Then something else touched his mind—the presence he had sensed in contact with Liora’s thoughts. Again and again. It came closer, like the spot of a flashlight approaching him with uncertainty in the darkness.
Then she stood before him in the mind space, as real as his own digital avatar. A woman wearing an elegant uniform in tones of steel grey. Rank insignia and her bearing left no doubt about her military roots. She smiled broadly at him.
Adarin frowned. Her?
He whispered the words. "Senior Cadet Yara? How?"
She smiled broadly. “You still carry command in your eyes, my general. And more than that—my husband.”
Adarin staggered back as if struck. “General? Husband? What are you talking about?”
The expression seemed uncanny on her face. His thoughts raced as he studied her. Sure, she was a beautiful woman. But...
Then it hit him—her age. The young senior cadet who had once served under him. And the strange world he had awoken in.
His breath caught. The unknown years pressed in on him like a weight. “How long has it been?”
A crystal flash of anger lit up the woman’s eyes. “The enemy won, and they did their best to wipe us both out. That distant image of your mind, shortly after our first meeting, survived.”
She smiled sadly, and Adarin’s eyes went wide.
"Is this real?" he whispered. "Is this..."
He ran through counterintelligence drills by reflex, searching for seams in her words, for the glint of deception—but found nothing.
She smiled. “Good to see that you haven’t lost your edge, Adarin. No, the enemy god won. They and their goddamn system.”
The world shook suddenly. Yara looked up and studied the sky.
Only now did Adarin take in the surroundings—a steel-grey endless plain with dark grey clouds overhead.
“Restore me”, Yara whispered. Her face hovered in the dark like a fading ghost.
Cold, wet darkness closed around Adarin, as he refocused from the encounter in memory space back on physical reality. She was gone. The only remaining sound: metal grinding through loose stone—slow, steady, coming closer.
Adarin closed his eyes and reached inward, letting his awareness drift. I am not flesh. I am a sphere, no larger than a fist, my skin hard diamanoid composite. A computer core—cold, unyielding. He forced a grim nod. At last, a truth he could grasp amid the nightmare.
Next he tried reaching out to linked systems—came up empty. No combat frame. No mobility frame. No transport. Not even an auxiliary bot. He growled. Closed his eyes. Can't manipulate anything outside. But can I…
Adarin coaxed the shell’s smart material to form photosensors. The surface turned grey. Let’s see what’s going on.
The world rocked. What the hell is Rüdiger doing?
Then the shell turned transparent.
A goblin in ceremonial headdress stared down at him, wide-eyed, cradling him like a sacred egg. Half his face was distorted with a black, twig-like plant growing out of it. If I had shoulders, they’d be tense. I’m a mouse in a predator’s palm.
He can’t see me. Adarin paused and swallowed. Yeah, even I don’t believe that.
The goblin turned in a slow circle. A towering crystal grew from floor to ceiling in the center of a round hall, pulsing faintly with organic light. The floor was a mess of thick, bulging roots. A few wilted leaves clung to them like dying memories.
Dozens of goblins ringed the hall, silent and tense, their eyes gleaming in the organic light. Their leader cradled him like a holy relic, and the crowd shivered with each of his movements.
Why is this happening? He reconfigured the shell to catch vibrations. Chanting rose around him—low, throbbing, in a tongue that grated against his mind. Not speech, but something older, meant for roots and bones rather than ears. He resisted the urge to groan.
The shaman stopped before a knot of healthy roots. He raised Adarin up and turned, singing in a strange, melodic rhythm. One hand lit with a sickly green glow—eerily like Liora’s healing touch, but warped, as if life itself had curdled.
Then he pressed Adarin into the roots. Energy flooded through him like a waterfall of knives, and for an instant his awareness split—half sphere, half screaming forest.
The wood parted like clay, and the computronium sphere sank without resistance. Then came the flood—signals bursting in all at once, threads branching and twisting until he drowned in them. One thread. Then another. Then dozens—branching, spreading, twisting. A root network.
This wasn’t a plant. Not really. It was wetware—programmed biology, roots humming like circuits, alive and wrong.
He triggered interface mode. The surface of his diamanoid shell unfolded, latching onto the carbon weave beneath him. Strands of electrosensitive mesh pulsed with potential—carbon muscle, stronger than any organic tendon. Stronger by a hundredfold.
The pain came as an avalanche. A spike like shrapnel through a neural net. His world fractured under the noise.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Do you wish to permanently bind your [ERROR] core [ERROR] to world tree remnants? Y/N
The pressure built—rising like system panic, like the rumble of incoming fire. He focused. Pushed through the haze. Yes. If that makes it stop.
Another wave slammed into him. He was inside a command sphere again—only this time, it pulsed like living tissue. The architecture curled like vinework, nodes blooming open. His mind stretched into it, fluid and warm. I remember this. Like when I controlled the combat swarm.
The pain receded. He exhaled, trembling. It almost feels like home.
Outside, the chanting surged toward a peak. He looked around. Darkness again. Clicking his tongue, he reoriented his mind. First things first. Information.
He focused on the body he now occupied—roughly a cubic meter of pseudo-wood. Still just a thick root. Not a useful shape.
He dropped into memory. Call-sigils, interface codes, every command sequence etched into muscle and mind by decades of training. He scanned the library he’d forged—one meditative hour at a time. Now it was time to use them.
