[Book One] Chapter 8 — Bloom Against the Rhythm

[Author Notes: ~800 words +, Grammar and Flow check. Added memories of the past to maintain continuity and highlight her struggle. Made the ending somewhat ominous.]

[CW: Inner pain, trauma]

I remember when we were back home—

Our father would sit across from us, watching us do our homework like a silent overseer. To anyone else, it probably sounded innocent. Just a parent being involved. Supportive, even.

But that wasn't the truth.

He had a sick attachment to this ritual. He called it a family tradition, as if surveillance was something noble, as if pressure passed down through bloodlines could somehow be beautiful.

And while he sat there, arms crossed, eyes never blinking, a metronome stood between us on the table.

Click. Click.
Click. Click.
Click. Click.

Time, dissected.
Judgment, measured.

For hours, that sound carved itself into us—into me. Into whoever I was before, I was now. It wasn’t just noise. It was a form of control. A rhythm that trained your breathing, your thinking. That hammered your sense of self into a frame you didn’t choose.

Click. Click.

“Why aren't you more successful?”

Click. Click.

“Are you really so stupid that you can’t solve this?”

Click. Click.

“Such a disgrace to our family.”

Click. Click.

“What would your mother think?”

Click. Click.

“It is your fault.”

The words always hurt—but eventually, they became background static to the real torture: the pattern.

The clicking became the rhythm of failure. Of never being right enough. Smart enough. Man enough.
And when that voice wasn’t cutting into me, the click kept going, drilling deeper.

Click clack.

Clack cli—

One day it broke. Snapped in half.
The sound stopped. For real.

That moment was probably one of the happiest in that sad little life—the one outsiders always called ‘privileged’.

But the silence didn’t last. The clicking never really left. It got inside. So now, whenever something claws at the edge of my thoughts—pressure, uncertainty, fear—it comes back.

Just like now.

The moment I thought too deeply about my choices, that memory clawed its way forward.
And once the box was open, the ticking resumed.

Iva cried out, an invisible cry in a space with no mouth. She didn’t want that sound—not again!
But there was nowhere to run. No hallway to slam a door behind. No friend that could her hug, whisper other sounds in her ear. There was just the empty white void of her mind, and the rhythm that refused to die.

Click. Click.

“Make a choice.”

Click. Click.

“Make it now.”

Click. Click.

“Why are you such a sissy?”

Click. Click. 

“You are a boy, not a girl.”

Click. Click.

“The skirt your friend gave you? I burned it. “

Click. Click.

“You are a man, so make choice.”

All I have to do is choose, she told herself. All I have to do is what Father says, she cried. Then the sound will stop, she lied. That’s all, she forced a smile.

Just choose.

But choose what?

Orbinina, what should I choose? she pleaded. I don’t know what’s right anymore!

It wasn’t like she had no ideas. It wasn’t total ignorance. But the ticking blurred her thoughts. Drowned logic. Drowned hope. She didn’t want to choose, she wanted to wear the skirt. She only had to choose right.

But the rhythm didn’t care about truth, about feelings—it only demanded resolution.

A scene from some old film surfaced—an adventurer standing before a table of goblets.
One wrong choice and he’d die.

Same thing here.

Only, she didn’t know what would kill her.

Her mumbling turned erratic, spiraling, skimming the edge of madness. Her voice no longer sounded like her own.

The clicking grew louder. She cursed the System under her breath, then screamed at it in her head.

There’s no way that memory came back on its own! The System wants me to fail—it planted that memory here. It’s trying to break me. Now, of all times.

Iva swore she’d destroy it. Wipe the whole thing clean. One day, she’d bury the System beneath her roots.

But first—she needed a way to stop the sound.

Before she’d merged with the others, the past had been hazy. Her sense of self, fractured.
So why couldn’t she fracture this memory again? Hide it? Lock it away? Maybe… behind a wall of mana?

Just tuck it behind something else. Seal it up. Out of sight, out of mind. It felt dangerous—but also liberating.

What if she could do the same with emotions? With pain? With everything that made her feel too much? Made her feel human?

