. There was no picture, only a description: Wanted. High-level Flora-Affinity user. Armed and extremely dangerous.

Jolie pulled her hood down a fraction of an inch tighter. She kept her head down and her pace steady, walking right beneath the glaring red letters toward Cargo Bay D.

She swiped her forged ID card at the automated scanner. The light blinked green.

Jolie stepped into the dark, oil-stained belly of the interstellar freighter. She found a corner behind a stack of metal crates, sat down on the cold floor, and crossed her arms. She closed her eyes as the ship's massive engines roared to life, vibrating through her bones.

Two days later, the ship broke through the atmosphere of Agri-World Prime.

Jolie walked down the loading ramp. The air was thick, hot, and smelled heavily of turned soil and cheap fertilizer. It was a far cry from the sterile, perfumed air of the Core Worlds.

She took a deep breath. Her Arborgenesis power hummed happily in her veins, resonating with the raw, untamed nature of the planet.

Jolie walked to a rusted information kiosk on the edge of the spaceport. She pulled up the local land registry. Thousands of acres of barren, failed farmland were listed for pennies.

Her eyes locked onto a remote, isolated patch of dirt on the edge of a dead zone. Plot 313.

A slow, ambitious smile spread across her face. She turned her back on the spaceport and headed straight for the local Land Management Bureau.

The Land Management Bureau was a decaying concrete building that smelled of stale smoke and despair. Jolie pushed open the heavy glass door, the rusted hinges screaming in protest. Overhead, a ceiling fan wobbled dangerously, clicking with every rotation.

Hank Jankowski, the regional director, was asleep with his muddy boots propped up on his metal desk. The screech of the door jolted him awake. He wiped a line of drool from his chin and eyed Jolie up and down. Seeing her cheap hoodie and dust-covered jeans, his lip curled into a sneer.

Before stepping into the building, Jolie had spent ten minutes sitting on a rusted bench outside, using her stolen terminal to slice into the local agricultural database. She had pulled the raw geological survey data for the region, cross-referencing the coordinates of the dead zone.

Jolie didn't speak. She walked to his desk and slapped a physical, untraceable credit chip onto the scratched metal. "Fifty thousand credits. I want the deed to Plot 313."

Hank's eyes bulged. He snatched the chip, plugging it into his terminal. The screen flashed green, confirming the funds. His sneer instantly melted into a greasy, sycophantic smile. "Plot 313! Excellent choice, little lady. The soil there is prime. Very fertile. But fifty thousand is a bit low for such a premium-"

"Save it," Jolie cut him off, her voice like cracking ice. "I read the unredacted planetary survey report. Plot 313 has a soil salinization level of eighty percent. It's been barren for three years, and the local groundwater is toxic. It's worth ten thousand, max. Take the fifty and give me the deed and the control codes for the two rusted farming bots on the property, or I walk."

Hank swallowed hard. He hammered the keys on his terminal, quickly transferring the digital deed to her forged ID. "Pleasure doing business, Ms. Jo."

An hour later, Jolie parked a rented, beat-up pickup truck at the edge of Plot 313.

It was a wasteland. Acres of cracked, white-crusted earth stretched out beneath the blistering sun. In the center stood a two-story wooden farmhouse that looked like a strong breeze would knock it over.

Jolie didn't care. She pulled out her terminal and activated the two rusted farming bots sitting in the yard. "Clear the surface debris," she ordered. The machines whirred to life, slowly rolling into the fields.

She grabbed a small canvas bag from the passenger seat. Inside were the cheapest, lowest-grade mutated corn seeds she could buy in town.

Jolie walked to the center of the barren field. She crouched down, digging her bare fingers into the dry, dead dirt. She closed her eyes and called upon her Arborgenesis.

A brilliant green light spilled from her palms, sinking deep into the earth. The energy acted like a microscopic filtration system, violently neutralizing the salt and toxins in the soil.

She pressed a single corn seed into the purified dirt. Taking a deep breath, she activated Sylvan Soul, pushing pure life-force into the seed.

The earth trembled. A vibrant green shoot exploded from the soil. It didn't just grow; it violently expanded. Within sixty seconds, the shoot thickened into a towering, six-foot-tall cornstalk. Broad green leaves unfurled, and two massive, golden ears of corn swelled on the stalk, radiating a faint, pure energy signature.

Jolie snapped an ear off the stalk and took a bite. The kernels burst with sweet juice, and a tiny rush of clean, regulatory energy washed over her tongue.

Her eyes widened. In a universe where high-energy food was a luxury monopolized by the elite families, she had just grown a gold mine in sixty seconds.

"Bots," Jolie called out, her voice ringing with newfound authority. "Commence mass planting."

For the next six hours, Jolie stood at the edge of the field, her hands glowing like twin suns as she cast a massive area-of-effect energy field over the land.

By nightfall, the dead wasteland of Plot 313 had transformed into a dense, rustling forest of golden corn.

Jolie collapsed onto the wooden steps of the farmhouse. Her mental energy was completely drained, her head throbbing with a dull ache, but her heart was racing with triumph.

She pulled out her terminal and logged into the galactic black market's anonymous trading hub. She snapped a picture of the glowing corn, attached the energy purity analysis, and listed it at ten times the price of standard crops.

Within five minutes, her inbox exploded with dozens of frantic messages from buyers. Demand was astronomical.

Jolie smiled, closing the terminal. She leaned back against the wooden railing, ready to sleep.

Suddenly, a deafening, mechanical wail tore through the night sky.

Jolie bolted upright. In the distance, over the center of the town, a blood-red military flare shot into the air, illuminating the clouds. The air pressure shifted, carrying the unmistakable, chaotic static of a Primal's feral energy going critical.

Jolie's eyes narrowed. A feral Primal meant chaos. But to her, it meant a free, massive energy battery just waiting to be harvested.