DXD SI : Chapter 69 : Life + Garden = PROFIT$$! (Patreon)

Disclaimer - I don't own any of the characters appearing in High School DXD or the Anime or the manga whatsoever.

The Lab, Inner Sanctum, Garden

–Magdaran Bael–

….”Um, why do you have your evil smile out?” Vali asked him, fearful and hesitant.

In response, he just went full evil scientist mode, “Muahahaha!” His arms splayed wide, he manipulated the lights in the room with a thought, casting a long shadow in front of them, using his powers to distort his shape to create a monstrous shadow to—

“Are you done?” he stopped in the middle of his grand evil laughter, all the mood having been sucked out by the fun police that was Vali Lucifer, who just delivered the most dry question. He slumped, returning the lights to their original state, before turning to Vali, “You happy now?”

She rolled her eyes at him, “Whatever, old man. Just get to whatever it is that you were doing. Also, did you really just kidnap a Zagan?” She asked him, slightly hysterical at the discovery.

His smile returned in full force as he wagged a dinger at her, “No, my dear student. He is not just a Zagan. He is the Zagan. Aldric Zagan, to be precise. The last known head of House Zagan, before that entire House was declared extinct in the war.”

She looked at the sleeping man with trepidation on her face, taking half a step back at the revelation. “S-So, he has the full Zagan bloodline trait?”

He nodded eagerly, as if her fear was totally unwanted and not even registering to him, despite knowing full well just what she was feeling, despite the girl being strong enough to kick Aldric’s ass seven ways to Sunday. The man might have become Lord Zagan and have the full bloodline trait, but the position fell on him more out of necessity than it being a matter of actual skill and power.

As he was now, he was only a High Class Devil, and it was a coin toss if he knew some of the higher tier refinement procedures of the Zagan House that allowed even members of low power to use corpses of higher tier enemies to produce artificial life of far higher tier to overwhelm the enemies.

That was the source of much of the fear generated from the Zagan name. Now, even without that, he was sure that he was going to have so much fun with the man, especially if all the information he had on the man’s personality was true. It would be a match made in Big G’s world.

Snapping out of his daydreams, he began working to make sure those daydreams had some chance of becoming reality. “Now, let’s get to work, or would you rather stay behind the safety lines?” He mocked the extremely competitive girl, who did not rise to the bait and merely deadpanned at him, “Is there anywhere safer here than right next to you?”

He turned to the sleeping Zagan, with a smile still on his face, making sure that Vali did not read his expression. The girl had a habit of saying the most deeply thoughtful stuff at the most random of times. He considered it an honor that Vali was her most authentic self around him, as it was something that happened only around a handful of people.

“Let’s begin,” He said, a curtain of his power isolating Vali and the rest of the room from the bed and a little area around it, just in case something unexpected happened. This was going to be the oldest patient he was going to treat that had Sleeping Sickness. 

He hadn’t been able to find anyone else who was afflicted with that curse even earlier than the Zagan guy, so once he was sure that he could deal with the Zagan, he could deal with anyone, and then he only had to make a trip to the Underworld to right one of the many wrongs of his sperm donor.

Taking a step forward, his cloak, as he liked to call it, manifested around him in the form of a cloud that had no shape, constantly moving about. It was deeply purple in some places, light purple in some, and then outright transparent in some areas.

It was something that he could not suppress if he was going to bring forth his true power. It was as if it was some immutable law of the universe that the cloak was going to come out in full force if he was going to exert one hundred percent of his powers.

He stood right next to the guy before a tendril manifested from his cloak and latched onto the Zagan’s head, before a dozen different tendrils or tentacles, depending on how you looked at things in life, appeared and covered the man’s entire head. 

The tendrils, originally light purple in color, began changing color to darken as he pumped them with his power and closed his eyes, reading the feedback through the tendrils. Originally, he had to place his hands on their head, read through the useless garbage for hours on end to figure out what was truly important, map the path to the soul, then find out the useful and useless paths, then find just how far the curse had spread, before retreating and then coming back with full force, as the soul responded with heavy resistance if one went in with overwhelming force at the start.

He mentally prayed for the first two Devils who died for him to learn that particular lesson.

Unlike the first few tries, this time, he mapped the entire thing within seconds, was done verifying the map within the first minute or so, identify the soul source in the next minute, map out just how far the curse had spread out, which barely took another two minutes, before his eyes snapped open, a shocked noise escaping his lips as he jerked back a bit, instinctively trying to disengage, but he held on, not wanting to lose this chance.

What in the fuck was that?

It was as if his entire vision was bombarded with the vision equivalent of white noise that constantly sent out the same message hundreds of times over in the split second it was visible to his senses.

LIFE! LIFE! LIFE!.

That was the sole message, something that had never happened before.

