The moving beings inside keep saying: ‘Do not expand wildly.’ Aspen relays to me.

Do they get that from Nash?

No. He feels that the system likely doesn’t care about your size. The only action that it would care about from now on should be ‘stealing’ too much Aether from the air. I believe Nash wants us to be circumspect and even if you choose to take Aether again, spend it all before it can accumulate, at least while we are trying to figure out how much danger you are really in and what the rules surrounding that.

I feel my meager Aether stores.

If I don’t store it… if I take Aether and use it right away…. would the system really ignore me? It sounds… dangerous.

We only have conjectures. And Nash’s book can only be activated by him so we can’t use that to confirm anything.

I can use his mana. Maybe I can learn to use his book.

But you can’t use his Qi or his Life. The only one you can share use is the first of the triad, but Vigor is strange and this is a system function.

Eventually, I might. I’m starting to get a grasp on his willpower and how to prompt him to act without doing it myself or forcing him to nearly wake up to act, which even for a split moment means a season or two even more withdrawn than usual.

The silence builds as Aspen fails to find a definite answer, though this is an old argument rehashed in using different mental images which won’t stop until we find a final solution.

A small bell tinkles in the corner of my awareness and I look within Nash’s inner world at the dozen people awake at part of my domain. With bloodshot eyes, after a full twelve hour cycle awake, even with heavy Vigor infusion and the protections of the inner world, they can barely finish another set of engravings.

Moments later in unison, they all drop into their beds and I pull the engravings out of the inner world. A solid silver disk of intricate shapes, reaching all the way to the core of the formerly solid hunk of metal. Something that I hadn’t seen from two leggeds before the system, but as I use a hint of my mana and willpower, a nebulous and untethered shield pops up.

Unhinged and not very solid, but with significantly better precision and mana economy than anything I could hope for by myself even after all my growth with magic.

It took just eight seasons to get to this point, but that is a handful of leaves amidst a full crown.

I slowly move the piece of metal outward and attach it to a preplanned position with all the supporting runes attaching it to the half circle of plates already in place.

As I turn it on, the unfocussed shield mostly locks in place capable of using at least the two anchors on its side to become solidly attached to the ground. And it stands still ready to protect my inner circle of trees from anything until any enemy walks half a tree length to the side and bypasses the incomplete shield, but even if it’s useless for now, the shape in the future and its usefulness is clear in my mind.

Using a tenth as much mana and a hint of my willpower for a much more comprehensive defense. With that and the help of a thousand other young seeds, they would simply add an unprecedented level of multitasking to deal with large groups of enemies, tracking thousands and eliminating them without relying on brute force, but precision targeting.

Just this should have left me to stand against the enemy for many many more seasons.

Another call for my attention comes.

This one thousands of treelengths away in a recently connected part of my domain. A place that stood twice as far from my center as the previous edge of my domain which only took 8 seasons to expand to.

A hundred defenders of the forest gather to fight a group of two hundred seed avatars, playing at an invading force. A good portion of the ones on my side were wolves including the defenders of the forest the seed avatars found not too far away from my domain and the group that Onyx brought.

With gleaming steel covering each of the avatars and pointy implements at the tip of wooden rods that were their preferred weapons, they advance.

I make a concerted effort to not stop them from using my roots, exactly because it would make the fight no challenge at all. That wouldn’t be good training, but I don’t have any other significant compunctions in helping the group of forest defenders.

With a constant stream of Vigor and all my attention on the fight, the wolves rush in on strafing runs as a few others move more slowly. With each pass, they lose one or two combatants, but the enemy loses five, which would put the two groups in somewhat a balance and only about half of the defenders would survive the encounter. But instead of a stalemate, the slower members get their opportunity as the enemy is slowly maneuvered in position.

Everything falls in place and the defenders start decimating the root avatars, though I take care to protect the seed in their heads as they fall to the ground and Aspen keeps the fallen defenders from worsening their injuries, though most are relatively mild.

A sweeping victory seems on the horizon until I realize what they are pulling underground and under the rules, I set for myself, I can’t do anything to stop them. A freezing formation grows with a much improved design, if there were still severe limitations.

Twenty seconds later, a pulse of mana stops a few of the stronger defending wolves and fangs that would have gone through their necks take them out of the fight.

A moment later and the strongest pair of Bulls fall to the ground. They were instrumental in soaking in the damage and using their very bodies to move the battlefield and create openings and their absence is sorely missed.

Though this isn’t a perfect representation of real combat it’s still an important exercise. The rules established to stop any needless death and our lack of a variety of truly strong beings that could walk around to simulate other enemies limited its usefulness, but we kept it up for a reason.

The one being that came close to filling the role of chief invader was Onyx himself, but his power set was purely physical and not really the best match to any invader I had seen.

