Cultivating Plants

The night threatened to end. All of this had started the moment the veil of the stars had fallen upon the heavens, yet it threatened to raise again this soon. How frightening that everything could end in just a single night.

For a moment, Mother Nature remained rooted next to the corpse of that woman. The old Ydaz and the past were finally dead, there was not a quest tying her any longer, and whilst she should feel limitless freedom instead nothingness surrounded her. Much like space had been oppressive, total freedom made her paralyzed.

Her whole past was erased and she was no longer bound by its disgusting chains, yet somehow, they were tighter than ever. As she gazed upon Naila's corpse, the druid felt nothing. It was nothing and yet…

It felt way heavier than the weight of the world.

But it was only a moment, for she remembered her new quest. There was a disciple that was screaming for her help, and as his master, she needed to aid him.

Now undaunted by the pressure of the legion of assassins that had inhabited the world of ideas, Mother Nature switched to the acuity internal infusion. Her body soon accommodated her enhanced senses to expand them even more, her silhouette becoming an arboreal monstrosity far more sinister than her recovery form.

The veil between the hells was still weakened and her vitality thrummed potently. There weren't any interferences any longer. Reality was no longer a bottleneck. Mother Nature's senses expanded through the whole planet of Ydaz.

Her senses were weak and mortal. All except one.

Her vitality sense had grown beyond the limit of the stuff of legends, and instead, it became something divine. She could feel them. She could feel all the signals, all the pulses of vitality that thrummed all across the world. Every single organism manifested in her senses. From animals, plants, and fungi to the recently discovered bacteria. She could feel all life.

It took her one faux heartbeat to find her disciple's body.

It was infuriatingly close.

Mother Nature donned haste and shook the heavens and the earth. The might of an unleashed cultivator of her level was not something that Khaffat could handle as the sheer energy she unleashed by moving displaced streams of air that in turn created tornadoes and displaced earth that in turn created sinkholes and earthquakes.

Yet she was done in a blink.

Mother Nature found herself in the canopy of the World Tree before any of inhabitants realized that she had arrived.

The next blink, a wind powerful enough to send homes flying assaulted the canopy. A maelstrom of colossal blue leaves assaulted the place and some dryads were sent flying through the rage of the air alone.

Yet all of that mattered not.

Only one thing mattered to her.

"O-oh Mother Nature!" A terrified Aleahilhahiba greeted her. It was simple to read the first dryad's face even when she completely lacked one.

"What has happened?" The druid commanded as she saw the body of her disciple laying inside of the arboreal prison that was the Chlorotrophy.

"The P-Prince of Flowers came to us asking for assistance, but…"

"He came to you?" Those words infuriated Mother Nature to no end.

"Y-yes, oh Mother Nature," Aleahilhahiba bowed and moved out of the way, making an inviting gesture with her lichenous arms into the Chlorotrophy. "He came with these awful roots in his body that gnawed on his flesh, so we tried to help by removing…"

Mother Nature no longer listened to her daughter. She moved only by instinct now. Before she had noticed, she had switched to recovery, entered the arboreal prison that had been her resting place for these last years, and knelt before the corpse of her disciple.

It was still alive and thrumming with vitality, but it was a corpse. She knew it.

She knew it so clearly.

And still…

"Wake up," she commanded softly. "Wake up, Xochipilli." Always softly. "Please… wake up. Otherwise…" I no longer know what to do.

Mother Nature left those words unspoken, yet her hands trembled, nonetheless. With a body the size of a tree and the toughness of a mountain, even the smallest of movements seemed like an earthquake of mythological proportions.

When she left the chasm…. no, way before that that, she had felt lost. Purposeless even though she had an imperious quest waiting to be completed. It was that small child who was also lost that had helped her to find her way again, of living a life without the need for a quest.

She knew it had been an awful thing to do, to depend on such a small and frightened child but she had nothing left, and she… feared going back to have nothing. This time it was worse even. There was no longer a quest keeping her alive through spite alone.

This time… there was nothing left.

"Please…" Mother Nature begged as she raised her head to the heavens.

Like always, they failed to respond.

Mother Nature slumped uselessly before the living corpse. Living… she thought to herself. Yes, that is the problem. The corpse is still alive. If I kill it, then maybe I could bring him…

"You know that won't work," a deep voice interjected.

Hope flourished and Mother Nature's eyes shot wide open as she heard that voice, but everything nice withered as she saw those glossy eyes. Xochipilli's eyelids were open and his jaw moved, but that wasn't her disciple. She couldn't cling to false hope, for she knew it so deeply and intimately inside. As the black veins pulsated, what lay before her was a monster.

"H-how…?" She muttered pathetically.

