Ashlock liked to pretend he'd fully embraced his life as a cultivating tree in a crazy world of immortal humans that could fly around on swords—but that was a lie. It was impossible to ignore the signs that had begun to fester—no matter how well his new body's biology attempted to mask the impending crisis in his consciousness.
A human mind simply wasn't designed to be sealed inside an immovable form. The desire for discovery, freedom, and connection are intrinsic parts of human nature, something the body of a tree, even with the potential of becoming a world tree, cannot provide.
The system attempted to bridge the gap. Providing Ashlock with potential tools to overcome the shortcomings of his new body, but they were makeshift solutions designed to obscure the fundamental problem.
He was a fucking tree.
But he had soldiered on, shrugging off the issue of his body through sleeping and while awake, being mentally stimulated by activity occurring around him. It was only in the stifling silence of the courtyard that Ashlock's mind had no choice but to wander and let the intrusive thoughts prevail.
What if Stella and Diana never returned and nobody visited the courtyard ever again? Would he spend the next thousand years alone with the birds, surrounded by a decaying courtyard in disrepair? Watching the seasons endlessly go by with nothing but his thoughts to accompany him?
Sure, he could summon things from alternate realms, but they were nothing but leashed monsters forced to carry out his every whim. They weren't companions nor friendly neighbors. They were nothing but slaves.
It felt silly. He was a demonic tree, a consumer of the living to fuel his own rise to power... but for what? With nothing but his own thoughts, the question of—why does he truly want power—ping-ponged around his vacant and numb mind.
The obvious answer was safety and security. To be able to protect himself from the threats of this world. That was a good goal—but also a selfish one.
Ashlock hated it.
Hated to admit he wanted power for more than just himself. Was it so wrong to shelter those weaker under one's canopy? Or did he want to provide protection in the hopes they wouldn't feel a need to leave him again? Was the innate desire to protect from his human mind or tree body?
Sometimes Ashlock couldn't tell the blurring line between the two.
What did other people with high cultivation in this world do? Ashlock wasn't sure, but there was an obvious draw to starting a family, house, sect, or kingdom. Was it a genuine want to share knowledge and continue a bloodline? Or was it an ego thing—the desire to rule over others and have people wait on your every word?
Ashlock watched the clouds go lazily by as his Soul Core hummed and Qi harmoniously rose and fell between heaven and earth through his trunk. Unfortunately, he had only managed to upgrade a single stage in the Soul Fire realm over the last few months, likely due to his lack of consuming corpses lately.
Since Larry was out busy causing havoc for the Blood Lotus sect, and with Stella and Diana off somewhere, Ashlock was very much alone and unable to acquire any corpses to feast on. Birds came by, and most died and contributed their lives to his growing forest of demonic trees surrounding the mountain.
He killed the occasional one with his lilac Qi, so he could still gain some points, but the going was slow. Everything was slow. Being a tree was slow, growing a forest was slow, and acquiring food was slow.
Slow. Quiet. Alone.
That summarized the last few months of his life as a tree—and it wasn't pleasant. He felt his human mind fading away, a part of him slowly dying. He needed a distraction, a purpose. A goal to work towards.
"With or without Stella and Diana, I need to survive and profit from the incoming beast tide." Ashlock still didn't know when it would arrive, how severe it would be, and if he could survive. But while Stella and Diana worked toward their Grand Elder exam and journey to immortality, he needed to prepare for the incoming threat.
And work had already begun. While progress on his cultivation had mostly stalled, with no way to rapidly increase it nor access to techniques to utilize it. Significant progress in other areas had been made, mainly those using his system-granted abilities.
Ashlock did wish to become more independent from the system. Although he didn't believe the rewards were genuinely random—having his strength directly tied to a Gacha mechanic was less than ideal. He wanted power by himself, but he hadn't figured out how. Cultivation was a solution, but so was growing his sphere of influence.
Feeling trapped in his own head, Ashlock summoned his sign-in system.
Idletree Daily Sign-In System
Day: 3465
Daily Credit: 261
Sacrifice Credit: 40
[Sign in?]
"Barley enough to secure a B grade draw..." Ashlock had been holding off from signing in for almost 9 months. The temptation to feel the buzz of new knowledge or acquire another summons was tempting. He hated to admit it, but few things in this world provided him as much of a rush as utilizing his golden finger in this world, the Idletree sign-in system.
He knew it was a sham. A cleverly disguised way to motivate him to consume and forget his humanity. He didn't like killing, but he sure did enjoy the rewards that came after, which helped numb the guilt.
His whole situation was like a cruel joke from a twisted god. Ashlock didn't even want to know who he offended in his previous life or what supposed atrocities he may have committed in a past cycle to be granted this fate.
