Chương 12: Chapter 10 - The unknown

In the dense forest, Dendron listened in on the conversation between Luan and the elders.

"Just as I suspected. It's the nature of ascension itself."

"This mysterious realm sounds fascinating, but I can't even go inside." Dejection settled over him. Even if his roots could technically reach it, they'd be useless without eyes to see through. A stray thought crossed his mind—maybe there was a door leading back to Earth too. Then a memory of a woman surfaced, unbidden, and guilt followed close behind it. He'd died without so much as a goodbye. He pushed the thought away and sat in the silence for a moment.

After a while, a sigh escaped him, and he turned his mind to something more useful, a plan.

"How do I actually take advantage of this?" He turned the problem over, searching for an angle that got him something out of it. Dendron worked through every option. Luan had become an avatar, the wolf as his eyes and ears, and, regardless of whether he wanted to accept it, even a friend of sorts. Being an avatar would divide him again, but this time the spiritual world changed everything.

He would need an avatar, an entity capable of entering that world, seeing, and moving freely while his physical body remained bound to the forest. His mental analysis stopped. The solution became obvious. He loathed that fact. An idea came to him a few moments later. He could parasitize one of the Black Ape Tribe. It would cost him his last avatar slot, but from what he'd overheard, the tribe was one of the stronger forces in the wilderness. That alone made it worth considering.

Truthfully, he wasn't thrilled about spending his last slot this way. He thought about Luan. Of how the wolf's tail wagged when he returned from a successful hunt. Of the quiet companionship that had begun to feel less convenient and more like... Something else.

"What if I lose Luan by doing this?" he wondered.

"What if I spread myself too thin?" He buried the thought. Luan was still loyal. Still here. This was just another step toward surviving. But the situation demanded it. He wanted eyes inside the spiritual realm, someone who could show him what actually lay beyond that door. Any relationship benefit would just be a bonus on top. He was curious what the realm really was, curious enough to wonder if it held some clue tied to his own arrival in this world. The gain clearly outweighed the cost.

His only real hesitation was over whom to target, given how narrow his options were. Building connections mattered too, especially this early on. Better to spend the avatar now, forging ties with a tribe like this, than to sit on it forever chasing some rare attribute that might never come. He'd noticed a pattern over the past few days—the same trio of Black Apes showing up in his area daily, as if keeping watch. Their reasons were still a mystery to him.

After his ascension, though, only two of the three remained, likely because the third had gone to report back to the tribe elders. [Name: Jepo (Black Ape)] [Rank 2: Mid-Stage] [Attribute: Shadow] [Name: Torou (Black Ape)] [Rank 1: Peak-Stage] [Attribute: Illusion] He was relieved, at least, that the one with the Sound attribute had left. That one would've been a nightmare, sensitive to every vibration and noise in the area. Disappointment came right behind the relief.

He'd wanted the captain as his avatar instead, the shadow being ideal for scouting and infiltration. But parasitizing someone of equal or higher rank was off the table entirely.

"I'll settle for this. At least it's a real step toward building ties with the tribe." Illusion wasn't nothing, he told himself.

"Plus, I will have a cameraman for the spiritual realm expedition. They don't die easy either, hahaha." Amusement flickered through him. He watched Torou work the illusion field a while longer than he needed to, noting the careful way the ape checked the treeline twice—a habit that had probably never once caught anything, and got kept anyway. I could wait for someone else. The thought surfaced, and he let it sit long enough to test whether he meant it. Another patrol. Another day.

No rule says it has to be him, or today. There was no guarantee anyone better would come along, though, and he already had a plan built around this one. That was the whole of it, once he stopped dressing it up. Not necessity. Convenience wearing a good excuse. A direct, stealthy strike was out of the question—the captain outranked him and would react instantly to anything overt. His caution kicked in fast. Then an opening presented itself....

"Set up an illusion formation. I'll rest while we wait for the main force," Jepo ordered. An illusion field was the best way to stay hidden, distorting truth and falsehood enough to throw off anyone searching. Torou nodded and activated the technique, burning through a large chunk of his own spiritual essence to weave the illusory field into place.

Once it took hold, it drew on the ambient spiritual essence around it to sustain itself, lasting anywhere from several hours to however long the initial investment held out.

