Tree of Aeons

Year 110

Another year. Time passed really quickly these days. I think it’s the effect of the curse. Even if I’m awake, I feel as if it’s not totally gone. It’s somewhat like nursing a mild headache, and I never quite feel like I’m at my 100% state.

I suppose this is what a [curse] feels like, and that’s why Jura never quite performed at his best when he had the curse. I wonder whether that princess I saved last time, the one that still had a bit of the curse left, is she still alive? Maybe she died, since Baroosh was destroyed. She too had a curse, and so did Meela, at least, until that hero removed it.

Curses can be removed, and they can also heal naturally. 

So, my curse is one of overexposure to demonic mana. It’s honestly very similar to the princess who had overexposure to void mana. Therefore, treating the curse is likely to be similar to the princess. In the case of the Princess, her soul spring was wrecked, destroyed by the exposure to void mana, and so she was dying. In my case...

My soul spring is not destroyed, so I was able to survive those 20+ years. But perhaps it is damaged, and if damaged, I would have to find out how to mend my own soul spring. All this is conjecture, I don’t even know if my soul spring is even damaged yet.

After a while, my musings led me nowhere, and I attempted to find out.

I mean, I’ve never seen my own soul spring. It’s kind of like asking a doctor to self-diagnose. Not exactly possible to be objective about it, and I may have certain bias too! But oh well, I need to know whether something’s wrong with me, and how do I fix this curse!

I thought at lengths about whether it’s possible to build a soul forge that is aimed at me, while being powered by me. If the soul is the engine of the individual, then like a car engine, I must be able to add sensors, readings, thermometers and all, and from that, a sense of what’s happening. 

“That analogy may not be the most suitable one, master.” Trevor commented. “It’s more of the driver trying to figure out what’s wrong with the driver. If I may, it is similar to trying to figure out whether the driver is sick from the way he is driving.” 

“Uh.” That’s... how’d he do that? Was he using my memories?

“Yes, master. We have access to your memories.”

Still, I tried.

I did something similar to a meditative state, trying to feel my own body, and be one with myself. It’s like Buddha meditating under a Bodhi tree, only, well, I’m the tree. 

And my senses are once again, assaulted by the demonic mana. After all, the edges of my network of roots and trees, are a constant battlefield, where the mixed mana produced by me, and my fellow trees, face-off against the demonic mana. 

“Not working.” I mused to myself after about one month of constant meditation. In hindsight, it’s obvious. I wasn’t able to meditate myself out of the curse, so why would it work now? “Any suggestions, Trevor?”

“Before you go there, master, I would like to remind you of the things you wanted to do last year and the years before. Which is to work on expanding your mana pool, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your mana, your experiments on the hybrid demon trees, and also, developing even more Lausanne-class individuals.”

Once again my scatterbrain reared it’s head.

“May I add, master, you have yet to decide on a vocation for your two contracted souls, Yvon and Eriz. You backed away from turning them into Mana Farms.”

“That wasn’t the most effective use of their skills.” I had a lot of thinking to do. I mean, this [soul contract] should be extremely overpowered since the person retained their memories. Even if they died, I could reuse their souls constantly. An individual who gained a tonne of experience, and therefore could retry different things at each life would be super powerful.

That is after all what makes reincarnators like myself, or even heroes, super powerful, because their existing body of knowledge is brought over to their next life! So, as I wondered what happened as my soul contractors died, then it appeared. The dreaded notification.

[No penalty for first death. For subsequent deaths, one year time-penalty will be imposed, and doubled with each subsequent death. One-third of all memories are wiped with each death after this first. No penalty on reassignment, as not considered as death]

Ah. The system isn’t stupid after all. 

So, in a way, it’s best to use their living knowledge and match it to somewhere where they could be most useful. 

So, Eriz, the maid that’s responsible for caring for Roma all these while, I assigned her to a Subsidiary Tree that’s focused as a childcare area, and she took the form of a [Nursery Tree]. I wanted someone dedicated to look after the new children that the survivors will have, and feed them supplements to make strong, high potential individuals to support my future Lausanne-class project. 

Yes. Lausanne-class is a name for an individual at that grade. I imagine the Lausanne class to be something like the Corvette-class, and I would like to eventually reach Battleships and Aircraft Carriers.

As for Yvon, I fused her into one of the [Training Trees], creating a different version of Treeiner. This is because she did have a long stint serving in the Valthorns as their guide and trainer, and she has good combat skills that I wanted her to pass on to the next generation. Though we didn’t agree with each other, she has some wisdom and knowledge of the world that would definitely contribute to a more holistic education and training for the next batch. 