"I'm not quite sure myself," the impostor chuckled. "If I had to trust the whispers, I am but a shadow of a life, a remnant cognition. The whispers imply that you are aware of them."

"I… am," Mother Nature admitted as she bit her underlip.

It had been a fleeting memory; one she discovered with her first usage of the Dream Spore. That fungi ended up leading her to her current control of the world of ideas and the veil that separated the hells, and that was why she was painfully aware that only a ghost was next to her. People, dead or alive, had a foggy presence in the world of ideas, a flowing cognition born of imperfect observation. Yet the being before her was defined like… the apparition of Umar.

Mother Nature looked at Xochipilli's glossy eyes, more glass than scarlet, and knew that this was an imprint of her disciple like that ghost had been a remnant of the assassin apothecary.

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"I…" She didn't know what to say. She had failed. She had utterly failed. She wanted to puke. "What should I do now, Xochipilli?"

The vegetable woman pathetically grabbed the vegetable man's hand. Both were dark, yet one thrummed with life as the other one didn't. It was a faux, lethargic life that remained within him.

"I'm not Xochipilli," the ghost told softly without bothering to move its body and instead remaining trapped on a bodily and mortal cage with its eyes facing upward.

"I know…" The druid admitted painfully. Oh, so painfully. "But do me this favor. Only once. Please. Please." She didn't have enough strength to beg. Her whole being was being undone by the seams.

"That's a… difficult question you ask, Aloe," the vegetable corpse said. "I am a tarnished imperfect copy, but I highly doubt I would have the answers otherwise."

"Ah…" Mother Nature whimpered. Out of all the answers, that was one she didn't want to hear at all. "I see…" Yet she accepted it. Whether it was out of desperation or to honor the memory of her disciple.

For she knew even this ghost was fading away.

"I…" The corpse's voice trembled. "I know I'm not the real Xochipilli, but could you do me a favor in return?"

"O-of course, anything!" She offered as she pressed hard the warm yet deathful hand. Her strength was divine, yet it wasn't enough to control her trembles.

"Would you show me the veritas? The one I saw when I met you?" Mother Nature recoiled as she had been slapped when she heard that. "Sorry, was that… was that too much to ask?"

"No…" She bit her underlip with enough force to make it bleed. "Not at all."

The druid freed one of her hands and grew an Aloe Veritas from her opposite arm. There was no need of seeds, Evolution, or movement of vitality. She willed it, and the arcane plant obeyed her summon, simple as that. There was no need to hide it any longer. No excuses about storing seeds in the Slowtide.

With visceral brutality, Mother Nature ripped the succulent from her arm and ink flowed freely, staining her already blood-soaked body. Many leaves portrayed the truth, but she cradled one with her shaky hand and showed it to the corpse and another grasped its hand.

The Aloe Veritas leaf that has soiler Mother Nature read:

Name: Aloe Ayad

Species: Aloe Verno

Sobriquet: Alraune

Description: Female member of her own species, a species known for their ingenuity, high adaptive capabilities, and being the apex of Life itself.

Alignment: Life

"Ah…" The corpse of Xochipilli moaned yet the most gorgeous of smiles was drawn on his visage. "I don't know why you would hide something so beautiful from… from me…"

Oblivion.

The next moment, no matter how hard Mother Nature tried to search for it in the world of ideas, Xochipilli's remnant was no longer there. Whatever hell it had ended up in was beyond Mother Nature's grasp. He was gone. Truly gone. Not even the remnants of his existence lingered beyond that of his corpse. And even that she had tarnished with her secrets.

"Ha… ha… ha…" The Alraune chuckled slowly, powerfully, pathetically.

"M-mother?" Aleahilhahiba, her daughter who had completely forgotten her existence, stood there in fear. True, abject, and sheer fear.

"Why?" She muttered softly as she gazed upon the heavens. Never softly. Never again. "Why?" She beckoned again, her powerful voice thrashing the canopy of the World Tree. "I have always done my best. I have always continued to try. I never gave up! So… why? Why does this keep happening to me?"

Her voice and this reality were both torn. It was so hard to keep clinging unto anything when there was nothing left to support one's hands on. Life had been always a mountain to climb, yet now the mountain face became completely vertical and smooth. There was nothing left to keep climbing.

"I am tired," she spoke with not a soft voice, but one eroded by the passing of the centuries. One thrashed by the life she clung to protect. "I am so tired."

Mother Nature groaned.

Until then, there had been a small chance. But now there was none. As that groan left her lips, the world was condemned.

She no longer knew who she was. Aloe Ayad. The First Druid. Mother Nature. Alraune. Or Life. But the awful truth was that… she no longer cared. Yes, she had been aware of this for a long time. She had even told Naila. All of this was inconsequential to her. Everything was.

