NOVEL FROG Chapter 93. An Impossible tree. Birth of a myth.
Warning!
Early days, but a dungeon wide warning has been released based on the first change to appear in the intermediate floors in a while. Every crystal spike previously classified as a “Living Crystal” has started throwing up “Living Crystal Treant” notes. According to one alchemist in town, all potions or cooking recipes using this material are now subject to change and a total recall of the last batch of crystal sheer has been issued.
Update 1:
An expert from the central continent has released treant information upon our queries. The only known “all is one” treant on record is a hypno mushroom variant that spread through spore clouds. This historical monster terrorized half the continent of Ihano for two full years before being put down in 1203 AS. All initial tests are coming back clean for dangerous mana types but remain vigilant! This case proves the crystal treant could be dangerous.
Update 2:
Living crystal “spawn points” have been appearing. Some treant variants have minions – humanoid wood like creatures or light-based elementals that are birthed from fruit. This seems to be related to that oddity and is a good sign! At least now we know what to focus on and – while the minions are increasing in strength – they are doing so at a measurable rate. More importantly the creation of minions from scratch points to the idea that no mind control will be embedded in them.
Update 3:
Tentative closure on this warning. Its been several weeks and the crystal spawn are the last major change. Please regularly analyse them and retreat if anything changes and you do not believe yourself capable of facing the unknown. No adventurer needs to die to these.
Warning placed at the crossroad link to Murek upon the "Crystal Treant's Discovery"
ZeMadDoctor: I've been thinking. How attached are you to planting Yggdrasil in your dungeon and having it grow and that being it?
Brutality Queen: Pretty attached to it being in my dungeon… why?
ZeMadDoctor: Because we could put it in the void. I think it would be a lot easier to deal with there.
Brutality Queen: Oh that’s what you were meaning. Sorry that wouldn't work. At least I don’t think that would work. Besides not trusting it to grow in the void without being corrupted by madness…I think it needs to grow down into soil and stone. It needs to be connected to the earth to grow well.
ZeMadDoctor: Connected? Or completely on the earth?
Brutality Queen: …sorry no clue.
ZeMadDoctor: What if we plant it in your dungeon. Then make it grow up into a massive portal? Then the top part would be in the void. And the roots are still in the earth.
Brutality Queen: uh…I think that might work? It doesn’t feel like it wouldn’t at least. Some leaves should poke through again so the tree can breathe and get sunlight… but it should be fine? Is it needed?
ZeMadDoctor: We can stick the whole top of the tree back into the top of your dungeon. No problem. The leaves can poke out into the forest around you. I think it would be safer – if the leaves need carbon dioxide what happens when it grows above the atmosphere? That way it can peak out into the island surrounding you. We can extend the middle to always keep the top close.
Amy: I thought this was a magic tree? I have plenty of magic plants that are growing just fine without sunlight.
Brutality Queen: What can I say. The tree has a lot of requirements to grow right… I’m not the one who made them.
Fated Eternal Design: There! Finishing touches added. I’m ready to print.
All the dungeons began looking over the schematic at this point. Fed had added flecks of several new materials to the roots, the separate bark, the inner trunk and the upper leaves.
Amy: What are these?
Abe: What did you just do? Bro, you can’t add stuff without telling us what it does.
Fated Eternal Design: Don’t worry about it. Its not going to weaken it and its going to be beneficial in the long run. I promise.
Brutality Queen: [unknown material?] What’s that?
ZeMadDoctor: I’m getting back [R3.A Rare Dungeon material]
Fated Eternal Design: Its my R4 affinity okay? That’s all I’m going to say. Its embarrassing okay? Don’t worry about it.
Abe: …if you think it's embarrassing why did you even pick it?
Fated Eternal Design: Other options were worse. The eternal spring would never pick them.
Innearth looked at the different materials – his system correctly showing their mana types and a modifier.
[Story mana material – the grasping roots of a myth], [Story mana material – the solid trunk of a myth], [Story mana material – the cloaking bark of a myth], [Story mana material – the hopes of a myth].
…well. I’ll let FED keep his secrets.
…
As the group discussed how best to change the environment for the tree, the combined schematic continued to print. It took an excessive amount of time in comparison to usual – the system really churning to deal with all the individual contributions – but finally finished dumping out into the large empty room queen had made for this birth. Plenty of fertile life+dirt and moist mud lined a large cavern roughly 50m in diameter and 50m tall.
Innearth was so engrossed in the discussion about keeping the trunk in the void and “why they would even want to do so” that he nearly missed his four ascended dwarves showing up. His dwarves and a 5th addition slipping through a portal into the tree cavern, nonchalantly wandering over to the tree.
