Chương 2: Chapter 1 - Reincarnation

In the depths of the forest, a majestic soul tree stood fifteen meters tall, bathed in solar glory. Its kaleidoscope of leaves pulsed with an incandescent vitality. The soul tree woke from its slumber. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. That was not a heartbeat. It was a pulse, a slow, syrupy rhythm of sap surging through wooden veins. He tried to sit up. His spine did not bend—and found only a hollow column of xylem and phloem, silent and immobile. No vertebrae. No discs. No ache from sleeping wrong. Just dead-still wood.

He tried to shift his weight, to ease the phantom stiffness in his back, but his trunk didn't care. Trunks didn't get stiff. They just stood. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, and what came out instead of words was the creak of old wood groaning against the wind. He concentrated on his right arm. Nothing. He pressed harder. Nothing.

"Come on." Nothing. He tried his fingers. Nothing. His toes. Nothing. His neck. Nothing. His breathing stopped.

"... Okay." He strained until the effort itself started to feel ridiculous.

"Move." No response.

"Move!" A blast of wind hit his canopy. Thousands of leaves trembled, but his body stood still. He fell silent.

"... No." He tried to bend his knees. There were none. He tried to scratch his back. No hands. He tried to touch his face. No face. His awareness sank downward through his trunk, deep into the soil. Moist earth. Small stones pressing against his roots. Puddles of water beneath the surface. Then something made him stop thinking completely. Roots. Thousands of them. Large and small. But they weren't under him. They were him. His awareness snapped back.

"... No." He tried to dig one of them out. Pain—not the sting of a cut, but something deeper, something coming from inside him. He stopped immediately. The root stayed where it was. Slowly, his awareness spread—through his trunk, his branches, his leaves. He felt all of it. The bark. The sap. The roots. The leaves trembling in the wind. Every part of the tree became a part of him. He was not standing next to the tree anymore. He was the tree.

"... I'm a tree." Silence. A bird landed on a branch. Dendron looked at it. The bird tilted its head. Dendron stared hard.

"Stop." The bird chirped.

"Don't you fucking dare." The bird hopped twice along his branch, and something in him broke.

"I got hit by a truck." The bird chirped again.

"Now I'm a tree." He looked up through his canopy.

"Why?" His vision spread in a full three-hundred-sixty-degree arc, leaves rustling faintly at the edge of his perception. A notification materialized in his mind, and a panel appeared. [Successfully found a compatible host.] [Reincarnation successful.] [Name: Dendron Gareth (Soul Tree)] [Rank 1: Early Stage] [Attribute: Soul/Space] He skimmed the point counters, the mission requirements, the math. His gaze snagged on the information at the bottom.

[Absorb soul core to rank up:] Rank 1 Early Stage 0/5 or Rank 1 Mid-Stage 0/1 [Attribute Skills:] Soul Core Absorption (C): able to absorb the soul core of a corpse through contact. Portal Creation (D): able to create small portals. [Innate Skills:] Spiritual Essence Absorption (F) (Passive): as a soul tree, it passively absorbs spiritual essence from the atmosphere. Soul Fruit (F): able to produce a fruit dense in spiritual essence at the cost of your own spiritual essence.

Root Control (D) (Passive): able to control your roots. Soul Eye (C) (Passive): Can perceive physical forms, souls, and obstructions. Dendron stared at the panel. The information. The numbers. The sheer fact that some system had apparently decided a tree was an acceptable place to put a human soul.

"I didn't even have a girlfriend in my previous life, and now I'm a tree. Heaven, where's the justice in that?"

"How am I supposed to build a harem... family, at this rate?" Sap pooled somewhere deep in his trunk, heavy and still, like a held breath. The joke arrived before the feeling did. It usually worked that way. Say something stupid fast enough, and you never had to sit with what came after. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"Not fair. I was a decent guy. I paid my taxes. I held doors open for old ladies. The universe owed me at least a moderately attractive reincarnation. A goblin. A slime. Even a wolf would've been better."

"But a tree?" He looked down at his roots, buried in the dirt. He tried to lift a branch. Any branch. Just one, angled upward in defiance. The branch swayed in the wind like every other tree in the forest, utterly indifferent to his frustration. For the first time in his life, he genuinely missed having a middle finger to raise. The anger came and went. He couldn't hold onto it—his branches didn't have fists to clench, his trunk didn't have a chest to heave.

So the heat bled out of him like sap from a fresh wound, slow and useless. And when it was gone, all that remained was the silence of the forest. A few minutes later, something started to nag at him. Why, of all things, a tree? It felt like more than coincidence.

"My name is Dendron Gareth." The name sounded strange on his tongue now. Dendron. Tree. He almost chuckled.

"My mother really did have a sense of humor." An unexpected memory rose before him. He was young, very young. His feet didn't reach the floor where he sat at the kitchen table, swinging them back and forth.

"Why did you give me such a name?" His mother turned away from whatever she was doing.

"Because it's pretty."

"It's weird."

"No, it's not."

"Every kid at school calls my name weird after I introduce myself and tell them what it means." She smiled.

"Every child at school is silly." He looked at her.

"Mom."

"What?"

"Why do you call me Dendron?" She put down what she was holding.

"Because trees are strong."

"That's silly."

"No, it's not."

"Trees just stand there."

"Yes." She leaned forward and touched his forehead.

"And they stand there while all others change." He frowned.

"I don't understand."

"You don't need to." She smiled.

