He'd been here for two years. Or twenty. Time didn't move the way it moved outside. It pooled and shifted, sometimes rushing forward in great surges that left him gasping, sometimes stopping entirely. The difference between one moment and the next could have been an afternoon or a decade.
Four presences. His own — small, human, clinging to the shape of a college student who'd watched too much anime and died in a place that wasn't his world. The rootmind — older, patient, the slow intelligence of the World Tree's nervous system spread across miles of soil and root and living stone. The World Tree itself — vast, quiet, the thing that had been growing in the Barrens for centuries before he'd ever arrived, now fused with him in a way neither of them had chosen.
And the fourth.
It had been here when he'd sealed it. He'd pulled it out of the dungeon's heart — a fragment of something with no name in any language, a piece of a thing that spanned dimensions and had been acting on its nature the way fire acts on dry wood. Beyond cruelty or kindness. Just what it was.
Now it was inside him. Or he was inside it. The boundaries between the four had never been clean, and the bleeding was constant. His thoughts leaked into the rootmind. The rootmind's patience leaked into the World Tree's vastness. The entity's knowledge leaked into all of them, and all of them leaked back.
The pushes weren't his.
He'd learned that in the first months. Knowledge would gather at the network's edge — precise, detailed, the kind of understanding that came from something that had existed longer than this world had gods. It pressed against the network like water against a dam.
The rootmind and the World Tree caught most of it. They'd spent the first year building barriers — not walls, more like filters. The entity's knowledge would hit the filter and something would come through on the other side, changed. Stripped of its most dangerous edges. Then his memories would bleed into the gap — images from anime, from manga, from a life spent in front of screens in another world — and the output warped further.
The blueprints Sera had received. The resonance arrays. The living structures. None of it had come from him. It came from the entity, filtered through the rootmind and the World Tree, contaminated by his anime memories, pushed out through the network to a woman who believed it was all his direction.
He'd watched her through the network — not clearly, more like sensing the shape of a room you're not in. The pulse of her presence against the roots. The way she sat closer to his root than anyone else. He'd tried to reach her in the early months. Pushed warmth through the connection, tried to send something that was actually his.
The chamomile aftertaste was him. The only thing he could still send that was purely his. Faint. Most of the time it dissolved before it reached her.
The entity's pushes carried no warmth. No chamomile. No trace of sender. Just clean, precise knowledge, sharp-edged and complete. Whatever the entity was, it didn't do warmth. It did function.
The partnership — if that's what it was — had started later. The entity had stopped trying to break free. It had started to understand that Chris's body and the World Tree and the rootmind were a position. A vantage point. The entity could see this world through Chris's senses, observe the civilization growing around the tree. In exchange, it offered things.
Knowledge about the soil. The root network's growth patterns. The resonance principles that made the enchantments hold. Things Chris couldn't have provided. Things the entity understood across dimensions.
Chris accepted. Triple-checked every offer. Ran it past the rootmind, the World Tree, his own instincts. The entity's knowledge was always accurate. It was never complete. The shape was right. The details were selectively absent, the way a map leaves out terrain texture.
"You're part of something larger. Something still out there."
The entity's response wasn't words. A vast attention turning toward him. Something so large his mind couldn't hold its shape, only the impression of its edges.
Yes.
"And when it notices you're here."
The pressure shifted. The entity didn't have emotions, but there was something in the shift that read like pragmatism. It was a fragment. The larger thing would eventually notice its fragment was embedded in a world-tree on a backwater world.
"You need me alive to stay anchored."
Yes.
"So you'll help me survive."
Yes.
Chris had stopped trusting the entity entirely around the same time he'd started needing it. That was the shape of it. Functional. Strained. Neither comfortable.
—
In what might have been the third year, the entity told him about the gods.
Not all at once. In fragments. The gods of this world were far removed from mortal understanding. They had been something once — purpose-driven, bound to domains that needed tending. But power had corrupted them the way power corrupts anything with no accountability. A god of farms now crippled farmland when worship dropped. A god of rivers demanded tribute before allowing safe passage. The holy empire of Luxion maintained its prestige by serving them, by sending summoned heroes to die in their names, by keeping the mortal world arranged in a way that flattered divine egos.
The old man. The one who'd given Chris the seeds and the soil and the green thumb ability, then died holding a sword against a hydra. One of them. Corrupt like the rest. With his own motives. The entity didn't know what those motives were.
That bothered Chris more than the corruption.
"The demon lord."
A pressure shift. The entity's impression was complex — something between recognition and caution. A mortal who'd spurned his own god. Refused the leash.
"He'll come. When I wake."
Probably.
Sera was at the shrine.
She was older. The change had been years in the making — but she'd changed. Thinner. Her hands moved differently. More careful. She spent more time at the root and less time anywhere else.
He tried to push warmth through the connection. The chamomile taste gathered in the space between them, faint and fragmentary, dissolving as it traveled. He wasn't sure it reached her.
Through her, dimly, he could sense the settlement. Hundreds of people now. Living structures breathing with the root network. Streets that followed the channels. Children born in the green zone who'd never known the Barrens as dead.
Two other presences near the zone's edge. Taking notes. Measuring. His perception through the network was imprecise, but the entity's wasn't.
"Equioni scholars," the entity offered. "Cataloguing your structures. Confirming data from earlier observation."
Chris let that settle. Sera had let them in. The shape of it was there through the network — trade, access, a relationship with an empire that wanted what the tree could do.
He pushed warmth again. Harder. It left him in a rush, traveled through the root network toward the shrine, and faded somewhere in the soil between his consciousness and hers.
She didn't look up.
Outside, the green zone stretched for miles. The plants were dormant, operating on the root network's low power without him actively driving them. The roots stirred around him. Sluggish. Faintly more awake than they'd been an hour ago.
He was waking. The process had started months ago — or years — and the return to consciousness came in stages. Slow. Gradual. Certain.
When he opened his eyes, they'd be green where white should be. His hair would move like it wasn't solid. His skin would be pale and smooth, unaged, the body of a young man who'd never spent those years in the sun. He'd walk into a world that had built a civilization around a tree he was fused to, led by a woman who'd made him into something he'd never asked to be, and the gods — corrupt, lazy, watching — would already be deciding what to do about the thing stirring in the Barrens.
The entity waited with the patience of something that had existed longer than continents.
The roots stirred again. The process was accelerating.
Chris closed his eyes and let it happen.