Going through the entire process again, he checked everything three times to see if something was wrong or if he had missed something. But nope, there was nothing that should have done that. 

Maybe it was a Zagan thing? Of course it was a Zagan thing.

Shaking his head, he decided to take things nice and slow, just in case something went wrong. After all, this was the sole Zagan in the world, as far as he knew anyway.

He deliberately let his power sift through everything in the man’s soul for almost half an hour, and only when he found nothing anomalous did he approach the Soul curse. It was clearly artificial in nature, as it fed on the target’s magic, directly from the soul where it was generated, instead of siphoning it off from any other part of the body, which would have been extremely obvious to any half decent doctor in the Underworld. The soul was where the problem arose when it came to finding people who could heal it, and that was what these geniuses targeted, to put them into a coma.

Plus, aside from a select few Devils, there was no House or any branch in the Government that specifically dealt with Souls, making diagnosis and defense even harder.

Either way, the curse itself might be a genius thing, but that was only because they took into account that the Underworld had scarcely any people who could deal with it, not that the curse was anything special.

Hell, Odin could probably dispel this whole thing with a snap of his fingers, but that would not have been helpful, not for Misla anyway.

Odin would never agree to that, and he would never ask Odin to do that.

Which is why, when his power surged forth, and enveloped the curse, and the decayed parts of the soul that had the curse in them, and disintegrated them entirely, and he felt no encroaching death on the Zagan, he smiled and withdrew his powers, stepping back a bit as he felt a dull pressure bloom behind his head.

It must have been that LIFE message, he decided, as a chair manifested beneath him. A sinfully comfortable one, as he collapsed in it, the curtain of his power behind him disappearing as Vali rushed forward to check on him.

“What the hell happened? You suddenly glowed white before things returned to normal?”

He smiled weakly at Vali, “Later.” Before he teleported both of them out of the Lab, Vali to the Outer Sanctum, and him to the Recovery Room in his Inner Sanctum.

The moment he fell down on the hard floor, a pathetic, “Oww!” escaped his lips, as, seemingly out of nowhere, the tiles slid apart, and a violent growth of roots enveloped him entirely.

It would have made anyone panic, especially since he couldn't even see anything, such was the density of the roots, but this was the Mother Tree. Instead of panicking, he just relaxed even further, almost blacking out immediately. The last thing he was able to sense before he succumbed to sleep was the Mother Tree doing its job and bathing him in its green healing glow, an ability just slightly less potent than his own healing ability.

___xx___

When he came to be, his vision was dark before the roots around him unfurled slowly, exposing him to the ceiling of the Recovery Room, as he had taken to calling the room right next to the now giant Mother Tree. Giant, not just in the sense of the size of the tree above ground, but giant in the sense that its roots now encompassed his entire Garde, Inner and Outer Sanctum combined.

It took a bit of work, but eventually, he was able to get the Mother Tree to accept some truly esoteric stuff. It just needed to almost die a couple dozen times before it could just take in certain types of energy a few times before being able to generate that energy at will.

Of course, all of that took massive amounts of energy, but he was never in shortage of that.

As his feet touched the ground, hand on his forehead, his body brimmed with energy, but his mind still felt a bit sluggish from the previous encounter.

He did not realise it at the time, but his mind must be pretty badly battered from that single interaction with whatever that LIFE message was, if even after a recovery session, he was feeling low.

He was probably running on pure instinct when he brought himself back here, though the Mother Tree would have sensed his condition and broken into the Lab if need be, to get him back here so that he could recover properly. It was good that he came here of his own accord; otherwise something might have happened to the Zagan.

If before he was interested in the man because he seemed to have a life aligned powerset on top of having the appropriate mindset required to be eligible to work with him, now he was more interested in his power and how it would work with his own conceptual power.

It was an entirely alien experience for him and his powers, and those were in short supply these days, especially in the past few years where he had begun feeling like he had explored pretty much all there was to explore of his powers.

Sitting on the comfortable root bed, he asked out loud, “Ugh, how long was I out for?”

Before he could get a proper answer, though, a notification ran inside his head, now that he was awake and conscious to receive it.

An annoyed gran escaped his lips as he collapsed on the root bed, a mental thought teleporting Vali from outside the Inner Sanctum right into the Recovery room.

Then, he looked at her stumbling form with a raised eyebrow, her raised fist that was also glowing, along with her White Wings, giving him a pretty good idea as to what she was doing, and how she was not supposed to be doing that anywhere near his Garden.

Judging by the way her Scale Mail disappeared, and she even made sure to fan away the small motes of light around her, she knew that as well, but had chosen to do it anyway, despite her innocent whistling and intent gazing at the ceiling indicating otherwise.

A/N - Man, I am on a roll today! Enjoy!