"One day you'll understand." He remembered the eye-rolling he'd done back then. He used to hate that name. He used to hate the half-second pause before a substitute teacher's tongue caught up with it, the little performance of trying and failing to make it sound like anyone else's. He used to hate when they said he had an exceptional name when all he wanted was an ordinary one. Now, standing fifteen meters tall with roots buried in an unfamiliar forest, he wished he could hear her say it again.

"Trees are strong," he mumbled. A bitter chuckle escaped him.

"Well, Mom..." His awareness traveled upward, through the gigantic canopy above him.

"... you finally managed to have your way." He stopped.

"Though I think you should've aimed a bit higher." He stopped laughing almost immediately. He wished she were here. He let himself sit with that for exactly as long as he could stand to, then reached for the next joke before the feeling could catch up to him. For a while, though, no joke came. The wind moved through his leaves in slow, unhurried passes, and somewhere off in the distance a stream kept talking to itself in a language made entirely of small sounds. He let it.

There was nothing else demanding an answer right now, and for once that felt less like being stuck and more like being allowed to just stand there.

"Maybe I'm the protagonist of this world," he mused, half-joking. Still, he was sure the system had been given to him by whoever had arranged his arrival here. Not that he knew why. He wasn't anything special in his previous life. He'd just kept living because he didn't know what else to do. He couldn't make sense of his own situation.

"Is God giving me a shot at redemption? Am I really the chosen one? Chosen one, my ass, I can't even walk." He cursed under his breath and let the thought go. There was no point dwelling on the unknowable.

"It's not like anyone's going to answer my questions anyway."

"Thinking too much never made anything better. Overthinking just gives you wrinkles, not that I'm capable of growing any." The thought almost made him laugh. He let the frustration linger the way dead leaves linger in autumn—too stubborn to fall, too dry to matter. Then the wind came, and they were gone. Might as well see what else this body could do for him.

"Being a tree has its own benefits, at least. I get to laze around all day, and I never have to worry about food. I just absorb nutrients from the sun and earth as naturally as breathing."

"This is the only thing I like about this whole situation." He laughed.

"Truly fitting for a slothful person... ah, no, a slothful tree." If anything, being a tree beat his old life. In his past life, he'd quit three jobs in two years.

"Too much work," he'd said, every single time. His parents had called him hopeless. He called it efficiency. Once he'd finished airing his complaints about tree-hood, curiosity finally won out, and he decided to test what exactly his new body could do. He tried Root Control first. A strange sensation stirred beneath the soil—roots responding to his will. At first, they only twitched. Then one burst upward, tearing through the earth.

"Whoa, that's actually kind of cool." He played with it after that—drawing a shape in the dirt, waving one root at another like a greeting, tearing up patches of ground just to watch them fall apart.

"Sup, beauty. I'm tree, by the way." He introduced himself to the empty air, shaking two of his own roots together in a mock handshake. The longer he kept it up, though, the harder it got to maintain—a strain settling into his mind with every extra root he moved. Maybe it was a limit built into Root Control itself. Maybe his own mind just couldn't keep pace yet, still too weak to handle much. He turned to testing something more offensive next, ordering a root to strike the tree beside him. Thack!

The bark dented, but the trunk held. Too weak a strike. He tried again. The root moved faster this time, and with another thack, the trunk caved in entirely, leaving a hole burrowed clean through. He would have whistled if he'd had lips. A root—his root—had just punched a hole through solid wood. He didn't know whether to be horrified or proud. He settled on a quiet, bark-creaking satisfaction. He let the root drop for a moment, the strain in his mind easing off before he pushed any further.

Two skills tested, so far. He wanted to know what else there was. Next, he turned to Portal Creation, willing it into existence. His spiritual essence dipped the instant he did. A crack tore open in the air, splitting into two separate points. He stared, stunned. Actual teleportation. He sent a root up and through one end. Whoosh! It emerged out the other. His own roots, teleporting from one point to another.

He pictured an enemy in his mind—striking them from an impossible angle, coiling them before they even knew what hit them. Fighting from a distance. Cowardly and untouchable. Exactly his speed. He laughed to himself, a little sinister at the thought of enemies who couldn't even pinpoint where the attack was coming from. He tried everything after that. Spears. Whips. Grabbing. Digging. Quaking the ground from below. But no matter how he mixed it up, everything came back to just two skills.

Despite having two attributes, he only had one ability tied to each. That struck him as odd. He'd read plenty of fantasy back home—one series in particular where characters wielded a whole spread of powers under a single attribute category. If that was the norm, then maybe this was some kind of limitation baked into the system itself. Even weak as he was, there should've been more variety than this. Still, there was an upside.

He didn't need to manage his spiritual essence manually at all—just think of the skill, and it fired instantly. A small bird landed on his lowermost branch. Boringly brown and unremarkable, this sort of bird wouldn't have caught Dendron's attention in his former existence. But now it chirped, chirped twice, hopped closer to his trunk, tilting its head as though trying to understand what it was seeing. Dendron froze. The bird chirped once more.

"I don't know what you want from me," Dendron told it.

"I can't feed you. I lack hands." The bird didn't pay him much mind. Instead, it settled on the branch, fluffed its feathers, and started preening itself. Dendron stared at it for a while. It didn't dart off the way something small was supposed to when it landed on something as big and strange as him. This one just kept preening, one leg tucked up under its wing, entirely unbothered that it was perched on something that used to sit at a desk eight hours a day.

"You don't know who I am," Dendron mused.

"You don't know that I used to be human. You only see a tree." The bird chirped.

"Perhaps it's not such a bad thing." He was still turning that thought over when something in front of him made him freeze.