Whatever she was didn't matter.

Only that she was tired.

Tired of ruthlessness.

Tired of death.

Tired of this world.

Tired of this reality.

Tired of this humanity.

So she pressed her palms against the surface of the bark of the World Tree and poured her infinite vitality into it for one final action. A river of unlimited Life flowed through her arms like pillars of existence herself as her very being drowned the veins of the world.

Blood infusion she had once called it, but it was more than that. With the forced growth technique of the flowing stance, Mother Nature showed Khaffat the true depths of her might.

The monster that was Aaliyah had covered a desert in greenery as her final act, but that was but one pathetic, repulsive act. No, Mother Nature's act was far more graceful than that mediocrity. The Alraune pushed and pushed, tapping into her very being as vitality kept flowing and flowing. So much time she dedicated to the flowing stance that for the first time she saw the form her body adopted for it.

A weak form.

One deprived of its own vitality.

A form long dead two centuries ago.

And its name was Aloe Ayad.

For that final act she maybe became that. Aloe. Perhaps this wasn't exhaustion, but rage. But she wasn't sure. Arms as thin as twigs and the height of a child. A pathetic sight if it weren't because she was drowning the very world with life.

With her vitality alone.

It should have been exhausted, her vitality was not limitless, yet it kept going and going. Ever-growing like the plants she boasted. The more she poured, the more it grew. Ah, maybe I was the weed, Mother Nature thought as she sensed the consequences of her efforts taking place in real time.

The birth of the Evergreen had been slow, had taken decades, yet now all the deserts across Khaffat grew with wild violence no matter if they were sandy, rocky, artic, or watery deserts.

Life grew.

Life destroyed.

When boosted with such colossal amounts of vitality, the soil itself couldn't survive the bestiality of life. A natural savagery that couldn't be tamed.

Plants grew big and mighty with roots that could go through bedrock and withstood magma. Marine flora cared not for the salinity and the lack of light, turning the very oceans green from the very depths. The crust of Khaffat collapsed with the rapid changes, the world itself infused with life, just not the flora and fauna. Earth split. Ecosystems collapsed. Mountains raged with fire and black death.

Even beyond the oceans there was no peace. She sensed an old woman surrounded by a rapidly growing jungle on her knees as she looked up to the heavens. But her prayer wasn't one of desperation, but joy as her wish came true. Then she was crushed between two hastily expanding roots, the fire of life coming back yet again to the world of ideas for one final time.

As Mother Nature looked upon the heavens herself, thick black clouds charged with lightning gathering all across the planet, she realized the answer to all her failed pleas.

"I should not pray to the heavens," the Alraune spoke with morbid glee. "It is the heavens that should pray to me."

That was all that this final act had been. Much like she had done with Naila, this was but mercy upon this rotten reality.

One final mercy kill.

One sickly action.

Omnicide.

Anything that hadn't fed on her vitality had no chance of survival. Life had proliferated too much in a handful of minutes and nothing could adapt this fast to a world brought through primeval savagery. The harshest of environments with the strongest of beings. Killing through the rawest form of life.

Everything died as she poured more and more vitality into the planet and she found herself crying tears of water. Not because of the untold massacre that flowed from her very hands, but because she wasn't included in that omnicide. No matter how much she tried to exhaust her vitality, to lead her body to wither, it just kept growing and growing. She let out a final yelp – a moan of untold pain – before she stood out, her shape still being that the flowing stance had given her.

Mother Nature slowly walked out of the Chlorotrophy, as every dryad peered at her in a kneeling position. None of her daughters dared to speak, nor did she invite them to do so.

From the edge of the trunk of the World Tree, the Alraune observed the Khaffat she had created. The Khaffat she had Evolved. The world was covered in lightning-ridden darkness from the ever-present ash clouds the world had spewed. Yet for the briefest of moments, the clouds cleared and revealed a myriad of soft rays of light.

"Ah, it is true," Mother Nature, killer of everything, mused as her heart beat with enthusiasm. An actual heartbeat. "Day always comes."

The night everlasting was over.

With that, all came to an end. All the stories, all the people, all the tales brought to a sudden end never to have a satisfying conclusion; for she had become Life. And life wasn't just a beautiful paradise, but it was struggle and hardship, difficulty and suffering. In other words, survival. Life Incarnate couldn't just kill, but it could bolster the cycle of violence, the law of the strong. Was it petty to have everyone suffer what she had suffered? Yes. Yes, it was. But she had the power and the moral standing to do so. Life was as much as a warm embrace as it was a visceral dress of thorns. She was but the greatest monster of them all, the root of all pains. From then on, her name was forgotten, substituted by a title that echoed through all of Existence.

Life Incarnate. Mother Nature.