Gazing down upon the scrawl-written trunk of the ginormous tree, Brock considered his next move. From the floral cliff he was stationed upon, it was a solid fifteen-meter drop down to the root-ridden streets where he could begin to progress further. While he was sporting what he deemed were relatively high Stats, Brock doubted he could survive a fall of that size without doing some serious damage to his legs.

There wasn’t any other way to get down that he could see, however, so he was really only left with the one avenue of descent. Climbing down would be risky, especially if he lost his grip or misplaced his feet as there was quite a long way to fall. It was different compared to the way up, which was only a minuscule five meters.

It seemed to him that the city square had actually sunk into the earth under the weight of the tree.

Grumbling, Brock let his chain-knife slither out from his bracer and he promptly smashed its length down into the wood, giving it a light kick to assure its firm position within. The office worker gave a strained sigh and lowered himself over the edge legs first as his fingertips desperately scrambled for gaps to slowly lead him down.

If worst came to worst, his chain should go taut and stop his fall, albeit with the risk of dislocating his arm from the resulting jerk. Despite that, he wasn’t going to bet his own wellbeing on how firmly stuck the blade was in a plant, because that would be stupid. Sluggishly, Brock slid further over the cliff, and he felt around, only daring to move further when his feet finally found purchase.

There was a thinness to the air at his attitude, even though he seemed to be closer to the original ground level than the area below him, and it left Brock feeling slightly breathless as he leisurely climbed downward, only serving to feed further into the fear he had percolating his thoughts.

Soon, he managed to reach the ten-meter mark, and he felt some solace in knowing he only had a third of the overall height left to travel. And then finally, after a few minutes of delicately scaling the artificial cliff face, Brock felt his feet tap down on the interwoven flooring of both stone and root alike, an odd sense of tranquillity washing over him.

Down here, the air had regained some of its previous thickness, albeit not as much as what he was used to, and it left him feeling a tad bit uneasy. In other news, Brock also noticed that while it was a marginal amount, the energy-rich atmosphere was speeding up the rate at which his body recovered from the effects of South’s final attack.

His sight was somewhat obscured by the ambient fog of the divine that floated about, though it was nowhere near as effective as the dark fog in the south section of the jungle. It did, however, serve to make the gargantuan form of what Brock assumed was the Source only a distant shadow within the white. The glowing scrawls shined through as radiantly as before, unfettered by the mist.

Feeling his brain throb behind his eyes, Brock refrained from looking at them.

“This place is like a rainforest on steroids…” Brock muttered as he stepped over a root as thick as his own torso, glancing at the cast of ivory flora that poked out from beneath.

Despite appearing scarily alien to Brock, the place had a profoundly holy and peaceful vibe, though he didn’t discount it as being a side effect of the unnatural calmness that the place instilled in him. The jungle had been nothing but a cruel monster to him so far, and nothing was stopping this strange area from being any different. If anything, it was the gods that were the harshest of them all.

That mentality served him well when Brock noticed movement off to the right side and quickly took a step back, a thin root shooting past him at speeds that he felt wouldn’t even cause the pre-South him to break a sweat. With a flick of his arm, he brandished his blade and severed the root before it could begin to retract, watching as it thumped to the ground lightly and went still.

The golden lustre it held began to dull, and before Brock could bend down and study it, the piece of wood began to crumble to metallic, silver ash. A soft breeze swept through the area and took the dust to the winds, never to be seen again. It was as though the entirety of the environment was in sync, like it was one being. But he quickly discarded the thought, at least until he had more proof of it.

Over the next while, as Brock hiked through the mysterious land he found himself in, he was forced to cut and carve root after root, some thin, some thick, as they continued to periodically lash out at him at varying speeds. It was relatively tame so far, as the number of them that he had actually felt threatened by could be counted on one hand.

It still made his injured body flare with pain no matter how powerful they were, however.

It was at what Brock had pinned as the halfway point of his journey through the Centre that he found something that gave him pause. It wasn’t a powerful root, nor a hidden beast, or even the promise of power. No, it was an aged stone tablet propped up by roots and vines as they slowly overtook its worn surface.

The tablet was large, bigger than Brock almost, and while the symbols and figures upon it were beginning to wear into the realm of the unrecognisable, the man felt himself easily able to parse apart that which he could see.

Upon it was some sort of depiction of a group of strange misshapen creatures as they worshipped the sky, the world around them slowly crumbling to dust. Brock knew there was more to see and understand what with the strange scrawls populating it, but he neither understood them nor cared much for it.

He cared more about the implications.

A bunch of aliens… worshipping the System on a dying world? Huh.

Brock thought on it but threw the theory aside. He didn’t know why he felt the way he did, but he felt that the mural was an analogy for something, for a deeper history than he could possibly begin to understand. Something that predated even the creation of his own world all those billions of years ago.

