NOVEL NEXT Chapter 56
Hao: “Lately, I’ve been seeing these creepy faces in my Mirror Bug… what is up with that?”
Even asked the necromancer, thinking maybe it was some sort of soul seeping in, but apparently it’s nothing weird…
Just last night, I closed my eyes to sleep and could feel someone watching me. Seriously, this is really strange.”
┗ Omon: “Did you just see your own reflection in a mirror?”
┗ Hao: “No, I’m dead serious here. This isn’t a joke!”
┗ Luka: “You saw it too? I thought it was just my imagination, but I guess it’s real.”
┗ Hao: “Did you really see it, Luka? It’s not just me, right?”
┗ Ebron: “We encountered a minor glitch while reinforcing the bulletin board. It’s nothing that affects reality, so no need to stress about it.”
┗ Hao: “How can I not stress? It feels like someone’s watching me non-stop!”
┗ Hao: “Is there really no way to get rid of this, Ebron?”
┗ Hao: “Ebron?”
I felt my whole body stiffening up with tension.
In the center of the workshop, a tree grew slightly taller than me. It was translucent, revealing what was inside.
And within, several blurry faces drifted by. The flow of this tree was incredibly peculiar, with its bizarre forms circling in a certain rhythm.
Could this time be the success I was hoping for? With hope in my eyes, I watched the tree intently.
But then, the tree started to blur little by little. And suddenly, it warped and collapsed.
The collapse happened in the blink of an eye. If I had even blinked, I would have missed the whole thing.
“And that makes ten times.”
I let out a sigh. 0 Unit, who had been fiddling with the magical circle beside me, handed me a towel. I wiped my sweaty face and mulled over the cause of this recent failure.
Was the circuit of the magical circle malfunctioning? No way. It was perfectly constructed without a single error.
Or was there a mistake somewhere in the process? Nope, that wasn’t it either. It proceeded flawlessly, without even a second of deviation from the plan.
So, what went wrong with the tree I spent an entire week making?
Eventually, the answer became clear. It was a conclusion I didn’t want to confront.
I collected the brain of the ghost tree hovering in the center of the magical circle. Worried there might be something wrong, I projected my magic inside it.
Fortunately, it maintained its perfect form without any deterioration. The many souls swirling within were intact as well.
This was its greatest feature. It could perfectly preserve what was contained inside.
The ghost tree fed on souls. It absorbed the memories and emotions of the dead drawn in by its roots, digesting those to grow.
The brain I possessed had superb storage capacity because of that. It was a space cultivated over a millennium, stacked with countless souls.
Though it had lost most of the souls it held by losing its body, many still remained inside.
Removing those spirits would weaken the power of the brain, so I couldn’t just remove them willy-nilly. Instead, I aimed to resurrect the body using the souls contained in this brain.
If I could reconstruct it, and control it, it wouldn’t just be a storage space but would also wield great power from those souls.
And… I failed.
Initially, I thought it was because I didn’t fully understand its structure. So, I gathered data to better comprehend it.
After several experiments, I felt confident I had grasped everything about it. With that confidence, I poured a lot into this experiment. But now, the tree collapsed again.
There was only one problem. I didn’t have enough magical power.
This wasn’t just about lacking the amount of magic. The density of that magic, the will contained within it, the strength—it wasn’t enough. In other words, my level was too low to make this experiment successful.
Sure, if I invested more time, I might eventually figure it out. Maybe in about a year.
But I couldn’t continue the experiment any longer. My Shadow Tree was bubbling over with information fragments. It was sure to reach its limit soon.
“I really didn’t want it to come to this.”
With a sigh, I acknowledged that with the failure of my original plan to resurrect the ghost tree, there was only one way forward.
I had no choice but to turn it into a doll.
This was something I really wanted to avoid. The reason being—efficiency.
If I had revived the tree, it would have wielded its powerful body to manage its powers and souls freely. Its old self would have been reborn, merging with my Shadow Tree.
However, if I made it into a doll, I couldn’t expect such power. The self I created would be too immature and flawed. No way could it handle everything contained within.
It would simply become a storage space. Sure, that was my initial goal, but I couldn’t help feeling a pang of regret.
This was a material worth two hundred thousand points. While dealing with it, countless inspirations had come to me, and now I had to choose the option I wanted to avoid the most. What a pity.
But since my mind was made up, I had to do my best to create the doll.
“Bring out everything you’ve prepared.”
