Alex’s exclamation caught everyone’s attention.
"It’s what?" Bladedance asked with a confused look.
"Elixir?" the old man asked, swiping his own palm on the surface of the giant root. It came back sticky, just like the other two, and he immediately tasted it. When he did, his eyes went wide in surprise as well.
"Elixir! This is Elixir!" he shouted. "And it’s so much thicker too. More condensed than anything I’ve ever prepared."
"What are you guys talking about?" Bladedance asked.
"This root is covered in Elixir," the old man said. "You know, the Elixir that makes your body strong."
"I know what an Elixir is," Bladedance said with an annoyed look. "I thought you mentioned that Elixir came from the beasts. Isn’t that why I have so much within my body?"
"The Elixir your body has does e from the beasts, but the beasts get it from somewhere else too," Alex explained. "They have to go down to a region of sludge underground where they absorb the Elixir from."
Bladedance frowned. "This Elixir is down there? Then why is it up here too?" she asked.
The old man shrugged. He didn’t know.
"Well, we theorized that the Elixir was created by the thing that was down there," Alex said. "The Yin vein or the metal formation that had spread all throughout..."
Alex’s words trailed as he looked toward the wall again, to its smooth surface, to its cylindrical body, to its surface covered in Elixir.
He moved to it immediately, feeling it not to see what it was like, but if it was similar to what he found down there.
It was.
"Holy... shit!" he couldn’t help but exclaim. "It wasn’t a Yin vein or a metal formation, was it? Those things were roots! They were all roots."
The old man’s eyes widened in realization as well. "Roots? These same roots?" he asked.
"It makes sense," Alex said. "If they were Yin veins, then Hell shouldn’t have so much Yang aura. If they were formations, then they neither had formation nodes, nor script runes. This is it. They were roots. Roots connected to a tree that actually does what we thought."
Alex’s eyes widened slowly, the understanding settling in.
A tree would need no power source to act. A tree would need no formation to act. A tree could gather Yin and make use of it.
"Then... does this root belong to a Yin gathering tree?" Alex asked, his question presented toward the Guardian Tiger.
"For function alone, you can call it that," the Guardian Tiger said. "But in name, there is another name this tree goes by."
"What is it?" Bladedance asked, her own curiosity growing by the second.
"The fog will be clearing soon," the cub said, ignoring her question. "You will see things better now."
As the Guardian Tiger said, the fog did grow thinner and thinner, the closer they got to the island. Their visibility improved, but still they couldn’t see the tree.
The darkness within the realm hadn’t gone away yet, causing Alex and the rest to wonder if they wouldn’t see the tree until it was gone.
"How much longer before we see the tree?" Alex asked.
"See the tree? You’ve been looking at the tree forever now," the cub said. "Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed yet?"
"Forever?" Alex asked, looking ahead. "But... I don’t see any shape in the darkness."
"We’re in its shadow," Bladedance said softly, more to herself than anyone else. Her eyes widened slowly. "It’s not that there is no tree in the dark. Everything that is dark, is the tree."
Her words caused Alex and the old man to look back at the darkness. Their heads swiveled to the left and then to the right, watching the darkness extend to all ranges their vision could follow.
The fog lessened some more before it finally disappeared.
And then, the tree came into view.
Bladedance was correct.
The tree was the darkness. It covered their entire field of view and more. In fact, it likely had been doing that for a long time. The fog had merely constricted their view.
To say the tree was massive was an understatement. To say the tree was the size of a mountain was an understatement as well.
There were no words Alex could think of to explain the size of the tree, except that if they were out in space and there was no spatial anomaly to disrupt the view, the tree would be a prominent feature that could be viewed from outside.
Alex didn’t have to look at the other two’s faces to see their shock. It permeated out of them, just like his most likely did.
In the face of something so grand, both a Celestial and the man who had lived 800 thousand years were shocked. It was easy to believe that Alex would be too.
The tree was the type to have several smaller trunks, each the size of mountains, growing together to a moderately tall height based on its width. From there, the tree expanded horizontally, its canopy wide enough to likely be dozens and dozens of the width of the tree.
The vines that extended downward from the canopy did extend far out into the foggy sea, their size making them assume that it was some sort of pillar growing out of the ground.
The three looked at the tree, their words failing them at that moment. Even Godslayer in Alex’s spiritual sea had gone silent at some point.
They didn’t realize when it was that the leaf had stopped moving.
The cub jumped, landing on a tiny piece of land that was left free from the tree’s trunks and roots. The entire island was otherwise swallowed by the tree, barely visible anywhere else.
The cub turned toward them, smiling at their shock.
"Do you just wish to stand there, or will you e onto the island?" the cub asked. "As strong as it is, it cannot municate with you unless you e in closer."
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