殖

Left bare-bones radical (Kangxi #78) — a pictograph of a stripped skeleton, signaling death, decay, and the boundary between life and not-life. It indexes 殖 alongside 死 die, 残 cruel, 殃 calamity. Counterintuitive for a word meaning 'to breed,' but the logic is fertility-from-decay: life rising from buried remains.

Right side 直 supplies the sound directly: zhí. Same phonetic powers 值 worth, 植 plant, 置 install. 直 itself depicts a single straight eye gazing forward — uprightness without deviation. Faintly semantic too: 殖 covers both breeding/multiplying (生殖) and planting/cultivating (种植), and both senses involve setting something upright to grow — sprout, embryo, shoot.