A thousand plans and possibilities that ran through my head for years aren’t just proven wrong, instead, I find the opposite of anything in my imagination.

The grove is empty. Failing to find Pado wasn't in my worst nightmares, let alone my plans.

With a few seconds to absorb the surroundings, I see the signs of his former fights. Thousands of tons of ash decomposing and whole patches with tenuous connections to the network. After a minute, I even start to reconnect a few places totally severed but it doesn’t feel like he is hiding anywhere like this.

I frantically look for any hint of an answer that would lead me to him. Not because I’m a sane and rational person, but simply because this is the best chance that I have to not go fully insane.

I push my perception field, even as Aspen connects with the broad network.

We cover the much smaller grove than the vast swathes covering tens of thousands of kilometers we had grown used in the instance. But what it gives up in size it makes up in density. Instead of thin roots connecting islands and fortifications, each tree across over 80 percent of the groove I would have considered fully grown before the system. And with the density of these heavy trees, the total weight likely surpassed the entire instance’s growth which had been fueled by so much mana I could barely conceive of it.

With the usual mental switch, my perception field ‘detaches’ from my body and roams around. It had grown to around 2 kilometers in diameter at the widest point and so I use this property to cover a lot of area simultaneously. But I still don’t know what I’m searching for.

I come to a full stop and sit with my back against one of the tree to meditate.

Then I search for that perfect spot, the careful balance of attention and speed seeking something I don’t know what it is yet, but I will after I see it. The first crossing takes me about two minutes, then I turn around and start covering a parallel line in the opposite direction but it goes a little bit slower. That mental limit slowly develops and gives me a headache like I was forcing myself to read too fast.

I cover more and more ground, but even as I do that, my Vigor plummets. Just the oxygen my brain needs to absorb all this information demands much more blood than most people ever use in their entire body. Each second that I remain awake the system increments insistence that I ought to sleep. I keep going but even before I finish the 3th line, the writing is on the wall and a single glance at my vigor bar freezes me.

I won’t even cover a third of the connected area at this pace. I need a better strategy.

Breathing in deeply and trying to calm myself should have let me center myself with ease, but now the stakes aren’t just my own life or of newly found friends, but of my first friend that I knew I could trust my life to. A friend that I wouldn’t trade for anyone or anything in the world.

With forced mastery after years learning and improving in the void and even before that, the instance, I pour my entire being into the task. Everything I’m drives to a solution even as a thousand seeds, increasingly more desperate, expand their own efforts in search.

Though even if they do have very, very limited perception fields of their own after getting ‘brains’ modeled after my own there is a good chance that they simply won’t be able to recognize what I was searching for, they were simply too young and naive.

The wood and copper batteries buried in the inner world, get heavily drawn as a hundred portals powered entirely by the few seeds that had grown to be able to take control of my inner world portals. If they couldn’t find it in the same way as me, they could at least expand the network.

Crevices, ponds and hills all enter fully the network. They make connections more redundant and robust while finding all the lost trees throughout Pando’s territory.

A thousand plans run through my head and I almost settle for going fully down the rabbit hole and ‘holding my breath’, saving my stamina for as long as possible. But while ‘surrendering’ and letting the other seeds and people in the inner world do the job could be the right path, if the more difficult one, in our case it is not clear which is better.

So I keep searching.

I try to absorb the entire network. Becoming one with each leave on every tree connected, all the plant matter, the exact same way that I learned from Pando. I could visualize the entire network, but nothing beyond. Each second, however, small patches are rejoined as the other seeds identify and target their efforts to reconnect the severed parts of Pando’s domain.

That lights a bulb in my head and I try to find the largest empty swathe.

A near circle of a few square kilometers and surrounding it plenty of old and new ash rings from the exact composition I would expect from burning Quaking Aspen trees.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I go over everything eying place… This is a dwelling and as I direct my full attention to the middle I call out the name of the only race I knew that would have shaped the trees into their abodes:

“Elves.”

Sure it could be a thousand others that I didn’t know the name of, maybe even another one that inhabited our galaxy, but my gut told me I was right.

Stuffy elves, if the stories were to be believed. I would have to meet a few by myself to get a better impression of their general culture and it might all be a giant hoax, but that was the impression they gave to most other races and I had no reason to doubt that.

I go over everything in search of a clue, but come up empty handed. Sure… it could be interesting, but it’s also meaningless compared to finding Pando.

Reaching farther, I seek somewhere that Pando may have hidden if he was still within his territory

My attention is drawn to the lakes.

A dozen of them inside his territory and each very lightly sparsed and even then only in the very edges.