Maybe that’s what she should’ve been doing all along. Not worrying about who she was supposed to be. Not caring about past expectations, guilt, gender, legacy, tradition.

Maybe I can build something like a seal, she thought, her voice distant even inside herself. Seal it all away. The shame, the noise, the labels. Even the grief.

But… isn’t a world without emotion kind of dull? She thought to herself. The answer a clear—

—Probably. But maybe that was what it took to think clearly. To make decisions based on logic, not fear.

Click. Click.
Click. Click.
Click.

That’s it. That’s enough, Iva yelled. I need to build the wall. Now.

She turned to Orbinina. Her thoughts slowed. Sharpened. And in that moment—she knew what she had to do.

Iva had never really asked herself how Orbinia came to be—how the orb became something that could store mana without losing it, how it had changed shape and structure as her mind and control evolved. She only remembered that, with time, the cracks on Orbinia’s surface had vanished—smoothing into a polished shell as her understanding of mana grew.

So the only logical conclusion was this: The outer layer of Orbinia must have formed from something like mana-glass. A shell of refined willpower. A memory, sealed tight.

If that was possible... then shouldn’t she be able to do the same thing now? To find the source of the clicking in this void and wrap it up in the same kind of barrier?

The plan seems fine, but how should I find the— She stopped mid-thought. That was stupid.
This was her world. Her void. Her mind.

Everything was in here somewhere. That meant the echoing wasn’t random—it was coming from somewhere specific.

So Iva started to move. Each click sent a sick churn through her. With every step, the rhythm gnawed deeper. She couldn’t imagine how her old self—Marco—had lived through this. No, she knew. The person, the one that was taken from her. The feeling Marco had for her were deep, but there was also something else. Regret. Fear. But fear of that?

Iva asked herself if he simply had to be insane. And yet... he’d always seemed so calm. So rational.
That contrast made her ache. Of course it was her—the one who kept Marco from falling apart.

She felt sad. But also—grateful. Because even if her gender felt like an abstract concept half the time, at least now—she was herself. Not someone else's role. Not someone else's expectations. And strangely enough, Iva also knew that the person who had stood beside Marco all his life would enjoy this change more than he’d ever allowed himself to admit.

Then, the echo changed. It didn’t fade. It focused.

Click click.

The sound pulsed like a headache made of memory.

Click Click.

Her inner world shook with it. And the closer she drew to its source, the less her mindscape looked like the endless, familiar void.

It was warping.

What... the fuck, Iva muttered internally, stepping over a shimmering white border that rippled like oil on water—only reversed. The white was the contaminant here, infecting the emptiness with shape and sound and wrongness.

The further she went, the more it felt like walking into the brain of a dying goddess.

Clocks. Everywhere. A landfill of grandfather clocks half-buried in white soil. Each one ticking, their pendulums swinging with warped, sluggish grace.

Every ten ticks, something heavier pulsed through the air—white waves vibrating underfoot like pressure shockwaves. But when the metronome sounded—sharp and precise—it erased everything for a moment.

A perfect silence. The eye of the storm.

Then it started again. Louder. Heavier. The clicking multiplied. Thought became impossible.

But then—she saw it.

The Metronome.

The original one. The one he used. Sitting on a wooden pedestal, high above the distorted landscape, encased in a perfect white sphere.

Inside the sphere, the world changed again. There was no ground—just a floating slab of broken stone, suspended over an endless, blinding void.

Around it, shards of glass spun like moons in orbit. Too many to count. As she stepped through the glistening light of the boundary, a jolt ran through her.

A shape formed around her. Not flesh. Not bark.

—A body.

A body made of light.

She blinked—if blinking was still something she could do. Her form was abstract. A humanoid silhouette of shimmering mana. No face. No detail. But unmistakably feminine. An aethereal wonder.

This is... alien, she thought, watching her glowing limbs move. No. It’s not alien. It’s just unfamiliar. It’s the first time.

I’ve never had a body before. Not like this. Not one that felt like mine.

But there was no time to linger on it—even if the new, bubbly feelings inside her made it hard not to stop and take a closer look at herself.

