Seeds have power in Luca’s country, much more than they do in ours. Selling rare seeds can make you richer than you can even imagine but the government keeps a strict eye on these transactions. Luca’s friend Christophe worries about Luca’s under the table sales but Luca doesn’t worry, until the government comes knocking on his door one night looking for his shut-in father. Luca flees, taking one of his father’s seeds with him, and realizes very quickly why the government was interested in him.
To get things out of the way, I’m reasonably sure this is supposed to be read as a boys love story on one level or another. There’s no confirmed romance as of this point but there are a few other things in the story (including a complete lack of female characters, I think the one female character we do see is actually secretly a plant and the fact that this manga is serialized in the magazine GFantasy) that makes me think that Rihito Takarai, also the manga-ka of Ten Count, must be catering to a shipping audience. It’s still a relatively light touch though, lighter than almost any yuri series currently being published in the US. So if you come for the fantasy, seed-economy setting and not for the BL then you probably won’t mind.
That said, this is a bizarre set-up for a fantasy series. If it wasn’t for the fact that some plants and seeds appear to have actual abilities that border on magical I wouldn’t even want to call this series a fantasy at all because it has such a low amount of world-building for a fantasy. As a seasoned fantasy reader, I can accept that Luca eats a seed given to him by his father and that now he seems more plant than human. Sure, that’s magic, I doubt it’s going to be explained very deeply (or at least, not until presumably late in the story) so I can roll with it. In the end, Luca’s state of being influences part of the plot but not his character so in some ways, it’s an inconsequential detail. Now, the fact that the economy seems to be largely driven by the sale of seeds and that the government is so fascinated by them (which, by and large, are not magical) just bothers me without more detail. To me, it felt like Takarai thought “what if I just changed one detail about the world to make it a fantasy? Perfect!”
In short, the setting feels lazy and it is truly hard to have a good story when it lacks that kind of solid foundation. This applies to more than just fantasy — the best contemporary stories also seem to be pretty rooted in their own time and place so as to explain and guide many of the characters actions, but when the setting is bad it sticks out more in fantasy. And as odd as it sounds, Graineliers has spent more time faffing around in it’s setting so far than actually engaging in the story. Lucas and Christophe spend most of the volume waiting around for something to happen and when the story does begin moving it consists of more set-up and more BL-baiting. I’m interested in giving the second volume a shot to see if Takarai can pull an interesting fantasy story out of this set-up, but by and large this was not a strong introduction to a new series.