*Blood rushing into ears noise*
*Beeeeee...*
"...can't you do something about it? You're the one that created her body in the first place!" I began to hear Fungus’s voice as he was yelling with a panicked tone at Yi Gore while also shaking the midget.
"L…Look, I may be a great C...Clone Master but I'm not a m...miracle worker, lad! I told her from the beginning that she had a limited time to fix her own roots! She simply leveled waaay faster than I have ever expected, so now she's suffering the consequences."
I woke up in a bed somewhere, probably the inn by the looks of the ceiling, and I was feeling like I had been tossed into a bush of thorns, except that the thornbush had replaced all of my insides and was now trying to come out like an alien chestburster. Whenever I tried to make any sort of a movement, something would screech and scrape from friction, or stab me in some way that felt very uncomfortable, so I knew that I was pretty screwed.
"Fung, let him go... There is nothing he can change about her situation and you know it." Lingfeng patted the Emperor-boy on the shoulder while trying to calm him down.
"But…there has to be something that we can do! I can't lose her to something ridiculous like this! How the hell can anyone die from “overleveling”?"
"Look, the Blessed Children and the Will of the Heavens have always been beyond the comprehension of us mere mortals. Sometimes things like these will happen, and we will have to deal with them as they come. The only person that can help her at this moment is only HERSELF, no matter how much I hate that fact." Lingfeng said with a deflated voice.
Looking around the room, Jin was also shoulder-hugging a tear-eyed Liliam, and Xibei was trying to hold back Carmine from attempting to "dig out my roots" with her pickaxe. Will-E was simply fidgeting around the room from one person to the next, not knowing what to do about the whole emotional situation.
[Hey, hey guys! Don't you be rushing and writing me off as dead already!!! What the hell, people!] I sent over the Raid-chat, as it was too painful to speak with my actual mouth.
"TRINA! ARE YOU AWAKE NOW?"
[DUH!]
In all honesty, I think Carmine had the best idea out of them all for the moment, even though it might have done some irreparable damage to my roots. At least, it would have been better than getting stabbed to death by my own growth.
True enough, turning my attention towards my internals, my broccoli-root had grown so much that it was now pushing against the walls of the dantian. My branch-tentacles had barely any more room to move around, so I immediately stuck out as many of the longer tentacles as I could through my navel opening, which alleviated the sensation of pressure a little bit, but did very little about the underlying problem.
I knew that it was time to get my “hands dirty”, and start adjusting my broccoli-bonsai of a spirit-root via more drastic measures, so I began to formulate a plan about how to perform further modifications upon it. I already had a vague idea in my mind about what I could do to the whole root-stem, but I needed to test it out first.
The first step was to count the number of available branch-tentacles, which turned out to be a daunting task, since there were so many of the damn things, and not all the branches had been “grown”. More than ⅔ were still in the “infant” stage, and had not been boosted with White-Qi to create any shape. But since I was bed-ridden, it’s not like I had anything else I could do, so I began to count.
In the end, I had counted a total number of 756 branches, and that number was resonating with me somehow. I mean, 756 was 108x7, and 108 is considered a “sacred” number, while 7 is the number of Chakras on the body. I wondered if that had any sort of connection, but knowing Mother System, she was most assuredly plagiarizing something from the Earth’s Eastern cultures once again.
My spirit roots were definitely unusual, at least compared with the ones from the other “NPC people” which had a lot fewer “branches” than my own, but I could blame that on either being a “Player” or a made-up clone, or maybe even both. I would need to have a look at Jin’s roots to confirm whether this was a “Player-only” thing or not, but I wasn’t exactly in an ambulatory state at the moment to go and have a poke at him.
Still, I now needed to “divide” these branch-tentacles into “clumps”, because what I was planning to do with them was to simply shove them through my meridian pathways, and then allow them to grow out of the body through the Chakras and the other meridian “exit points” like the fingers and the toes, instead of having them scrape against my internal dantian walls and disturbing my insides.
The Chakras and other exit points like the fingers seemed to be akin to “valves” or “sphincters”, as they would allow the branch-tentacles to exit out of the body without any problem, but then they would constrict around the circumference of the tentacles, preventing any of the White-Qi from the insides of the meridian-pathways to leak out of the body along the wiggle-branches.
