013Spirit World Tree

With the forest as our witness, we battled.

Long Xue appeared to my left in a flicker of mist, the telltale shimmer of short-distance teleportation betraying his move before he even fully materialized. I didn’t hesitate. “Take him,” I ordered, my voice steady despite the adrenaline surging through my veins. “Rip, destroy, and reduce him to waste until there’s nothing left.”

Several Thorn Whips burst into motion, lashing out with barbed fury to ensnare him. Vines thick as my arm whipped through the air, aiming to bind his limbs and roots digging into the soil for leverage.

But Long Xue merely flexed his fingers with casual grace. Thin strings of water qi sliced through my whips like razors through silk, severing them cleanly. Droplets of severed vine sap splattered across the undergrowth.

“Plant beats water, idiot,” I muttered under my breath, drawing on my phytokinesis for finer control. New Thorn Whips surged from the ground and from my staff, weaving a denser barrier that absorbed the incoming water blades. The liquid qi hissed and steamed as my plants drank it in greedily, converting the attack into harmless nourishment. I didn’t even need to waste another spell.

Long Xue appeared to my right in another blink, but a quick perception check revealed the faint distortion in the air. It was an illusion. The real threat was behind me. The fact that I still beat him in raw stats brought me a small, grim comfort.

I thumped my staff hard against the earth. “Ironwood Spike!”

A massive spike of reinforced, iron-hard wood erupted from the ground directly behind me. It earned a startled grunt from Long Xue as he barely twisted away in time. The enormous spike grazed his cheek instead of puncturing his torso, drawing a thin line of blood that trickled down his jaw.

He laughed, a rich, genuine sound that echoed through the canopy. “Marvelous. Introduce yourself, cultivator of the leaf!”

Since he wanted to talk, I decided to indulge the question that had been gnawing at me since this mess began. “The seeds. Where did you get them?”

A bored look crossed his face, as if I had just asked the most obvious thing in the world. “Now, this is just disappointing. You should know the answer. After all, your village was the reason these things exist.”

He placed one hand over his chest, right where I could sense the nasty seed pulsing with corrupt energy. “A powerful tool, suitable for cultivation, and to refine as a sacred treasure. What did they do with it? They abandoned it, which almost caused its species’ extinction. Why? Because of their damn rules. No grace at all.”

I sighed, exasperated. “My village? I am sorry, but I have no village. The Hidden Village of Leaf is unrelated to me.”

Long Xue threw his head back and laughed again, louder this time. “Is that so? Perhaps you can enlighten me. What are you doing here, then?”

I tightened my grip on my staff, the living wood warm and responsive in my palm. “I have a list. One, your people disturbed my good night’s sleep. Two, a pitiful crying girl asked me to save her people, and now, obviously, it seems I’ve failed. Three, that nasty seed inside you is upsetting the balance, and keeping the balance is part of my whole identity. I am going to purge it from you.”

Through my Druidic Insight, I could feel the true nature of the seed. It was a parasitic thing that twisted life force into something foul, feeding on its host while promising power. It reeked of wrongness, like rot hidden beneath blooming flowers.

Long Xue’s eyes narrowed with amusement. “You claim to be not of the village, but what difference does it make? Like them, you lack grace—”

I cut him off sharply. “That thing is polluting your mind, feeding on your soul, and its mere presence distorts the circle of life. There’s a greater balance in the world that must be kept. Things like good and evil have nothing to do with it. Co-existence ultimately is about finding the middle, and only in harmony can there be true peace.”

The druidic part of me was speaking now, the ancient instincts woven into my soul urging me to restore order. But I wasn’t wrong. My Druidic Insight had revealed exactly that much.

I leveled my staff at him. “You didn’t answer my question. Where did these seeds come from?”

Long Xue’s smirk faded, the faintest trace of it vanishing like mist. His voice dropped, carrying a weight that made the surrounding trees rustle uneasily.

“From the end of all.”

Long Xue suddenly vanished, trying to get the jump on me with another one of his slippery teleportations. I didn’t wait to see where he would reappear. “Entanglement,” I cast, and thick roots burst from the earth to my right, snaking upward with vicious speed. They caught him mid-materialization, wrapping around his legs like iron cables.

“Rip him apart,” I ordered coldly.

The Thorn Whips that had been waiting in the canopy and undergrowth burst into motion, lashing toward him with barbed hunger. But the moment they struck, Long Xue’s body exploded into a cloud of mist. Thin, razor-sharp strings of water qi wrapped around my throat from behind.

“Farewell,” he whispered, voice dripping with mock courtesy as the strings tightened like a garrote.

My Shedding ability activated. The ‘me’ that stood there was beheaded in a spray of illusory sap and leaves. The decoy withered instantly, crumbling into a pile of dead foliage as I slipped away, reappearing just beside the real Long Xue with my staff already pointed at his head at point-blank range.

“Sunlight Orb.”

A blazing sphere of condensed solar energy erupted from the tip of my staff. His head burst into mist once more, but even as it did, another figure materialized from behind the fading illusion I just killed. A cerulean sword, gleaming with lethal water qi, thrust straight toward my abdomen.

Did he think I had a dantian or core like cultivators? I almost laughed at the assumption. Xing Ning’s lectures about the importance of the dantian flashed through my mind for half a second.

“Wild Shape: Primal Nature Elemental.”

Silver-wood texture rippled across my skin, bark-like armor forming as vibrant flowers bloomed across my body and robe. The sword struck with a resounding thump, but it bounced harmlessly off my reinforced form. The damage was completely canceled, and the initiative swung back to me.

Without hesitation, I shifted again. “Wild Shape: Tyrant Lizard King.”

My body exploded in size and power. Bones cracked and reformed, muscles swelled, and in an instant I became a towering T-rex, jaws lined with serrated teeth the size of daggers. I lunged forward and chomped down on the space where Long Xue had been standing, nearly taking his entire upper body with me.

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He barely escaped, teleporting away in a panic. When he reappeared in the distance, he was mostly intact but missing an arm, blood spraying from the stump.

I cast Entanglement silently this time, roots erupting to pin him in place once more.

Long Xue teleported upward desperately, trying to gain distance as he barely dodged the roots, but I was ready. I let the Thorn Whips surge forward, consciously amplified by my phytokinesis. Over the course of hunting down his subordinates, I had been seeding the entire battlefield with Thorn Whips. The forest was no longer just a forest; it was my domain from every vine, every root, and every thorn answering my will.

The whips caught him mid-air. He sliced through them with his remaining arm and that strange cerulean sword, but it bought me the precious seconds I needed.

I canceled the T-rex form and Wild Shaped into an eagle in one fluid motion. With a piercing cry, I burst upward, soaring past him on powerful wings. As I cleared his position, I drew in a deep breath of qi and roared the next transformation.

“Wild Shape: Steppe Mammoth!”

My body ballooned into an enormous prehistoric behemoth, gray hide thick as armor plating, tusks like ancient spears. I crashed down on him with the force of a falling mountain, creating a massive crater that sent shockwaves rippling through the forest floor.

I stomped.

“RRRRROOOOOOAAAAAARRRRR!”

I stomped again.

“HRRRRNNNNNGGGHHHH—BOOOOOM!”

And again.

“GRRRRAAAAAHHHHH—CRRRRAAAAASH!”

The ground trembled violently with every impact. Long Xue struggled beneath me, teleporting in frantic bursts and throwing up watery and shadowy illusions to confuse my senses. His thin strings of qi finally managed to bind my massive legs for a few critical seconds, giving him just enough room to slip away.