The Oracle Paths

Chapter 1229: The Tree That Should Not Speak

Calyx was a gaunt man with that grayish pallor shared by most natives. The hypnotic violet glow in his irises under daylight wasn’t unusual either.

What set him apart from the rest of his kind was his size. He was average—nowhere near the ranks of Life-Lumyst-pumped colossi around him. Even the Underworld Barbarians from the Duskwight Lands towered over him in height and frame, turning him into a near-dwarf among his own people.

Maybe that lingering sense of inferiority and rejection had fermented into hatred and ambition, driving him to train and study like a madman. By the time he realized it, he’d become a respected—and feared—permanent member of the Radiant Conclave, ruling above everyone and beneath only one.

Once he reached the top, still steeped in resentment and small-man rage, his ambition naturally set its sights on the Celestial—and on the Titan Tree, Anthace. In a way, for that corrupted tree, he was the perfect servant: easy to sway, easy to steer, and harboring a bottomless grudge against the world.

Of course, Lord Calyx hadn’t started off insane enough to want Twyluxia destroyed. Ruling the continent would’ve been more than enough to soothe him.

That was before he let Anthace corrupt him. Once he accepted the traitor tree’s energy and ”help,” there was no shifting into reverse. For a long time now, the master assassin and spymaster hadn’t even counted himself as one of his own.

And yet, watching—helpless—as everyone he knew and hated got erased in an instant without the slightest effort, he felt a rage and loathing surge up fiercer than anything he thought himself capable of. Not just at Jake, their all-powerful enemy—but at those useless wastes who couldn’t last half a second.

Eldrion most of all... Calyx’s gaze locked onto the broken, unconscious elder sprawled a few meters away, naked disgust and fury in his eyes. After all, Calyx was the only one still standing.

”Dead weight to the bitter end,” he snarled, limping over and spitting on the warrior’s head.

Each finger snapped like brittle twigs under his boot, ligaments tearing with a wet pop as he pried the staff free. He didn’t just want the weapon—he wanted Eldrion to feel the desecration, even in his coma. Warm blood slicked his palms, tacky and hot. The pristine white staff came loose at last, rewarded with another blood-flecked glob of spit on the crown of the elder’s skull.

Calyx straightened, drew a long breath, and shut his eyes, flicking his long, blood-slick black hair back with careless disdain. He seemed to have completely forgotten that an entire crowd of enemies was silently watching him—including the one responsible for the massacre.

Jake had tracked every motion, every tell, without the slightest shift in expression, as if letting Calyx take the lead. In truth, he’d already sensed the immeasurably vast root network unfurling exponentially beneath them the instant Calyx raised the staff.

’He knows what he’s doing a hell of a lot better than the last guy who used it,’ he noted, clocking the other hidden weapons and tools on Calyx’s person, all fashioned from the same wood.

Something told him the relay to Anthace didn’t much care about the specific object—so long as it was part of the tree’s body and the Titan gave permission.

’This tree really thinks I can’t feel its mental sense sweeping the battlefield on loop?’ Jake’s upper lip curled with pure contempt, finally letting a real emotion show.

It didn’t last. A chill ironed his features flat as the purpose behind the root deployment crystallized. The dying spiritual energy of that fucking plant reeked like a rotting corpse, tainting everything it touched like a creeping poison.

Aside from him—and maybe Asfrid—no Player or native seemed to have noticed a thing. It was like an undetectable tag, pinging their locations for what came next while twisting them with insidious changes they hadn’t clocked yet. The air itself tasted wrong, metallic and rancid, like breathing in decay.

”Hmph.” With a single thought, a burst of Spirit Power atomized the microfilaments of spiritual energy carrying Anthace’s will and awareness around him.

Maybe it was his imagination, but he could’ve sworn he heard a silent shriek of pain and fury. The echo didn’t hit his ears—it shuddered through bone. A few nearby soldiers clutched their temples without knowing why.

