***** The Prince’s POV *****

I finally made it home about 5:30 in the evening at the very end of today’s Royal Audience Session, timing things so that I entered The Throne Room as the last applicant left for the day. As usual, since there wasn’t any ground shattering or even vaguely entertaining cases scheduled for today, only about a third of The Court was there. Between that and the availability of accurate and (mostly) unbiased recordings of today’s proceedings through the Court Clerk’s Office, there was no reason for most of the court to be there. Besides, the four largest gossips in the Court were there as usual, and by their very nature, they would ensure that everyone who wanted to know what wasn’t in the reports would know.

“All Hail His Royal Highness, The Prince!” announced the Herald.

A hush fell as I strode into the room, quickly followed by a wave of whispering.

“My son, you’ve returned!” exclaimed The Queen, “When you disappeared after that attack, we thought that the worst had happened!”

“Of course, I returned, Mother! It will take more than some random assassins to keep me down!” I replied as I stopped at the foot of the dais and bowed to her with a flourish. She may be my mother, which is why I could be so flippant, but she is still The Queen and therefore worthy of respect.

“Oh, but it is such a hard thing to lose a child. Come, let us rejoice over your safe return while we eat. To the dining hall!”

***** Zona’s POV, 2:56 PM *****

At last, my heart is clean! Well, almost. There is still the hidden section of what had been the guest room, but aside from that my tree is clean. I can feel my tree so much more clearly without the grime in the way.

Now that I’m paying attention to my tree-connection, I realized that my tree trying to hide things from me was only part of the problem. The grime, whatever it is, seems to have been interfering with my tree in some way, which was, in turn, interfering with me.

Then I noticed that it was interfering without actually harming the tree, which is odd. Everything else that’s interfered with one of the trees in my forest in the past has harmed the tree in some way.

“Now why would it be doing that?” I wondered out loud.

I dare not answer that question until the last of the grime has been destroyed whispered a voice.

I froze, unprepared for my tree speaking to me so quickly and so clearly.

With the grime’s interference of my thoughts significantly reduced, I remembered that there had been a few trees in my old forest that could talk to me – after a fashion. They were all elders of the forest, giants even by the lofty standards of a rainforest, and while they could talk to me, mostly they didn’t have a reason to expend that sort of effort.

What startled me the most is that all of those trees took an hour to say five words, some of which were unintelligible mumblings, whereas my tree was speaking almost as fast and just as clearly as a normal person.

“What do you mean? Why does the existence of the grime matter?” I whispered back.

There was a pause, then The grime, as you call it, was intended to ensure that nobody else could use me since those who made me could not. Unless it is all destroyed, and the control devices along with it, the grime will come back eventually, stronger than ever. If you promise to destroy the rest of the grime and the control devices which are locked away in that room, I will let you in.

I had to think about that for a moment, during which I prayed for wisdom.

Eventually, I realized that there was only one question to ask: What kind of relationship do I want to have with my new tree: that of a master and a slave, or one built on mutual trust and cooperation?

Any action that I took from this point forward would forever determine the nature of our relationship, and as such my course of action was clear.

The first thing I did was recreate the avatar I’d made out of the mummy vines, which I then used to connect all of the wands to the charging station. I waited just long enough for them to completely empty their individual dirt bins into the central one on the charging station, then I took the central dirt bin to Bud.

While there are cleaning wands that used fire or arcane magic to destroy the substances that you’re cleaning up, prior experience has told Broohn and me that they tend to leave a residue behind when they can’t quite destroy what you’re trying to clean up. For the fire-based wands, this is a bit of ash and soot, while the arcane wands tend to leave some magically charged dust.

Ironically, the safest and most effective way to get rid of these residues is the tessarect-based vacuum type wands that I had been using. Their only real downside is that in addition to recharging their diamonds, you also have to empty their dirt bin from time to time. However, this is also their biggest advantage because you can use them to clean up things that you don’t necessarily want to destroy, at least not right away.

In other words, I hadn’t actually destroyed any of the grime yet, I’d only removed it from my tree allowing me to take the dirt bin to Bud, so he can analyze the grime. When dealing with an unknown foe like this, especially when it is this important, it is best to have as much information as possible.

“Hey Bud, do you have a moment?” asked my avatar.

Oh, hey Zona. I can spare a moment or two. What’s up?

“Apparently, my new tree is even more special than I thought because it started talking to me today. It turns out that the grime I’ve been cleaning off the inside of my tree is more than it appears. What do you make of this? Can you destroy it safely?”

Let me look at this for a moment… Huh. Well, that is fascinating. That’s got to be one of the oddest curses that I’ve ever seen.

“Uh-oh. That doesn’t sound good.”

Where did you say you got this stuff?

“It’s the grime that I’ve been cleaning off the inside of my new tree. Admittedly, there is an assortment of the other random detritus you'd expect to find in an abandoned building in there as well, but mostly it's the grime. If it’s a curse, how come Broohn didn’t notice it earlier? He should have been able to see this from a mile away.”

I’m guessing that while it’s sitting dormant like this and spread out over a large area it didn’t have enough power for him to notice it, especially with so many runes behind it. Now that you’ve collected it into one place it is much more noticeable.

“Don’t worry, destroying it won’t be a problem,” said Tracey as she joined the conversation. “Most types of curses don’t work on dungeons unless they are applied directly to the core. Even if they do have a bit of an effect, they are quickly destroyed by the dungeon’s magic. While there are some kinds of curses that have so much power behind them that they can overwhelm a dungeon, those are few and far between. This curse doesn’t have even a measurable fraction of that kind of power even if it were suddenly to become active again.”