I said to 0 Unit. It began to fetch an enormous number of bottles from the drawer on the workshop wall. Each bottle contained a piece of the tree’s stem, quietly resting in magical liquid.
Seeing that made my heart thump. My tree was trembling. It made sense. Those countless stems were taken from its body.
I chuckled wryly. Others would probably say I was insane. This was a way of degrading my level and thus myself.
In reality, I was sure I couldn’t beat anyone at the same level as me. It might even be hard to contend with those who had merely cultivated seedlings.
But I didn’t care. I knew my shortcomings. If I had been alone, I wouldn’t have even crossed the level of seedlings. It was through this degradation that I could overcome that wall.
It would continue forward like this too. All these dolls I created would lead me to greater heights. For that reason, my own power didn’t matter anymore.
I gathered the bottles together. I had already laid plans to turn this into a doll. I just kept postponing it, but it was always ready for execution.
0 Unit began preparing a new magical circle. I took out the tree stems that were contained in the bottles.
As they emerged from the magical liquid, they gradually began to awaken. And slowly, they started emitting magic. If left alone, they would surely scatter.
Thus, I artificially created a flow by intertwining the magic they emitted. The stems began to move, following the flow I created, connecting with one another.
It soon took the form of a massive sphere. And it perfectly sealed the magic that was being emitted inside. No more consumption could occur.
However, that shape was unstable and seemed on the verge of falling apart. There was no core present that needed to be there.
I retrieved the brain of the ghost tree once again. This was the core that would stabilize the whole thing. Carefully, I placed it into the sphere.
It seeped in without any resistance. Then it began to absorb the flowing magic within. It looked just as I had anticipated.
Honestly, I pondered quite a bit about how to turn this into a doll.
This brain of the ghost tree had almost no substance, making its shadow appear as nothing but a blur. Therefore, I couldn’t gather its shadow separately nor plant my tree stem within it.
So I decided to approach it from the opposite direction.
If I couldn’t place the stem in the shadow, I could simply put the shadow into the stem. To do that, I had brought out all the stems I had clipped over time. Simply in terms of amount, there were double the size of my current tree.
0 Unit carefully activated the magical circle. The magical air became murky and darkness began encroaching. An artificial shadow world was starting to take shape. This magic, which had been improved over time, was constructing quite a convincing alternate realm.
I quickly retreated outside the magical circle. From now on, it was entirely up to it. I tensed my body, ready to protect the brain in case of failure.
Within the eerie magical energy of the shadow world, the sphere made up of my tree stems gradually began to take root inside the brain. The brain, consuming its magic, stretched out its spinal cord, establishing a connection with it.
In that connection, my tree stems instinctively emitted magic. My unique magic. It sought to create a self centered around the brain.
The magic operated perfectly fine. If it were another doll, a self would have been awakened here.
But the outcome it produced was different from my expectations. It didn’t become a star. Its self had not fully formed.
However, that didn’t spell failure.
The brain of the ghost tree blended with the stems, sending its spinal cord back to my Shadow Tree. Since it had no physical form, it enabled a very instinctive movement.
And it began to burrow into the Shadow Tree, connecting with the stars that flickered within. From it, only a strong instinct to link with the Shadow Tree was felt. So, I left this new doll alone, allowing it to do whatever it wanted.
It managed to connect with a multitude of stars. And began to pull them in slowly. The stars were drawn towards each other, lured by that force.
Thus, a clear flow was carved within my Shadow Tree. It resembled a river, glowing like a shining galaxy made of stars.
At the center of that galaxy was the sphere created from my tree stems.
It started to absorb all the information contained within. The fragments of information that were nearly filling my Shadow Tree flowed into it along the river of stars.
I sighed in relief. Though it was an unexpected result, a success was still a success. I signaled to 0 Unit. Receiving the signal, it deactivated the magical circle.
Then, the dark world faded, revealing a sphere the size of my head. I cautiously approached and grabbed it in my hands.
This sphere existed in both my Shadow Tree and reality. The traits of the ghost tree had transferred completely over.
I carefully filled it with magic and checked its contents.
The brain inside had fully merged with it, existing as the core. It was likely because of that it could stabilize, even without forming a self.
The brain had changed very little. Just a tiny fraction of its massive volume had filled up. It was certain that it would have no issues absorbing information hundreds of times over.
It wasn’t a perfect process, but the outcome was perfect.
In the process of creating this connection, a few spirits that had existed in the brain drifted into some other stars, but that was a trivial matter. In just a few days, they would lose their power and vanish on their own.