Aside from the obviously mysterious stone tablet, Brock realised that the occasional attacks from the roots sped up drastically, and he was now forced to become an otherworldly gardener every minute or so. Some roots even required him the use of his Augment to make quick work of, a fact which only worsened the throbbing headache he was currently enduring.

“How much longer do I have to walk, mate?” Brock groaned as he looked to his surroundings. By now, he was certain he’d walked for well over four hours. From the cliff, the place hadn’t looked even remotely as big as it felt. Brock’s timer was constantly ticking downward, and he was starting to feel the weight of it on his shoulders, “My legs are getting sor-”

Abruptly, the overpowered office worker dived out the way of a bus-sized root as it tore itself from the woven patchwork around him and smashed down on where he had been standing seconds prior. The roots had only seemed to get more and more powerful as the distance he travelled grew, though blessedly, the rate of their appearances had lowered proportionally along with their creeping power.

It took around a minute of combat, but Brock finally managed to carve deep enough into the root that it couldn’t withstand the force of its own movements, and it broke apart, the sappy stump promptly retreating back into the weave around him. Sighing, Brock didn’t know how much longer he could continue to push his wounded body like this.

His scabbing wounds from his fight with Ur’Kahn had once again opened up, and the occasional expulsion of soupy organs through vomiting had also picked up in frequency again. Aside from the constant ramping pain of the ache of his body, his head was also positively blinding in its pain from his continued use of his Augment.

Right now, he wanted nothing more than to just pass out and get some much-needed rest.

And, just as Brock felt himself on the brink of physical and mental collapse, he stepped forward and the fog was abruptly gone, revealing the great trunk of the Source as it stretched up into the reaches of the heavens.

Up this close, the mere roots of the tree appeared to be thicker than a house, carving into the earth deeply and ravaging the soil beneath. Idly, he noticed that they seemed to throb, as though they were ceaselessly pumping the lifeblood of the gods into the very core of the planet itself.

Brock watched in subdued awe as golden roots wormed out of the mess of road and roots and formed a set of interwoven steps leading up to a stone gateway placed onto the base of the trunk. It was barred by a barrier of swirling golden energy, mysterious runes flickering upon each stone that formed the arching gateway.

From where he stood, Brock finally realised that the trunk itself wasn’t even made of wood. It was a creation of a myriad of golden bricks, forming impossible ripples, divots and bends in the trunk despite the material it was supposedly formed of.

The golden scrawls coated every surface, an encyclopedia of every occurrence and trace of knowledge since the dawn of time itself, and absentmindedly, Brock noticed that the glow from within wasn’t a result of energy, but the constant reflection of light on the golden fluid flowing along the carvings of the inscriptions.

Breathing out and steadying himself with a hand on his forehead, Brock continued forward, placing his weary feet upon the floral staircase and making his way upward. He had half expected to be assaulted by the dormant roots to his left and right, yet they lay still, throbbing in time with the silent heartbeat the tree seemed to possess.

Within his chest, Brock felt his caged Ascendancy ache with longing.

Reaching out upon arriving at the top of the stairs, Brock’s palm settled on the scorching surface of the barrier before him, and he felt a divine energy wash through his pathways and surge into the golden wall, easing the heat and forcing the obstacle ahead to flicker and dissipate into wisps of remnant energies seconds later.

[Key to the Gateway consumed. You are treading in forbidden territory. Turn back now.]

Brock read over the words in front of him, slightly shocked by the personal way the System seemed to be speaking to him. From what it had gone out of its way to say, this place was something of a secret and most probably of extreme importance, though whether it was cultural or otherwise he had no idea.

Although, he somewhat doubted the System had a cultural background.

Ignoring the System’s mixed messages, Brock began to step forward one foot after the other. First, the System had told him to seek out the Source to remain alive, then so much as practically forced him to gain the item that led him here, before finally telling him to turn back? The System was the word bi-polar if Brock had ever seen it.

“Yeah, fuck you mate.” He said as his first foot passed the dark threshold left behind by the disappearance of the barrier and tapped down onto an invisible surface. Contrary to the outside, it was eerily cold in there.

Otherwise, the message he had just seen might have been merely a basic prompt that appeared for any and every person that attempted to access the Source. Thinking on it, Brock pinned that as being the most likely case, as you wouldn’t be able to obtain the Key Fragments if the System didn’t plan to make this place accessible. It was probably presented as a dangerous ‘opportunity’ to improve and had to be interpreted as such.

Though for Brock, the only improvement he expected to see was access to a basic function he should have been able to utilise from day one. In other words, the System was the world’s greatest scammer.

Slowly, his other foot entered the darkness and he followed, cresting the stone archway and disappearing from the warmth of the sunlight outside and into an oddly familiar icy embrace.

[You have left the territory of the System. You were warned.]