[EoR] Chapter 90

“Cheokit!” my sister’s voice called out. I paused, turning back away from the trunk to watch as she scampered towards me along the crystalline branch.

This world was far and away the strangest of the worlds I had been born into thus far. The last two worlds had been explicable to me, at least. Tovar’s world wasn’t all that different from Earth, as I remembered it, aside from the addition of mana. There had been aspects of the mana itself that I never fully understood, as they defied the natural world, but I could see how the changes to Tovar’s world followed from its inclusion the universe.

Mali’s world was more alien, but it still followed the scientific laws I could recall. The ecosystem had evolved very differently from what I was used to, but it was still biology. The elements were the same, and from that, I had been able to refine iron. Blood and its weird effects aside, the universe itself was mostly recognizable.

That was not the case here. I looked out at the sky, which was a riot of shifting color, like an infinite aurora crossed with a lava lamp. The tie-dyed, acid trip of a firmament was wholly beyond me. It was, unquestionably, gorgeous, and I had spent many days staring at it in my youth, but that didn’t make it any less confusing. There was no star above, pouring down life-giving light and illuminating the kaleidoscopic heaven.

I fundamentally did not understand anything about it, which was made all the worse by the other side of the coin.

In the evening, the black sun rose, sapping all the color from the world, leaving us in monochromatic shadow. The only color at night was the vague shimmer of mysterious energy surrounding the sun as it was absorbed. The closest thing I could think of to explain the nega-sun was some kind of black hole, but that couldn’t be right either, at least not in the framework of a universe that I understood.

Were it just the sky, perhaps I could come to terms of it, but that was only a fraction of the weirdness here.

Our whole world, as far as I could understand it, was some kind of tree. After a life with no trees at all, now my entire life was shaped by one, the one, this world-tree.

Tree might not have even been the right word. It wasn’t an actual plant, made of wood; it was a tree-shaped kind of crystal, where again, crystal was only the closest comparison I could make for it.

The world-tree was also indescribably large. The “branch” my sister was running along to catch up with me was large enough that I couldn’t even feel the curve of it. The trunk was so wide across that even at a distance, it could fill my field of vision, blotting out the sky beyond it.

I had no idea what this tree was growing out of, either. The young weren’t supposed to go to the edge, but my mother had taken me to see it exactly once, in order to warn me of the danger. I could see no ground, only a roiling miasma far, far below, stretching infinitely towards the horizon.

There were other branches between us and the miasma, and branches above as well. Each one was its own world, basically, far enough apart that few made the trip between them. It was a journey that could take an entire lifetime, given the distance between them.

My sister finished closing the distance between us, panting slightly and grumbling. “Why’d you leave without me?”

Like me, my sister was mostly purple-furred, with some blue and white highlights. She scratched her big round ears, and her bushy tail twitched slightly in irritation. She was, as always, adorable, though I had gotten used to it already. More or less.

I wasn’t sure I would ever fully get used to being some kind of sapient squirrel creature, really. Calling us ‘squirrels’ was seriously lacking as a descriptor, but it was the closest single word I could come up with for us, especially given the fact that we lived in a tree.

As with the Uli, I couldn’t really gauge our size against a human form—or squirrel form—with no basis of comparison. I was inclined to say we must be larger than Earth squirrels, since we were sapient and our brains likely needed to be a certain size to achieve that, but then, I wasn’t sure we were even mammals. My sister’s faceted jewel-like eyes bore into me as she waited for my answer.

“You overslept,” I said with a shrug. “I didn’t want to be late for class. Again.”

For all that this world was different, some things were the same. Mundane, even. And I was leaning into that, hard.

I had enough of big, world-shaking plots and kingdom-wide plans. This world was too weird for me to even begin to care about any of that stuff. I was just going to live a quiet life, convalescing and grabbing what skills I could. I didn’t have big expectations for my growth in this life; as far as I could tell, our lifespans were quite short.

There were no seasons to track the years, and I didn’t know how long the days were, but I had been counting them as they passed, and—going by the standards I was used to—my sister and I weren’t even two years old. Yet, we were well on our way to being grown.

Without annual changes, it was a bit hard to figure out how old the elderly were when they passed away, but based on how many generations removed they were from the youngest in their families on death, I was only estimating an average of seven years of life, total. Which meant I was already approaching a third of the way through my own.

At least things came fast in this life. Maybe that was a benefit of something different about this brain, or just my high stats, I wasn’t sure. Having lost my blessing, and thus my translation skill, the chittering language seemed like something I would have struggled to learn compared to those I had so far. That hadn’t been the case, thankfully, with the language coming fast. But so did everything else in this life.

