A sweet scent flowed out of the pit. Stairs weaved from roots connected the surface and the underground. A soft rainbow light glowed at the bottom. An arched pathway at the end connected the stairs to the light-filled chamber twice Mannat’s height and large as his house. Nothing had changed.

Glowing roots covered the chamber dirt walls. A garden of flowers carpeted the whole floor and gave him a fragrant welcome. His mother slept straight on her back at the center of the chamber, under the womb of roots inside which the naked priestess, whom the Witch called the flower of Morality, laid sleeping undisturbed.

There was not a single wrinkle anywhere on the priestess’s body. Golden locks partly covered her pale face. Skin smooth and silky, lips soft and luscious, she was a breathtaking sight to behold. Yet Mannat only found her curious because of her heritage. He was not ignorant of her appearance. She was someone he thought would fit well in the stories in which kingdoms fought and fell over women.

Surprisingly, his mother was becoming like the priestess. Noor’s skin was glowing. Her wrinkles had disappeared in the year of mana therapy, and her skin had retained its youthfulness. Her cheeks were rosy and full. Her body had grown thinner, healthier. The marks of age had all disappeared from her body. Her face had lost the marks of time the wrinkles of worry, the speck of illness. She had shed a few years of age in the year.

“I wonder how father will react upon seeing you, mother,” Mannat whispered. A gentle smile caressed his face.

He carefully navigated around the roots that had melded with his mother’s body and cupped one of her hands. He sat beside her, staring at her youthful face. He could see why his father thought he resembled his mother when she was younger. Now Noor was younger, and the resemblance was uncanny. She looked like his older twin sister to be honest, which was an incomprehensible notion for Mannat. It would have made quite a topic of conversation if she were awake.

Many things had happened in the last year. He had grown up. He was a blacksmith, though his job experience was like sitting in an unstable buggy on a bumpy road. He had a girlfriend and he was going to ask her hand in marriage in a couple of days. His father was finally a master blacksmith

His mother had missed so many things!

“We’ll be together again soon.” Mannat kissed Noor’s forehead. His eyes didn’t grow wet, but the pain was there for him to feel. He had grown with it, and it was a part of him.

He didn’t hear when the Witch appeared behind him. He couldn’t sense her, but that was to be expected. She wouldn’t be a master at her job if he, an apprentice, could outdo her. He had a question for the Witch.

“Is there a reason why you would rather live with a hunched back than to look young and spirited?” Mannat had guessed his mother's and the priestess’s youthful appearance was the result of bathing in mana. He found it baffling that the Witch would voluntarily suffer from the consequence of age-related problems despite having a solution at hand.

“I don’t need to hide my age.” The Witch said.

Mannat didn’t think so. “Or,” He said. “Your aged appearance is doing the work of hiding you.” He was fishing in the sea, hoping the Witch would latch onto his bait. She obviously knew all about his schemes. He wanted to know her past.

The Witch wasn’t interested in telling him anything though, not for now.

“So long you understand.” The witch smirked “Are you ready to be disappointed?”

Mannat sighed. “Please, stop trying to discourage me for once.”

“I’m not trying to discourage you.” The Witch answered with a chuckle. “I’m keeping you grounded.”

Mannat ignored her the best he could and went onward to replenish his mana pool. The Witch had told him to open a mana channel with the roots, the same roots that had magically melded together with his mother’s body without harming her. They pumped mana into her body to fight the miasma growing inside her like cancer.

He wanted to see what the roots were doing to her and activated his ‘mana vision’. A tendril of mana rose from his heart and shot toward his eye, which instantly started burning as if he had gotten a spider web stuck in his eyes. The sensation passed quickly and then his vision went through a rapid transformation. The chamber grew dark around him as everything inside lost its natural colors. A blue fog of mana replaced the light. Its presence was like a grainy layer of blue on top of his vision. It didn’t help that everything else with mana passing through them glowed with the same blue hue. Mannat wasn’t surprised to see the carpet of flowers taking on the same hue together with the roots.

Blue was the color of the mana traveling inside them and it glowed the brightest at the bulb of roots where the priestess slept. Shockingly, it wasn’t the roots that were growing brightly – they were like stars twinkling in the night sky, while the priestess glowed to his eyes like the moon. Then he saw that Mana was not flowing into her body, but out into the roots. The sight confused Mannat.

He canceled the skill at that moment because the light from the mana was too bright.

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He hadn’t sensed anything amiss during his past visits, because the mana flowing inside the chamber would overwhelm his senses every time, forcing him to cancel the skill. He thought his experience with the ‘Mana vision’ would be different; it wasn’t.

“Do you see it?” The Witch asked calmly, without sarcasm or hostility.

Mannat was thinking and didn’t answer her. He had always thought the priestess was sleeping like his mother and the tree was feeding her mana to hold the miasma inside her body in check. What he saw told him a different story, something that made him shudder.

