Chapter 17: The Fruit of Forgotten Suns
Chapter 17: The Fruit of Forgotten Suns
The first petal unfurled at dawn.
I woke to a pressure in my chest hollow, the sapling's branches twisting outward like grasping fingers. Where they breached my bark-armor, a single white bud trembled, its veins pulsing gold.
(Worldroot Symbiosis: 72% → 75%)
(System Alert: Photosynthetic Decay Overdrive - Solar Absorption 300% Efficiency)
Joren's snort echoed across our makeshift camp. "Of course you'd start flowering."
Lina prodded the bud with a stick. "Does it hurt?"
"Not exactly." I pressed a root-finger to the blossom. A memory spilled forth—not mine, not the mountain's, but hers. The spirit's.
She stands at the center of a grove that no longer exists, her bare feet buried in soil that hasn't tasted corruption. A man with bark for skin offers her a fruit. "Eat," he says. "Remember us."
The vision shattered as the spirit materialized, her glow flickering like a guttering candle. "You saw the before-time."
(New Ability Unlocked: *Bloom Recall - Flowers store ancestral memories)
Joren's flames turned an uneasy violet. "We need to move. Your mom's pals won't stay down forever."
He was right. The Verdant Dawn survivors had fled, but the mountain's whispers told of reinforcements massing at the valley's edge. Yet something else pulled at me—the dagger's memory of my mother's last words.
"That blade was meant for the mountain's heart."
I touched Dawnthorn's hilt. "We're not running. We're digging."
The tunnels remembered.
As we descended, my root-feet traced scars in the stone—the paths of ancient battles, where Verdant Dawn earthshapers had fought something that left claw marks too precise to be natural.
(Rot Vision Upgrade: Detects historical energy residues)
Lina paused beside a peculiar marking: a spiral scored into the rock, its edges fused glassy by immense heat. "Joren. Look."
His fire sputtered as he touched the symbol. "This isn't cultivator work." His pupils dilated. "It's mine."
A vision took us all:
Joren, but not Joren—an ancestor with the same flame-kissed hair, standing back-to-back with a woman made of living stone. They fight a tide of black-robed figures, his fire burning blue, her fists shattering earth. A child screams—
The memory dissolved as the spirit wailed: "No! That path leads to the bad place!"
She pointed to a side tunnel, its entrance choked with bioluminescent moss. "The answer is there. In the quiet dark."
The sapling in my chest tugged toward the forbidden path.
(Instinct: 87% Desire to Follow Ancestral Memory vs. 13% Trust in Spirit)
I chose wrong.
The tunnel dead-ended at a circular chamber where the air tasted of static and old blood. At its center stood a pedestal—and atop it, a fruit.
Not just any fruit.
The fruit.
Identical to the one in my vision, its skin shimmered between colors no human eye should comprehend. The sapling in my chest shrieked with recognition.
(Bloom Recall: Perfect Match - Origin Seed of the Worldroot)
Lina reached for it—
"DON'T!" The spirit's scream shattered stone.
Too late.
Lina's fingers brushed the fruit's stem.
The chamber inhaled.
Reality peeled back like rotten fruit skin, revealing the truth:
The spirit wasn't the mountain's consciousness.
She was its jailer.
The vision unfolded with terrible clarity:
The first tree grows too powerful. Its roots drink entire rivers dry. Its shade kills rival crops. The ancient cultivators (our ancestors) plead with it to stop. It refuses.
So they poison it.
But trees are hard to kill. So they birth a spirit from its dying heart—a child tasked with convincing future generations to* never let the tree regrow.
The spirit smiles as the first cultivator carves the spiral into the stone. "I'll tell them it was the others," she whispers. "I'll make them hate the rot instead of the roots."
(Worldroot Symbiosis: 75% → 80%)
My bark-armor cracked as new branches erupted from my spine. The spirit—the liar—floated backward, her glow now sinister.
"You were never supposed to find this,"she hissed.
Joren's fire turned black. "You used us."
"I saved you!" She gestured to the fruit. "That thing birthed the first parasites! Its 'gifts' require sacrifice—your mother knew!"
Lina still held the fruit. Her eyes met mine. "Do we destroy it?"
The sapling in my chest answered before I could:
NO.
(Decay Veyra Epiphany: The fruit isn't the source of corruption—it's the cure for overconsumption)
I took the fruit from Lina's hands.
The spirit screeched and lunged—
Teeth met rind.
Juice like liquid sunlight flooded my mouth. The taste was unbearable—every memory of every star that had ever nourished the first tree, compressed into a single instant.
(System Override: Symbiosis Critical Threshold - 90%)
The spirit's claws raked my face, but I barely felt it. My body was unmaking, remaking:
- Legs fused into a single trunk-like pillar
- Arms elongated into canopy-bearing branches
- Face smoothed into featureless bark save for my quartz eye
The spirit recoiled. *"What have you done?!"
I spoke with the mountain's true voice for the first time:
"What you were made to prevent."
The chamber walls crumbled. The oubliette became a cradle. And from my outstretched branches, a rain of new fruit fell—each one a perfect blend of flesh and photosynthesis, decay and rebirth.
(New Ability: Arbor Ex Nihilo - Temporary tree-form transformation)
Joren caught one midair. "Uh. Do we eat these too?"
The spirit's glow flickered out. "You don't understand. The elders will—"
A tremor cut her off. Not from below.
From above.
(Earth Sense: Verdant Dawn siege engines locking onto our position)
Lina hefted her dagger. "We fight?"
I flexed my new roots, feeling the mountain's power thrum through them.
"No." My voice shook the cavern.
"We grow."
To Be Continued…