Chương 161: The Greedy Genesis Seed

I opened my eyes and I was back in Han Renyi's body, standing in front of the Ancestor's Tree at the Three-Leaf Clover Sect. The transition from the crystalline heart-space had been so smooth that there wasn't even a moment of disorientation to mark the shift.

One second, I had been in that strange place talking through plans with Astralis, and the next I was just here in the physical world with the ground solid under my feet and Han Renyi's consciousness still somewhere else entirely, still sleeping and recovering in whatever space it retreated to when I took over.

I looked up at the tree, and it was already reacting to my presence, its branches moving and swaying with this obvious enthusiasm despite the fact that there was absolutely no wind, not even a breeze, nothing that could account for the movement except the tree itself deciding to move that way.

"Someone's happy to see you," Astralis said, appearing next to me in a faint shimmer of starlight, and in the physical world he looked different than he had in the heart-space, harder to pin down somehow, and the stars in his hair were much less visible out here.

"We did go through something together," I said, thinking back to how the tree had been involved when I'd had to deal with the Seventh Ancestor. Though honestly it probably had more to do with the World Tree Sutra than anything particular about me as a person.

"Shall we begin?" Astralis asked, and his face shifted into that serious expression that always looked a little bit wrong on features that young, like a child doing a very careful impression of an adult. I stepped forward and pressed my palm flat against the trunk. The bark was warm under my hand which surprised me slightly. I closed my eyes and reached inward for the familiar energy of the blue sun sitting at the center of my inner world.

The connection formed immediately, it felt completely natural, and I could tell from a nearby disciple's sharp intake of breath that my eyes had started glowing with that blue light again even though I obviously couldn't see it myself. The poor kid had probably just been heading out for morning practice and instead got to discover that the mysterious figure from before was back and apparently doing something with their sacred tree.

The energy started flowing from my blue sun into the tree and what happened next was more than I had expected. The whole trunk lit up with a soft azure glow that spread in both directions at once, climbing up through every branch, reaching down through every root, and wherever it reached things that had been subtly wrong started becoming right again. Small imperfections in the bark smoothed out, and branches that had been slightly drooping straightened up, but that wasn't even the main thing.

As the blue energy moved through the tree's system, it started to pulse. Every pulse sent a wave of something outward through the surrounding reality that I could physically feel, the air became easier to breath somehow, and I could actually sense the local rouqi concentrating and thickening around us.

"Fascinating," Astralis said quietly, "the stabilization effect is far stronger than I expected, how are you…" I didn't hear him finish the question because something in my inner world interrupted my attention and pulled it inward.

"Master," Azure said, "you need to see this." I kept the connection to the tree going and split my attention to looked inward at the same time. What I saw made me glad I already had something solid to lean against.

The Genesis Seed was growing, but it wasn't doing it the way I would have predicted based on everything I understood about how it worked, instead of extending its roots through my inner world the way it normally did, it was somehow routing them through the blue sun itself, using it as a passage to somewhere else.

"Azure," I thought, keeping my face as neutral as I could manage from the outside, "what am I looking at right now?"

"It appears," Azure said in the tone he uses when something interests and worries him at the same time, "that the Genesis Seed is using the blue sun as a conduit to extend its influence directly into the Starhaven Realm." I watched the roots reach through the blue sun and disappear into somewhere I couldn't quite see the destination of.

"Is it trying to take over the realm?" I asked.

"Yes and no," he said.

"It's not doing it the way I would expect an annexation attempt to look, it's more subtle than that. The connection it's establishing seems to actually be helping stabilize the realm rather than working against it."

"But the end result is still a path toward annexing the realm?"

"Yes, Master, that does appear to be where this leads." I glanced sideways at Astralis, but he was completely absorbed in watching the tree's transformation. If he had noticed anything happening at a level beneath what was visible, he wasn't showing it at all.

"The stabilization is exceeding every projection I had," Astralis said, and he was practically bouncing, "the energy distribution is perfectly even and the decay rate in this area has already dropped by at least thirty percent!" Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. I nodded in what I hoped looked like modest acknowledgment while keeping the majority of my actual attention on what the Genesis Seed was doing.

"Azure, how long is this going to take to complete?" I asked internally.

"Hard to say right now," he answered.

"We'll understand more after we see the other two trees and whether the Genesis Seed does the same thing with them, it might be establishing a network or this might be isolated, we'll know more when we have more information." The tree's branches swayed again in what looked like a welcoming gesture. It was like it was claiming me as something that belonged to this place now and was glad about that fact.

"That should be enough for now," Astralis said after a few more minutes had passed, "we can't overwhelm it and we have two more to get to." I carefully pulled the energy flow back. The tree's glow settled down from brilliant to subtle, a quiet luminescence that made it look more alive than it had before.

"I haven't seen it respond this way in a very long time," Astralis murmured, staring up at it with the stars in his hair doing that rapid flickering thing, and then he seemed to catch himself and shook his head slightly.

