Chapter 588 - Unlimited Wood Works

Sofia was in the middle of the swamp, away from her city foundations and levelling pit, which were closer to the southern coast. She had dried up a large section here just by sparring with Saria with a piercing bolt as her sword. Here the swamp plants had died and the mud was dry and full of cracks. Standing there, Pareth and Bookie were waiting next to Sofia. Pareth seemed to actually be the one most excited to see how the spell was going to turn out.

“Alright, let’s see it. Graveyard of the Nymphs!”

The mana spewed out of Sofia, much more than usual for the graveyard, but that was expected from the updated skill description, dead trees started sprouting out of the swamp’s dried mud like a cursed forest.

From fifty mana per second to maintain to ten thousand… This better be worth the two hundred times cost increase.

The Nymphs started climbing out of the ground, much like the original graveyard skeletons.

Only ten of them?

They appeared around Sofia in a wide circle, bones of dark wood striated with glowing green currents emerged from the ground, the nymphs’ ghostly form swirling around the wooden bones. As they climbed out of the mud, lush green grass and flowers wildly sprouted around them.

Short.

The first nymph to fully be out of the ground was about Alith-sized, with short twig-like wings like the fairy skeleton, and if Sofia had to describe the appearance of the Ghost, it was like a  plant dryad. Whereas Dryads had a body entirely made of wood, Nymphs had wooden bones and a more leaf-like plant-matter body. They looked a bit more human than Dryads, but not much. One by one the ten Nymphs came out, patiently waiting for their orders, they had a clear air of innocent mischief to them that was hard to describe.

The center of the graveyard was already like a small garden, every second that Sofia waited, the grass was growing taller and taller, more and more strange plants growing out of the previously dry and dead ground.

“Hard to believe those are still the graveyard skeletons,” Sofia expressed her disbelief.

Bookie tugged on her robe, “Sofia, Sofia! Look, the tree!” he excitedly told her, pointing at something behind her.

The growing grass had reached the closest of the graveyard’s dead trees, and it had only taken a few seconds for the tree to start growing taller and sprouting with new leaves.

“Oh woah…” Can they… Surround that tree, she ordered, and the Nymphs followed the order, gliding above the grass with their thin ghostly wings. Sofia heard one of them giggle, which was strangely unsettling, and she watched as the surrounded tree started growing much faster.

She could hardly believe her eyes as the tree kept growing and growing.

Can you make it even taller?! Even bigger? Is it going to stay?!

This small dead tree of an unknown species that had sprouted out of nowhere was rapidly reaching tens of meters in height, and following Sofia’s request to make it even bigger, the Nymphs placed their tiny skeletal hands on the trunk, further speeding up the process.

Sofia was bewildered, and couldn’t believe her eyes as the tree kept growing and growing, so much that they had to step back as the trunk was becoming so big, as the roots were upheaving the nearby ground.

Then, it all stopped. With a piercing headache, Sofia stumbled, caught by Pareth who looked concerned.

“Ahah… Ahahahah,” Sofia laughed happily, “thanks for catching me, Pareth. It seems… I just ran out of mana,” she explained.

Looking past Pareth’s concerned fiery eye-sockets, all Sofia could see was the lush green canopy of the giant tree overshadowing them.

“For once what I bring is not destruction,” she whispered under her breath, “Nymphs are incredible.”

Sofia glanced at the skill again, and at the small flask Alith had just handed her containing about three drops of shimmering pink liquid.

[Mockery of the divine]: Your body feeds on the essence of the divine, piercing the realms through them, and keeping them hostage within the shadow of mana core prisons. By arranging the mana cores within your body in the shape of divine constellations, you can gain a limited hold onto their absolute domain.

“So this is supposed to help… Any idea what will happen when I drink it?” Sofia asked Alith, who had recreated this ‘potion’ from the demon king’s recipe.

“Not in the slightest, nope. Half of the ingredients I’d never even worked with before. I’d try it on myself if I had more, but this is all I managed to make with the herbs we had so there wasn’t really any to spare for testing.”

“Well… We’re about to find out, then…” Sofia nonchalantly said as she opened the flask.

“I’d pinch my nose and quickly swallow if I were you, the taste probably ain’t great,” Alith suggested, and Sofia did as she said, quickly gulping down the pink liquid.

She felt a burn as the potion traveled down her throat, and felt it clearly pierce into her, and plunge straight for her mana heart. The sudden collision made her a bit wary, but nothing else seemed to happen after that.

“Well?” Alith asked.

“It fused with my mana heart, I think. But huh… That’s it?”

Alith shrugged. “Heh. I expected a bit more considering all the reagents in there, but I guess getting no side-effects is good. Maybe try your skill again, now?”

