Hour Ten of Operation: Plant Genocide arrives.
With it comes full stamina, cool night air, and the return of the stars—pouring chaotic, questionably filtered commentary directly into my eardrums.
Excellent.
I rise from my branch perch and immediately begin converting the second tree.
Same process as before.
Clear the perimeter.
Score the base.
Carve the cavity.
Ignite from within.
Vent upward.
No hesitation this time. My cuts are cleaner. Steam bursts are anticipated. Vent channels are carved earlier and wider. I waste less heat drying sections I can bypass entirely.
Six hours and some change.
Improvement.
Excellent.
At some point during the burn cycle, the nightly horde spawns.
Their scaling is tied to forest depth rather than my level, which places me comfortably above them in the food chain.
They do not earn a glance.
A minor fluctuation in my gravity sense. A brief redirection of two vines. A few thousand fresh tutorial points.
Tragic.
Starborn regeneration continues to carry my ambitions with embarrassing reliability. By the time the second furnace reaches a stable internal flame, I still have enough stamina to continue.
Which means I do.
The third tree is selected diagonally from the first two, several kilometers from each. Positioning matters now.
I notice the difference immediately.
The air no longer drifts passively.
It pulls.
Two draft vectors form—one toward the original furnace, stronger and more insistent, and a second toward the newer ignition point. The first remains dominant, fed by a larger internal burn mass.
Convection hierarchy established.
Good.
By this stage, my vines have transitioned fully from precision instruments to continuous systems. They do not wait for instruction. Everything within range is shredded, dropped, processed. Undergrowth collapses. Canopy thins. Debris accumulates without pause.
Extremely efficient ecology eviscerators.
The third tree ignites in roughly six hours as well. The interior glow stabilizes. Vertical vents begin burning independently. Surrounding debris starts drying faster than I can physically intervene.
By the time morning arrives, my stamina is nearly depleted.
And my mind—
My mind is still grappling with the deeply troubling revelation that chicken soup ranks D-tier on the universal horror index, tomato soup achieves A-tier by being “morally compromised,” and cream of mushroom soup inspires existential dread in ancient stellar entities.
There are implications there.
Implications I am not currently equipped to process.
My brain has been active for nearly twenty uninterrupted hours.
Divine soup intimidation theory will have to wait.
Therefore—
I withdraw several kilometers from the half-formed furnace complex and select a sturdy branch outside the primary draft corridors.
I retract my vines.
Sit.
And fall asleep almost instantly.
It is more comfortable than stone.
Therefore, no futon tonight.
…
I open my eyes approximately six hours later, according to the Tutorial clock.
Acceptable.
I go through my usual morning routine—stretch, fix hair, assess surroundings—then immediately return to work.
The furnace complex greets me with heat shimmer and thickening smoke. The first tree dominates the airflow now, pulling steadily upward like a chimney. The others feed into it, their drafts beginning to synchronize.
Good.
I sweep controlled washes of starfire through the surrounding debris fields, igniting freshly dried piles and accelerating the spread. Small flare-ups catch and hold without assistance.
Propagation confirmed.
Then I select another tree and begin again.
This time, I attempt something clever.
I fully manifest my Garden, allowing Starborn regeneration to operate at full efficiency despite it being daytime. Vines erupt. Dahlias bloom.
For several seconds, it works beautifully.
Then a falling branch—structurally compromised by my own sabotage—crashes downward and crushes one of my dahlias.
One of my very slowly regenerating anchors.
I stare at it.
My tail lashes in open irritation.
The Garden folds immediately.
We are doing this the hard way.
Airflows continue strengthening. The original tree now clearly functions as the central exhaust, its thermal column stronger than the rest. Smoke density increases accordingly, wrapping the entire region in a hazy fog of heat distortion, smog, and aggressively burning chlorophyll.
The fourth tree ignites faster than the previous three. The surrounding air is already drier. The wood resists less. Experience trims inefficiency.
Five hours and some change to stabilization.
I pause for two hours afterward, allowing stamina to regenerate before committing to the fifth.
It goes up in flames just before nightfall.
The sixth joins it roughly an hour after the nightly horde is politely introduced to my vines and processed into fine particulate tutorial points.
And with that—
The first furnace complex is complete.