So there would be no epic journeys to other branches, or any attempt to climb to the canopy, or an exploration of the miasma below. I just didn’t care, since there was no time to do anything with the information, and soon after I would be gone forever. Any information I could glean would likely be as useless to me in future lives as my past knowledge was for this one.

I was, ultimately, glad I stuck it out through Mali’s life. It taught me a lot about myself, and I think I did more good than harm in that world, though only time would tell. But it had been hard work. My twilight years with Ibriya and Shappi had been nice, but we spent a lot of that time training. It paid off, but that was also tiring. I needed a break.

This life would be a good one for that, in my opinion. I would learn what I can from class, see if I could get some skills, and largely just… chill out.

The only thing I really wanted to do was see if I could learn more about my System, particularly figuring out how to access my locked skills. As was the case between Tovar and Mali’s life, things had changed after my reincarnation.

The stats had been renamed again, but that didn’t tell me much, and they were presumably the same at their core. My full Will-slash-Blood stat was active from the get-go this time around, but I couldn’t make much use of it yet. Like my mana-based skills, my Blood-based skills were also locked.

My martial and crafting skills remained accessible, which I had come to expect. So long as I had a physical body, they should be available to me… though with how different this world was from my previous, that wasn’t a guarantee forever. Interestingly, [Quadral Wielding] remained, even though I was back to only two arms. I did have four limbs total, so maybe that was it, but that didn’t feel exactly right either.

Maybe I was overthinking it, but it seemed like the only skills that got locked where the ones that relied on energy sources that didn’t exist in this world. Despite the fact that neither the Uli nor Sheowon used bows at all in my last world—and I wasn’t sure they existed, without wood—I still had the [Bowmanship] skill. I never really used it, save for some minor influence on projectiles in general, but it was available.

That was how [Quadral Wielding] felt now, alongside [Bowmanship] again, and a few of the others. The physical world allowed for it, which wasn’t the case for my spells or Blood techniques. Nor was it the case for [Metasurvival], which affected me between worlds, and shut down after I was born with my stats and skills intact.

My sister, Rukechi, scoffed, but fell into line with me as we continued up the branch towards the location of our class. It was a somewhat informal affair, comprised of the youths of various ages that lived on this region of the fork of the branch. No one was forced to go, but the elderly squirrel who led it, Tochiki, hated latecomers, so if you missed the start of his lesson it was better to not show up at all. I tried not to get on his bad side, since I liked attending them.

Our brothers had long since stopped going, some of them having already left the village on journeys of their own. The birth rate was high here, since each squirrel had a full litter, but kids frequently left home once grown to explore the tree, usually never to be heard from again. Sometimes, kids from up or down the branch settled here, not that we had much worth settling down for. Very, very rarely, someone from another branch would pass through entirely.

It was usually fairly obvious how far people had traveled. Different regions cultivated different cultures. People looked different when they came from afar, and people tended to look similar within the same region, like the one my sister and I crossed to reach class this morning.

We made it to class just in the nick of time.

“Cheokit. Rukechi. Cutting it close,” our teacher Tokichi grumbled as we settled onto the ground among the other students.

I muttered an apology, though internally I was a bit miffed. We didn’t have clocks and the day had no sun to gauge the passage of time, so we could only operate on instincts honed from living through days that were always the same length. Class started a certain length of time after the start of the day, once the black sun had set, which was supposed to be about how long it took for a young squirrel to travel from the farthest part of our “village” to where Tokichi led the gathering, and yet whoever was last to arrive was either “cutting it close” or “late” depending on the grumpy old squirrel’s mood that day.

Still, I planned to attend the classes as much as I could. All information was oral, and Tokichi’s stories were interesting. I struggled to accept them all at face value, but I also couldn’t outright disagree, since I had no idea how this universe operated at all.

The hunched old squirrel looked up and down the branch, to see if any other students would be joining. Coming to an internal decision, he shuffled to the front of the crowd and eased himself down into a seated position.

Like us, his fur was purple, though his highlights were yellow and white, as opposed to our blue and white. It was a minor variation that wasn’t too uncommon here, but was more common in a village further up the branch where he was from.

That difference was dwarfed by the large rack of crystal antler on his head. They were larger than almost any other male in the village, which spoke of his sheer vanity in his youth. He hadn’t even bothered to grow patagia, instead putting all of his growth into the display—at the expense of his neck and back, which was probably why he was such a grumpy old squirrel now.

He looked over the group of students, frowning. There were a lot of younger kids present, and not many on the older end like me and my sister. “Let me tell you the story of the Mother, and how we all came to be.”

I leaned back slightly, glancing upwards. The Mother was what these people called this world-tree, and the story Tokichi was about to tell was their creation myth. Or, their creation fact—I really couldn’t say, as what had sounded like pure fantasy the first time I heard it could very well be the truth. In any case, I had heard it before, as had Rukechi. She grunted slightly from next to me, not loud enough to be heard by our teacher lest she draw his ire, but loud enough to express her annoyance that she had rushed after me this morning to be on time for a rerun.