“Not like it’s a real skill, I just have to recreate divine runes by moving the essences around but as you know, it’s only ever given me a headache so far… I should try Sun or Sorrow first to be safe.”

“Maybe we should go outside, don’t want you to trash my lab, yeah?”

“Sure. Let’s check up on Remia on the way out,” Sofia agreed with a nod.

“Didn’t you say you did that on the way in already?” Alith asked, following Sofia out of her laboratory which was the entire upper floors of the Zangdar castle where Zhang Lu previously had his own labs.

“I just want to check again, I wanted to show her the Nymphs but she has been sleeping so soundly these last three days I didn’t want to disturb her.”

Alith nodded, “She’s starting to wake up more often these days, though never for long. It won’t be long until she can start staying awake for more than a few minutes at a time, I think. Maybe the nymphs will help, I still can’t believe you grew this massive tree in one go.”

“I can’t believe it either, but it’s hard to miss now, I feel like soon we’ll have a regular forest right next to the spirit forest.”

“Hmmm… Might need to be careful about that, maybe leave a bit of a buffer zone between the two, wouldn’t want the nasty things from out there to cross over.”

“True, true…” Sofia agreed, looking through one of the castle windows, “Looks like she’s still sleeping,” she remarqued, looking at Remia who had been relocated to the glowing lumian-bone forest where she was initially born.

“Ah well, better that she stays here while we’re out testing your new powers anyway, could be dangerous.”

A few minutes later, under the shadow of the nymph tree, Sofia was drawing Sun’s rune on a bone table, deciding how to spread the essences around.

“Like that? Nineteen essences is a good number for this, honestly,” Alith commented.

“I have no idea what I am doing, to be perfectly honest.”

“Isn’t it always like that with godly stuff? Just try and see.”

“Alright.”

Sofia focused on the essence cores within her. They were like empty physical and spiritual balls roaming within her body, displacing her flesh and soul as she moved them, but she knew for a fact that these hosted the divine essence, just that she couldn’t see them at all from the physical plane. Slowly, she rearranged them to form Sun’s divine rune of weirdly stacked triangles, drawing the larger edge of the first upside down triangle in her shoulders, with its lower point around her belly button. This took thirteen of the nineteen essences, then with the remaining six, she drew the two smaller mirrored triangles, one in her neck and one in her upper chest. Then, like she felt needed to be done, she moved her mana heart to be at the centerpoint of the rune.

Something! There’s something! The potion worked!

Sofia felt a calm heat rise within her chest, as if something was warming up for a big reveal, then all of a sudden, it derailed, and she clutched her chest with a yelp as the essence cores were thrown in disarray.

Alith was there to help, and Pareth had instantly teleported in.

“Still failed? Potion didn’t work?” Alith asked, seeing that Sofia looked more annoyed than in pain.

“No, the potion worked, it definitely did, I don’t know what it did, but that unlocked something. I was able to go further than usual, but it failed midway through, as if… It felt a bit like a being in a carriage falling off the side of a mountain road. I don’t know how else to describe what went wrong…” Sofia explained.

“Maybe Sun’s rune was a bad choice? Could just be that Sun is too powerful and it’s messing things up?” Altih guessed.

“Maybe but… I don’t know. I feel like it was almost there. Let me try again.”

“Alright, don’t push yourself too much, it took me a while to get a hold of my new racial traits too.”

Sofia nodded, rearranged the essence cores, and tried again.

The result was the same, but she understood the failure a bit better this time: the rune was unstable for some reason, one side seemed to warm up faster than the other.

Is it because the two Deep runes are on that side?

Sofia shared her discovery with Alith, and following that, they worked on rearranging how Sofia drew the rune, spreading the essences around so that the EV was relatively well balanced with one Deep rune on both sides and the Sun and Death essences positioned symmetrically across the rune.

This failed again.

“We’re close! I can tell! So close!” Sofia rejoiced.

After a few more tries, she noticed that putting Sun’s own essences at the extremities seemed to work better. She tried one final time, placing Sun’s essences at the point of every triangle.

Sofia finally accessed the main feature of the Lumian race.

[Mockery of the divine]

Author notes:

I somehow managed to write this in time despite the things I had to do today, hurray \o/

In other news, it's about time we started talking about the elephant in the December room, also known as Christmas holidays. My last vacations were in June, if I remember correctly, although I did since take one week off from writing to focus on editing instead, that wasn't really relaxing... So I'm like... I kind of want to take two weeks off now and really rest.

But I also see the patreon numbers keep falling like clockwork, so I really don't know what to do... Taking two weeks off might make it way worse...

I'm lost X_x