Nykka waited impatiently for the girl to finish dawdling. It seemed as if she felt the need to record every aspect of the Display.

I wonder if she thinks she’s being a spy or something?

If so, she wouldn’t be passing along anything new. The Display was meant to be seen, after all. Frankly, Nykka found it pretty gross, but she understood its function better than just about anyone who wasn’t Doctor Quimea. It was a lure, a trap for the real big fishes of the Garden.

The Doctor wanted to catch himself a Tier Five. Or at least find out what would happen if one came.

From the few times he had spoken about the subject in her presence, she understood that he no longer believed such an event was likely to occur. She rarely had the opportunity to find out what the Doctor was truly thinking though. Most of what she picked up was from his habit of speaking to himself. Or at least that seemed to be the case; it wouldn’t surprise her to find out that he only spoke to himself when someone else was present to overhear.

She had even felt a little jealous during the conversation between the Doctor and the girl. Almost. After all, she knew more of the Doctor’s secrets than anyone else alive.

She was his biggest secret of all.

But this girl was something different. Nykka had seen the Doctor at work many times over the past decade, and he was entirely economical in his communications. It had struck her before that not only did he use his words to achieve his ends, but that he was constantly applying some kind of internal aesthetic, like a craftsman who had honed his movements to utter simplicity and cared more about the elegance of the crafting process than the final result. This conversation with this girl, who evidently carried the same system as Attaboy, had diverged from that pattern.

Or perhaps it hadn’t. Nykka had no way of knowing for sure, despite the powerful enhancements her own system offered.

She was shaken from her thoughts by the screams. First the girl’s, and then, before she had taken more than a few steps to where Lilijoy had collapsed against the central core, the guards joined in. A flurry of notifications hit her internal awareness.

Mental influence through sensory insertion diverted

Safe mode instituted

Auto-logoff procedure initiated

Her Inside senses blurred and ended in a burst of static, leaving her with one last image of an explosion of white tendrils bursting forth from the stone floor. And one last impression of a voice, a thought that was not her own.

Feed my roots, it said.

***

The part of Lilijoy who had called herself Jiannu coalesced from her state of fractured agony and gathered her senses to understand the forces that had just been unleashed within her mind. Minds.

What was that? Where did it come from?

Her thoughts were slow, far slower than they should be. Large sections of Stage Two were in a state of decoherence, and her biological areas were barely functional. Cells were dying, axons and dendrites fractured stumps sputtering random neurochemical signals into the interstitial matrix. Vines and flowers crawled through the wreckage, their movements oddly jerking in her perception.

This is bad. Am I going to die? All of me this time?

She cast around and found another large area of coherent quantum activity running parallel to herself; her other primary narrative consciousness. She checked for memories, a far more laborious process than it ought to be, and found fractured images of a golden glyph, which she recognized as a huge holographic information structure.

I delivered that somehow. No wonder…

A branch of her Mighty Immortal Oak opened to her as the root system finally dumped enough heat to allow coherence to develop among the captured particles in the crystalline matrix. Immediately she added it to herself, and understood. A huge portion of Stage Two had been co-opted in some way and then, in turn, it had used the entire broadcasting capabilities of Stage One to send a torrent of data up the satellite link to the Inside. The energy needed for such a signal had generated massive amounts of heat, greatly exceeding her capacity.

I fried my brain. Or something did, anyway.

The heat had not damaged the Tao System components, but it was still wreaking havoc on her other tissues. If it weren’t for the distributed nature of her uplink antenna, she would have truly cooked her brain. As it was, the damage was serious, but survivable.

Yup. I’m going with survivable.

Further exacerbating the problem was that her Stage One power reserves were almost completely drained by supplying the signal energy. Her vines and flowers would need some time before they could begin to help her heal. If she hadn’t begun the process of adding med-bug capabilities to Stage One, she would have been permanently damaged.

Well, more permanently damaged anyway.

The situation in her brain was still chaotic, and she didn’t have a good sense of what parts of her organic system were shut down by the heat disabling enzymes and denaturing proteins, and which were permanently destroyed.

To think I was so worried about Emily and then the Doctor, when a real danger was already lurking within the very system I was building. But what was it?

