Chapter 1406 (Patreon)

From above and in the dark, my old hometown looked rather peaceful. Sure, that was mostly because there was very little left of it, and the ruins were completely covered in shrubs, trees and even a couple of overly large mushrooms that made my gut twinge in concern, but that was it. There were no obvious signs of civilisation, nothing that indicated a fairly large city had stood here not that long ago, unless you knew what to look for. And had the right perspective, namely, mine. 

My elevated perspective allowed me to notice certain regular, somewhat unnatural shapes within the overgrown jungle. It looked like large plants, mainly trees, were growing mostly in areas that were once paved-over roads, while the large mushrooms were concentrated in what used to be parks, maybe gardens, too. The rest, the areas where buildings had collapsed, were covered in shrubs, vines and ferns, creating a carpet of dense greenery.

Curiously, the surrounding area beyond the former city limits was much less overgrown than the city, making me wonder how that worked. Why would fields be less verdant compared to the concrete jungle that used to be a modern city? Shouldn’t it be the other way around, with plants conquering the fields that had been used for planting for decades or centuries, instead of digesting the carcass of our old civilisation?

Unless the system was playing its part here, essentially rewarding plants just as it did with other beings, like humans. A part of me chuckled at the idea of a little vine looking at the world and deciding to literally grind down concrete until it could achieve a Pokémon-style evolution, maybe turning into a pitcher plant in the process. Or maybe it turned into a tree, or something entirely different, until it eventually became an Ent or something similar, capable of walking on its own. Possibly even a dryad or an equivalent, ready to conquer the world in a very different manner. 

The idea made me chuckle for a few seconds, until I remembered the massive tree of the Elves on Mundus, the source of their immortality. If a tree could achieve a level and the accompanying power sufficient to anchor an entire civilisation, was it that big a stretch to believe that plants could create a civilisation of their own? Or maybe they already had one, and I was simply unable to parse or understand how they organised? Could there be pheromones or spores or something in the air, allowing for sophisticated communication in a way I was completely ignorant of, simply because I didn’t know to look for it?

Even up in the air as I was, my senses were sharp enough to detect trace amounts of pollen and other particles shed by the vegetation below, carried high into the air by the wind, but did these scents and pollen mean anything? Or were they just that, fragments carried by the wind, and I was making up a theory out of whole cloth?

In a similar vein, could there be other intelligent beings out there, and I simply overlooked them due to their size? Could a colony of ants, or other insects, maybe a hive of bees, turn into a literal hive-mind, or achieve a level of intelligence sufficient to communicate on a level I could understand? Or, to flip the question around, was I sufficiently intelligent to communicate on a level such insectile minds could understand?

Or was my ability to reason limited to other land-dwelling mammals, maybe reptiles if my draconic transformation continued, and the entire rest of the ecosystem would remain closed to me forever?

It was a rather sad thought. After all, mammals were only a tiny fraction of the myriad creatures living on Terra, and the fraction was likely shrinking in real time. Mammals, as I understood it, were comparatively bad at adapting across generations, at least when compared to something like insects, simply because mammalian generational spans were comparatively long. Rats, mice and such might have the best chance, but did they have the innate intelligence?

And, most important of all, much of a hand did the system put in? Or whatever appendages the system used to manipulate things, and it most certainly did manipulate events and species on a macro scale. The giants, sasquatch and other impossible species I had observed on my journey were more than sufficient proof of that. 

Hel, the Giants alone were patently impossible, unless some sort of magic was involved. What’s more, there was their genesis. After all, the idea that creatures possibly able to physically wrestle mammoths and elephants could somehow appear within a year of the Change as a little… ludicrous? Or maybe calling it straight-up impossible was better, unless there was some massive divine intervention. 

Well, system-intervention, as no deity would have allowed me to step in and essentially steal their investment, and the creation of an entire race of giants had to be a fairly large investment in terms of divine power. Plus, I had put in enough work on the giants by now that I could rather confidently state their bodies weren’t divine in origin. Even mine had traces of a stronger divine influence, mostly stemming from divine experiments in the distant past, and those traces were truly minor. Only detectable because I had some experience with divine energy, thanks to my partial and potential apotheosis, and because I was a fairly capable Blood Mage. Otherwise, those traces of divine lineage would be utterly undetectable, especially with my ever-growing primordial draconic bloodline overshadowing everything else. 

Returning my focus back to the world around, well, mostly beneath me, I banked, letting my wings catch the wind and carry me away from the ruined city. I had no idea what might lurk down there, and the mushrooms made me especially weary. I easily remembered the zombie-fungi or whatever the Withered had been, and had no interest in encountering them on their terms. If they were down there, I wanted to know before so I could prepare and figure out how best to kill them.

The classical answer was obviously ‘kill them with fire’, but even with the relative strides I had made with that element, it wasn’t my favourite by a long shot. My instinctive answer was Ice, but I had no idea how long mushroom and similar spores could survive when frozen. Sure, the mushrooms themselves would perish rapidly; they were largely sponges filled with moisture, making them incredibly vulnerable to the cold. But their spores? I had no idea; they might be able to survive indefinitely, ready to pop back up and start their spread again, as soon as they were thawed out.

Chuckling to myself, I focused on the world beneath me, trying to turn my memories of travelling on the ground into an accurate map I could use to find my way from above. The world below had changed massively; even if the fields and pastures hadn’t changed as fundamentally as the city had, they still had changed. Shrubs and trees were everywhere, competing for nutrients and, amusingly, here, too, the roads were a hot-bed of plant-life, as if the asphalt that had choked them out in the past had somehow been transformed into a nutrient-rich bed for them. It was a little strange, but it seemed that reality didn’t care about it being strange, or maybe the system delighted in the strange and unusual.

Regardless, it took me almost as long to find my way from up in the air as it would have taken me down on the ground, though that assumed that I could have found my way down there, despite the thick, overgrown vegetation.

Still, I eventually made it where I wanted to go, grinning to myself when I realised that I should have taken a different approach. But then, I hadn’t known that it could have been so easy, not without checking first. Should have guessed, maybe, but I had not. One of those pieces of hindsight.

Looking down at the impossibly large yew tree below, just shook my head. Obviously, if all vegetation was supercharged in the area, growing in impossible places, at improbable speeds and to ludicrous sizes, the tree I had built Lady Hecate’s shrine under was just the same. Back then, when I came here the first time, the forest had already shown signs of odd growth, with rather aggressive vines and shrubs, a tendency that hadn’t changed in the slightest from the looks of it. 

And building a shrine between a tree's roots obviously influenced the tree in question, too. Or rather, let the deity enshrined influence the tree, and Lady Hecate had taken that opportunity and made the tree her own.

Or maybe she just wanted to show off, possibly flex on the elves or something like that.

I wasn’t sure, but a tree crown easily a hundred and fifty metres, maybe even two hundred, across was a bit of a give-away that something was going on here.