"Well, we should go to the next one."

"Where is it?" I asked. He grinned at me.

"Hope you like heights."

Sect Master Bai Yun of the Mountain Dweller Sect had spent two hundred and eighty years accumulating unusual experiences and he had genuinely believed by this point in his life that very little could actually surprise him anymore.

He had been doing his daily inspection of the Star-Catching Tree that morning when he realized something about it was different then it should be, the massive tree that normally stretched its branches straight up toward the sky was moving in a way that couldn't be explained by any wind pattern he knew, and then he saw the figure hovering in front of it, wrapped in a cloak that his spiritual sense just seemed to slide straight off of without catching on anything.

Every instinct he had said to sound the alarm immediately, any unknown entity capable of reaching this altitude without using the sect's own specific techniques was a threat by definition, but then he saw who was standing next to the cloaked figure and every thought in his head stopped completely. The Immortal Boy. Astralis himself, the child-like figure with the stars in his hair, standing there radiating an authority that made Bai Yun's legs feel unreliable even from a quarter mile away.

Nobody had seen Astralis in person since the Celestial Sovereign's disappearance. Nobody. And now here he was standing next to a cloaked stranger at Bai Yun's sacred tree like this was a perfectly normal thing to be happening on an ordinary morning.

Bai Yun stood completely still and watched as the cloaked figure reached out and touched the Star-Catching Tree's bark, and what followed was something that he knew even as it was happening, he would never be able to fully describe to anyone who hadn't been there to see it.

The tree blazed with blue light so intense it was probably visible from the neighboring province, and with every pulse of that light, Bai Yun could feel the air around him changing, becoming more substantial, like reality itself was being pressed back into a shape it was supposed to hold.

It lasted for what felt like it should have been hours but was probably only a few minutes, then both figures were gone, and Bai Yun was alone with a softly glowing tree that felt different than it had that morning when he'd arrived.

He approached it slowly and reached out with his spiritual sense like he had done hundreds of times before as sect master, expecting the familiar gentle acknowledgment he always received, and instead got back something that felt like trying to get the attention of someone who had vastly more important things to think about.

He stood there for a long time looking up at the glowing branches and decided that the correct response to what had just happened was probably to feel honored and terrified simultaneously, and that both of those reactions were entirely reasonable given the circumstances.

Sect Master Yan Mei of the Deep Sea Sect was in the middle of her regular communion with the Deep Root Tree when she felt the disturbance moving through the water toward her. It wasn't anything like the normal disturbances she felt living at the bottom of Pearl Heart Lake, it had no relationship to currents or pressure or anything natural, the water itself was just moving out of the way of something that was choosing to descend.

The figure that came down through the water wasn't swimming, that would be the wrong word for what they were doing, they were just occupying progressively deeper locations with their cloak moving around them in ways that had nothing to do with how water actually moves. Then she saw who was accompanying the cloaked figure and everything suddenly made a great deal more sense, or at least the presence of something impossible became easier to accept.

"Lady Yan," the Immortal Boy's voice carried perfectly through the water, "I hope we're not interrupting anything important?" Yan Mei, who had lived beneath the lake's surface for over two centuries, knew better than to waste time asking questions like "How are you speaking underwater?" or "Why has no one seen you in three hundred years?" Instead, she simply bowed deeply and replied, "The Deep Sea Sect is honored by your visit."

The cloaked figure moved toward the Deep Root Tree and the tree responded before they even made contact, its massive roots that spread through the water in every direction began to shift like it was aware that something had arrived that was worth waking up for.

Yan Mei had spent decades studying this tree in detail, learning every subtle shift in its consciousness and every pattern in how it interacted with the world around it, and she watched with her full attention as the figure reached out and touched the submerged trunk. The blue light that came out of that contact spread through the water in every direction at once.

It was so bright that fish from the deepest and darkest parts of the lake, species that had spent so many generations in total darkness that they'd lost any adaptation for light entirely, started swimming upward toward this completely new source of illumination that had appeared in their world. The changes Yan Mei could feel moving through the water around her were harder to describe, the pressure became more uniform, and the water itself felt more real was the only way she could put it.

It was like the physical laws that governed how the lake behaved were being reinforced from somewhere underneath where they normally operated. When the figure finally stepped back from the tree the contact point kept glowing with a soft blue light that changed the whole character of the space around it.

"Thank you for your hospitality," the Immortal Boy said cheerfully, as if they hadn't just fundamentally altered one of the most important artifacts in the realm.

"We'll be going now!" Before Yan Mei could even form a response, both figures vanished, leaving behind only the softly glowing tree and about a thousand questions she knew would never be answered. She reached out to the Deep Root Tree with her spiritual sense and the response she got back nearly disrupted her water-breathing entirely. The tree's consciousness, which had always been vast but somewhat sleepy, was now alive with an energy she had never felt before.

It acknowledged her presence in the same way a mountain might acknowledge a passing cloud – with complete disinterest.