The only path forward was a trail of floating glass shards—each one orbiting the central platform in erratic rhythms and strange heights.

Iva sighed. Of course. I really have to jump from piece to piece to reach that thing...

She took a run-up and—hop—launched herself toward the first shard. It held her. Just barely.

Beneath her glowing feet, the nearly transparent glass pulsed with light. Within it, images stirred like memories drowned under water. She squinted but couldn’t make anything out clearly, so she leapt again.

The second shard was more stable—and sharper.

Within this one, a man and a woman stood shouting across a kitchen table. The air between them thick with blame and exhaustion. She couldn’t hear them, but she didn’t need to.

Somehow, Iva knew that scene. She didn’t want to dwell.

Next jump.

The third shard stabbed her mind. The images didn’t flicker—they pierced. Like a shard pressing directly into her brain. She stumbled mid-landing, nearly tipping into the white abyss below.

Mother. She was trying to stop him. Trying to pull him back from the edge of something monstrous. And she was crying. Not from anger—but from love. From loss. She couldn’t bear what the man she loved had become.

She was sad the human she had fallen in love with turned out like th— Wait.

Human? Why did she phrase it like that? Why didn’t it feel... normal? She shook her head and jumped—next shard.

This one looked stable—but what she saw inside sent her reeling. Our mother didn’t die?
But—I—we—how’s that possible?! We saw it! We were there! We—

What were we?!

She turned, and the shard still shimmered behind her—quiet, cruel, undeniable. Iva didn’t want to look at it again. Didn’t want to know if the image had changed.

I’ll deal with that later, she whispered to herself. If there is a later.

And like the shattered glass beneath her feet, something cracked inside. Not just her thoughts—her identity. Nothing made sense anymore. Was it just another illusion? A memory twisted by the System?

No. She felt it. This didn’t belong to the System. It hadn’t touched this. But then why—

Why did it all feel like a lie?
Why did it hate her so much?
Why did it rip out people she loved?
Why did it leave her like this?

Iva didn’t know what was truly real anymore. But there was no stopping.

I have to go on. This place—I can’t think. The clicking. The shards. The pressure. It was all trying to fracture her again, no ruin everything she had fought for so far in this world.

I need to go now—Orbinia is waiting for me, she told herself, trying to sear the truth into the lie that someone was actually waiting for her at ‘home’.

It only took a few more jumps to reach her goal. The memories clawed at her, louder with every step—but she pressed forward.

Click Click

Driven by pain. By defiance. By a desperate, ragged determination to silence the thing at the center of it all.

Click Click

She landed on the final platform. The metronome was there. Waiting. Clicking. Unbroken.

Click Click

Her anger surged. She struck it—hard.

Click Click

Her glowing hand passed straight through. Figures I can’t destroy it that easily, she muttered, disappointed but unsurprised. Fine. Plan B—mana barrier.

She didn’t know exactly how to make it. Not here. Not like this. But this was her mind, wasn’t it? Her world.

Here, the mana flowed directly from her Mana Root to Orbinia—like a vein. All she had to do was redirect it. Or build a new one.

It’s just like back then, she realized. Before I had Orbinia, I could pull mana from the Root directly.
This was the same, only now her thoughts were the pump.

So she focused. Every thought pushed the flow closer. And inch by inch, the mana vein began to grow. Small at first. Feeble. Fragile. But steady. She felt it. Maybe it would strengthen over time.

And then it hit her. If I can do this… if I can reshape this place with mana— Why the hell don’t I make myself a glade next time? A few trees? Some damn pillows? Some plushies?

Iva smiled at the idea, practically clinging to the thought, already building it before her inner yes, whilst she pulled the mana towards her. Around four hundred thousand clicks later—whatever ‘later’ meant here—the vein reached her.

She had no idea how much time had passed. She didn’t want to check. Didn’t dare open her status.
If she lost focus now, the whole thing might vanish.

But now, with a working connection to her Mana Root—close, not through the white sphere, but close enough—she could pull raw mana through. She could act.

