A/N
2 chapters combined into a longer chap, enjoy!
Chapter 760: Steal The Moon
The Weeping Root looked up at me with those wet, translucent eyes, waiting.
"What are you going to do with it?" he asked.
My smile grew wider.
"I'm going to steal the moon."
There was a beat of silence after I said that.
Steal the moon. I was standing in a dying inner world, wearing a borrowed body, operating as a split spiritual manifestation during an active tribulation, and I had just announced my intention to steal a moon.
At some point in my previous life, I had watched a film about a man who hatched an elaborate scheme to steal the moon using a shrink ray. I had found it amusing at the time. I had never thought that it would ever feel personally relevant.
And yet here I was, ready to steal a moon.
I could hear Snik’s baffled muttering, but I didn’t pay any attention to it.
I was more interested in seeing the Weeping Root’s response.
Clearly, the Weeping Root also hadn’t expected to ever hear that because his mouth was wide open, his eyes had gone and pushed his tears sideways before they fell, and for a moment he looked less like a traumatised child and more like a child who had just been told something so unexpected that all the expected responses had simply stopped working.
He closed his mouth, then he opened it again.
"That is..." he started. He seemed to be searching for the word. "That is better than destroying it. If the Walker takes it, it lives. If it stays here, it dies with everything else." He looked up at the Blood Moon, that enormous red disc that had been pressing its light into every surface of this world for as long as anyone here could remember. "It is better the Walker takes it than it gets destroyed."
I appreciated that he had arrived at that conclusion quickly. I had half expected an argument, or at least a longer pause. It wasn’t easy to give away your life’s work to someone else. Most would rather destroy it then let someone else take it. But the Weeping Root had spent more time with this world's foundations than anyone alive, and his nature seemed to be a lot kinder than one would expect from the inner world spirit of a blood cultivator.
"To do this properly," I said, "I need the Realm Stabilising Trees. How many does this world have?"
The Weeping Root's expression shifted, and a small frown pulled at his translucent features.
"We used to have nine," he said.
Nine Realm Stabilising Trees?
That was not a number that happened by accident. Even for a Civilization Realm cultivator, nine trees were extraordinary. The trees were rare, they were extremely difficult to acquire, and most inner worlds at that level were doing well to have three or four.
In fact, they were rare enough that entire sects had been built around the knowledge of where to find them, rare enough that Su Xuan had coerced an entire sect into selling one for a single Life Realm treasure. Nine suggested either a very long cultivation history, or access to sources most cultivators never encountered, or both.
Where had Ke Jun gotten nine Realm Stabilising Trees?
The blood statue in my inner world had already demonstrated that Ke Jun knew how to acquire things through methods that most cultivators considered off-limits. Which meant he probably acquired them in ways that would make me sick to the core. Even then, the list of questions I needed to ask him, assuming he survived long enough to answer them, and I survived long enough to ask, was getting longer every hour.
But I did not have time for those questions right now. The inner worlds were still pressing toward each other, the portal was still open, and the population I had just sent through on a Leviathan's back was waiting in my inner world for something to happen that would prevent the whole situation from getting significantly worse.
I pushed the questions about nine trees aside and focused on what I had to do.
"How many are left?" I asked.
For what I planned to do, it would require more than the one that I had already met.
"Three," the Weeping Root said quietly. "Only three.”
When he saw the questioning look on my face, he continued. “When Master first died, the trees began to wither away, it was slow and painful to watch, and after he came back to life, I thought Master would save them, but the Masked One enslaved him. Three is all that is left."
Three wasn’t ideal, but it would have to be enough.
"Can you take me to them?" I asked.
He reached up and took my hand.
The world blurred the way it had before, that folding and unfolding of space that was smooth enough that I barely registered the transition. One moment we were standing at the edge of the deep bog, and then we were somewhere else entirely.
We were standing before the first Realm Stabilising Tree that he had taken me to.
The one that I had mistakenly thought was the Weeping Root.
I walked up to it and pressed Snik's palm flat against the bark.
The Genesis Seed was still bound. I could feel the calligraphy the Heavens had pressed into its surface, those golden characters that locked its purifying ability and its authority away from me for the duration of the tribulation.
