Shadow Slave

Chapter 2593: Smallest Branch

Sunny saw the vibrant forest once again, this time long after the Demon of Repose had created the cycle of seasons. The great tree — the avatar of Heart God — was different, as well. Instead of hungering for exponential growth, it stood like a pillar that supported both heaven and earth, immutable and stable in its towering glory. The branches of the tree were like a world in and of itself, with human cities built on their weathered surface. The people did not wear furs or use flint weapons anymore, having mastered much more sophisticated tools and developed an elaborate culture... which hinted that he was not seeing the dawn of times anymore.

This had to be the Age of Heroes — the era of mortal champions fighting against the Corrupted Creatures for dominance over the world. That struggle was happening somewhere far away, though, in the mortal realms. The Void could not exert its influence in the Heart Realm, and therefore, there could be no Corruption in the sacred forest.

Which was why it was so startling to see the World Tree falling sick.

A virulent rot spread through its trunk and its branches, turning vast blotches of the weathered bark dark. The golden sap had turned into torrents of abhorrent black pus, flowing from the rotting valleys and raining down on the distant ground. The golden fruits were devoured by immense maggots, and human champions banded into armies to resist the horrors born of them.

The eternal leaves withered and fell, carried away by the wind.

No matter how fiercely the humans resisted, the vile rot continued to spread, slowly devouring more and more of the tree over the course of countless generations. The great tree itself tried to battle its sickness, as well, but the insidious disease continued to consume it from within, gradually spreading toward its roots.

The great tree was a pillar of existence, holding up the heavens and supporting the earth... and that pillar was slowly crumbling.

Sunny was terrified by the visage of the dying vessel of a god. It seemed unthinkable that an avatar of Heart God could have come that close to dying... long before being burned and toppled during the Doom War. Gods were great and ineffable, after all — they were supposed to be all but invulnerable, if not for the absolute law of imperfection they themselves had created. But perhaps the avatars of the gods were less so.

In any case, Sunny felt a dark sense of curiosity while watching the World Tree rot. He was trying to understand what the sickness ravaging it was.

The spreading rot looked like Corruption — what he imagined Corruption would look like, if manifested as a physical force — but it was not. Instead, the vile disease... was a living being. An Unholy Terror — a malevolent remnant of the Age of Chaos, or maybe an insidious curse uttered by a Void Creature whom the gods had slain.

Not all of the Chaos Creatures had been sealed with the Void, after all. Just like one of the gods ended up being trapped behind the seal, some of them had escaped it — the being whose death gave birth to the Hollow Mountains, for example, and whose blood became the source of true darkness.

The gods had battled the remnant Creatures of the Void at the dawn of the Age of Gods, aided by the daemons, and scars left behind by those primordial battles could still be found across the Dream Realm.

The Corrupted came later, but some of them grew just as powerful. Enough so, it seemed, that even an avatar of one of the gods could not resist this particular Unholy Terror... without help.

And help it did receive.

Answering Heart God's call, the Demon of Repose returned to the sacred forest once again.

Ariel, the Demon of Dread, had defeated an Unholy Titan in combat once. But his sister did not battle the curse consuming the World Tree — rather, she helped the great tree plunge into a state of endless rejuvenation, so that it could consume the disease devouring it instead.

The World Tree rotted and grew anew. Its leaves fell, and new ones sprouted from emerging buds. The dead bark crumbled into dust, then was replaced by fresh growth. The diseased branches broke and fell, causing the world to quake when they impacted the earth, but new branches appeared in their place.

Over, and over, and over again... without end.

Rotting, dying, and being reborn again. Until the disease was no more.

The Unholy Terror had perished, and the World Tree regained its vitality.

..The cities of humans who had made home in its branches, however, were decimated. Most of them were destroyed, and those that remained became overgrown by leaves and bark, with not a soul in sight. The arrival of the Demon of Repose was a boon for the great tree, but it was an indescribable disaster to those who had lived in the shade of its leaves.

A calamity that could not be escaped, predicted, or reasoned with.

There was a reason, after all, why daemons were feared above all other deities of ancient times.

Once the disease consuming the World Tree was no more, the Demon of Repose left. However, it took payment for helping Heart God save their avatar.

That payment was a young branch of the great tree.

And from that branch, she fashioned a magnificent ship.

A living ship that was more than a kilometer across from port to starboard, and countless times its width in length. One that was like a city in and of itself, with dozens of decks, gorgeous palaces, tall pagodas built on its surface, and great mysteries hiding in its boundless holds. A ship with wild groves, rushing streams, and deep lakes. Ꞧ𝓪ＮɵʙĚꞩ

The Demon of Repose named her ship the Night Garden, and made it her home.

..The World Tree was long destroyed, and the Demon of Repose was dead. However, the Night Garden still remained — the last living sapling of once great forest.