Six skyscraper-sized fires burn in a vaguely star-shaped configuration: one central column and five fanning outward around it, each spaced roughly two kilometers from the center.
Heat overlap zones established.
Drying fields expanding.
Smoke output substantial.
Which means it is time to move roughly forty kilometers deeper into the forest and begin again.
…Yippee.
I sigh.
My tail lashes once in irritation.
…Again
Then I continue forward.
Days begin to blur.
Burn. Carve. Vent. Ignite. Shred undergrowth. Eliminate undead. Construct furnace complex.
Occasionally return to prior sites to reignite dried matter and ensure propagation remains self-sustaining.
By day four, a second full complex is operational, aggressively drying its quadrant and contributing its own smoke plume to the growing atmospheric insult.
By day six, a third stands complete.
The first complex no longer requires supervision.
Fires do not fizzle.
Drying now outpaces combustion in its outer perimeter, allowing flame fronts to advance naturally.
Which is fortunate.
Because that region is so choked with smoke that visibility drops to mere meters.
My starfire purifies the smoke as I inhale, preventing any meaningful harm.
It does not, however, make walking through it at all pleasant.
Notifications of forest monsters and stray undead quietly converting themselves into charcoal in the distance have become routine.
They flicker into existence.
They are ignored.
Naturally.
Every night, the horde grows.
Two hundred.
Two fifty.
Three hundred.
They arrive. They are processed. They leave as numbers.
By day nine, five full furnace complexes burn across the zone.
The forest is no longer a forest.
It is a lung filled with smoke.
An endless draft pulls inward from every direction, the air choosing its allegiance and flowing obediently toward flame. Even kilometers away from the nearest ignition point, the atmosphere feels wrong.
Dry.
Thin.
The undergrowth snaps instead of bends.
Leaves crumble between my fingers if I bother touching them.
At this point, even forty kilometers from the most recent complex, my earlier work has already softened the battlefield. Trees ignite faster. Brush catches without sulking. Fire no longer needs encouragement.
I don’t even return to new complexes anymore.
The distant inferno ensures I don't have to.
Good.
Day 10. Six complexes.
Day 12. Eight.
Day 14. Eleven.
Day 16. Fifteen.
Somewhere around the twelfth, I stop pretending this is a “plan” and start acknowledging what it actually is.
A campaign.
The smoke never clears now. It just shifts. Rolls. Thickens. The sky is permanently bruised, sunlight filtered through a hazy orange veil. Ash drifts like unpleasant snow.
The air is so dry that my lips crack constantly, only to heal instantly thanks to my passive regeneration.
Tragic.
Even the nightly hordes seem irritated.
By day sixteen they arrive in dense clusters, nearly five hundred strong, scaling with time, points, and whatever algorithm the System thinks is appropriate.
It does not matter.
They walk into a forest that is already dying.
I am merely expediting the paperwork.
Then finally—
Morning of day seventeen.
I stabilize the sixteenth complex.
Sixteen star-shaped furnace clusters burn across Zone Four, spaced with deliberate cruelty. Each one pulling air. Each one feeding the others. Heat layers overlap. Draft corridors snake between them like invisible highways.
Half of the entire forest is now a system.
And it belongs to me.
I stand on a branch overlooking the newest ignition site, smoke curling around my silhouette, distant columns of fire punching into the sky.
Sixteen.
My tail sways once, slow and satisfied.
Yes.
That should do it.
I can leave this zone now.
The fires will handle the rest.
I check the Tutorial clock.
Six days until the lich spawns.
Plenty of time to misbehave.
Naturally, I make the most dignified and entirely predictable decision available to me.
I head for Zone Three.
The fog wall parts without ceremony, and I cross into the Deepwood.
This one is easier.
Much easier.
The trees are smaller. The density is manageable. And—most importantly—there is actual leaf litter. Fallen branches. Dry ground clutter begging for poor life choices.
Which means it is once again a “sprint through at high speed with a starfire shell active” situation.
So I do exactly that.
For the next two days.
I run.
I carve grid lines through the forest with fire.
I overlap paths.
I double back.
I ensure there are no safe pockets.
The Deepwood catches beautifully.
Then I evacuate to Zone Two—the Mist-Veiled Grove.