"Calm down," Ashlock spoke aloud to nobody except himself. Sometimes hearing his own voice helped drown out the intrusive thoughts. Focusing on meditation and sleeping were also solutions. Unfortunately, it was the peak of summer, and the intense sunlight kept his mind abuzz, making shrugging off his problems difficult.
Since he had been rather slothfull lately, Ashlock decided to busy himself by doing a round of checks. As his body now covered such a vast area, keeping tabs on everything required a conscious effort. "It's like my entire body is numb, and until I feel explicit pain or am alerted to something, I have no idea what is going on." Luckily, with how slow everything happened, Ashlock had little need to do checkups that often.
His branches had grown alongside a few added meters in height. He now fully towered over the central courtyard, with his branches drooping in various fruit, spreading out and shadowing the other courtyards.
Three birds were feasting on his fruit, and to Ashlock's annoyance, two of them had sussed out the poisonous yellow ones. "At least one will give birth to another demonic tree in an hour or so..." There was something truly nefarious about knowing a lifeform had unknowingly sealed its fate.
But overall, nothing of note was occurring on the surface. It was just another quiet day—the only thing of mild interest was his new glow-in-the-dark mushrooms that sprouted between the cracks in the runic formation. The magic truffle that would help upgrade Stella's spirit root was also halfway grown. However, Ashlock hadn't played around with his new {Magic Mushroom Production} all that much. It was costly to make mushrooms even with such minor effects, and he wanted to focus on progressing his cultivation.
Casting {Eye of the Tree God}, Ashlock's vision left his prison of a body and floated high in the sky. Darklight city loomed in the far distance like a black splodge on an otherwise scenic view. With his 3rd stage in the Soul Fire realm, he could now see more of the city than ever.
It had served for some decent entertainment, but a person could only listen in on mundane conversations and witness bar fights so many times before it got old. Ashlock had noticed that people in the world acted with humble attitudes. Conversations never diverged far from talking about the weather, how the rice fields were doing, and what neighbor had recently given birth.
That last point had seemed odd, but the more he listened, the more Ashlock realized the true extent of the difference between this new world and Earth. Here, giving birth to two kids at once was considered normal, and triplets were ideal.
The more he investigated, Ashlock soon discovered through idle conversation between excited mothers that giving birth was a lottery ticket. Each child had a low chance of being born with a spirit root, allowing them to cultivate or achieve the peak of the Qi realm before they died.
So because food rich in Qi was so plentiful, childbirth was safe for mothers as they had resilient bodies, and children were strong enough to help around the house from a young age due to Qi—the mothers had no problems birthing an obscene number of children. In the hopes that one may be born with the talent to cultivate immortality and enroll in an academy within the Blood Lotus sect.
Another point he had nitpicked from a particular conversation was the families of children attending an academy could buy evacuation tickets at a heavily reduced price, meaning nobody had to be left behind.
Ashlock wasn't sure what being left behind entailed, but he could take a wild guess. Moving this many people would be impossible without some cultivator bullshitery, and if the exchange at the Ravenborne spirit stone mine was anything to go by, a sharp reduction in earnings was a telltale sign of the beast tide incoming.
His eyes wandered away from Darklight city and to the opposite peak. Nothing had changed except the palace of white stone growing in size and the discourse between the Evergreen and Winterwrath families escalating. They weren't perfectly balanced in strength, with the Evergreen family being the agreed-upon stronger of the two—much to Winterwrath's annoyance.
Ashlock wouldn't be surprised if a civil war broke out any day now. Larry, being an absolute menace to society, had also done an excellent job of furthering the divide between the two families by only targeting one family at a time and then switching. So all thing's considered, Ashlock wasn't really surprised nobody from either family had visited Red Vine peak in the last few months.
Which was good because they may find the sudden increase in demonic trees questionable. He hadn't cultivated a dense forest yet, but dotting the area around Red Vine peak were the scarlet canopies of his children.
Baby demonic trees.
The tallest stood at a proud eight meters, while the newer ones were nothing but saplings in full bloom. Summer helped speed up the growth process, so Ashlock hoped to get the entire area surrounded by them before winter rolled back around.
Ashlock let out a sigh. Nothing had changed since he last checked a week ago, and he was bored. "What about my roots? I haven't checked on them in a while..."
He sent a pulse of feeling through his roots. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until he felt pain. "Pain? From my roots?" That had never happened before.
There was nothing to hurt Ashlock down in the mountain depths... it had been nothing but dull grey rock and the occasional small deposit of spirit stone ore for thousands of meters.
So what could be nibbling at his roots?