Cultivating Plants

Power. Power overwhelming. There was no feeling more tearing than that of untapped and raw power trying to claw its way into freedom. By definition, power was corruption, but most forgot many of its other capabilities. Power, by itself, was a living and breathing entity. And unfortunately, even if it wasn't, others also wanted that power to come alive.

Power wouldn't be allowed to rest.

Unfortunately.

"What do you want?" She asked softly, so softly… Each action had to be constrained, otherwise everything threatened to spill out. Restriction upon restriction to make the simplest of actions seem commonplace.

"I want you to listen to me," he spoke so powerfully… so… unrestricted.

"I do listen to you constantly, child."

"Considering you keep calling me child, no, you do not."

The Mother of Plants opened her eyes upon hearing those words but was surprised to find no change in her environment. Her senses were so keen and plentiful that the only addition her eyes could provide was color. There wasn't anything that she hadn't seen yet.

"Nonsense," she scoffed softly. Always softly.

"It's always that!" The young druid stomped on the tree's bark with his bare foot. "It's always that nonsense! You cannot say you listen to me when you always respond the same way!"

"Oh, Xochipilli…" Her emeralds landed on sight before her. A small sight. One bursting with life, even if it was pathetically small. Always pathetically small. Trivial. Insignificant.

Life needed a vessel to be contained, but when every drop of life was as big as a drop of water… there was no need for a container when the surface tension was enough to keep that drop by itself. Yes, that was life. And time was that merciless sun that threatened to evaporate it. It all had started with its hostile light…

"Don't look at me that way!" He pushed his arm to the side, a piece of cloth waving behind. "You look at me as if I'm small! And I am that no longer!"

But you are… Mother Nature kept those thoughts to herself, for she knew it was the fuel that made the campfire burn brighter.

"So…" She started softly. Always softly yet… never weakly. "What do you want me to do?"

"You…" Those words disconcerted him. He wasn't expecting them at all and he backstepped as if he had been slapped. His eyes shone in confusion and doubt, they screamed that he must have heard wrongly. "Are you being truthful? Are you asking for my advice?"

"That I am," Mother Nature affirmed softly, gracefully, and vibrantly.

"I…" Xochipilli stopped for a second to think. He took two steps before the words escaped from his lips. "I want you to follow me."

The elder druid tilted her head to the sight in confusion, but before she could elaborate any further, the young druid broke on a mad dash and jumped out of the World Tree.

A part of herself burned brightly in that instant. A reaction whose name fell short of instinctual; primeval was more accurate. She saw a small child plummet to his death, no matter how much vitality, how many hundreds of Haya he had under his belt, she had to protect him.

It took a blink for her to be already in the air, but he was already falling. Terminal velocity wasn't enough to reach him as he was in freefall, so in the next blink, she kicked – softly – the trunk of the World Tree and was sent flying far faster than gravity allowed for. On a third blink, he already had the child in her arms.

"Oh," he expressed his disappointment. "That was way faster than I had thought."

"You have never able been to outrun me, child. Not then, not ever," the Mother of Plants stated as a matter of fact.

He simply pouted in response.

Even though both druids were in their own world, the gravity of the outside world still took effect. For them, it was easy to ignore it, but the same couldn't be said for the people waiting beneath them, so the elder druid grew massive amounts of Cottonpull to slow their fall and mitigate the effects of gravity. By the time they softly touched the ground, a multitude had gathered on the ground.

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Xochipilli quickly jumped out of her arms with a blush on his face, and as for Mother Nature, she released thousands of Cottonpull balls into the heavens in a marvelous spectacle as the winds swung them around in a dance.

"It has been a while since you blessed us with your presence, oh mother," Aleahilhahiba, the oldest of her daughters, spoke.

"Little Xochipilli here has convinced me to go for a stroll," Mother Nature replied softly.

The fungal dryad looked at the young druid and bowed to him. "I must thank the Prince of Flowers for his actions then."

"There's no need for that, Aleahilhahiba," Xochipilli added, to which the eldest dryad responded with a smile.

"As enthusiastic your presence makes me, oh mother, I will not restrain you any further. Your continued well-being is more than enough for me."