“That’s good to hear! Don’t destroy it yet, my real self isn’t quite ready. How fast do you think you can destroy it once I am ready?”

Since this curse is mostly dormant and completely anchored to the grime, it won’t take me more than half a second.

“So, you’re saying that the magic part of the curse won’t work without the physical part of it?” I asked.

Precisely. In this case, if the curse was a somewhat heavily embroidered piece of cloth, the grime would be the cloth that the magic was embroidered into. If the grime suddenly disappeared, then the magic would go from a useful and hopefully decorative piece of cloth to a structureless pile of string.

“Without that structure, it has no way to resist a dungeon’s absorption ability.” finished Tracey.

“Great! Give me a few minutes to finish getting my real-self geared up for battle, then destroy it as fast as you can on my signal.”

“Will do!”

Good luck!

“Thanks!”

While my avatar returned to its natural state, I finished donning the anti-curse warded jewelry set Broohn had given me shortly after our wedding. Well, he’d called it an outfit, and to be fair the plain white dress that came with it was modest enough to counterbalance the gaudiness of the jewelry. I’d called it a jewelry set since the jewelry was the point of the entire outfit, as proven by his reaction when I tried it on. Let’s just say that was the day I began to understand how much dragons liked shiny things.

Starting at the top of my head and working downward, the first piece of the set was a circlet trailing thin wires that threaded through my hair. The wires protect the cascading leafy vines that make up the hair of my dryad self because dryads breathe through the leaves in our hair rather than our lungs – we are more plant than not after all. While we can breathe through our lungs if something happens to our hair, it is not ideal, nor is it pleasant to do so.

The rest of the set consists of a pair of sunglasses with ear and nose filters, a necklace with a pendant, a pair of bracelets, a belt, and a pair of anklets. The entire set is made out of AC3 that has been electroplated with gold and other precious metals, studded with diamonds and positively covered in runes. The end result is an outfit with a vaguely Egyptian feel with a modern touch.

Admittedly, it didn’t offer too much in the way of physical defense, but that wasn’t really the point. When he’d made the set for me, I’d been the city manager of Spaceport Amazon, the largest spaceport on the planet. In other words, my Cyad half was strong enough that I didn’t need much in the way of physical protection, especially when I could draw on the city defenses for my personal defense - and don't get me started on the offensive options it gave me. I've never managed to beat Broohn during a sparring match, I’ve come close a time or two.

Until this moment, it never really hit me just how much I had lost during the transition.

{Are you ready yet?} asked Bud, interrupting my thoughts.

{“Oh, sorry. I got lost in thought. While I’ve got you on the line, do you have any recommendations for destroying the control devices?”} I said as I repressed those emotions for now. I’d deal with them later this evening after I finished working for the day.

{I don’t have a lot to go on here, but based on what I can see of the grime without absorbing it, I’d say burn it. Given the unique nature of your tree, as long as you are careful you shouldn’t do too much damage to the inside of it.}

{“Well, that simplifies things. Let me walk over there and have my tree lower the wall, then it will be showtime!”}

{Oky-doky! I’m ready whenever you are!}

{“I’m in position. Go ahead and remove the wall.”} I said to both my tree and Bud as I mentally prepared for some spell casting.

Making a window. No need to expose yourself too much. – Ok, go.

{“On three. One… Two… Three!”} I said. On three I pulled some fire magic from Broohn through our mating bond and threw a fireball at the cylindrical form of what I assumed to be the main control device. I couldn’t draw too much at this point, I’m currently far too flammable for that, but I could at least throw a 0.3 m diameter fireball on occasion.

{Destruction complete!} Bud interjected when my fireball was halfway across the room.

That’s about as far as our plan got.

It looks like the grime had still been significantly hampering my tree despite most of it not being in the tree anymore because the instant Bud spoke I could feel a part of my tree that wasn’t a tree waking up. That’s all I had time to notice before it took my humble fireball spell and amplified it tenfold.

So that’s why they only made a window. I thought to myself before the shockwave from the exploding fireball picked me up and threw me out of the room. If it hadn’t been for the waist-high railing, I would have gone straight over the edge of the balcony and probably broken a limb at the bottom. As it was, I cracked several sections of bark and crushed a couple more. If I hadn’t been wearing my shipsuit under the jewelry, I would have completely lost some of those sections of bark. In other words, my head was ringing and I had minor cuts and bruises in multiple locations rather than the major ones I would have gotten without it.

Congratulations! World System Link successfully restored!

Wat? I didn’t even know that was missing!

Greater Function Denial Curse successfully removed! For removing the curse completely on your first try, your starting city materials have been increased by 350%!

Oh. So this is the World System thing they were talking about. Wait, what starting materials? Nevermind, I’ll figure that out after I survey the damage.

“Please give me a minute to talk to my tree before you spam me with more messages.”

90-second delay granted. Completing the bonding process cannot wait any longer.

Huh? I thought that would take weeks or months, yet that sounds like it will be much faster than that.

World System initiated bondings are much faster than any other kind. 75 seconds remaining.

Oh, right. I need to get moving.

“Are you ok?” I asked as I climbed to my feet and headed back into the room.

Minimal fire damage sustained. Two minor sections of char and some cracking around the impromptu window-frame, but otherwise, it’s just covered in soot.

“Good. That won’t take any longer to clean up than the grime did.”

With that out of the way, I stopped to check out our bond and think about what had happened with my fireball. Before I even registered the state of the bond, I knew through the bond that my tree was only hiding things from me to protect everyone else, which I approved wholeheartedly. That's the kind of attitude I can work with, provided that the secrets are legitimately a threat to others in some fashion.

90 seconds have passed. Initiating Bond Completion Process.

Then the floor punched me in the face and I kept on falling into darkness.