It’s why the high level “normal” cultivators like Lingfeng weren’t dying from the overgrowth of their own spirit-roots, as the “tree” that developed simply went out of the body through their Crown-Chakra, also known as the Sahaswara Chakra that was on top of the head, which would then become constricted around the “tree trunk” and would keep their White-Qi inside of their meridians and prevent it from leaking out in the same way that it did to my own.
But to perform the branch-division, I first needed to modify the base-stem, because simply redirecting the branches did not work, as they kept stubbornly bouncing back in their original place like elastic rubber bands, especially when I was trying to point them downwards.
Currently, I had a total of 108 branch-tentacles dangling out of my navel-chakra, but that was not enough. I needed to redirect ALL of the branches and spread them evenly across my body to get rid of the bloat, therefore I needed to perform a few more risky steps to get everything “ready”.
The first step that I could think of was to penetrate the dividing membranes on both of my Leg Meridians, since those would open up a rather large “realestate-space” for the branches. Also, I needed to open the path towards my “Root” Muladhara Chakra exit point, which was located slightly lower than my dantian, and basically equated to my coccyx/asshole from an anatomical point of view.
Because if I was ever going to perform an ass-pull about this whole root-inflation situation, it might as well arrive in the form of a branch-tentacle wiggle out of my actual ass. Still, the risky part was the CXP gains that I would receive from the meridian openings of the leg-pathways, since I did not know how much those openings would add to the inflation of the whole root-stem, and I was now regretting that I had not opened those meridians earlier.
There was only one way to find that out though, which was to pop one of them and observe the results, so I immediately used my “specialised tool” branch-tentacle with the corkscrew-end to pierce the membrane separating the Right-Leg meridian away from the dantian.
As soon as the pathway was cleared, I felt the Mother System’s intervention as she began to “upgrade” my internal leg structure, and also a very upsetting increase in the overall root-pressure, as the newly-gained CXP simply got stuffed inside of my roots, making them bloat even further.
I was playing a very dangerous game here, and my whole dantian felt like a balloon in the paws of an angry cat, as-in ready to explode at the slightest paw-touch. Since the root-stem was still stubbornly resisting my attempts at bending it downwards by hand, I knew I had to apply some more forceful measures, so I pulled out my wood-saw tentacle, and I prepared to start hacking away at the stem.
But before that, I messaged everybody via Raid-chat and I told them to hold my body down and ignore any of my screaming, because I knew this would hurt like hell and there were no “soul painkillers” available anywhere. I did not know how I would thrash about from the pain, so it was safer if I were pinned down beforehand.
After Xibei and Jin locked my hands in place, Liliam cradled my head while placing a stick in my mouth so I would not bite my own tongue, and Fung placed his whole body on top of my legs, I then drew a heavy breath in and started sawing away at the Root-Stem in an attempt to separate the 108 branch-tentacles that were supposed to go downwards through one of the legs by forcing the structure at the base to bend away without actually severing it from the main-stem.
*Hrrrkhh*Hrrrkhh*Hrrrkhh*Hrrrkhh*
Immediately, I was overwhelmed by agony. It felt like sawing-off my own limb while still being totally conscious and with zero anaesthetics onboard, just like the victim in that crappy horror movie with the same name.
Timmy: Warning! Your spiritual roots have taken damage!
Timmy: Your cultivation has been lowered by...
SHUT UP, TIMMY! NOT NOW!
*Hrrrkhh*Hrrrkhh*Hrrrkhh*Hrrrkhh*
From the gaping wound left by the saw, bright wispy stuff began pouring out almost like a hot-steaming glowing-white-LED colored blood, except that it seemed to be just another form of Qi, one that I had not encountered before. From what I had read in the cultivation books that I had been given by Lingfeng, I assumed that this was the so-called “innate true Qi”, a form of Qi that had become completely attuned to my very own soul, and it was slightly different from the general White Qi found in the environment.
Since I also had my statistics screens open, I suddenly noticed that my accumulated Experience Points were also going down along with the innate-Qi bleeding outside of the roots, and my Hit Points were also going down with each movement because of the internal pain, even though my bodily and meridian integrity still seemed to remain at 100%.