Under normal circumstances, the Genesis Seed's influence over Realm Stabilising Trees was something I had come to take for granted. If I had that connection available to me right now, this would have been straightforward, and I would have been confident in it succeeding.
But I did not have it. The Heavens had been thorough about that.
What I had was the Golden Sun.
I just hoped what I had in mind actually worked.
I shifted my attention inward, past Snik's body and through the thin thread connecting me back to my own spiritual half standing in my inner world. The Golden Sun drifted in its orbit, its light touching everything in the space around it without distinguishing between what it warmed.
I pulled a thread of that energy through the connection, felt it travel the distance between my two halves, and pressed it gently into the point where Snik's palm met the Realm Stabilising Tree's bark.
The effect was not instantaneous. It built the way warmth builds, starting from the point of contact and radiating outward through the tree's structure in expanding rings. The bark under my hand changed colour in a band that moved upward toward the canopy and downward toward the roots simultaneously, the dead grey surface cycling through something darker before settling into a colour I didn't have a word for in this world's palette. It wasn’t the colour of blood, but that was the closest comparison that I could make.
The avatar came up behind the tree like a second shadow.
It was the prime form, the shape of what this tree had been when this world was young, and the creator's voice was still present, and the sky was still expanding. It rose above the canopy, vast and composed, its branches spreading in perfect geometry against the Blood Moon's light. And the surviving bone-trees at the clearing's edges leaned away from it on instinct.
I felt the tree's awareness settle into something I recognised as responsiveness.
I smiled.
The smile was for me, not for the Weeping Root or the tree or anyone else.
There was something satisfying about finding a path through a locked door, even a narrow one, even an improvised one built from whatever happened to be available. The Genesis Seed was bound. The normal method wasn't accessible. So, I had used something else, and it had worked, but I was not done.
"Next one," I said.
The Weeping Root took my hand again.
The second tree was in the northern part of the world, in a region where the marsh gave way to something dryer and the bone-trees grew in clusters rather than spreading lines. The tree itself was smaller than the first, younger, which was a relative term in this context since younger still meant centuries.
It had sustained more damage throughout the years. I could see the evidence in the root structure, the places where roots had been severed and healed over, the asymmetry of branches that had grown back in the wrong directions after being removed. It seemed that some of the inhabitants of this world had tried to use it as a weapon during the Great Coagulation.
Unfortunately, when I tried to connect to this tree, it was much more difficult.
The Golden Sun energy moved slower through it, finding more resistance in the damaged pathways, taking longer to reach the parts of the tree that still remembered what it was supposed to be.
I held the contact and waited, maintaining the flow and letting the tree decide the pace of it.
Forcing a Realm Stabilising Tree was not the kind of choice that produced good outcomes.
The avatar rose above this one too, smaller than the first but present, its form accommodating the asymmetry of the damaged tree rather than imposing the original shape over it. The avatar was not the idealised version. It was this tree's version, including the evidence of what it had survived.
I found that I respected the accommodation.
The third tree was in the southeast, half submerged in a channel so wide it was almost a lake. The roots were underwater, which the tree had apparently decided was not a problem and had adapted around, sending its growth upward instead of outward, tall and narrow rather than wide and spreading.
The Golden Sun energy moved through water with less resistance than I expected.
By the third tree, I had also developed a better sense of the technique, where to press and where to wait, what the energy needed from me and what it needed to find on its own. The avatar rose above the submerged tree in a form that was tall and narrow to match it, its silhouette distinct against the Blood Moon from the avatars of the other two trees.
The Weeping Root stood at the edge of the channel watching all three avatars visible across the sky at once.
"Three keys," he said quietly, which I assumed was him connecting what he saw to the prophecy's language, though he might have just been counting.
"Are you ready?" he asked.
I looked at the three avatars, the three trees, the three remaining foundations of a world that had been running on an empty tank for longer than most civilisations exist.
"Yes," I said. "Can you cut the connection?"
He nodded. There was no need for words. He simply turned to face the center of the world, in the direction of the central bog and the statue and the Blood Moon hanging above all of it, and he put his arms out at his sides, palms up, fingers loose.
I watched him, but I didn’t see anything happen.
