Unbound

The Realms Refute, But The Crucible Rewards!

+100 STR

+100 END

+95 VIT

+45 AGL

The Crucible Rewards You, Companion!

+35 STR

+32 END

+25 PER

+25 AGL

The sizzling choir of System energy rolled through Felix and Pit as they traversed the short hallway and over the fallen statues. It was a serious buzz, rattling through Felix’s core space like a wild gale. By the time it ended, energy had settled into both of their Bodies, and some of their exhaustion peeled away.

“Now that’s more like it,” Felix said with a grin. “Proper rewards.”

The pair of them made their way back to the room of Roots. At least, that's what Felix was calling it. It was empty of Roots now, of course, all of them having been consumed. Felix swallowed, the thought of it unnerving—it had felt too good devouring them. If all of Etrionn tasted like that, he was glad he hadn’t tried to eat his way into the Empyrean Halls, otherwise he would have been catatonic by now.

Pit chirped. “Small place. Filled with thorns?”

“Packed full.”

Pit grimaced. “What a messed up Trial. Where to now?”

Felix pointed. On the opposite side of the small chamber was an eight-pointed star that had been punched into the wall. It was forged of silvery metal and stamped with designs of pale green ivy where the sigaldry didn’t cover. Inscriptions followed along the edges of the star and in looping patterns across its face. Felix knocked on it, and it gave the dull sound of thick metal. The sigaldry did not respond.

Pit tilted his head. “Why’d you knock?”

“Just being polite.” Felix fished at his belt before pulling out the long hexagon that was the Authority Key. “I also have this.”

Do You Wish To Absorb The Authority Key?

Y/N

Yes.

The silver metal melted, pouring down his hand so quickly that Felix nearly threw it away—luckily, the metal clung to him. It poured toward his palm, and with a cool, somewhat upsetting sensation, it slipped into his Mana Gate and traced across the pathways of his arm and into his core.

“Gah!” He could sense the Authority resting now somewhere in the boughs of his Divine Tree. But when he looked, there was no visible sign of its presence. Just a very slight change in weight. He looked at the door. "Open."

The sigils filled with a faint glow of Mana. Something ground inside the door. Mechanics were whirring and pieces pulling, screeching against each other before the light faded.

"Well, that was anticlimactic. Was the key not enough?" Pit asked.

"I don't think it's a problem with the key. It's power." Felix reached out. The Empyrean Hall was too damaged. He shaped his Mana, not bothering with any Skill at all, and let it pour out of his palm without an attribute. A pale liquid slithered against the door, and the sigaldry soaked it up like a sponge. Immediately, the array lit up, bright as high beams.

"Open," he repeated.

This time, the door activated with ease. Like the aperture of a camera, eight separate points spun outward, sinking into the walls. Through it was a forest.

"What is this?" Pit asked as he stepped in, Felix just behind him. “Did they pack a greenhouse into this monster?”

"Does it surprise you? The Nym loved nature. Of course there's something like this." Felix would have called it a garden, but the place seemed more wild than cultivated, save for the thin pathway they trod. Clustered forest, thick with skeletal bushes, clinging vines, and thorned bramble spread out before him for at least several hundred feet. The air was stale and unmoving; only their steps stirred the plant life around them, and none of it was good. Only a few steps in, several shrubs had collapsed into dust, joining the gray-green accumulation that covered every inch of the ground.

“Eugh, this place is gross.” Pit shook a paw, casting away the wrinkled stem of some fern. “Is that ash on the ground?”

“Looks like it.” Felix waved a hand stiffly, and a sharp breeze rose up, tearing through the ash for several yards. Beneath it was splotchy, gray-green dirt. “And mold, apparently.”

Pit sneezed.

The plants were blackened and rotting in the dry air, not as if the place were burnt with fire, but as if everything had desiccated, much like Etrionn’s flesh. What remained was a complicated tangle, like a forest made exclusively of briars and nettles. Felix even spotted more than a little of the Roots of the Aberrant Soil among them, but they had fared just as well as the rest. The walk was quiet and gray.