“I won’t have to care for people for a long time.” They both said, noting that the population of young children is extremely small. The survivors are almost all adults now. It’s been 20 years, and there’s no immigration from abroad to fix the lopsided population pyramid. 

“That’s fine.” I would think they need some time to get used to their new bodies and their newfound abilities. I want to monitor what they can do. I had initially just let Meela and Alexis somewhat free reign, and I must admit my awareness of what Meela did was close to none. “You can provide training to the existing people, consider it as a gym.” 

“How about me? It’ll be some time before any of them have kids.” Eriz mentally responded. She found her new body awkward. All of them did, since they were far too used to humanoid forms. 

“Create supplements for the new moms. I’m sure they need to boost their body to take on the load of having children.”

“These two... trees are Yvon and Eriz?” Jura seemed extremely perplexed when I informed him of what I did. 

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know you could do that...” Jura seemed to think about it at length. 

“Lady Mika was one.” 

“Oh.” After a while. “So if... If I were to have a soul contract with you, and I died, you could in practice, make me into a tree?”

“...yes.”

He paused, and then of course, he quickly told Laufen about this, and soon the entire group of survivors knew about it. And then some interesting comments emerged.

“Well, I know the elves used to say that when we die we return to the trees, but I didn’t expect it to be a literal statement. I always imagined it was more of a figure of speech.”

“What did they give for that?” Jura asked later that day. 

“For Eriz, it was a punishment for luring an army here. For Yvon, she traded her soul for a patch of grapes and blessings on the land for her winery project.”

“Really. Was I there when that happened?” 

“Yes.” I recall Jura was in the same room. He was quiet for a moment.

“Lausanne got one?”

“No.”

Jura breathed a sigh of relief. 

“I trust her.”

“That’s good to hear. I... I don’t think we want to be turned into trees, like... literally.”

Is it? It’s not that bad. Yvon’s Training Tree has a humanoid shaped tutor that is able to verbally communicate once she gains a few levels. For now, as a level 1 training tree, she’s just like a combat dummy that’s unable to talk. Eriz, I’m not sure whether she will eventually gain the ability to talk, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she could. What’s so bad about trees?

Trees don’t really need to eat, we can generally regenerate almost all our body parts, and well, we can keep growing! What’s not to like? 

"Did you offer it to Lausanne?"

"No. Why?"

"Ah... am I right to say this is more of a punishment than a reward?"

"You could say that. I have rarely offered the soul contract."

Jura looked relieved, and then he changed the topic. “Good, good. So... children. That’s the plan for them?”

“Yes. We will have more children, and they need to grow up strong. I hope to make them as strong as Lausanne, if not more.”

“Ah. Planning for the long term.”

“Yes.”

Then Jura spoke about some other priorities, such as weapons for the survivors. Over the past few years, as the responsibilities for defense shifted to my army of beetles, the survivors were able to take a break from combat. Still, it didn’t escape anyone’s notice that they all needed anti-demon weapons, and that was something Lausanne had requested from me before she left. All her spears were damaged or broken over the decades. I dedicated some time to equip the remaining survivors with anti-demon weapons.

Over the past few years the repairs to the general environment has been ongoing, this meant things like farms, houses, outhouses, gardens. Things that, well, generally contribute to happiness.

Some even asked for the [Tree of Prayers]. Which I gladly made one, again.

I went back to the next topic on Trevor’s list.

“Hybrid demon trees.” 

I have a dilemma with them. If I were to be seen and known that I have some limited ability to control these demonic trees, would the outsiders suddenly suspect that I too, might be a demon? After all, I already have demonfire on the top of my branches like Hades, it wouldn’t be a stretch for these narrow minded natives to suspect that I am perhaps a demon, and that would make me a target of the world’s temples and kingdoms.

Yet, understanding, and controlling them is key to my attempts of breaking out of this place. If I could break them free of the demon’s controls, I would be able to accelerate my expansion. And I don’t trust any of the survivors to not leak this fact to the outside world, and that’s not because I doubt them. This world clearly has mind controlling and mind reading magic. The fact that the demons were able to access the heroes’ memories are obvious enough. 

So, some things must be kept absolutely secret. Just like the fact that I am also an Earther.

My newfound abilities over the [hybrid-botany] meant I could vaguely, very vaguely, influence them. It’s not yet outright controlled, like with the regular trees. We speak different languages, and I’m just a beginner in their language.

I will need more time with them. Secretly.