"Wake me up if anything important happens," Jepo said the way a man says something he's said a hundred times before, already half-asleep on his feet before he'd finished the sentence—the particular tiredness of someone who'd been a captain far longer than he'd wanted to be. Torou settled down beside a nearby tree, younger in the shoulders than the rest of the squad, still carrying himself like someone who hadn't quite grown into his own rank yet. He gathered essence to recover what he'd just spent.

Stolen novel; please report. He despised this assignment. He was proud to have been chosen, but not proud of the mission itself. What about the waiting? What was he even watching for? It left him feeling useless. A warrior should fight rather than stand guard over a dormant tree. He thought about his sister in the village. She was much younger than him, barely old enough to train.

He had promised her that he would return with something impressive from this mission to show that her brother was more than just a scout.

"You're not just a scout," she'd said, tugging at his fur.

"You're my hero." He smiled as he remembered. Then he refocused, scanning the tree line. Nothing shifted.

"Just a few more hours," he murmured.

"Then I can go home." He thought about her face. The way she'd looked at him when he'd promised to come back with something impressive. He'd believed it, too. He was a warrior. He could protect her. He could make her proud. Now, sitting in this forest, waiting for something to happen, he wasn't sure he'd ever felt further from being a hero.

"Just a few more hours," he repeated. He didn't believe it this time. A small portal, no bigger than a fist, blinked open above his head. A translucent soul worm dropped free of it. He reacted instantly, diving sideways and drawing his sword in the same motion. He cut the worm clean into four pieces before it could land. It died there, and Dendron felt nothing from the loss, the soul simply drifted back into him.

What he did feel was fury, at the spiritual essence wasted, and at the fresh wave of pain that came with it.

"You fucking cameraman. Could've just held still. It's an honor being chosen by me." He grumbled, annoyed at how complicated this was turning out to be. Torou, meanwhile, stayed fully on guard now, spiritual essence recovery forgotten, watching for whatever had just tried to sneak up on him. It looked like an ordinary worm, but his gut told him otherwise.

"What the hell was that?" he muttered. A few minutes passed. Nothing else came. He checked the tree he'd been sitting under, scanning for any trace of spiritual fluctuation, and found nothing out of the ordinary. Everything read as perfectly normal.

"Did I really just overreact? Should I report this to the captain?" The urge to say something nagged at him, but the moment he pictured the conversation, telling Jepo he'd seen a suspicious worm with nothing to show for it, the words caught in his throat. It had been cut down in a single strike, after all. Maybe he really had just spooked himself over nothing. Several minutes passed before Dendron struck again, this time willing to risk being noticed.

He opened a wide spread of portals in Torou's blind spot and sent roots surging through all of them at once. Torou reacted fast, cutting down three roots before the sheer numbers overwhelmed him. The rest coiled tight around his limbs and torso, one wrapping across his mouth before he could scream. Dendron committed fully this time, manifesting a fresh soul worm and teleporting it directly onto Torou's head. It crawled into his ear before he could react. He felt it—the moment Torou's will began to break.

It wasn't a battle. It was an erosion, slow and quiet, the way water wears down stone.

"I'm sorry," Dendron said, knowing Torou couldn't hear him.

"I didn't want to do this. But I needed someone inside." The words felt hollow. He'd told himself the same thing about Luan.

"I'm getting good at this," he said.

"Making excuses." He felt something spill out of him the moment the worm took hold—the same way it had with Luan, unbidden and impossible to aim. Whatever the worm carried, it carried on its own. He'd never learned how to stop it. He wasn't sure he could. Torou struck at the side of his own skull, trying to dislodge it. It was useless. A dull buzzing filled his head from the strain. Jepo jolted awake at the noise.

"What are you doing?" All he saw was Torou sitting on the ground, staring blankly into nothing. Then a flood of memories crashed into Torou's mind—not his own. Dendron's. Alien and unfamiliar all the same, but Dendron's.... Sunlight, cozy and golden, spilled through a window, white curtains stirring in the breeze. A girl sat on the bed, maybe sixteen, maybe seventeen. She read with her hair falling across her face, lips shaping the words in silence.

He leaned against the bed frame, seated on the floor, reading his own book, one with a dragon on the cover. His story wasn't nearly as good as hers, and that bothered him more than it should.