Indeed, it felt akin to losing parts of myself, like I was leaking out memories of random small encounters from the recent past, and it felt incredibly unpleasant. I immediately began to mentally grab all of that leaking Qi and pull it back inside, but it became apparent that it was a very hard thing to do, even if not impossible. The Qi DID respond to my mental commands like no other, since it WAS my own “internal Qi” in the first place, but it was hard to manage both the leaking-away of the internal-Qi and the “surgery” at the same time. I basically had to split my entire attention two-ways, with half taking care of the bleeding, and the other half taking care of the surgical procedure.
Still, I pressed on, and I succeeded to separate the large clump of branch-tentacles that I wanted to push down my right-leg meridian away from the main-stem of the broccoli-root by pulling them away from their original position by sheer force while I was sawing at their base, which basically allowed me to turn the entire clump of branch-tentacles downwards and pointing at the leg meridian from now on.
After trimming away with the shears-tool some of the excess membrane that had resulted from the down-twisting process, I then began to stitch up the gaping wound with makeshift Qi-strings, except that this time I tried using strings created from my own innate true Qi which seems to be a lot more responsive to my mental manipulations than the basic White-Qi, and it worked wonders.
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The wound closed up immediately, and Timmy told me that it would take about 3 days for it to properly heal. After that, I had to take a long pause and catch my breath, as I had been screaming from the pain like a maniac all throughout the entire procedure, and everybody seemed to be worried to the maximum about what I was doing to myself, since they could not understand what was really going on. Even Yi Gore had been left totally shocked as he had been observing the entire procedure with his orange glow-eye, and could not find the words to properly explain to the others what was going on.
After I regained some of my lost breath, I then grabbed the entire clump of branch-tentacles that I had just bent away from the main stem and I pushed them through my right leg meridian until they were basically sticking out from the “exit points” found at the heel and toes, making me look like I now had literal roots coming out of my feet.
Timmy: You have unlocked the passive skill [Grounded Cultivator]
The skill progress bar has been added to your status screen.
Description:
As long as you keep your right foot planted onto the earth, you will gain increased Qi regeneration by siphoning away the Qi directly from the Earth-Mother’s ley lines. The amount will still vary based on your geographical location, but the amount of overall Qi gained through this method will always be a whole lot higher compared to just siphoning it from the air.
Timmy: Unlock your other leg to receive double the effect.
That’s easier said than done, you bastard of a circuitboard! Do you even know how much this hurts?
Timmy: Of course I do. I’m one with the root-stem, you know. But you don’t hear ME complaining about it, now do you. Now man up, and open the other leg too. The overall pressure is going down.
HRR!
Timmy: Complaining is a waste of energy.
Sadly, Timmy was totally right, so I refocused my energies, and after another round of screaming and sawing away at the root-stem, I had also opened the Left-Leg meridian and had filled it with 108 branch-tentacles. After that though, I simply passed out from the accumulated exhaustion and stress.
━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━
In my dreamstate, I began to feel like I was a leaf flowing on a river, taken away by the currents and getting tossed around wildly, as I would sometimes get knocked against other strange objects and would get strange flashes of random images that would remain forever stuck inside of my mind.
The first time I had experienced the “visions”, they had been rather terrifying, as I had suddenly found myself tied up, and facing a cruel-smiling young man in white-silk finery which was also shadowed by a creature that looked like Fire Incarnate. The cruel man then placed a knife over my throat and slashed out a deep wound, causing me to gurgle in pain as I choked on my own blood and began to feel my life drain away from me. Before my vision went black, I could see the Fire Demon behind the noble grab the bowl that had been filled with my own blood and finish an intricate spell formation that had been painted on a nearby wall.
━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━
As a result, I woke up screaming, and I startled everybody in the room with my sudden bout of panic. Immediately after waking up though, I noticed that Timmy had been screaming some message prompts at me even during my revelry, so this had been more complex than just a simple nightmare.
Timmy: [Unknown Demonic Runic Circle] has been permanently added to your library of “things that you have read”.
Timmy: Because of your freshly-acquired root-connection with the Earth, you have gained two new passive skills: [Remote Visions] and [Prophetic Visions]
The progress bars for both skills have been added to your status screen.
Description:
[Remote Visions] allows you to sometimes see things that are happening in other places of significance at the present time.
[Prophetic Visions] allows you to sometimes see things that will happen at other places of significance sometimes in the future, or have already happened in the past and have left a strong mark upon the Earth.
