In Japan, I had been an ordinary high school girl. Then, I was reborn in this world and grew up as a Saint. Now, I was following the path of a Plant Monster as an Alraune. Neither my high school self nor my Saint self could have ever imagined this turn of events.
However, plants were something that I, Ayame Komurasaki, had been somewhat familiar with during my time as a student.
While I loved anime, manga, and games, I had been a "closet otaku" who kept my hobbies a secret at school. Instead of socializing, I was always the girl sitting alone with a book.
People probably mistook me for a "literary girl," but the contents of my books were almost entirely field guides. Animal guides, fish guides, dinosaur guides—you name it. Among them, the ones I read the most, and loved the best, were the botanical encyclopedias.
What started as a way to kill time at school eventually turned me into a plant-loving girl who genuinely enjoyed admiring flowers.
That said, it was strictly a hobby. I didn't possess any true professional expertise.
Despite my limited knowledge, I had at least heard the name "Alraune" back in my original world. I was an otaku, after all.
While I had only recognized the Alraune as a creature of myth, I had actually read about a very real plant that resembled it.
The Mandrake.
The plant known as the Mandrake did indeed exist on Earth.
In fiction, the Mandrake was often called a Mandragora and was frequently used as an ingredient for things like magic potions. Most people had probably heard the legend that the Mandrake let out a soul-shattering scream when pulled from the earth, and that anyone who heard it would lose consciousness. They even appeared in those famous movies about boy wizards.
In addition to that, I recalled another crucial piece of information.
I was fairly certain the Mandrake belonged to the nightshade family.
Perhaps because I had been so struck by how much they didn’t look like eggplants, the fact had stuck in my mind.
So, I decided to do a little analysis.
Personally, I suspected that the Alraune was something like a relative of the Mandrake. The fact that they were both Plant Monsters growing in the ground was a major similarity. I even remembered seeing descriptions in books back in Japan that categorized the Alraune as a type of Mandrake.
If that were true, it meant the Alraune was also part of the nightshade family.
Wait... so I was a nightshade?
I liked eggplants well enough.
But I certainly didn't want to be one.
If I recalled correctly, the nightshade family usually produced hermaphroditic flowers—flowers that possessed both stamens and pistils. However, looking at my current body and corolla, I didn't seem to have any stamens. That suggested that as the pistil evolved, the stamens had degenerated and vanished, resulting in a unisexual female flower.
Which meant my gender was definitely female.
Even though my body was that of a woman, I was still fundamentally a plant and a flower. I had been a little worried about the logistics.
Thank goodness. If I had been a hermaphroditic flower, I would have been an existence that was both a man and a woman at the same time.
As a former Saint and a former high school girl, I simply didn't have the mental fortitude to handle having both genders. Or rather, I hated the idea. Please, give me a break. That was a close call.
This meant I was an angiosperm—which are typically hermaphroditic—yet I possessed the unisexual traits more common in gymnosperms.
I was pretty sure that things like sponge gourds, cucumbers, and watermelons were also angiosperms that produced unisexual flowers.
Actually, I had a faint inkling the moment I realized I lacked stamens, but this upper body of mine was the pistil, wasn't it?
This human, female torso.
In a normal flower, the single structure standing in the center is the pistil.
If this body was the pistil, then there had to be an ovary at its base.
The "base" would be around my lower abdomen and waist. Since my body transitioned into a plant from the waist down, it was likely right around there.
If the ovary was there, then the ovules—the precursors to seeds—had to exist inside it. It felt strange and nostalgic to recall the biology I had learned in school during my previous life.
In human terms, the ovary was essentially the uterus, and the ovules were the eggs.
I reached down and tentatively touched my stomach.
Yeah, the place for making children was in roughly the same spot as when I was human. How very mysterious.
If I were to be pollinated, I wondered if I would turn into a fruit, like a cucumber or a watermelon.
What would happen to me then?
A fruit is just an expanded ovary.
The seeds are just matured ovules.
I tried to imagine my ovary—my stomach—swelling up after being pollinated. I might end up looking like a pregnant woman. But I was a plant. My stomach would just keep growing and growing, and this human upper body would probably be absorbed by the fruit until I simply vanished.
I hated that thought.
If that happened, I would surely cease to be myself.
I had to make sure I never, ever got pollinated.
Besides, the fact that I was literally a giant pistil was a bit too much to process, so I tried to push the thought out of my mind...
Just as my spirits were sinking, a low, heavy buzzing sound reached my ears from the distance.
I knew what it was without even looking.
A bee was approaching.
A bee, huh? I really didn't like bugs.
It would hurt if I got stung. Though, now that I wasn't human anymore, a bee sting probably wouldn't be a life-threatening emergency. Besides, as long as I was a flower, it was a simple fact of life that I would have to deal with bees.
When I thought about it, it was only natural; I was a flower. It stood to reason that a bee would come seeking my nectar.
In fact, it was strange that no insects had come until now. Perhaps my body was emitting some kind of pheromone that repelled smaller bugs, keeping them at bay.
Wait, hold on a second.
That sound was getting incredibly loud. It sounded more like a heavy-duty helicopter than a bug.
As the realization hit me, it appeared.
A bee-type monster.
If I remembered correctly, its name was a Zornbiene.
It looked exactly like a honeybee, except it had been scaled up to the size of a human being.
When people thought of honeybees, they usually thought of pollination.
When a honeybee—a worker—went to collect nectar or pollen for food, pollen often got stuck to its fuzzy body. When it moved to the next flower, it would inadvertently deposit the pollen from the previous flower's stamens onto the new flower's pistil. That was how even a unisexual flower could bear fruit. It was called cross-pollination. Farmers often lived in symbiosis with honeybees specifically for this purpose.
To put it bluntly, when a honeybee visited a flower, it effectively forced that flower to be pollinated so it could bear fruit.
They carried pollen and fertilized flowers against their will.
That was why honeybees were also known as pollinators.
Wait...
Wait, time out!
Beep, beep! Stop right there!
You! Stop moving!
Please, I’m begging you. Don’t come over here. Stay away!
Think about it, Mr. Bee. You're only after my nectar, right?
You're planning to touch me, aren't you?
Which means...
Mr. Bee, if you touch me, and the pollen from some other flower that's stuck to your legs gets on my body...
Won't I get pollinated?
I was a female flower. I was the pistil itself.
No! No, no, no!
He was definitely flying around with the pollen of some random male flower all over him.
I knew it; my instincts as a female flower were screaming it at me.
Aaaah!
He was definitely coming this way. He was flying straight for me!
And just as I feared, the creature was covered in pollen.
This was bad!
This was really, really bad!!
At this rate, I was going to be pollinated!!!!
*Angiosperms: Plants where the ovule (the future seed) is enclosed and protected within an ovary.
*Gymnosperms: Plants where the ovule is "naked" and exposed.
Depending on this Plant Monster girl's grades, if her knowledge and the logic of this world held true, this Alraune appeared to be an angiosperm.
Her ovules were hidden right inside her stomach.
Next time: The Pollination Crisis.