This addition to the group was young – although it was hard to tell that with his magnificent beard – and stood awkwardly behind his father. The dwarf fiddled nervously with a small pipe occasionally raising it to his beard and blowing.
With each absent-minded blow, smoky bubbles that rang with nervous laughter or uncomfortable questions and eyes in the darkness rose up. A line of runes would fade in and out with each puff and the dwarf visibly seemed to calm down – as if all his worries were being literally blown away.
Are they blowing out their nervousness? That’s neat. More importantly…
HEY! How have you all been! Don’t think you can just sneak in without saying hi – tell me what’s new! Should I call this fine whippersnapper my grandkid? Hey Ilm when are you going to get a kid? See anyone you fancy? Rutile my boy! ABE TREATING YOU WELL?
Innearth visibly rushed the group, his focus so strong his voice travelled all the way to Queen’s dungeon and reverberated in four of five humanoids minds. They flinched slightly then relaxed not minding the attention.
The young dwarf looked confused for a moment before realizing what was happening. As if just then remembering something, the dwarf pulled out a small hearing aid of sorts and slipped it around the top of their head.
!!!
Innearth didn't know what to say or send or feel… but the young dwarf reaching out started solidifying his thoughts. He went from confusion to certainty in a single message.
This new creature was once removed from him. The very fact that his soul wasn't faintly linked to him – the fact that he needed a prosthetic sort of artifact to hear him was proof of that – would he hate the fact that his father was once a monster? Would he hate Innearth? But then the dwarf started talking and Innearth latched onto that line they had thrown him.
An awkward pause persisted after the dwarf's first message and then Onyx reached behind him – grabbing his son’s shoulder and wheeling him to the forefront.
Well that’s a strange introduction. Treat him well? Innearth thought to himself while responding with a warm greeting.
Oh!
Oh of course! I don’t have anything specific, but we can start right away. Want to check out my workshop areas? You can make whatever you want there, I’m sure the materials will spark something in you!
While Innearth was distracted fawning over his "grandson" – already completely attached to him – the four older crystal dwarves moved on. They began a highly technical discussion of the project in front of them – speaking of mathemagical symmetry and self-reinforcement – while using magical pens to sketch stuff both in the air and on the tree.
The pens used on the tree made deep grooves that looked like actual grooves – but were mostly fake and could be easily erased with a wave of a separate “eraser”.
…
Innearth brought Cobalt to his workshop – the whimsy floor. This floor had mutated and changed over the years.
Now hundreds of taps of filtered pollution and random essences ran out into pools of liquid. Wild monsters roamed and fought whimsy dungeon monsters and one another.
Fields of incredibly colourful and varied plants grew – some watered by pollution, some fed a fertilizer of monster scraps.
Some looked relatively normal, while others floated surrounded in flames, or bubbles, or sparks of energy.
And everywhere amongst this overload of chaos, crystal dwarves walked. They tended fields of chaotic plants or collected monster corpses – dragging them to loading areas on floating pallets to be skinned and stripped of materials. Some dwarves came out of flickering doorways with frankly what could only be called abominations – twisted globs of demonic-looking materials or items that were very clearly cursed – dropping them into the fray.
Still others dragged boxes of weapons and items into designated areas for Innearth to add to his loot pools.
…It was overwhelming.
There was an “excessive amount of dwarves” filling a dozen different positions and the sights and sounds and smells created a cacophony of information.
Items were made on an industrial scale – Innearth truly was letting his dwarves run wild. At this point…if this whole floor disappeared and all production stopped, Innearth considered he could probably stay stocked with items for over a decade – that’s how overkill this production currently was.
…on that note Innearth should really see about selling some of these loot crates. He could sell boxes of 4, 16, 64, 256 items at a time. Nice round numbers for a core.
I’m sure some dungeons find it hard or annoying making their own loot. This idea…it has some merit. I just wish I knew what I wanted for them. Set them up for R4 materials? People seem to have stopped using cores as currency now that they have more mana.
Cobalt looked about at the thousands of puppet dwarves with a complicated uncomfortable sort of feeling. He saw a crystal dwarf mauled by a spikey cross between a porcupine and a particularly aggressive waterfall and visibly shuddered – a faint “eek” slipping out of his beard.
Innearth immediately refocused on his grandson and was quick to comfort him.
Don’t worry! You’re safe here. I won’t let a single monster hurt you. Do you want to see some of the material stores? Is there anything you’ve wanted to make before but haven’t had the resources for? Come! Come! I’m sure you can come up with some amazing things once you see my essence stock!
…
The four ascended crystal dwarves finished their planning and worked away, chiselling out their design. Every square inch of the wood was now covered with fractaling nested shapes. They cut grooves into the bark using their void claws – picking separate sections of the tree to work on and chiselling with a calm but serious sort of intensity.