ARGH! Fuck me sideways! So those weren’t dreams, they were visions! Did I just get System-upgraded to an actual Oracle! This can’t be any good!
I immediately messaged Lingfeng over Raid-chat, and he came rushing down from the Temple in about 10 minutes. I then took out a pen and paper and I painted with as much detail as I could the runic circle that had been written in blood by the Fire Demon upon the wall during my vision.
The moment Lingfeng gazed at that circle, I saw all of the blood drain away from his face and he immediately ran out of the room at top speed. He did not even bother to take the stairs, he simply just jumped on his sword and flew out the window towards the Temple at max speed while ignoring everything else.
[What’s wrong...why the rush?] I messaged him via our Raid-chat.
[That’s a Mass Energy-Drain magic circle, but from the sheer size and complexity of what you drew, it would be capable of draining an entire city’s worth of space! Hundreds of thousands of people could become caught in it and die! I have to warn my team ASAP so I’m rushing to the Weirdwood Tree] Lingfeng replied over the Raid-chat while still flying away.
[But, didn’t you already tell them to discard any-and-all forms of communication?]
[I’m not going to contact them directly. I’m going to ask for an anonymous connection to the team via the Adventurer's Guild network. If you have a high enough Guild Plate, you can even use it that way, and the ones I have on me are Platinum.]
[But, won’t that become traceable?]
[It will, but I don’t think anyone is going to bother to keep an eye out for the Platinum Guild Plate of the VERY DEAD Hero of the Sun. The only people still who know that I have it with me are the members of my team, and they will realize what’s what when they see the caller ID.]
It took about half an hour more before Lingfeng said anything again, and the tension was killing me. Sadly, the reply came back that nothing of significance had apparently happened anywhere inside of the three Empires, at least outside of the noble’s power-struggles for the Thrones, so I did not know what to think anymore. Had that been a vision of the present, or one of the future? Was there some way to differentiate which one was which?
Raargh! I hated being so powerless! I had to fix this fucking root ASAP!
Since I was already awake, I told my party to hold me down once more, and I “sawed-away” the last bottom-portion of the root-stem, which I then promptly pushed downwards and forced the clump composed of the 108 branch-tentacles to wiggle out of my “Root” Chakra, as to avoid calling it my asshole.
Timmy: While sitting down on your ass, your Qi regeneration will now triple, as it stacks with the effects you receive from both legs. Just pretend that you are meditating and act all Guru-like to fool the audience. They don’t need to know that you’re just milking the planet of her White-Qi by simply sitting down.
After I had pushed out of my body more than half of all my branch-tentacles, the pressure had alleviated somewhat, and I was able to move around once more. But after sawing myself alive for the third time, I simply did not have the energy to do anything else, so I simply fell asleep once more.
━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━
As I was sleeping, another “vision” struck me. I was now only a small child, and I was crying my eyes out among a pile of corpses that I knew were my servants and my parents. Pushed into a corner, the evil grin of the masked men in black garbs who were wielding sharp daggers would forever remain inside of my mind, as they became the last things I saw before getting hit and the vision terminating.
━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━◦○◦━
GASP! Hiiiic…! I woke up wildly waving my hands as I tossed the covers away.
The moment I regained consciousness, I saw Ping the Healer that was now in the room, and was tending a wounded Fung that was sporting a nasty cut which went from the top of his left eyebrow and down onto his cheek, making him look rather ferocious. Fortunately, the hit had missed his eye, and he still had his good dual-vision.
[What happened.] I asked him over Raid-chat.
[AH, you’re awake again? Good...we were getting worried. You’ve been out for almost a day now, and you kept twisting and turning while mumbling in your sleep.]
[Yeah, nevermind me, what’s with the eye-slash? Who gave you that?]
[Ugh...just some random skeleton, sadly. We went again into the First Level to gain some more XP while you were unconscious, but just as we were heading for the staircase that lead to the Second Level, all of the Dungeon mobs respawned right behind us, and we were forced to fight them all once again. I think that everything in that place simply gets reconstructed after a day or so after getting smashed to pieces, as we found new armors and magic items on the skeletons and demons, even at the locations we had previously looted before. I thought that we had snagged everything that was available in that place, but apparently even the rusted gear that the skeletons wear on themselves gets randomly restored when the timer resets.]
