The settlement located where the branch connected to the trunk was far and away the largest I had seen in this world. They had been steadily growing as I approached, but nothing quite like this. Where the other settlements were like villages, this was more of a city.
Despite the fact that travel between branches was arduous and lengthy, I could clearly get the sense of this settlement being a travel hub. There were far fewer children and plenty of people from other branches. I had seen a handful of people with different forms of growth in the settlements nearby, squirrels who had settled down after migrating, but there were more here, both in terms of numbers of people and in differences of growth.
I had been interested in the people from other branches in the last few villages, but I had taken to racing through them even faster than I traveled between settlements, trying to avoid dealing with those hoping I would settle down in their part of the branch. It wasn’t like I really needed anything in settlements, so my journey had become a bit of a race to the finish, where the finish was the trunk.
Now that I was here, I was going to slow down a bit. I hoped to talk to some of these travelers and learn more about the tree.
From what I had heard, if a squirrel started traveling young and never left the trunk, they could feasibly travel upwards around a dozen branches in a single lifetime. There were winding paths carved into the “bark”, and rest stops dug out like the burrows squirrels lived in on the branches, though things sometimes shifted over generations as the tree grew and healed.
Not many people actually pushed themselves that hard, though, since there wasn’t much of a reason to. That meant that information traveled up the trunk quite slowly. Conversely, a squirrel with patagia could glide downward quite quickly, though that wasn’t without some dangers. Gliding all day was fatiguing in its own right, and one had to stop for sleep and food.
Food was the largest issue around the trunk. The trunk, and the parts of the trunk that branches grew from, was old growth, and not prone to budding on its own. The closer I got to the trunk, the more energy I saw people putting into encouraging tree growth, using the [Generative Growth] skill.
I hadn’t yet learned that skill, which I was coming to realize might be a problem for me. The skill acquisition would probably be simple enough, but I was worried about the results of actually using it. If it was as aggressive as my restoration and transformation skills were, due to my stats, a single use of [Generative Growth] might be substantial. Probably not that much compared to the scale of the tree, but enough that it would attract attention around other squirrels.
What I needed was a way to moderate how much Love went into my skill use in this world. I had to find a way to limit it, like I could with my Blood.
I couldn’t really risk practicing with [Transformative Growth], and my uses of [Restorative Growth] to help manage internal damage from my Blood transformation was always comprehensive, one bulk use per day. I could head back outside of the settlement in order to train with [Generative Growth], but assuming it was the same, I would quickly attract attention from all the new growth I would be causing.
The nature of this world’s “magic” wasn’t one of fine control. In that case, was there something I could do as a result of having access to magic from another world?
It was something I was already thinking about as a result of my Blood transformation. My Blood wasn’t regenerating like it did when I was an Uli. It was slower, presumably because this body and my food sources were different. In some ways, that was good, because it staved off the damage that came from overloading my body with foreign Blood, but it also limited my skill use. If I wanted to race up the tree in order to see more than the average squirrel, I would need better conversion.
When I first did the transformation, I had been overloaded with Blood, and I debated trying to use [Transformative Growth] again, but I didn’t think that was the right way to go about it. The transformation had been to my body, giving myself the biological processes for generating Blood. I assumed that had been overloaded by my high Love stat, which accelerated my Blood generation while I was unconscious, but I couldn’t duplicate that. I already had undergone those changes.
No, what I needed was to transform the energy itself. That wouldn’t come from a native growth skill in this world. It was something between worlds. A metaskill, maybe?
I was pretty sure I had touched on that already, when I gained access to my Blood. What I needed now was to dial that in and unlock a skill that would give me fine-tuned control.
Backtracking far enough away from the settlement that I could experiment without being observed, I found a somewhat private gnarl in the branch where I could sit and focus.
It had been a while since I had last seriously meditated. I spent most of this short life with my sister or mother, which kept me fairly engaged. I had kept rather busy in my adulthood as Mali, as well. I still sometimes sat to recenter myself, but compared to my life as Tovar where I would often sit for hours focusing on my breathing and sensing mana, I was a bit out of practice.
Focusing on my breathing was, as always, the first step. Before I tried to touch on magic, I needed to settle my mind, get present, and let go of everything else. It was harder than usual, because I was painfully aware of my heart thumping in my chest. If I sat still for long enough, the minuscule amounts of Blood generation would begin to add up, which would translate to pain.
Were I well-practiced, I could probably have focused through the pain. I could bleed myself, either cutting myself open or using [Bloodletting], but that would make a mess and be a worse distraction.
Instead, I used [Blood Augmentation], even though I wasn’t in combat or motion. It was just a way to burn the energy while I meditated.
Once I had comfortably settled into my breathing, I allowed my focus to shift from the breath to the flow of my energy, specifically the way my Blood was being used to power my augmentation.
This wasn’t something I had studied all that closely as an Uli. Blood was natural for an Uli, and I had a familiarity for manipulating energy thanks to a lifetime of [Mana Manipulation]. Once I gained the [Blood Augmentation] skill, it didn’t take much more conscious thought from me.
Now, bringing my full focus down on it, I compared it more directly to what I remembered of my mana as Tovar. Both followed a path through me, be it my blood vessels or my mana circuit, and in both cases, I could diffuse it across myself to empower me or focus it and use it to power abilities, my spells and techniques.