This was a matter of pride for them. They were doing this as a favour…but they had to prove there was a point to their help. They had to show off a little. They had to prove runes were superior to other spells.
As runes were cut they activated and began to glow with mana. Ambrosia bled out of wooded flesh and pooled in the crevasses – mixing with the mana and creating a visible glow that wasn’t just visible in mana sight. Golden Ichor seemed to sparkle with light streams of mana crystalized in ambrosia changing it… and finally the dwarves were satisfied.
The dungeons could have manually finished it off if they were in the facility and overlapping the same area…but due to the mess that was their influences mixing they had to put it back into the cad program to finish editing it.
The bark they had already designed was fixed slightly and placed over top – layers of bark completely covering the runes in layered uniform coats of different defensive materials.
Like clothing, the bark was attached on top and smoothed over – minor changes to account for the runes were needed, before it was once again set to printing.
Doc began setting up a portal at the top of the tree chamber – rats climbing the walls and embedding anchors into the ceiling to create a gate straight to the staging area by the facility.
He then began scraping bits of demon flesh through the hole in the roof chunks of meat landing in the mud with splashes – next Doc needed to set up the upper portal for the top of the tree but Innearth was now focusing on his contribution to this setup and the other dungeons work faded away.
I can do this.
Briefly borrowing the design – dragging the tree through a portal to his shrinking mana material room – Innearth began slowly carefully squeezing the space.
He was terrified of ruining it – despite all of his practice he was scared he would push too hard on one spot. Scared he would relax for a moment and warp it or crush some of the more delicate parts – this fear led him to taking a much longer time than he needed shrinking it.
Hours and hours slowly ever so slowly shrinking it down, Innearth was being more careful than needed but that was fine. He wanted to do this right the first time.
…
Finally, after the shrinking finished – perfectly, Innearth might add – it was brought back a final time to Queen’s dungeon. This shrunk tree could no longer be added easily to the system panel – the matter itself was shrunk not just compressed and the panel did not play nice with twisted spaces. To combat this “problem” Doc had to perform a complicated-looking feat of portal surgery.
A strange contraption was wheeled out with stacked rings and twisting dials that changed their diameter slowly. In the center of the contraption the divine egg was placed, and a portal was shifted into the center of the egg. An inner portal slowly but surely moved up and deposited the shrunk tree on the inside.
Everyone is acting carefully – I’m glad it's not just me. Innearth watched Doc's movement carefully.
Just before they finished and committed, Abe mentioned they probably needed “at least one fresh whale for a maximum chance of this working”.
…so a few days were dedicated to making a new harpoon staking out yet another candidate and quickly fishing it out of the void and into the staging area. As the 27km whale twitched its last spasms of life nearly a hundred monsters ascended in Innearth’s dungeon – 21 of them crystal dwarves!
…It really said a lot about this tree-making session where more monsters than Innearth had ever had ascend, ascended all at once – and yet he was more focused on the combined project.
It's doneee, I want to see if it worked, let's gooooo. Innearth impatiently began to urge everyone to complete their tasks.
Queen was ready.
She spun a cloak of plant mana about the divine shell and as the mana sunk into the mana everything seemed to click.
Divine mana on its own was a milky semi-opaque white substance that “felt” different. It wasn’t that striking on its own but despite that, the mana/material drew attention. It also felt…halfway real in a strange sort of manner. Like instead of being transparent normally it was vibrating between fully there and fully not there too fast to notice and that flicker was what made it “transparent”.
After joining with plant mana in the seed spell the shell seemed to solidify. It became more real as it gained a purpose – milky white “too fast to notice flicker” solidifying into a more solid every so slightly transparent green. Plant mana turned to seed mana despite the scale and moved about the inside of the seed with a turbulent flow.
The air began slowly building – the whole area felt heavy as if the atmosphere was doubled…but full of life. Behind the divine seed’s shell, a faint view of the roots and branches were lit up in an eerie manner.
Innearth half expected the tree to start pulsing and pumping like a heart or some monstrous embryo in this moment…but instead, the whole room began to breath in and out of the egg, the nascent tree motionless at the center.
Environmental mana pulled in and pushed out in a great omnidirectional oscillation – like a three-dimensional beach that grew stronger and stronger each rolling wave of mana crashing against the matter of the room around it.
Innnnnn and ouuuut. Innnnnnnnnnnnnn and ouuuuuuuuuuuut. This whole effect was notable if only because of how hard it was to affect environmental mana normally. To add to the pulses each wave felt…slightly purer than the last. As if the tree was ripping the attributes out of the mana and pushing the pure stuff back out.
Suddenly there was a crack.