[Well, that’s great, isn’t it? It means we have an almost inexhaustible source of materials for smelting now! I hope that you looted everything, as Carmine can recover most of the metals even if they are totally rusted crap in their current form.]
[Don’t worry, I grabbed everything. I even had the auto-loot thing on. My ring was always full of junk, so I had to dump most of the stuff inside Will-E. By the way, that Town-Portal thing you made with Lingfeng? Incredibly useful! All of the Guardsmen are absolutely in awe at the miracles you keep on bringing to the Village. A lot of them have been taking turns and have gone Delving into the Dungeon in teams of 5 as well, so they have been leveling like crazy.]
[Good...we’ll need as many strong people as possible. By the way, do you know a Noble house that has a crest that looks like a purple lilac flower wrapped around a golden spoon?]
[Yes, why? That’s one of the branch families of our main Ming family. Actually, come to think of it, besides myself, the only other true inheritor of the Throne would be the young child from that particular Noble’s House. Where did you get to see that crest?]
[In a vision of sorts...I think that the particular Noble House I just described suddenly got killed by masked men, or will get killed in the future and the child will get slain or kidnapped. I can’t tell if these visions are from the past or future yet. But it was a horrible thing to happen to a young boy like that nevertheless.]
[I see...Well, the power struggles for the Throne have always been bloody like that, so I’m not surprised. Still, if what you say is true, then the problems that the Ming Empire is currently facing are deep indeed, and the only people that will really suffer will be the normal ones, as they will bear the burden of fielding the armies during all of this madness and die for other people’s ambitions. I wish I had some way to stop them, but the way I am at this moment, I’m powerless to do anything. Heck, even a measly skeleton got the best of me because I got careless for even a split second, so what the hell would I be able to do against an entire army of the Empire?]
[Don’t sell yourself short yet, Fungus! We’ll turn this whole mess around somehow in the end! Just have confidence in your own abilities! You’re not the comic relief character anymore, you’re the REAL FUCKING EMPEROR NOW, and nobody can take that away from you as long as you still breathe!]
"I...Ugh…(*Sniff*)...thanks, Trina." I could see tears forming into Fung’s eyes once again, as he spoke out loudly to me instead of using the Raid-chat.
"AH! I am sorry...did I do something wrong? I did not know it hurt so much!" Ping began to fidget as he kept swabbing off the blood from Fung’s eye wound.
"Ah...it’s nothing like that, Mister Ping. These are just...eyeball sweat-drops. You did nothing wrong."
[PFFFT! MWAHAHA, FUNG! EYEBALL SWEAT MY ASS! YOU’RE CRYING LIKE A BABY ONCE AGAIN! BUT THAT’S WHY I LOVE YOU MAN! (NOHOMO)]
After encouraging Fung and even tossing a Regen spell on him, I went back to “trimming” the root. Fortunately, a lot of the space inside the dantian had now been cleared, and I was not in an immediate danger of blowing up anymore, but I still had to do something about the upper branch-tentacles, which were still getting squished against the dantian walls by the growth.
Following the path that I had used for unlocking my crown meridian, I then took the rest of all available branch-tentacles, wove them together like a living-willow fence, and then I shoved them up my spinal meridian with impunity, as it was large enough to barely accommodate all of them in their woven form.
After that, I split them into three sections once I reached the Heart dantian, and I continued pushing some of the 108 branch-tentacles that were closest to the middle-path towards my head and the Crown dantian, while splitting the rest 216 into the left and right sides of the body, as I proceeded to open the meridian paths that led to the lungs and then to the Hands, which garnered me even more CXP, but it wasn’t enough to affect me negatively anymore. In the end, I now had branch-tentacles dangling out of my fingers and even from my backside like the Archangel’s tentacle-wings, as I had discovered even more “exit points” along my spine after opening my lung meridians, and I was now turning into a veritable tentacle-monster.
At least this way, the entire root-tree was spread evenly across my entire body, but I was literally becoming one with the root as a consequence, since I now looked like some sort of a weird winged treant abomination with a tail and root-stems in every direction if inspected with Qi-sight. Still, if it worked, it worked, so who was I to complain? At least I wasn't dying anymore.