There was no visible change, no light gathered, no energy discharged, no sound accompanied whatever he was doing.
But I guess that made sense.
The Weeping Root wasn’t doing something external, he was focusing on the internal structure of the inner world, something at the level where this world's foundations were written.
I had never seen an inner world spirit cripple their master’s own cultivation.
Honestly, I think most cultivators could say the same.
A sight like this probably only happened once in hundreds of thousands of years.
I waited and waited, and then something changed.
The Blood Moon went dark.
The deep, saturated red that had been lighting every surface in this world since before anyone alive could remember, died down to a flat, absent grey in the space of three or four seconds. What remained was a disc of dead stone hanging in a purple sky, suddenly enormous in a new way because it was no longer a light source and had become instead just a weight in the sky, a thing that had no business being that large and that close.
The entire world shook, the channels rippled, and the bone-trees swayed without wind.
The Weeping Root opened his eyes; I could see the pain in them.
"We don't have much time," he said. I could hear the struggle in his voice. Severing the connection had taken something out of him, something that was more than energy and effort. "With the Blood Moon cut off from the inner world, the world will begin to collapse. The Blood Moon was the world's anchor as much as its ceiling. Without it, the spatial integrity will fail. We have minutes if we’re lucky."
I was already moving.
I reached through the connection I had established with the three trees, the threads of Golden Sun energy that still ran between my palm prints and their bark, and I directed the connection upward, into the avatars, and through the avatars into the branches and roots of the trees themselves, and I told the trees with everything I had available what I needed them to do.
The roots came first.
Three root systems, two of them ancient and vast, one of them younger and differently shaped from its damage, extended out of the ground simultaneously and reached for the sky.
The branches followed from above, the canopies extending their reach toward the dead disc of the Blood Moon, branch tips brushing the air in directions that had nothing to do with how trees were supposed to grow. The avatars above each tree guided the direction of it, enormous hands of prime-form wood pointing toward the target.
The roots and branches found the Blood Moon's surface.
I felt it through the connection, the moment of contact, the three sets of root and branch systems wrapping themselves around the edges of the Blood Moon like how a hand wraps around something round and heavy that it is trying to lift.
The Blood Moon was not just a physical object in any normal sense. It was a cultivation construct, a crystallised expression of thousands of years of blood arts built into the spatial fabric of the inner world. Its mass was conceptual as much as material.
But the trees had roots that understood how to grip things that were conceptual.
The pull began, slow, very slowly.
The Blood Moon moved a degree, then stopped, then moved again.
The trees groaned with the effort of it, the sound of deep wood under stress.
The avatars above each tree were straining visibly, their prime forms bent toward the Blood Moon, their vast hands wrapped around the roots and branches to add whatever presence they could to the pull.
The Blood Moon drifted toward the portal. One degree. Two degrees. Five.
I felt the rate of it and did the calculation in my mind.
The portal was not close.
The Blood Moon was enormous and resistant and three Realm Stabilising Trees, even ancient ones, even assisted by Golden Sun energy, were not the ten trees that should have been available for a task like this.
I had known this before I started. I had known it the moment the Weeping Root said there were only three left, that the war had taken the others, that the adequate number was gone. I had started anyway because standing still and doing nothing was not a third option, it was a way of choosing the worst outcome while maintaining the appearance of choosing nothing.
But the rate was too slow.
The world was already showing it. The channels in the distance were running in directions they hadn't been running before, a sign that the spatial fabric was beginning to lose coherence. A section of the marsh to the southwest had gone flat in a way that marshes don't go flat, a visual artifact of reality losing its confidence in what it was supposed to look like.
The Blood Moon was moving, but not fast enough.
I looked at the three avatars, straining in the sky above their trees, and I understood what came next before I had quite finished the thought.
The trees had done what the trees could do. They had gripped the Moon, and they were pulling with everything their root systems and canopies could generate, and it wasn't enough.
Which meant the gap had to be filled by something else.
I looked at Snik's hands. At the Golden Sun energy still moving through this borrowed body. At the thread connecting me back to my other half standing in my inner world with the Red and Blue and Golden Suns still in their orbit, still available, still mine.
The Blood Moon needed more than trees.
Which meant that I was going to have to pull it myself.