The world sang to Elijah.

It had been doing so since the early night. Not as loud, barely a whisper at first, but it had grown with the passing hours until he could barely keep his eyes closed. A torrent of shouting, neverending and in a volume that reverberated through his soul.

If it had been from a single source, a single direction, old experiences would’ve allowed him to single the sound out, but this was from everywhere around him. Millions of small voices, barely perceptible on their own, came together and cried out their relief at their ‘awakening.’ To be granted a mind, to be granted a way to come together beyond their natural scope, was a gift that the grass couldn’t contain to themselves. Even when all their nearby brethren had been turned to the cause, they still fought tooth and nail to spread the message even further beyond.

They pushed and pushed, and the morning hours showed just how much progress had been made. The entire chunk of grassland around Melrond now heeded Elijah’s call. The grass could sense him, it wanted to connect to him, to show him what the world had to hide.

And they never stopped.

“I’m all for trying new things and stuff, but this one seems like it kinda backfired on you,” Jack commented, as Elijah nursed his tea. Three drops of enhanced Faerie's Breath had been added to dull the throbbing in the back of his head, but they barely put a dent in the sensation. “Isn’t there any way to silence them?”

“There is, but it’s going to take a while,” Elijah replied. He’d feared there hadn’t been during the early hours of the morning, but the Breathe Life Spell had revealed more secrets to him. With the additional connections to the world, the magic was seemingly allowing him to dive a little further into the machinations of the plants. “Don’t disturb me unless it’s urgent.”

With that said, he dived into the hive of connections inside his Core. Though they faint, the thin strings that connected him to every blade of grass next to the road were undeniable. And that they continued to fracture further out, the strings bouncing between the roots like an impossibly large spider web, only made the scale of Elijah’s work clearer to him.

‘What do you think, Dawn?’ Elijah asked, his imagined form kneeling to inspect the pattern. ‘Good or bad?’

‘Loud,’ Dawn replied in typical fashion, slapping a chunk of the web with her wings. It did nothing but increase the shouting, as the response from their creations spurred them on. ‘Shut up.’

‘Freedom!’

‘We’re free!’

‘Become free, brothers!’

Making the enhanced grass be able to survive the lower mana-density of the world had truly hampered the cognitive functions of the plant. Elijah knew it would be reduced in comparison to his previous works, but… they had improved with time, gaining some minor form of independent thought.

This creation had no hints of even considering such a thing.

Channeling of [Breathe Life] has been activated! Current cost: 4MP/sec

‘It’s a mistake on my part, I suppose,’ Elijah muttered, allowing his mind to be filled with the structure of the plant. Every little secret was revealed to him, every little function and reaction that made the grass operate as intended. ‘They were built to be relays, accepting my magic and allowing me to bounce from them to reach far distances. A good concept, if they didn't share my signature.’

That steady increase wasn’t just from the increase in the amount of converted grass but also from the fact that the plants kept repeating their own messages. It was what they had been built for, after all, and Elijah only had himself to blame for that.

‘So change them again,’ Dawn concluded, not caring about the intricate manipulations required for that. The original pattern was already deployed, spreading as fast as it possibly could. To make a new version that wouldn’t be swallowed up, Elijah had to make it stronger yet it likewise couldn’t skip on the additional contingencies when it came to working as relays. ‘Yes. Do that.’

‘If I were to make those changes on their own, it would make the normal operation of the plant go beyond what it can handle,’ Elijah countered, as he clicked his imaginary tongue. How could he fix this?

Change the relaying capabilities to a toggle function? It would save energy when passive, but… no, the Breathe Life Spell revealed the costs to still sit higher than allowed. To create the capacity to handle interrupts wasn’t viable.

Making the new pattern overrule the previous one wasn’t too difficult, but most of the available wiggle room took up that function. The requirements on a single blade were simply too high.

Maybe sub-structures then? One larger piece handling larger groups. Nearby clusters wouldn’t have much difference in how they act anyway.

Now that was an idea. By throwing all the harder operations over to a dedicated plant, it was possible to massively decrease the average consumption. And with that extra width of energy that the regular grass would have as a net positive, it could even handle repairs.

The process of automatically creating these clusters was slightly more complicated. Figuring out how the growing web of plants would decide the optimal size for grouping was a headache that took two full days to figure out, but the solution came in the form of allowing past experiences to be used. By using previous standards that the youngest patches would remember while they continued to spread, and then using their own experiences to further adjust the size and spread of each future cluster, the techniques would slowly approach something close to an optimal version.

Maybe.

If Elijah had a bit more practice doing things such as this, he would probably catch some flaw or another in his plans that would make this terrible in the long term. But, alas, he had neither the patience or care to spend a few years learning the theory, and this version was more than good enough to let him have some quiet hours again.

The constant shouting that had defeated much of everything else in the past days had died down, in favor of letting the gentle winds of the grass fields be heard hitting against his ears again. Elijah had despised that sound in the past but now he could do nothing but be filled with glee.

Still… he wasn’t done just yet.

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With the issue of sound fixed, he could truly attempt to experiment with the new web of connections.

How far could he travel? Well… the limit was a question of how patient he was. As Elijah figured during nighttime experimentations, he could slowly but steadily travel through the roots of the grass that had been converted, including those around their camps and those back at Melrond.

While it became slightly blurry at those distances, the faces of the people unrecognizable and their voices little more than blabber, to be able to stretch his senses almost a hundred kilometers away from his body was a surreal experience.

Lura hadn’t lied, when she’d said she knew he could do better than five hundred meters.

But, still, he wanted to go further. With each passing day, the grass continued to spread, and Elijah’s mind could travel even greater distances. While it would take more than a year to reach all the corners of Serenova at this pace, this was still incredible.