That didn’t call my attention initially given that Pando mostly skipped the very first body of water he came across and he seemed to have followed that instinct throughout, but if he didn’t leave his own domain, he must then have hidden in one of the lakes.

Something within me agrees, but I don’t need my gut to tell me the lakes were my best shot at finding him. I drive my perception field all around and ask all the seeds to concentrate on reaching deeper with their tendrils. Then they connect to Pando's network and grow as fast as possible.

I search the smallest of lakes: nothing.

I move to the next and the next still finding nothing.

Five more come and go without a hint of Pando.

One by one I dismiss all of them, but something is still not sitting right in my search. So I go back to a lake where the feeling I was missing something intensified and spread my will trying to feel Pando’s presence.

I don’t use any particular skill, nor do I rush it.

I only half believe this will work, but it is my only shot at this point.

The remaining time on the clock dwindles, but I release my muscles and let the blood flow slow for a moment. Tendrils will reach out brushing against anything and everything.

And then it is impossible to miss.

A hint of Aether tied to something that I overlooked.

And that is when I feel the stark, complete and utter lack of any hint of Aether anywhere else in the air.

And it feels like standing somewhere with zero percent humidity. I didn’t expect actual rivers, but so little Aether is unnatural and the contrast sharpened my senses and called my attention to Pando.

With the very first hint of luck, I extend the perception field to cover most of the lake and concentrate on the spot that had the most Aether. As I do that, every other seed comes to my side without the need for a single word.

A hundred points of Life explode covering the water in a thousand root strands which grow and grow and then a constant stream head out from my reserves aiming at the very bottom of the lake.

I keep going and going but the faint sense of Aether that sometimes loosely attaches to a location is too nebulous. Like the sense of community that so developed over time in our village.

Sure this was only a single being and weaker to the point I may not have felt it when I left the instance, but even if I can’t pinpoint the epicenter, I know there is something in the middle of this lake near the edge of Pando’s domain.

I keep spreading the roots that reached the bottom outward, even as the others approach from every single direction so that we can consume everything in the lake.

I go back and forth until I get a good grasp of the Aether. With each pass more and more impressions reach me, he is scared and he is making himself small.

Pando should never be small.

I hear the popping of my joints as I squeeze my fist wasting a fraction of a Vigor point then I purposefully relax myself. No sense in wasting my bottoming out Vigor. Taking my attention back to the lake with the little remaining time, I fully spread the perception field and absorb everything.

I drink in the world around me. From the smallest of rotting leaves to the older roots, every smidge that there is passes through my consciousness. I connect to this piece of old home and then I find it. A seed roughly mango sized, not something that should be able to contain Aspen fully.

Time has run out. The last point of my stamina is gone and I can’t even twitch a muscle. My body goes limp, but my mind is iron and I keep going by sheer will. Another hundred life points drive to the nearest root and I concentrate everything I’m in the simple action. I use my only strand of Aether rooted in deep meaning, the one that was fully attuned to myself and my purpose.

True attuned Aether that came without the contamination of the system.

As it flows into my veins, each of my actions becomes deeper and more purposeful than they ever could without such fuel.

I drive forward reaching for my friend, twice as fast as I thought I could even using Life in the effort. My last breath is forcefully driven out of my laying form in both a literal and figurative sense, but while fundamentally dangerous, Aether supersedes the system’s rules.

I WILL HOLD ON.

The roots touch the outside shell of the seed and with a soothing thought, I call out:

“Pando.”

Nothing returns but the faint sense of a scared slumbering being.

“Pando!” I call again trying to keep control of myself after time has already run out nad I’m only waiting for the judge to call out the game.

He stirs and I call one last time:

“PANDO!!!”

A wave of mixed emotions wash over me and his tucked form that can’t fully stay on the tiny seeds unfurls and spill out.

I let the seconds tick even if I’m impatient;

Mental images flow confusedly from him, but soon he seems to sense something and a clear sharp image is sent my way.

Friend?

Yes, I’m back.

Friend. Friend… FRIEND

I let his words wash over me for a moment and as the bangs of the system start to prop my Health. They grow so strong that I fear what it is doing to me as I try to stave off sleep or rather a coma.

“I will be sleeping, but I’m back. Now… everything I’m, everything I could be, is yours. For now, my body is a vessel and my resources tools so that you can properly defend yourself because I promise: nothing will be left on the table when it comes to protecting you.”

The last vestiges of Aether fade spread into my very being and absorbed into my remerging soul. Pando tries to say something, but after my last words, I let the system take me and I can sense nothing in this realm anymore.