“Mana.” Trevor read out the list. “Mana processing, mana efficiency, Mana allocation.” Yes. Mana. That juice that powers all the living beings of this world. That involved working on the Giant Attendant Trees to create super-mana farms. 

“List of repairs. Grand MindTree.” Trevor went onto the next item. “We’ll need resources for this, master. Which we do not have.” I wonder whether I could configure the grand mind tree into a diagnostic programme to check me, since it did have the ability to reduce the effects of any mind control on me, so it should have some kind of scanning ability to identify what the curse did to me.

“Inventory items. Forest Rod.” I wanted to keep the forest rod for any magical leyline I found, in order to get access to other kinds of soul forge colors. Though I believe they would’ve been extremely useful in converting this general area back to normal, I still think the forest rod’s unique ability to capture special magical locations should not be wasted on just any regular sludge and corruption.

Well, unless I find the main source or node of this corruption, then I would want to use the rod. I mean, I’d risk it for the chance to convert the entire corrupted continent into my domain. THat’ll just be awesome. 

“Preparations for the next demon king?” Trevor asked. “Would that be something of concern?”“Yes. We have to be prepared.” Though, if something like this happened again, what could I have done differently? Well... I honestly have no answer to this. If this corruption happened again, what could have I done? 

As the year drifted ever closer to it’s end, a group of survivors returned. About 30 of them. Their return was met with a massive celebration.

“Aeon.” The leader of the returned survivors spoke. “There is civilization out there. After 4 months of travelling we finally got out of the corrupted area, and made contact with a kingdom. Only our continent suffered significant damage from the corruption, and many are amazed that a pocket of us survived in the middle of the Rottedlands.”

“Rottedlands?” Jura and the rest of the survivors asked. They were very interested in the outside world. 

“Yes. The outsiders refer to the entirety of the corruption as the Rottedlands. Well, it differs by region, but most call it the Rottedlands, or the Blightlands. Many that we’ve met are interested in forming diplomatic relationships with us, but the terrain is too hostile unless the group is at least level 50 and above, and has the ability to create our own food and filter water, since there’s nothing to harvest for a whole two months, and there’s no clean water anywhere in the entirety of the Rottedlands.”

“How many did we lose?” A Remainer asked. 

“Of the 400, we lost 100 on the journey out. We lost 20 on our way back, even after we came with better equipment and supplies.”

“How’s Lausanne?” Laufen asked.

“Lausanne is fine. She and a small group of the younger ones are on a journey to the other cities and kingdoms. But more importantly, we have a map.” The returned men unfurled a massive map that indicated the edges of the Rottedlands, and as Jura described it to me, it seemed Lilies was so far away that she wasn’t harmed. 

But my other forest and the Verdant Volcano were both in the range of the Rottedlands, were they destroyed?

I only lost connection, but I didn’t get a message that Dimitree was destroyed. How about the Verdant Volcano.

The map was important for a few reasons. One, it showed us the shortest path to civilization. Where the edges of the Rottedlands and where Freeka once was. Next, well, who we want to form any sort of diplomatic relationship with. As it is, it’s a large distance, and I may be open one path out of the Rottedlands. Maybe a few more once I get stronger.

On the flipside, I may also not open a path, such that the Rottedland formed a natural moat or barrier. After all, having to go through these Rottedlands would greatly discourage any attempts at invading us.

So who and how we expose and declare our presence is important. And I need to balance this with other aspects of my long term plans. 

The demon king incident is my first, but certainly won’t be the last one I face. If I will live for hundreds of thousands of years, as great old trees often do, then I must consider the plans to prevent such events over the longer period. 

Sure, the first time isn’t really my fault, but if I let it happen to me more than a few times, that is entirely on me. 

The heroes and the demon king are part of a continuous cycle, and therefore are a predictable, preventable crisis. 

What could I do?

Find ways to let them fight it out elsewhere far from civilisation and nature? How can I prevent them from destroying all the gains made by the jungles and forests? All the destroyed natural habitats? 

That involves knowing, no, influencing where the demon king and heroes appear. That’s... unlikely. 

Or should I aid the heroes such that they kill the demon king as soon as possible? I have hesitated in participating in this conflict, but as I predicted previously, it comes for me whether I like it or not. 

Or could I... kill the demon king myself? How did the demon kings die so quickly? Is there some trick? I clearly need to investigate this hex power and see whether I could make a safer version for myself? Like Clean Nuclear! 

So... how should we approach the future? It comes for us. 

Hex. And I will need to gather power to slay the demon king myself. Only with power, we can preserve nature. Without power, nature will just remain a setting for their conflict.