“In the beginning, the Mother sprouted,” Tokichi began. “Emerging from the darkness, she began to grow, constantly reaching for the light of the firmament above.

“As she reached, she grew the first branches. She spread them wide, to separate the light from the dark.

“The distance was vast, and though she sought to bridge it, she knew it would be an effort of eons. The Mother would never stop striving for this, but she grew lonely.

“And so, the Mother gave birth to us, to live in her branches, and share her journey.”

I continued to listen to Tokichi talk, trying to reconcile myth and reality. It was a perfectly reasonable creation myth, and reminded me of vague memories I could no longer perfectly recall from my pre-System life, but what I could remember was that those stories came from a lack of knowledge and scientific understanding. They occupied the gaps in our comprehension that were later explained by abiogenesis and evolution.

If we lived on a “normal” planet, with a “normal” sun, I would believe wholeheartedly that this was just like that. That was not the case, unfortunately, so save for remembering those words in English, I fundamentally couldn’t imagine how else our species could have come to be. There were no other animals or plants, nothing but darkness below, color above, and the tree between. Where else could we have come from? The creation myth was probably only a partial explanation, but I certainly had no better one. Particularly when it came to the next bit of the story.

“And because she is our Mother, she gives us a mother’s Love. Each day, she grows, her trunk climbing taller and her branches spreading wider, and so too does her Love grow for us, and into us.”

I pulled up my System again, glancing at my stats: Form, Sense, and Love. The first two were self-explanatory, like Brawn and Brain had been in my last life, but Love was a bit harder to infer.

Fundamentally, the fact that the supernatural existed in System worlds meant that the creation myth could very well be actual truth. The world-tree might have a consciousness and may have brought people into existence from her will alone.

“And because we are her children, we too grow, growing out of her Love for us, to show her that we love her in turn.”

Tokichi dropped his head slightly, his huge, heavy crystal antlers the physical evidence of this story. They were like the branches of the tree we lived upon, climbing and spreading up out of his head.

Of course, we ate the tree, as there was nothing else to eat. It was constantly growing, as the story said, her branches extended outward, branching and leafing out, new buds emerging, and so on. The old growth of established branches was quite hard, and we dug our burrows in it, but most of our food came from new growth, harvesting the crystal “leaves”, or better yet, the emerging buds.

Our ability to grow crystal as part of our body could come from our diet, and “Love” was just energy we used for that, with nothing to do with the Mother… but I didn’t really care. I wanted nothing to do with that, so I was very careful to do no worship or prayer at all. I wasn’t sure if tree-worship would connect me to the admin, but I wasn’t willing to find out.

This was my vacation, and I was happy to keep it that way.

I was looking forward to learning the growth skill, the one with which Tokichi grew his antlers, but I was in no rush. I didn’t think it would be all that helpful to my future lives, and I didn’t want to stand out as a child in this one. It could wait, and it didn’t even need to wait long; I was basically an adult already, and it wouldn’t be unusual to acquire the skill soon. I was mostly just waiting for Rukechi to go first, because the fact that my Love stat was 101 at birth, instead of 1, meant that I had to be very careful about how much I grew at a time to avoid standing out.

Class came to an end, eventually, and Rukechi and I wandered back down the branch, not really in a rush. I could tell she was thinking about something, and I was going to ask, until an extremely upsetting voice called our names.

“Rukechi! Cheokit!”

I grimaced as the squirrel bounded over, and then froze as he slung his arms around my shoulders.

“Are you two still going to class?” he laughed, pulling me into his side. “It’s time to grow up! Say, Cheokit, why don’t you and I—”

“Kiritik,” I said, throwing his arm off and spinning around. “I told you last time. Don’t. Touch. Me.”

The boy blinked in surprise, then laughed. “Come on, Cheokit, don’t be like that,” he said, stepping towards me again and reaching out.

I lashed out, knocking his arm aside and sweeping his legs, sending him to the ground.

“I swear to the Mother,” I growled, leaning over him. “If you touch me again, I will cut you open from groin to throat and dance in your entrails.”

Turning away before he could respond, I marched off, every muscle in my body taut with tension. Rukechi raced after me, eyeing me nervously.

“Canopy above, Cheokit. I don’t understand why you hate him so much,” she said. “He’s not that bad.”

Exhaling through my nose and closing my eyes, I focused on calming myself, but the older I got, the more this had been eating at me.

“I’m just… not interested. At all.”

“All right,” Rukechi said, looking at me worriedly.

My sister reached out, tentatively, and when I didn’t freak out, she put her arm through mine.

“Come on, sis,” she said to me. “Let’s go home.”