Mother’s Love was different. When I sought it out, it was more like a connection to something outside of me. That connection could be opened with a skill, but when it was, the full force of Love flooded through. There was no valve, no mechanism to control the flow that I could sense at all.
When my magical sense tried to follow the source back, it was blinded by a vast source of power, the pressure of which was too much to bear. The world-tree, presumably, I thought as I pulled away.
If I couldn’t control the flow, could I redirect it? The only method I knew of to access it was using a growth skill. Both [Transformative Growth] and [Restorative Growth] were rather intense skills, and the energy was immediately converted inside of me.
Instead of taking the energy on myself, I wanted to feel it flow through me, to try and get a sense of it. For that, I needed to learn [Generative Growth].
I opened my eyes, stood, and stretched out, looking around to make sure there was no one in sight. Someone who knew the area well might be surprised to find a bunch of growth here next time they traveled past it, but so long as I wasn’t here when it happened, I didn’t care.
When I confirmed I was alone, I set my hands down on the tree, picturing a node of growth expanding from this part of the branch. I reached for Mother’s Love, and opened the flow, directing it through me and back into the tree.
An intense rush of energy raced through me, and despite my attention and concentration, it flowed fast. I could only get a vague impression of the energy before it escaped me, fully channeled into growth.
I sat back, appraising my work. The branch I grew was sizable, about half my width and a few times my height, with several leaves fully unfurled along it. The growth tapered off towards the tip, where there was a few buds that hadn’t yet opened. Most squirrels could only grow a single bud per day with this skill, if even, but most squirrels didn’t have over 100 Love.
“Yeah, someone’s definitely going to notice this,” I muttered to myself as I looked it over.
It wouldn’t go to waste, though. I climbed it, picking the buds to eat immediately, and collected all of the leaves to eat later. It was more than I needed, but I couldn’t leave anything behind, in case someone passed by that knew this area really well. This part of the branch was too picked clean for leaves to be fully grown here, and it would raise questions. There was no real way to tie it back to me and most squirrels would probably just shrug and harvest the food, but there was no reason not to be cautious.
I rolled up the leftover buds in the leaves, packing it all up so I could relocate. While I did, I thought back to the feel of the energy.
With only two other forms of energy to compare it to, it felt more like mana than Blood, despite the way it primarily interacted with the physical world. It occupied the space between the two, but the way it seemed to generate life rather than be generated by life reminded me more of Tovar’s world than Mali.
That was only from my perspective as the user, though. From another perspective, if the energy was the tree’s life force, then it could be generated by the tree like Blood was generated by an Uli. Or maybe it was like a point of compressed mana, like a dungeon, which generated monsters.
I was pretty sure squirrels weren’t monsters, since we had souls, so it wasn’t a one-to-one comparison. Very little was perfectly straightforward when it came to the supernatural and magic. I didn’t need to perfectly understand it, though, I just needed a way to use it.
After finding a new place to hide out, I unrolled my leaves and ate my buds. I had used up my Love for the day, so I couldn’t experiment again until tomorrow. I settled in to return to my meditation, trying to hold on to the feeling of the energy.
*
Since I had food on hand, my second attempt to feel out the energy was with [Restorative Growth].
I didn’t particularly need healing, but that didn’t matter. The energy didn’t care. It was without will of its own, flowing through my skills to act. It had helped to be damaged to focus the energy into the skill in the first place, but that was a results-oriented process. In order to study the energy, results were less important than method.
The flow erupted, pouring into me and converting into restoration.
Supernatural healing was something I had experience with in all of my reincarnated lives. As with the flavor of the energy itself, this form of healing was somewhere in between healing spells that used mana and the restoration technique that used Blood.
I could vaguely sense that I could have directed it through me into another, where it still would have been used for healing as guided by my skill, losing some of the strength along the way. In that way, it was like the healing spells I had learned as Tovar.
But it wasn’t really imposing my will onto the world itself, which was what my spells did. It was imposing my will on the energy to heal the body quickly, like [Blood Restoration]. Since it was external energy, it could apply to others, unlike my Blood technique, which used my own energy on myself and myself alone.
How can I convince the energy to directly replenish my Blood? And, if possible, can I convince my Blood to convert back into the native energy?
The latter would be ideal. If I could turn my day’s Love into Blood, and then turn a controlled amount of Blood back into Love, then I could use multiple growth skills in a day, limited to something more reasonable for a regular person. I’d take damage from overloading my body with Blood, but I could fix that by turning some back into Love and using [Restorative Growth].
If that wasn’t possible, then if I could siphon off some of the flow to convert it into Blood, I could reduce the amount that was left going into the desired growth skill. That had its own issues, predominantly that the flow was so intense that I wasn’t sure I could divert a part of it.
So frustrating, I thought with a grimace. I knew I had already done something incredible unlocking Blood in this life, but the limitations chafed.
With the ability to grow food now, I had what I needed to climb the tree. If the amount that I grew each day risked drawing attention, I would just need to travel faster and outpace the rumors. With my stats and [Blood Augmentation], I could push harder and faster than any native. And with that mobility, I could probably find some out of the way nooks along the trunk to use [Generative Growth] where no one would be the wiser.
I’d keep meditating, when I could, and try and get a better handle on this energy, see if I could crack the code. If not, maybe there was someone on this tree that knew more about Mother’s Love who would share their insights.