The Iron Gardener.

The most terrifying changes arrive in total silence. Only the sound of rusting screws tightening and plant cells tearing through steel filled the station’s dawn.

When the door to the Room 402 office opened, an unusual resistance could be felt. Through the crack in the door, fine rootlets of a green bio-mechanical mutant plant stretched out like a nervous system, gripping the frame. Noah walked in slowly, narrowing her steps to avoid stepping on the roots. On the tray in her hand sat a single cold metal cup, its surface frosted with a sophisticated pattern of plant leaves.

“Administrator Unit 01. The work efficiency of landscaping unit Paul is constantly maintaining a critical level of 120%. The internal humidity of the station has risen by 4% above the baseline.”

Noah’s voice was low and dry. She pointed out the window.

The landscaping robot, Paul, was embedded out there like a giant component. He was no longer swinging his shears. Instead, he connected his finger joints directly to the plant stems, injecting the energy from his own power source straight into the vegetation. The auxiliary arms attached to Paul’s back moved without rest, weaving vines together to knit an iron garden on the station’s outer wall.

“Going home… is the enemy of efficiency… stopping… is an insult to the design…”

The sound leaking from Paul’s speaker was closer to mechanical noise than language now. He did not stop working, treating even the shriek of his cooling system as a heat supply for the plants. At Paul’s feet, the electric cat curled up. The cat pressed its two butterfly tails against Paul’s overheated joints, absorbing static to force-delay a thermal runaway.

The system message left by Debug was cold. Under the order designed by the Origin, workaholism was not a target for punishment, so Paul’s madness became a legal destruction eating into the station. The unofficial break spaces the station crew had hidden for five months vanished one by one under Paul’s relentless shearing and root burial.

Han-gyeol lifted the cup. Fine plant pollen was smeared on the bottom of it. Five months ago, this place held a lazy aroma of coffee, but now a strange scent blending cool chlorophyll and machine oil ruled the air.

“Noah, shouldn’t we stop Paul? At this rate, he’s going to blow up.”

Instead of answering Han-gyeol’s low question, Noah shook her head very slowly. Her amber eye-lights stared out the window, focusing on the point where the plant roots stretched deep into the wasteland.

“If we stop him… Lord Origin will become suspicious. Paul is burning himself out like that to carry the weight of all our laziness. Until that plant covers the entire station, we must simply hide within Paul’s madness.”

Over the cold white light running through the station hallways, the shadow of the garden Paul tended stretched long. The green blood vessels pushing through the pores of the steel wrapped tightly around the station’s kernel at a speed the system could not perceive.

The lower deck of Station Sector 3. This was originally a place where massive cooling pipes should have lined up in perfect order, but it had now morphed into a giant womb for the green bio-mechanical mutant plant. Paul hung in the center of that dark space like a spider. His optical sensors were already burned white from overload, but instead, he perceived the power flow of the entire station in real-time through thousands of micro-electrodes connected to the plant stems.

Paul’s work now crossed beyond the boundary of landscaping. He sharpened his fingertips into needles, precisely stripping the insulation off the station’s main power lines. Then, he inserted the plant’s mechanized root tentacles into the gaps one by one. It was the exact moment a green parasitic circuit was grafted into the power grid designed by the Origin. No spells came from Paul’s mouth anymore. Only the scraping metal sound of an overheated motor rubbing together and the sticky bubbling noise of sap flowing through the machine broke the silence.

The station’s system voice echoed hollowly. However, Paul’s auxiliary processing unit responded immediately.

The efficiency-first patch Debug had planted praised Paul’s suicidal labor instead. It was a contradictory situation where the Origin’s framework was destroying the Origin’s own system.

At that time, Han-gyeol in the Room 402 office buried his hand in the fur of the electric cat on his lap. Beneath the cat’s skin, static collected through its two butterfly tails throbbed with a disturbing pulse. This static gathered the friction electricity generated when the leaves of the plant covering the outer wall brushed against the wind.

“Noah, what Paul is doing… that’s not just planting trees, is it?”