The bottom of the seed shattered in a dozen places. Cosmic void tipped roots pushing out slowly searchingly…hungrily – and the waves slowed down even as they grew larger. Each push and pull lasted much longer than they had and moved much less aggressively as time went on. Despite calming down they were stronger in a manner – moving for hundreds of meters in ever direction instead of being mostly contained in the room itself.
Roots sought sustenance and found a meal in demonic flesh – the moment they touched the meat they sped up. Crawling up and into chunks of corpse melting through magical matter and consuming it. Consuming it and making it its own, the demonic matter was transmuted into magical matter and the tree grew.
In the center of the room the tree briefly looked like an octopus – its thick roots spreading out in all directions from the relatively small central seed. After eating all the offered fertilizer and not a moment before the tree finally turned its attention up. The shell surrounding the “main” part of the tree shattered into motes of light that quickly faded to nothing. Even as its divine cocoon faded Yggdrasil ate – grasping bits of the material and eating it before it could disappear for good.
Its growth accelerated in leaps and bounds and the trunk moved up faster and faster.
Up the tree grew until its central trunk poked up into the void – branches appearing to sense the rest of the whale flesh and shiver in delight even as buds unfurled and became glowing golden leaves dense with mana.
Six dungeons and four dwarves watched the tree grow as if spellbound, while all around humanoid rats ran – hooking meat and tossing it into the pit below with curved kinetic devices.
After nearly an hour of this feeding one of the roots managed to poke up into the staging area moving around and sweeping the chunks to its brethren below – one of the rats was caught as well and accidentally consumed but for the most part, the tree only had a taste for the mana dense feed.
The top of the tree poked through the upper portal into Queen’s dungeon – a small entrance above it being ripped into and expanded as it surfaced.
At this point, Innearth started to have his fill of watching the tree grow. He felt proud of his contributions towards the undertaking… but needed to start focusing on some of the tasks that he was putting off.
Main one at this exact moment being his ascended monsters.
There were just so many of them! Innearth decided he really did need to start making them a floor to live on. A proper one – not just stuffing them into other floors or unfinished areas.
Below the last official floor of his dungeon – the as yet unopen to adventurer’s pure lake – he started creating a floor for ascended. A home they could crawl or walk or fly back to. A place that was specifically not part of his “dungeon” that no adventurer should find themselves.
Instead of focusing on a specific theme Innearth instead made a wide hallway with the start of rooms heading off it in all directions. Each room was a place an ascended who wanted to live here could call home – and quite a few monsters began taking up his offer asking him to help them remodel their new living spaces. Two spiders had him break down the wall between their rooms and throw some pools of lava about so they could feel at home. One turtle had him toss some dirt and plants about while another wanted a pool they could swim in.
Time was spent on living arrangements and then it was winter and Innearth finally completed his seasonal essence set, finishing the hardmode ice caves and opening up the pure lake goal.
The crystal treant grew stronger, its minions now too strong to be allowed in the upper crystal caverns and just as Innearth was starting to feel like he had time once again something with Yggdrasil changed.
Or more accurately was noticed by the dungeons and defined by the system.
The area around the tree…had an effect. Around its roots around its trunk. The system defined the effect like so.
Effect: Aura of the world tree
Description: Ease and strength of spell craft increased by 14%.
But that was far from a comprehensive description. The percentage multiplier was climbing as the tree grew and became stronger the closer you got to it…but more importantly it didn’t have a target.
It affected everyone. Dungeons included. It made mana flow easier and respond faster. It made each and every dungeon in their group request a root of the tree and time was spent portaling the roots to each of them. Innearth planted his portaled root in the pure lake’s island and created a crystal tree above it to hide the gate.
The effect seemed to partly affect him and partly affect the area – all his manual spellwork was stronger in general by a faint percentage that would only grow with time and any spells he cast right by his root were stronger as well.
Adventurers began to notice both the effect in the pure lake room and the effect in Queen’s entire dungeon… and a second wave of immigrants began to arrive. Mages of all sorts – sapients of all sorts because nearly everyone used magic, mage or not. The city above Innearth grew but the most drastic change was the city growing around Queen’s dungeon. Everyone wanted a wizard tower, or a school or a guild close to the miracle tree.
Rather than a vague percentage multiple on something as simple as attack-based skills, the tree’s aura made all magic easier. Runes, material creation, chanting. Innearth found his insight with dungeon circuits began to grow and his dwarves began more consistently making higher tiered items.
...but – as interesting as this all was – enough time had passed with his focus on side projects that he was beginning to feel like he was ignoring his “main project”.
Innearth wanted a dedicated brainstorming session dedicated to his main goal. Every event that happened, every side project he did was a building block he could use for this greater goal but…it was time to start really focusing on it. Focusing on how exactly he could help make a god.