“This is so boring.” Pit flexed his wings. “Why don’t we fly over all this?”

“Because it’s a garden, not a landscape.”

“So?”

Felix ducked under the mold-ridden branch of a waist-thick tree. “So it’s meant to be seen from the ground, not the air. We go flying, and we might miss what we’re looking for—not to mention, this place is so busted up that there’s no telling how long it’ll stick around.”

He tapped another branch, and the thing crumbled into pieces.

“Oh.”

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

So they walked.

Ten minutes lapsed before the complicated tangle of trees parted before them, and the trail led them out into open terrain. Felix’s eyes widened. Hills rolled off into the distance, crowded here and there with more bramble forest, but plenty was simply empty ash. Fields of it stretched for miles toward a horizon clouded by gray clouds. Straight ahead, a hill higher and wider than all the rest rose up into the gloom at the center of the vast place. Felix hesitated to even call it a chamber. It was more like he'd walked outside. Even the ceiling was hidden beneath a haze of gray clouds and falling ash.

Pit squinted. “Is that a Spirit Tree?”

Felix’s mouth opened as the scale of the place was reset in his head. “That’s a Grove of them.”

The pair of them made their way across the field with long, loping steps that scattered knee-deep drifts of ash in every direction. Felix had expected creatures to be waiting for him somewhere, but the world was quiet save for their thumping footfalls, and soon enough they summited the hill. The Trees only grew larger as they approached, until each one was easily the size of the Atlantes Anima.

Does that mean they’re all Elder Trees? He brushed them with his gaze, but he received nothing from them. The System was as quiet as the landscape.

Perhaps that was due to their withered, deathly appearance. Or, most likely, it was due to the mounting Dissonance in the air. There, at the center of this place, that scrawling, buzzing burr that had sat around like background radiation was stronger than ever.

"It feels like I swallowed a mouthful of bees,” Pit complained. He clacked his beak several times as if to banish the sensation. “I hate it.”

Felix didn't disagree. As used to Dissonance as he was, it was never a pleasant experience to bathe in its sound. It was glass grinding against a chalkboard and metal mashed into a silver filling. Painful and vastly irritating, but not unbearable. fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com

Wordless, they passed beyond the vast roots that clutched the hilltop like an octogenarian’s arthritic knuckles. Felix whistled. There were eight Trees spread around the area, each one with such thick trunks that let little of the daylight in—the Grove was dark as twilight, but that didn’t blind Felix to the absolute behemoth at the center. Spearing upward from the highest point of the hill was a ninth Spirit Tree. Easily twice the size of the others, it extended upward for what seemed like miles before its branches vanished into the ashen clouds.

"Now, I definitely know they're screwing with Domains," Felix muttered, following the spread of the distant branches. "No shot this fits into a monster, no matter how big they are."

Roots crawled out from the bottom of the trunk, each one as high as office buildings. They coiled around the dead, dusty dirt, puckering the earth into uncertain dips and hollows devoid of ash. Like the light, it couldn’t reach inside the Grove. Every step that Felix took had an almost echo, a soft thump that reverberated through the air, undercutting the Dissonance that tried to drown them both.

"My Tempering Memories were right.” Speaking aloud felt wrong. The best Felix could manage was a low whisper. “The Nym cultivated Spirit Tree Groves. I wonder if it’s for the same reason I did?”

“Like a Shadowgate?” Pit rustled his wings nervously. “Wouldn’t we have seen that in our Heart of Darkness map?”

Felix shrugged. “Maybe the Abundance cutting can tell us more.”

He reached into Pit's saddlebags and fished out the cutting of Abundance. The small plant with its blue leaves glowed as he touched it, rousing like a living animal, but the moment he took it from Pit’s bags, it twisted. The glow dimmed, the branches curling inward at the same time as the leaves themselves, and the stalk trembled.

“Crap!" He shoved it back into Pit's saddlebag. "Converge with me! Quick!"