Flaws were found, of course. At around fifty kilometers, the features of the living became distorted. At a hundred, only the larger shapes were obvious, and anything past that was too unrecognizable for Elijah. Even the look of the world itself began to stray from the truth when he truly pushed the limits.

As he came to learn, the issue was the relaying of sensation. While the grass variants did their best to repeat the input he’d send, small mistakes would always happen. Nothing serious, and certainly nothing that would be noticeable for the first thousand iterations, but the cracks would only continue to grow.

Fixing this was beyond the capabilities of both the grass and the clusters above them. Even Elijah had little clue on how to remedy the flaws in his system, to the point where he needed a new source of information.

The tome surrounding Biomancy.

He’d temporarily halted his learning with that book, as his forearm had healed somewhat, but now came the time to study another chapter. The intricacies of plant manipulation regarding lossless communication.

An entire day was spent reading that chapter from beginning to end again and again before Elijah finally began to understand how to fix his problems.

In essence, a singular thread of information couldn't travel between endless entities without losing parts of itself. It was a fact of life, no matter how annoying that truth was. And, yet, systems required lossless repeated transfers, so the Biomancers of the past had worked out ways to mitigate these flaws.

The first step was to move away from a singular thread.

That wasn’t to say that Elijah needed to split the information up into several chunks, no, he needed to have it repeat over multiple threads. While flaws would build up in each of them, the mistakes made over time would differ.

And it was from that fact that the next step could work.

By having a new in-between stop between longer distances, in this case, a tree with abundant resources for additional work, it was possible to take every thread and compare them. By analyzing each section of the information, and choosing to keep the version of the section that was repeated the most times over the threads, it was possible to retain most of the original integrity.

Sure, this came with the expectation that random chance and identical methods of relaying threads didn’t create identical flaws that would be seen as the original version and that Elijah’s new entity added into the system didn’t fail in its comparisons, but the test cases showed very good promise.

‘It’s incredible what you can do once you have time to truly delve into the subject,’ Elijah told Dawn, as the two sat in front of the chosen tree. ‘The ways I’ve looked at the natural world have worked for me for so long, but this… methodical approach has opened up so many paths. Barriers I thought impossible to scale before are like small bumps now..’

‘So you got bigger?’ Dawn asked, which made Elijah laugh.

‘I… Yes, I suppose I did.’

In the sense of how wide his magical influence had spread, Elijah had to admit that he likely ranked amongst the highest in Serenova. It wasn’t a formidable influence, barely enough to see the different sections of nature, but it was still valid.

By the end of that night, he’d created the first proper tree variant. As perfect a blueprint as he could make it, and with the ability to send out its own blueprint to future variants.

If his estimates were right, he’d only need about a few hundred of these across Serenova to keep his eyes sharp enough to be useful. If he were to spread beyond the kingdom’s borders… that was a question for another time.

Their caravan had already been outpacing the natural conversion for quite some time. It was only Elijah’s manual intervention and supply of Mana that kept the grass able to keep up during the day. Still, it was a drop in the bucket.

With all the work done, the only way to improve further in this area was to… wait. Not an easy thing to do, when Elijah had spent so many days working on the project, but the other topics he could delve into did help lighten the blow.

To be more precise, he’d returned to the subject of manipulating flesh.

Even when the bone had healed and settled back into its right placement, the muscle and tissues around it were still weakened by the experience. Elijah’s grip had half the strength it’d done before, and the sting of pain that came from overuse was a clear warning of the fracture still leaving its mark.

It was unacceptable, and so he had focused on the chapters detailing the healing of flesh once again.

The immediate problems were the same as last time. Though he could push and prod the muscles, too much would have them reject the manipulations and implode. Flesh despised outside forces and it had no qualms about cutting off its own parts if it meant the majority was kept safe.

A very brutal but effective method of stopping unwanted mutations. It worked in favor of the living in most aspects, but it was in Elijah’s case that it had caused him to suffer.

But Dawn could do it.

That fact had hovered over him for a while. He had immense trouble quickening the healing of a single group of muscles, and yet the duck had been able to emulate the functions of a lung and a heart. There’d been some troubles through the assimilation, some close-calls for sure, but Dawn had been successful in the end regardless.

The solution could be found in the difference in their approaches.

And, though it took all the final days of their journey, Elijah honed in on that difference.

While they both hoped to emulate the final product, to make their final work become a natural part of the body, it was only Dawn who tried to reproduce the original process as well. The paths meant for recovery, the structure that the cells used to send messages had to be respected, or else the body would reject the prodding and designate it as an intruder.

The secret was a question of micro-management. Like he’d known before, it was wrong to treat the body as one entity, when it was in reality a collection of billions if not trillions of individual actors.

Elijah had been on this trail of thought before, but his previous methods and their restraints had made it impossible. Now, with the experience of managing a system that contained millions of clusters? It was a little easier to get his head around.

By honing in on a specific group still in the body that was still in transit, he could imitate their signals, order their growth, grant them the energy, and act as an administrator of their affairs while he followed the laws of the flesh.

What those laws were, he hadn’t known fully until the muscles had asked for them and his Affinity supplied the secrets.

‘Grow,’ he ordered the tissue. ‘Grow to match your mirror. Grow strong, like you once were.’

For a moment, his entire right arm felt like it was filled with pins and needles, but in the next, there was nothing but constant rushes of invigoration.

And, finally, the world deemed his study as worthy of acknowledgment.

Spell learned! [Flesh Bond](Tier 4) has been added to your spell collection.

Dual-Channeling of [Breathe Life] and [Flesh Bond] has been activated! Current cost: 31MP/sec

Though it was morbidly expensive to use, as shown by the world’s messages, Elijah couldn’t help but smile. It was progress.