Mother Nature smiled at the word 'well-being', a soft gesture that made her tremble internally.

"Should we get going, then?" Xochipilli asked and she nodded.

It was no news for the elder druid that quite the number of people had gathered on the roots of the World Tree because she had felt their gathering vitality from the beginning, but it was a different thing seeing it with her own eyes. Her senses were that expansive, and talking about those…

From the corner of her senses, Mother Nature perceived two dryads observing her. They were newborns that had yet to be brought to her to be named. Aleahilhahiba or other dryads would bring their new sisters – always sisters – whenever they appeared in the Evergreen, but as it would seem, it wasn't an instantaneous process.

Of course, it didn't help that the dryads were close to where the old Ydaz-Loyata frontier used to be at the moment. Even at such distance the dryads could feel the World Tree and their mother, and through her powerful senses and recognition of her own vitality, so could Mother Nature. Perhaps she wouldn't have detected them if they weren't two or she wasn't fully awake, for there were a handful of hundreds of kilometers between the couple and the World Tree.

With a groan, the vegetable woman got them out of her mind. It would take days before any of her other daughters noticed them, but they would notice them, so there was no need to do anything.

Xochipilli guided Aloe out of the village on an especially dark spot where the light of the sun or the bioluminescent fungi didn't reach. Such darkness was no impediment to either of the druids as their senses had progressed beyond the need for light, though there was minimal light around either way.

"Are you going to simply lead me in a stroll?" Mother Nature questioned softly, carefully. "I thought you would have a more elaborate plan."

"I do… have a more elaborate idea, but that requires us to go to Asina. Can we do that?"

"You do not need to ask," the elder druid responded softly. "How do you want to go? Do you want to take the airship again?"

"Aloe!" The young druid protested with a blush. "That was ages ago! And besides," he puffed out air, "we can get there far faster by running."

"Oh, but are you fast enough to outrun an airship?" She asked with a roguish yet soft tone.

Xochipilli's response was to smile at her and break into a powerful sprint, his body already donning haste. The boy's speed was considerable as he quickly faded away from her gaze, but that wasn't difficult to do in a forest. Most importantly, air constantly exploded around him.

Breaking the sound barrier, people of this age called it. Not that such a concept had ever appeared in the consciousness of people centuries prior.

Apparently, that happened when you moved faster than the speed of sound. It had been a queer concept that had needed a bit of trickery to understand, but it made sense that sound had a speed once compared to many things occurring in nature like thunder. Though it was painfully slow. The speed of sound in air in Khaffat was three-hundred-fifty meters per second, and considering a somewhat trained person could run at ten meters per second, that meant that a person running at thirty-five times the average could run faster than sound itself.

To reach those levels of multipliers, a cultivator needed to have more than three digits of Haya, but not by much. Even things like air resistance mattered not that much as having that much vitality increased other properties like potency, dexterity, and recovery, which greatly affected the way a person might run efficiently.

Bound to her thoughts, Mother Nature gave the Prince of Flowers a head start of nine seconds. The next second she was running side to side with him. It was quite the chore of weaving through trees at that speed without obliterating any trees. Though her sheer speed caused more than enough damage.

Xochipilli's eyes widened in surprise and his lips moved, but as stated, moving faster than sound made them incapable of hearing each other. There were ways with the sense stance, but those were a bit cheap and revolved around hearing the lingering sound many hundreds of meters behind them rather than hearing them in real-time.

Softly and carefully, the elder druid grabbed the young one and leaped into the sky. The air resistance and the proximity slowed them enough that made communication possible.

"Let us restrain from moving at these speeds inside the Evergreen," she spoke softly. "We are disturbing the environment and scaring the critters to death."

With a blush, the boy nodded. Fortunately for them, they had been moving so fast during these handful of seconds that by the time they landed the Evergreen was no longer as thick and it allowed them to move still at high speeds, though they kept a subsonic movement unless the terrain allowed for Xochipilli's full speed without being too disturbed.

A lingering part of her being – her power – greatly enjoyed this small liberation, this burst of speed. But it was still too little. Too soft. It ached for a greater, more violent, and unrestricted release.

Mother Nature didn't allow that to happen.