Despite her system’s tattered state, it wasn’t hard to put it all together. The only being who had once had free access to her system was Head Treetouched. Not only that, but now she understood that the Immortal Crystal Oak wasn’t just designed for her on the spur of the moment. It was something more than an alternative Stage Two cultivation system, something that had been adapted for her, a structure for quantum information management given material form.

Her attention went back to review her other self’s memories.

As soon as I was close enough to use my ability, something triggered me to upload that golden glyph thing. But why didn’t I ever find it before? It’s not like I would have missed something like that lurking within Stage Two. I mean, I built the whole...oh.

Whether it was more and more of her system coming online as the heat levels diminished, or reaching a critical mass in a certain thought process, she understood.

I was the one building it the whole time. That glyph was the implicit information structure for Stage Two. I just uploaded Immortal Crystal Oak into an actual tree. Huh.

It was an oversimplification, to be true. The Greatwood of Averdale certainly had no need for crystals, or possessed neurons to enhance. Those were elements already present in her brain in the earliest Stage Two elements. When she subtracted what was inherent to the Tao System from what she had been given by the Head, there was a superior method for heat transfer, one which had certainly kept her alive just now, and then there was… what?

She couldn’t quite wrap her head around it. Something to do with consciousness, an element that was nearly invisible to her because her narrative structures were already self aware. To some extent, she thought it possible that her own awareness had been used as a template of sorts, and that Immortal Crystal Oak had contained a method for generating and guiding awareness loops in a quantum computing environment. It occurred to her that the best way to understand what she had just uploaded would be to see what it was doing now, and she turned her attention to her other self’s current experiences.

At first, the sensory processes of Inside Lilijoy were a tangled mess, but after a moment of confusion, she realized she could pull apart what was happening using the new thought-tagging system she had developed as a Charm defense. After she did that, she could follow along with the events in Averdale.

***

Every surface of the Greatwood sent forth pale instruments of vengeance, blindly writhing and questing for the blood of the enemy. The white roots coated the tree in a thick fur of movement, expanding by several feet every second. At the ground level, the new roots thrust out of the blackened earth and within the Sinaloa compound, tearing and crushing, rending and grinding the mighty stone fortress into rubble.

Upon the Bough of Burdens, the roots burst forth from the burn-scarred bark in waves, a ciliated billow of ever lengthening tendrils that flowed to the end of the giant branch. Human bodies could be seen, half submerged in the constant motion, not crushed and destroyed, but carried along on a conveyor of wriggling rhizomes, carried back along the branch to the massive trunk and upwards.

Well, they’re not having a good day, Jiannu observed. I wonder if they’ve logged out yet?

From her vantage through Lilijoy’s senses she could see everything. Her other self’s mind was still deeply entwined with the newly awakened consciousness of the Greatwood, lost in an ecstasy of anger and retribution. Even at her level of remove, Jiannu couldn’t help empathizing, though she was a little concerned with where this was all going. The mana around the Greatwood, and the roots in particular, was not the green Prana of health and abundance, but the sickly white of death and decay, streaked with the blood-clot red and black of hate and destruction. Threads of miasma trickled down, overflowing the sides of the caldera of the former torture garden in rivulets of thick fog.

That can’t be good. The prisoners are out.

When she turned her attention to the site of the prison, now very much former prison, she could only make out hints of wraith-like movement among the thick cloud of foulness that filled the hollow. Then the first wave of bodies transported up the trunk began to arrive and…

She pulled her senses away before she saw any more than the first stages of what was being done to the helpless humans, but not before she learned more than she ever wanted to know about the elasticity of human skin. The exalted cries of the former prisoners turned to wails of frustration as their victims proved to be unresponsive, their minds logged out and beyond the reach of pain.

Oh crap. My body is in there somewhere. Maybe they’ll think I’m on their side?

She reached out internally, finding the channels that led back to the senses from her Inside body, and felt some relief as she learned that it was, as yet, unmolested. Her eyes were closed, but she could sense the activity around her as body after body was conveyed into the crater, pinned by the roots to the walls and floor, could feel the movements of the former prisoners as they flitted among the new prisoners, desperate in their hunger for suffering.

As soon as my ability ends, I’m going to be the one scrap of food for dozens of starving beasts. And I can’t count on respawning because they're not killing anyone.