Still, when he was in the field, the battle was highly contested. With a limited amount of mana, even a hundred defenders of the forest could still do little to halt his progress. Even with unlimited mana, I still had trouble stopping him without causing long term injury and he was growing faster than any other being unbound by the system’s forced sleep. Though a hint of that progress I attribute to the seed in his chest. Which was yet another one beyond the thousand helping me expand my domain directly.

Nash had spread my genes around.

That didn’t matter. Before I was fully brought to thinking about Aether’s arrival and Nash’s interactions with it, I never saw the need to will spread myself so much. I just let my instincts guide me most of the time, even when they didn’t serve like during the long fight with the slow decay of the grove. But after witnessing the immense progress that a thousand young seeds could bring with tendrils growing so fast by the sun cycles that they rival my growth in a season I started to warm up to the idea. Though the rabbits' mana supply in the inner world couldn’t keep up with our ever increasing demands, that is not the only area that the seeds could help.

Even if demand for mana increased when the other mages pushed for more training or experiments the seeds would not be idle.

The seasons grow short and long and the hundreds of lines extend so far away that I start to have trouble conceptualizing everything. Though the constant growth of my domain continues, a hundred or so avatars take onto themselves to run for days ahead of the expansion and grow a mesh with holes so large that when they connect on the far side create areas larger than my old grove. They are relentless, some only coming back for a fraction of daylight to recharge, before leaving on trips lasting several sun cycles.

If they keep this up, it will be impossible for anyone to threaten me again with the puny armies they were sending. If they can’t even cover my domain in a single sun cycle while their feet hit the ground, I would win by default.

I withdraw my attention from the edges of my domain and concentrate on the images flowing from Aspen once again. It takes him a few breaths, but eventually, he gets to where he was trying to go.

A hundred different flowers and other plants sit in the inner world, which is his preferred place to keep his main consciousness. In the middle, I see the product of his work, still something complete but finally, I get a hint that this will be capable of greater resource regeneration than anything else we had.

Even though I was consuming the best current ‘mana/health/stamina fruits’ which increased my regen, he seems to have found the balance to keep a better one stable.

I reach out and he sends me an impression of what I would need to grow. Which is an action I had never thought about investing my time in outside of when I was forced to. Growing other plants as part of myself had long been in my capabilities and that had probably been one of the most instrumental skills that helped me to hold out as long as I did against the armies. And now I could take that capability to a whole new level.

A minute later I drop one of the fruits on a small press mimicking a mouth. As I squish the juices and they dribble down a long cone of leaves, the system takes notice and the stream of resources to my pools starts ticking up. A small improvement, but one that breaks the norms, instead of being something so small I couldn’t even notice the difference, this is just the first iteration of an entirely new technique.

My attention heads from exploiting the system to something that is entirely in the physical realm. To make a material that withstands fire more easily, while being stronger and tougher in all the ways that matter.

I had seen some progress just after the invasion by absorbing other trees with naturally harder wood and my repertoire grew a little more with help of the ones Nash made himself. Though I did have to pay the price in time, mana and nutrients to grow or reinforce existing trees or even to grow them from scratch. A full third of the seeds in the inner world had taken up upon themselves the task of helping research and growing them from scratch.

All was not a sunny day, as another important project was solely in my domain. Try as they might, no sapling could contribute meaningfully as I attempted to connect fully with Nash. I need a hint of something else. I don’t lack willpower or raw dexterity, so they can’t help me with anything. The closest one to provide me with insights was Aspen and I left even him behind in my pursuit. But so many seasons had passed with few improvements that the goal seemed impossible even as I could almost taste the richest soil. That final step that I didn’t know how to take.

Still, the longer I work at it, the faster I would be able to put my roots where they belonged and fully wield his resources.

Nash’s lean and thin form strapped by roots nearly immobile in the middle of my heart tree gets up with my prompting. I guide his body and even add to his blood flow like Aspen had taken to as I push his muscles to move so they won’t weaken too much.

But as those thoughts cross my mind and flow among the leaves of my crown, a possible path shines forward. I failed to SEE. We were the oldest of friends and he cared for Aspen like his own sapling, but we spent too long apart.

I stop trying to force the connection into place, to will the world to become that which my mind believes it should be, instead I return to my roots and just bypass an obstacle by being MORE.

I dredge up every hint of what the seeds in the inner world had told me felt to connect with Nash. Without even asking, the Aether in the air and the feelings leaking out from me are enough for everyone to take notice.

They KNOW what I need as I act like Nash.

I let a thousand streams of will envelop my own, letting their raw power add strength, while I provide the focus and direction to it all. Hints of the Aether flow enter Nash and spread throughout my oldest living tree and with single mindedness that always brought a smile to Nash’s face I grab his Qi and will through him a fireball.

And though I was no fan of fire, this was the most beautiful flame of them all.

With a well treated path in place, better times lay ahead and if enemies try to invade once again I can simply:

GROW,

LEARN and

OVERCOME.