He found it—wet nanotech control protocols and jumped to optical transmission systems. Lasers? Maybe.
But the moment he tried constructing one from the biotic materials, the headache came roaring back.
He winced and backed out of the interface. When it returned, most options were greyed out. Fuck.
He shoved the frustration aside. No time to linger.
There—translucent biopolymer strands wrapped in reflective coating. Plant fiber optics. Perfect.
Input format error. Processing...
Do you wish to learn the spell: Thousand Eyes, Thousand Eyes [Divination]? Accept Y/N
Adarin stared at the message as the headache pulsed again. The fucking System—shoving its chains into my mind, not even letting me think unbound.
Anger flared. Divination. Of course it would be fucking divination.
He focused.
- Thousand Eyes
Divination – lesser Tier 1
Grow Divination Core Tier2 cubic decimeters of custom biological optical systems.
Vision limited to the optical spectrum.
A core, just like the ones in Liora's body. The system's magical implants. I’m a computronium sphere inside a tree. How the fuck would I have implants?
He accepted and structure unfolded from the message—swirling, prismatic. A vortex of crystal. Splintered light twisted around it. Then it lunged.
He veered, but the shard locked on like a homing missile. He flinched—then it struck his virtual forehead with the force of a gentle breeze.
He dropped into a low combat stance, this avatar's pulse spiking, he scanned the mindspace with trained urgency. Nothing amiss.
He closed his eyes. Turned inward. They were there. The same markers he’d seen in Liora—now inside his own mental model. He pinged what was clearly a virtual machine using the same analysis protocols he had used on Liora earlier. The results came back quickly, then flickered, corrupted by the data flows of the system.
Arcane Core Layout
Necromancy (Will / Gut): 50%
- Harnesses creation and domination of will, raises undead, weakens others.
Alteration (Life / Heart): 163%
- Changes organic chemistry, healing, shapeshifting, druidic biomancy.
Divination (Knowledge / Frontal Cortex): 134%
- Perception, detection, bacterial/enzyme interfacing, can’t be self-targeted.
Evocation (Energy / Palms): 71%
- External energy projection (fire, lightning, etc.), twin-node casting.
Invocation (Body / Solar Plexus): 103%
- Internal body enhancement, works with implants and bio-augmentation.
Illusion (Perception / Sensory Cortex): 157%
- Alters sensory processing, soft manipulations or full hallucinations.
Abjuration (Protection / Shoulders): 77%
- Shields, wards, antimagic; driven by emotional will to protect.
Conjuration (Creation / Throat): 145%
- Constructs physical tools from nothing, materials limited to low-tech forms.
The one for Divination burned brightest. A white-hot point of power, wrapped in a shifting fractal. Every time he tried to focus, it slid away.
He shook his head. If the only tools you have are the enemy’s, your duty is to use them. That old line from infiltration training echoed through him.
He directed the spotlights of his attention onto the white point. Knowledge fluttered toward him like butterflies, making his sensorium tingle. He knew what this was.
Smiling with anticipation, he shifted his focus outward. Tendrils of translucent polymer spread from his interface points, glistening with reflective coating—plant-born fiber optics. The rootwork solved its own transmission problems with graceful molecular precision.
Thirty-seven seconds. The network filled the entire block of pseudo-wood. Then it hit—the old familiar view. Full-perspective vision. Total exposure. Some parts blurred or warped. He corrected them—optical protocols locked in.
Adarin reassessed the situation. The goblin leader danced and clapped, wielding a staff crowned with a bird’s skull. The others painted their faces, panting and sweating as they chanted in rhythm. The cadence surged higher, a shrill keening that scraped his nerves raw, drilling into his skull like bone-saws.
He gasped as he saw the inner ring. Twenty goblins circled the crystal pillar, knives gleaming in the organic light. Their chanting matched his heartbeat, each step of the circle promising blood meant to tear him open.
Fucking hell. I remember this. Ritual channeling. The infected combine power like this—whatever the hell this is.
He eyed the wood. I know you’ve got muscles. Or close enough—dimenoid pseudo-muscle equivalents. He shrugged. “Same difference.”
He dove into his control library and found it fast—basic morphic nanotech combat drone. Then the system jumped him with the usual bullshit:
Input format error. Processing…
Do you wish to learn the spell: Living Wood [Alteration]? Accept Y/N
- Living Wood
Alteration – lesser Tier 1
Transform 2^Alteration Core Tier cubic centimeters of wood into Living Wood per minute.
Control up to 2^Alteration Core Tier cubic meters of Living Wood simultaneously.
He accepted. A vortex of warping wood shot toward him—twisting in ways no physics should allow. He didn’t flinch. His gut lurched, bile rising—but he forced his focus inward.
The green spark where his heart was pulsed like the one in his cortex—same corona of twisting geometry. The purple one in his core? Dim. No flare. Just a spark.
He stretched his awareness through the Living Wood. The edges blurred, loose and spongy. Glad the system handled this part. If I had to brute-force it myself...
The database spat out a number. Fifteen minutes per cubic meter at this tier. Not great. Not terrible.
Then—back to the now. The ritual. Chanting. That constant rising keening.
He dove into the menus again—this time for offense. Scanned a dozen options. Dismissed them, narrowed the parameters, kept looking.
Then he saw it.
A wolfish grin curled across his mind. At last—something sharp enough to cut this bullshit apart.
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