’That’ll teach you to respect my personal space.’

Wordlessly, he spread his spiritual energy as a massive sphere over the zone Anthace had covered—and then simply... assimilated it. Converted it. A slow, deliberate feeding, like a predator swallowing a struggling prey whole.

For anyone versed in soulmancy and Spirit Power, it was pants-wettingly terrifying. And almost no one saw it. Aside from Asfrid, the native Radahn... and of course, Claire.

For the Eltarian priestess, the shock hit hardest. Spirituality was her thing; she knew what Jake had just done wasn’t some technique you could memorize or teach. She couldn’t do anything like it. Not now, and probably never.

She might replicate the outcome one day—but not this. She felt like she was watching a star go supernova up close—beautiful, annihilating, and utterly beyond reach.

’How did you change this much in so little time?’ she wondered, her expression unusually grave. This wasn’t just raw talent and hard work paying off.

She had talent. This was something else. Something hungrier. Something that had stopped being human.

After Jake’s inexplicable masterstroke, the tree’s mind sense yanked back underground for good, retreating into the safety of its roots. By then, Calyx had planted the staff in the ground, using it like a cane to make direct contact with the network. Wi-Fi to Ethernet.

While Calyx played the part of the shattered survivor who’d finally snapped, Anthace’s massive roots finished closing the circle around them—a process that had actually begun back during the very first duel. At the slightest signal, they could impale every soldier in their camp, turning the flat, barren plain chosen for their final battle into an endless pit.

And that signal was coming. It was the other reason Jake had scrapped the duels. If the enemy wouldn’t play fair, why the hell should he stay ”honorable”? He was principled, not rigid.

More importantly, those giant buds and flowers that had spat out the feral duelists Eldrion sent to fight... beneath them lay thousands more. No—millions.

And among the vital and spiritual signatures his mind sense picked up, plenty eclipsed a Saint’s. It was like some long-running conspiracy had been brewing in the shadows, and the puppeteer had set things up so the outcome was all but inevitable.

It felt like fighting fate itself. Could fate be changed? Could the inevitable be bent?

”Even if it is fate, I’ll make it kneel,” Jake said, matter-of-fact, finally summoning a weapon.

A long black blade—somewhere between a sword and an anti-cavalry war saber—materialized without a sound between his hands. He wrapped his fingers around the grip and shifted into an aggressive fencing stance. His aura changed hard.

From wide-open to suppressed. Dense. Murky. His outline blurred, while the lethality of the cosmic energy storming around him spiked off the charts.

The air around him seemed to splinter—molecules grinding against each other like broken glass in a blender. Even the ground under his feet blackened, hairline cracks spiderwebbing outward with a sound like breaking teeth. His killing intent kept compressing tighter and tighter, a dark vortex of pure execution.

For a heartbeat, even the wind seemed to hold its breath. No bird cried. No soul dared whisper. Soldiers felt the hairs on their necks stand and their guts twist as if the world itself had turned on them.

And Calyx? Calyx felt it too. That thing standing across from him was no man. No Player. No king. It was a cosmic executioner. And the moment he blinked, he knew Jake would erase him like a typo.

Then Calyx’s eyes snapped open and he let loose a tearing scream. The next second, all hell broke loose, and a battle of breathtaking violence and destruction finally detonated across the main battlefield.

One Player against millions. A corrupted Titan Tree against an aberration that could stand toe-to-toe with it.

That opening clash was the last fuse waiting to be lit for the rest of the continent to ignite. Regions that had been spared—so far—by war, skirmishes, or the monster invasions from beyond the membrane were suddenly smothered by a dense forest of roots.

From their trunks spewed an unquantifiable horde of spawn, preying on anything alive—or sentient—within reach. Humans, beasts, wandering vengeful souls, Spirit and Living Artifacts—everything was on the menu.

The whole of Twyluxia had just entered a state of total war.