There was no doubt in her mind that all the Sinaloa Outsiders were here for the long haul. The only question was whether she would end up alongside them or not. Even if the Greatwood was inclined to let her go, she was pretty sure that the…

I can’t keep calling them former prisoners. I wonder if the system has a name for them?

She carefully opened one eye, borrowing a handful of motor neurons that weren’t in use anyway, and used Scan on the nearest of the creatures.

Gwellin Leafflow, Dhrowgos

Level: 42

Oh boy. How am I going to get out of this?

***

Rosemallow dusted off her hands as the last remains of the air elemental blew past her face. It was like this every time she instance traveled by herself; always air, air and more air.

I should get an air source, just so I can get a little more variety, she mused.

That was easier said than done at her stage though. She looked around the vast blue void, hoping for a sign that her journey had reached its conclusion.

I could have avoided this annoyance entirely if the Archon would just do his own dirty work. Saving children is his thing, not mine.

If it wasn’t for her own students’ involvement, she wanted to think she would have told the Archon to stuff his little errand up his sanctimonious…

Ah, there it is.

Ahead of her, a direction which quickly rotated into below her, a patch of green appeared. She felt the air begin to whistle past her ears as gravity asserted its pull.

All right. Now I just have to land and find this newly tempered subset that’s supposedly in trouble. Why it would take a Gongen to do this…

The ground rushed up at her, carrying into view a towering monstrosity with millions of twisting tentacles.

Oh.

Well, this might be fun after all.

She fell for a few more seconds before she realized just what she was looking at.

That’s one seriously messed up tree. Time to get serious.

She activated her third eye and surveyed the souls below her, releasing herself from gravity’s grip as she did. She was glancing over a few hundred tightly-clustered dull blobs, the cast-off husks of Outsiders not currently present, when her eye was caught by several dozen oozing voids of despair incarnate.

Aw crap. Dhrowgos. Strong ones too, for the Garden anyway. Looks like someone finally kicked over the Averdale anthill. Made a right mess of it too.

The Outsiders and the dhrowgos formed a tightly packed crescent around another soul, a tiny spark midst the ashes.

That must be the one I’m..Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.

Lilijoy’s soul looked pale and distorted from what Rosemallow was used to seeing.

You look like shit, kid. But if that’s her, then where is the newborn?

Even with Rosemallow’s powerful vision, the clouds of corrupt mana made it difficult to see what was going on. She pulled more energy to her third eye and her sight began to manifest as rays of red light, scanning and penetrating. Several of the dhrowgos looked up and called out in hunger and defiance, fixing their greedy eyes upon the form floating far above their heads.

Come on! Rosemallow thought. You can’t hide from me. Here baby, baby. Here baby…

At this point Rosemallow swore aloud for several seconds. Her eyes continued to drill deep into the heart of the Greatwood, revealing the commingled selves within. When she peered into the soul of the newly tempered being she was sent to ‘rescue’, she was hit by a wave of familiarity. She understood, understood it all, and she added Eskallia’s name to her invective.

***

Jiannu, though at this point she was thinking of herself as Lilijoy again, was startled when the red lights filtered through the murk above her head. The dhrowgos around her immediately began to hiss and wail, their faces turned up to look at something beyond her perception.

Now’s my chance. Sorry to interrupt!

Seizing the reins of all her functional motor circuits, she pulled herself from the tree and felt her other self cry out in surprise and disorientation as the merging of the two selves was forcibly severed. Moving was an agonizing process as she rerouted impulses around damaged areas of her brain and did her best to patch over the many missing reflexive patterns that enabled thoughtless coordination. With her mind working at its current top speed, she was just able to move her limbs as she intended, though it was far from graceful.

Her trembling hand reached through the air, glowing with a pure white light before it passed into another space entirely. She thrust her hand down, feeling around in a void of desperation, her fingers searching, seeking…

Finding.

Ouch! Why couldn’t I have found the handle end?

She blunted the pain and gripped the blade tightly, pulling it forth in a burst of diamond mana. Triumphant, she raised the evil knife by its blade and raised her eyes, feeling her blood run down her wrist as the knife twisted in satisfaction.

Looking back at her were a dozen pairs of dull white eyes, set in faces oozing with dark miasma.