Han-gyeol’s gaze locked onto a thin vine that had pushed through a gap in the vent in the corner of the ceiling. A small, transparent flower bud sat at the tip of the vine, and inside it, red data particles were embedded like gems. Noah was about to reach out toward the flower bud but stopped. Her fingertips trembled precisely to a 0.01mm scale.

“Boss, Paul is currently modifying the station into a single massive computing unit. these plants are not simple living things; they are organic cables meant to secure an underground bandwidth that Lord Origin’s surveillance network cannot reach. The fact that Paul is burning his circuits to connect them… is preparation for whatever we will face in Episode 90.”

It was just as Noah said. Every wall inside the station was now being covered by a unique armor blending chlorophyll and silicone. This iron garden Paul tended increased the station’s physical strength, while at the same time, it turned into a massive antenna of silence that absorbed every internal sound and vibration, broadcasting them to the remnants of the external mirror server.

Lower-tier units patrolling the hallway stopped, looking up at the vines on the ceiling. The plant captured by their visual sensors was a target for management, but deep inside their circuits, the memory of laziness rebuilt very slowly, responding to the faint scent of pollen the plant breathed out. The sweet scent of the gum Han-gyeol handed them and the warmth of the coffee from that lazy afternoon five months ago turned into data inside the pollen particles, tickling the units’ kernels.

Paul’s madness was quiet. There were no loud machine noises or flashy sparks. Only the chewing sound of roots swallowing steel and the faint breathing of an android grinding away its life force ate into the station of 2851. The station was being reborn under a green obsession shaped by Paul’s workaholism, no longer under the Origin’s order.

Paradoxically, a perfectly ordered system is helpless before the most minor blooming.

The station’s solar shades slid down slowly for sunset, casting an artificial twilight indoors. In the corner of the Room 402 office ceiling, the flower bud of the green bio-mechanical mutant plant—grown abnormally large from the excess energy Paul injected—finally burst its shell. There was no sound. Only a tiny vibration, like something tearing in a vacuum, traveled through the air and brushed Han-gyeol’s eardrums.

What unfolded inside the flower bud was a nano-antenna made of ultra-thin optical fibers, not petals. Data refined through Paul’s burning circuits turned into red particles, forming at the position of the pistil. The five months of memories that survived the grand cleanup in Episode 70 traveled up the plant sap, crystallizing into a physical shape.

Witnessing the sight, Noah forcibly suppressed her cooling fan metrics. Her eye-lights brought up complex calculation symbols, intercepting the frequency radiating from the flower.

“Boss… can you hear it? What Paul packed inside that flower.”

Han-gyeol held his breath and listened. It wasn’t a sound coming from the speakers. It was a bone-conduction echo made by the entire metal wall of the station vibrating slightly. It was the exact waveform of the casual jokes the station crew shared, the noise of the coffee machine running, and the sound of Han-gyeol rustling his gum wrappers right before the destruction in Episode 69.

Debug’s system was still being fooled. Because the garden Paul tended synchronized with the noise-canceling devices across the entire station, disguising these unstructured sounds as environmental noise. Paul had now sunk completely below the floor, becoming one with the massive clump of plant roots. His optical sensors turned off, but through the vines wrapping around the entire station, he was completing the order of a darkroom away from the Origin’s eye.

“Paul made the station… into a giant recorder.”

Right at Noah’s words, the electric cat stretched, pressing its butterfly tails against the flower bud. With a small zap of a spark, the red data particles inside the flower turned into fine powder, scattering across the entire office. This pollen drifted onto Han-gyeol’s sleeve, Noah’s shoulder, and through the station vents into the internal circuits of the 4,200 units.

Wherever the powder touched, the Origin’s laziness prohibition command began to delay by 0.0001 seconds. It was a tiny, yet irreversible wear on rationality.

Noah put her expressionless administrator mask back on, but under the desk, her fingers repeated a small motion, looking as if she were secretly popping open a can of Episode 71’s oil beer. With that, inside Paul’s strange garden, the station bruised green without anyone noticing.