The mist makes things slightly inconvenient, but the Tutorial has clearly committed to a design philosophy of “no rivers, no fire breaks, and aggressively overgrown ground cover.”
Moss.
Bushes.
Grass.
All dry enough once encouraged.
The Grove is small compared to the later zones.
It takes a single day to lay down a proper grid and ensure ignition.
Then I move to the first zone.
The Thicket.
Strangely, there is already a large burned patch in the forest.
No idea where that came from.
Highly suspicious.
Definitely unrelated to me.
Still the same story.
I run.
I burn.
Another forest goes up in flames.
And with that—
The entire Tutorial is being gracefully converted into charcoal.
My tail sways, slow and pleased.
Now the forests are doing the work for me.
Which means I can return to the city.
I sprint all the way back to Zone Five, my starfire shell devouring fire and ash the moment they approach me. Smoke curls away from my path. Embers vanish before touching fabric.
It’s arrogance is deeply earned.
Finally, after twenty-five days of radio silence, my running skill advances to the next rarity during the journey back.
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[Running (Rare)] has been upgraded into [Running (Epic)]
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[Running (Epic)]
Unlocked by running 2500 km without stopping, or exceeding 10000 km within a single day.
(Passive) Increases movement speed by 25% and reduces Stamina consumption while running by 25%.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Incredible.
A one-hundred-fold requirement increase from the previous tier.
And it is still only Epic.
As if I needed further confirmation that Asteria is going to be absurdly large.
When I reach the ruined city, I have a bit less than a day left before the lich spawns.
So I explore.
The palace is large and unnecessarily complicated, as if someone thought “labyrinthine” meant “impressive.”
Eventually, I find it.
The throne room.
More specifically—
The highly suspicious coffin placed directly on the floor in the center of the room, directly beneath the throne.
Subtle.
I study the throne.
Ornate.
Gold and white instead of the expected undead gloom.
And—most importantly—an extra soft-looking cushion placed in the middle.
Naturally, I sit down.
My ears perk.
Nine out of ten.
Comfy.
I pull up my status.
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Lyn
Health: 2200 / 2200
Stamina: 11000 / 11000
Race: Starborne Foxkin (Level 50) [Tier 1]
Class: Astral Duelist (Level 50) [Tier 1]
Aspect: Star
Traits: [Starborn] [Atrocity]
Titles: [Dragonslayer]
Stats
Vitality: 220 [+20]
Strength: 416 [+37]
Dexterity: 1100 [+100]
Perception: 798 (+5) [+72]
Charisma: 121 [+11]
Free Points: 0
Class Skills (8/8):
[Horizon Slash (Rare)]
[Stellar Finesse (Uncommon)]
[Improved Dash (Uncommon)]
[Astral Step (Uncommon)]
[Starline Thrust (Uncommon)]
[Celestial Momentum (Epic)]
[Severing Arc (Rare)]
[Starfire Resonance (Epic)]
General Skills (7/8):
[Inspect (Common)]
[Running (Epic)]
[Evasive Footwork (Uncommon)]
[Astral Manipulation (Epic)]
[Volatile Rune Crafting (Rare)]
[Blazing Star Dance (Epic)]
[Guiding Star Dance (Rare)]
Racial Skills:
Cosmic Perception
Silent Star
Special Skills:
[Arcana: Garden of Eternal Midnight]
[Universal Translation]
[Slipstream]
[Peripheral Continuity]
Tutorial Points: 987409
Tutorial Countdown: 20 days, 17 hours, 42 minutes
Skill Selection Available
Evolution Available
Class Advancement Available
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One hour and some change until the “final boss” spawns.
My points have ballooned obscenely thanks to my fires and the increasingly desperate nightly hordes.
Nearly one million.
By my estimate, I should reach roughly 1.5 million once the fires finish and I clean up whatever crawls out of the ash.
As for the unearthed dungeons—
I have located six so far.
There are almost certainly more.
The smoke hides many things.
It is mildly tragic that the hordes will stop tonight.
After all—
The lich will die the day it spawns.
This is not a prediction.
It is a promise.
I lean back into the throne, adjust into a properly dramatic posture, and rest one elbow on the armrest as if I have always belonged here.
The coffin sits below me.
Waiting.
Luckily, three weeks of industrial-scale arson have done wonders for my patience.
…
I sigh anyway.