He had always wondered how the tree converted miasma into mana. Now he knew. The tree was only responsible for absorbing the miasma from the surrounding; the priestess was the core that converted miasma into mana.

The Witch told him the truth. She knew he had figured it out. There was no need to hide it any longer.

“This is what death looks like for the flowers of the No man’s land. This is her grave and the tree is her gravestone. Even in death, she protects the world from miasma. She is dead but her beliefs stand tall as the tree. She is the tree and thus alive.”

There was melancholy in her voice, longing that Mannat understood very well.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Mannat asked. His voice rose when he spoke, unable to hide his surprise.

“You wouldn’t have understood.”

“I thought you were waiting for her to wake up.”

“The priestess will never awake, but your mother still can.” The Witch said looking past him. “You should understand by now what you need to do.”

Mannat bit his lips and turned back toward his mother. He would scream later. His mother lay on the carpet of flowers in peace. The news that the priestess was dead had no effect on her. Mannat stopped hesitating. He grabbed one of the nearby thin roots with a comparatively feeble amount of mana flowing through it and connected a mana channel to it.

He didn’t know what to expect, but he couldn’t believe it when the mana from the roots forced their way into his body. A tingling sensation shot up his arm and challenged his willpower as the foreign mana flowed through his veins. He knew what would happen if he let the mana rampage inside his body. He didn’t want to end up like little butcher. Mannat screamed out as a burning sensation filled his arm. It was no longer like ants crawling through his veins when he controlled his mana. He instantly released the root and closed the channel closed between them.

Mana no longer invaded his body, but there was still a sizable amount of it rampaging inside him.

“Fight it!” The Witch told Mannat. “Don’t let it out go out of control or you will die.”

Mannat started cultivating without wasting a second. He controlled his mana out of his heart and got into a vicious struggle against the foreign mana. The situation reminded Mannat of the times he would train his mana strike against the vegetables in the Witch’s garden. The roles had reversed. He was the vegetable and the tree was the aggressor.

The experience proved vital for Mannat to defend against the invasion. The mana had a spark to it, but it didn’t last long against his tactics. The foreign mana soon grew stable under the pressure from Mannat’s mana.

Did the Witch want to kill him?

Mannat was dripping sweat from his chin when he opened his eyes. His heart was going wild inside his chest. He was breathing laboriously and his arm was twitching and red. He won in the end. His status showed his mana pool had increased to 439 points… the last digit was constantly flickering and decreasing, representing the extra mana was slowly leaking from his body. No wonder he felt bloated. It was straining his veins since they were not accustomed to having such a great amount of mana flowing through them.

“Don’t stop cultivating.” The Witch advised from the side. “You need to grind down the mana you absorbed to the same grade as your personal mana or it will simply leak out and disappear. You might have destroyed its conscious, but it’s still not under your control.”

“Help me,” Mannat pleaded, but the Witch shook her head.

“I can’t help you even if I want to. The mana I control is not enough.”

Mannat had an epiphany. Perhaps, this was the reason why she couldn’t help his mother either. One of his thoughts went a step further and told him there was a chance she couldn’t absorb mana from the tree’s mana either. It was reasonable. Possibly, only someone like his mother who had no mana roots could absorb the tree’s mana without needing to fight it.

He started cultivating.

What he needed to do was simple. Keep his mana moving and turn cycles around his body. His strength swelled. The two different qualities of mana grind against each other, decreasing in quantity while improving in quality.

By the time he stopped cultivating, both his ‘fortitude’ and ‘cultivation’ had leveled up by once each, and his mana had regenerated. Skills that would usually take months of constant struggle had leveled up just like that. A fool might say he had found a shortcut to prosperity, but Mannat knew things weren’t so simple. It was a path fraught with danger. He had succeeded today, but who could say he wouldn’t lose his life in some freak accident tomorrow?

That goes to say danger and opportunism go hand in hand.

Mannat opened his eyes and looked around. The Witch was staring at him without blinking.

“What do you think?” She asked as if she had asked him to taste the cake she had cooked for him.

Did she think he would praise her? Mannat blew a raspberry.

“I think you are crazy!” He said causing the Witch to grin from ear to ear. There had to be a reason why everything she did turned extremely eerie, even if it was just an honest to a simple smile.

“Want to try that again?”

Mannat wanted to curse at her but stopped himself just in time. He had leveled up his skills and regenerated his mana in a matter of hours. The result was the best of both worlds. As for whether he would repeat it -- never was not an option. This was a shortcut to misery, but that didn’t mean he could just abandon and forget about it.

He couldn’t answer her because there was no correct answer to the question. He wouldn’t eagerly try to repeat the method in the future, but wouldn’t seal it off as useless either. Everything has a purpose.