"What's yours about?" She looked up, smiling. Her eyes carried a tiredness that didn't belong on a face that young, shadows sitting beneath them that shouldn't have been there either.

"It's about a girl who can talk to birds."

"Stupid." She laughed, weak, like she was running low on air.

"You're stupid." He tossed a crumpled ball of paper at her. She caught it and threw it right back. The room felt safe. Small. Just the two of them, nothing else. But something was wrong underneath it all, a weight pressing at the edges of the space, something sinister he didn't want to look at directly. He shoved the feeling aside. She laughed again. He laughed with her. She didn't look up when he finally stood to leave.

"You'll come back?"

"Yeah." It was such an easy promise to make. He didn't want to leave this room. He left anyway. He always did, in the end.... The memories cut off. Torou stood there, confused, caught somewhere between happiness and fear without understanding either. He didn't know what any of it meant, only that it wasn't his own memory. Something in him synchronized with the person from those images, a feeling he couldn't place. He loved that girl the way he loved his own family, and he had no idea why.

"This isn't my memory," he realized. The ache in his chest wasn't his to carry, and yet it had settled in anyway, uninvited, like it had always lived there.

"Oi, did something happen? You woke me up, and now you're just standing there zoning out." Jepo's voice carried nothing but irritation.

"Everything's fine. Sorry, Captain." Jepo didn't bother replying, just turned and walked back to where he'd been sleeping. A voice cut through the confusion in Torou's own head.

"It's an honor that you've been chosen as my avatar." Torou flinched, the voice arriving too suddenly in his own skull.

"Who are you?" The question felt right to ask, and wrong at the same time. Instinct told him this voice belonged to his main body somehow, and yet he had no real sense of who that even was.

"I am you, and you are me." The words settled into Torou's mind like they'd always belonged there. He wanted to fight it. He tried—clenched his jaw, dug his claws into the dirt, told himself this was his body, his mind, his to keep. It didn't work like fighting a person. There was no wall to push against, no throat to bite down on. It was already inside him, in the same places his own thoughts lived, wearing the same voice he used to argue with himself. By the time he understood that, the fight was already over.

He just hadn't felt it end. Dendron looked through Torou's eyes. He noticed the confusion, fear, and gradual acceptance settling on his new avatar's face. And he felt something unexpected happen to him. Guilt. Genuine, sharp guilt. I've done this before, he told himself. I did it to Luan. It's fine. He wasn't sure if he'd ever be able to make things right. Torou then said in a small voice, "I don't understand."

"Who was she?" he asked quietly.

"The girl in the memory?" Dendron went quiet. He knew exactly who she was. That was the problem. The silence stretched long enough that Torou stopped expecting an answer. He knew, somehow, that it was true. It felt strange all the same.

"How should I address you?"

"I've got too many names. Different people call me different things. You can call me the Unknown." The word hung in the air between them. Dendron had chosen it on a whim, half-joking, half-covering his tracks. But now that he'd said it, it felt heavier than he'd intended. In his previous life, he'd been nobody. A face in a crowd. A name that did not matter. Now he was unknown. Something no one could pin down. Something powerful.

"I like the sound of that," he told himself.

"It suits me." But even as he said it, he felt the weight of it.

"Unknown" wasn't just a name—it was a choice. A decision to stay hidden, to remain a mystery, to never let anyone see who he really was. It was exactly what he'd done his whole life. Become invisible. Fade into the background. Never let anyone close enough to be disappointed. He'd died that way. Alone in a motel room, forgotten by everyone who'd ever known him. And now he was doing it again.

"Maybe that's what I deserve," he thought.

"To be unknown. To be nothing." The thought settled into him, cold and familiar. He'd worn it before. And yet, even as he said it, a part of him worried that he'd forget who he was behind the mask.

"Unknown..." he echoed quietly.

"Then, Mr. Unknown. Why did you choose me?" The question went hollow the moment Dendron heard himself answer it in his own head. Luck. Convenience. The illusion attribute. Or maybe it was the sister who believed in him. He pushed the thought away. He was getting good at that. Was he choosing his avatars at all, or just taking whoever was closest? He didn't have an answer. He wasn't sure he wanted one.

"You'll know when the time comes," he said. He hated how much it sounded like a lie.