Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 3158: Faster Than Thoughts

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Realm Of True Evil

After going through every nook and cranny of my new form with the assistance of the Hive Spirit, the conclusion was almost anticlimactic.

I was a gigantic ass tree.

That was it.

There was no hidden consciousness buried inside the genetic structure, no extraordinary soul organ, and no mysterious ability that could explain the behavior of the forest. My transformed body behaved exactly as a tree should, only on a ridiculously larger scale.

For a moment, I thought I had wasted my time. I was already preparing to revert to my original form when I suddenly sensed something.

It was faint.

So faint that I almost mistook it for an ordinary fluctuation in my surroundings.

A resonance.

I froze and focused on it.

The sensation wasn’t coming from outside my body. It was traveling through my roots. More precisely, it felt as though something was guiding them.

One of my roots began responding to the faint resonance, subtly shifting its direction as though following an invisible signal. I concentrated harder, and the sensation became clearer. It wasn’t commanding me directly, nor was it controlling my body in the conventional sense.

It was more like a current.

A resonance flowing through the network beneath the forest and gently influencing the direction in which my roots wanted to grow.

I followed it. The sensation led downward. Deeper and deeper.

My attention followed the resonance through the soil, past the upper layers of the earth, and toward the enormous underground network I had discovered earlier. The deeper I focused, the stronger the connection became.

And then I understood where it was leading.

The roots of the trees weren’t merely connected because they happened to grow into one another. There was another network of roots that was connected to their roots.

The resonance was guiding my roots toward the same place where the roots of every other tree were connected.

Deep beneath the forest. Whatever secret this place was hiding, it wasn’t in the trees above.

It was underneath them.

And for the first time since arriving in the Realm of True Evil, I had finally found something that might explain how an entire forest of supposedly ordinary trees could behave as though it were one enormous living entity.

Now that I had a hint that the answer I was looking for might lie underground, I didn’t recall my clone-head drones. I still needed them to continue exploring the surrounding area, since I had yet to determine exactly where I had landed within the Realm of True Evil. Knowing that I was somewhere inside the realm wasn’t enough. I needed a general understanding of my location, the surrounding terrain, and ideally some landmarks before I ventured deeper into this bizarre ecosystem.

I did consider sending some of my clones underground to explore the root system, but the thought immediately brought me back to what I had witnessed earlier. The white-feathered leviathan had been dragged down by the forest, its enormous body crushed into a compact ball before being dropped onto the ground. Then the roots had erupted from beneath the soil, wrapped themselves around the corpse, and dragged it deep underground. Whatever was happening beneath the surface, those roots weren’t merely transporting nutrients between trees. They were also retrieving and storing food.

Sending my clones into that underground network therefore seemed like a terrible idea. Even with their strength, there was no guarantee they would survive long enough to reach the deeper sections of the root system. For all I knew, the moment they entered the network, the entire underground system would detect them, tear them apart, and turn them into manure before they could gather anything useful. I had no idea how deep the roots went, how extensive the network was, or what else might be living beneath the forest. If I wanted to explore it, I might eventually have to do it personally.

I was still contemplating whether that risk was worth taking when I suddenly felt a faint sensation of being watched.

I considered reverting to my original form and using If You See Me, I See You to determine who was observing me, but I never got the chance.

Something struck me.

One moment I was floating among the clouds in my gigantic tree form. The next, my body had been cleanly severed below the torso. There had been no warning, no sound, and no visible attack. I hadn’t even perceived the moment of impact. I only realized what had happened when the upper half of my body began separating from the lower half.

I immediately reconstructed myself and swept my senses across the surroundings. Nothing.

The only clue was a faint disturbance in the air several miles ahead, already fading by the time I detected it. Whatever had attacked me had crossed that distance after attacking before I completed my thought.

That alone was enough to put me on guard.

I prepared for a second attack and waited, but none came.

After several moments of silence, I began reconsidering what had happened. If that thing had been targeting me, there was little reason for it to strike only once and disappear. The attack had occurred while I was transformed into a gigantic tree, which suggested another possibility.

Perhaps I wasn’t its target, the tree was the target. I decided to test the theory rather than speculate endlessly.

I had one of my clones transform into another gigantic tree and float among the clouds. I then positioned myself directly on its massive trunk and deliberately made no effort to hide my presence. Compared to the tree, I was practically microscopic. Its trunk was so enormous that I looked like nothing more than a tiny speck clinging to its surface.

If something was hunting these gigantic trees, then this should give it every reason to attack again.

I simply stood there and waited, keeping my senses alert while watching the vast expanse before me.