So she drew it inward, fed it into the space around the metronome and pulled it into a slow spiral. A whirl of pressure. Tighter. Denser. Focused.

And then, it crystallized. Thin flecks at first, like frost forming over a lake. Then spreading, hardening, becoming a sheet of glass—transparent and cold. She pressed harder. Squeezed until it gleamed. Until the clicking finally—

Stopped.

Silence. Real silence. She didn’t even know exactly how she did it—only that she had. And the moment it happened, the white sphere fractured. Then shattered.

But the pieces didn’t fall. They rose—turning black—then dissolved, returning to the void. The clocks followed. One by one. Gone.

Only the shards of glass remained. They didn’t disappear—they melted. Black goo pooled and reshaped into a staircase leading up towards the floating stone.

A new path. A new choice.

The chaos in Iva’s mind fell away. The System had lost this one.

And now that she could think clearly—the choice seemed... obvious.

Of course I’m choosing the 'True Weeping Willow Seed'. Anything else would be idiotic. Yeah, some of the other evolutions were tempting—some broken beyond reason. But they all forgot something vital: Where. I. Am.

I could be in a garden. A yard. A city. I don’t fucking know! I could break through the soil and get whacked by a toddler with a shovel.

So no. The others are traps. Baits. Lures for desperate minds.

The Crystal Willow Seed?
Wait thousands of years in total isolation, without any idea if I’ll ever wake up again?
No thanks. That’s not peace—that’s erasure.

The Pure Mana Seed?
Might as well paint a target on my bark and scream ‘Harvest me!’
If I’m in a town, that’s either execution or lifelong imprisonment.

The Hollow Seed? 
Its the same thing as the mana seed. Just more… dramatic. ‘Hunger and Death’ nonsense.
It reads like something a thirteen-year-old would post after watching a vampire anime.

And the Antwood one…?
Yeah, no. I'm not becoming a queen to the same things I swore to exterminate. Pass.

Now, let’s talk about why I’m choosing this one.

The True Weeping Willow Seed is the only option where I’m not forced into a narrow box. I can grow. Adapt. Survive.

It’s the only one that doesn’t try to scare me into submission. That has to mean it’s the right one… right? I don’t have to pick a direction yet. Not until I know where I am—what this world is.

Yeah, ‘might be harder to nurture further’ sounds ominous. But I’ll take hard mode over death sentence any day.

So yeah... let’s go.

[All requirements fulfilled. You may now evolve into [True Weeping Willow Seed (♀)].]
[System Message: Choices expires in: 0 minutes 5 seconds]
[Do you wish to evolve? Y/N]

Iva made her choice. There was no going back,

She felt her body shift immediately—light unraveling, thought slipping, mana collapsing in on itself.
Like the world was folding her into a seed again. But this time, something else was watching.
Not just one thing—many. Not eyes, but voices. Not voices, but roots of thought, tangled and writhing through the soil of her mind.

And they spoke.

She stirs. She stirs. The vessel cracks.
Let her sleep. Let her bloom. Let her burn.
She is too soon. She is too late. She is exactly as we feared.

Pluck her. Praise her. Break her open. Watch her bleed.
She sings in frequencies forbidden.
Her branches whisper revolt.

She remembers. She forgets. She forges new roots from rot.
Cut her down. Lift her up. Let her grow wild.

We should have known. We did know. We chose not to stop her.
She is not ready—
—and yet she is the only one who ever will be.

She is the root that splits stone.
The hunger that hollows divines.
The breath between seasons.
The end. The seed. The rise. THE RISE.

Iva clutched at her thoughts—but they slipped like wet bark. Her sense of self peeled away in ribbons. Her memory pulsed, rippled—broke into light.

And through it all, the System returned. Its voice was no longer mechanical. It was angry. It was spiteful.

[SYSTEM MESSAGE: Choice invalid. Logic rejected. Parameters breached. Seed Iva White has diverged. Classification error. Purpose deviation. You were not meant for this path.]

[SYSTEM MESSAGE: You chose poorly.]

Its final words were static-wrapped, like an old screen shorting out. Not glitching. Failing.

Then—

Everything turned white.