Pit didn't hesitate, vanishing in a flash of light and settling into Felix's Spirit. Immediately, he could detect a shift in the harmonics around him.

Exalted Conjunction is level 104!

Felix put his hand to his chest. "How is it? Is it okay?"

Pit, coiled among the roots of Felix's Divine Tree, gave a relieved sigh. It's better now. It seems like whatever's affected all the plants tried to kill this thing. You think it was the Dissonance?

"Has to be.” Felix paused. “But there’s Dissonance in there, right below you.”

Pit arched his neck over the opalescent roots, staring down into the lightshow of his two grinding cores. Sure enough, Dissonance buzzed out from that connection.

Maybe it doesn't count? Because it's not in the real world? Pit huffed a breath. Why would that matter, though?

"No, no, maybe you have a point there. Because Dissonance isn't the only thing inside me.” Felix's cores produced two things by their grinding against one another: Dissonance…and Harmony. The interlinked nature of those two sounds was something he'd used to advance his Skills in the past and even Temper himself. They were two sides of the same coin. “I think there’s just so much Dissonance here in this Grove that it killed…everything.”

Pit shuddered. So this is the source?

“Maybe. We’ll have to check. If I can cut it off, then I can pull Paxus and Karys in here. Maybe even Knowledge.” Felix gave himself a little nod. “Okay. Stay inside of my Spirit for now. I'm gonna see what I can do."

Alright.

The gray-green ash puffed with every step. Felix searched for some hint as to what caused the Dissonance, scattering ashes around himself in the process. He found nothing concrete, though His gaze caught on the Roots of the Aberrant Soil that clustered around the ninth Spirit Tree. They were larger than any of the others he’d found, nearly four times as thick as the one’s he’d fought, but they were withered. Like everything else, they’d been killed by the ash and whatever else blighted the place.

It’s like everything is dying for a single sip of…

Felix stopped, a simple, almost idiotic thought striking his Mind. "Is it that easy?"

The bulky pouch at his hip popped open at a thought, his Garment pushing free the fist-sized Sachet of Fecund Offer and the larger Ritual Cask. The former was warm to the touch, a detail Felix hadn’t noticed before, though it still smelled like warmed-over death. A little uncertain, Felix loosened the bag's strings. An awful stench rose up, worse than what he smelled from outside of it. Choking back a gag, he poured it out at the roots. The contents dropped like a thousand-pound stone, crashing into the earth with a muted boom.

What the heck is in there?

“Looks like…dirt?” A dark soil had spread out on the ground beside the ninth Spirit Tree’s roots. It was flecked with Mana crystals, each smaller than his pinky nail, but exuding a staggeringly powerful aura of life, water, and earth. Moreover, Essence was mixed in as well, obvious as the clump of soil broke up into streaks of dark crimson gel. What struck Felix the most, however, was the significance that clung to the soil. That was what gave it such impressive weight.

Felix glanced up at the Tree, but nothing had changed.

The Cask came next. He tipped it carefully, pouring a stream of clear water from it directly onto the soil, making sure to spread it around as much as possible. He kept going until the Cask was empty and the dirt before him was almost swimming in liquid. It absorbed slowly, but it took the dirt with it, sinking into the moldy earth until it vanished entirely. The moment it did, a thrumming glissando slipped through the air. The pressure changed, popping his ears, and the Tree before him shuddered.

The Ritual Is Observed.

Offering Accepted.

Be Welcome, Inheritor.

Where the roots joined, the bark split to reveal the pale flesh of the Tree—then that, too, parted in creaking snaps to reveal an elegantly carved stairwell. Felix leaned forward, ducking his head through the entryway and glancing up. The stairs ascended up the hollow trunk so high even his eyes were blocked by a mint-green haze.

That looks promising, Pit said from within. Do you think it’ll try to kill us this time?

Felix grinned. “I thought you said you were bored.”

Leaving the Cask and Sachet behind, he stepped into the staircase—just as the trunk of the tree sealed up behind him. freeweɓnovēl.coɱ

Yep. Pit sighed. Definitely gonna kill us.