My mind connects to the Elf in the inner world cell with my telepathy skill. The so very useful communication medium that had become a staple to anyone following my footsteps and trying to talk to other races in the instance and even now around the world with other humans with the lack of some magical universal language streamed in our heads.

The clear images are relatively familiar, not because I saw them before or I grew used to his ways of speaking, but because roughly half of his thoughts run in words like in most humans. This is a lot different from talking to a bunny, let alone a tree for the first time. His brain structure seems even more similar to ours than to goblins.

“Let me go. You have no idea of the trouble that you are bringing on your head by keeping me here. ” His words don’t even make my heart flutter for a moment, for I sense the empty bluster. He partially believes them, but something shook his confidence and I know more about the situation than he possibly knows. Even if we get overwhelmed in the later stages, for now their best efforts would at most kill a slightly larger fraction of a fraction of earth's population while they lost droves of their reinforcements.

“Ohh, I have some idea. But your comrades are still too weak to really compete with us. They can hurt us, but it is only a thorn in our side for now.”

“You are all doomed, do you think that torturing me will give you information? I’m not stupid, I know that you captured me with whatever evil mechanism allowed you access to a portal you managed to acquire. The system’s toys and gifts will be of no help to you as the waves continue coming. I may have failed to kill myself, but you will not get a single word on the healing arts.”

“Too bad, I was hoping for something on that front. But that is not why I’m here, not yet. Trying to get you to ‘betray’ such knowledge would be futile. I just wanted to get to know you. We have captured a lot of lower level members of your race, but no lieutenants, let alone someone higher up. I want to get an overlook on your culture.”

“I will give you nothing.”

“You have already given me so much, but the main question in my mind right now, is why do you hate us so much?”

“Hate you? You aren’t worthy of hate. You are bugs to be crushed. You should have just surrendered.” The lithe being nearly spits out.

“The hormonal response I sense from you says otherwise.”

He takes a deep breath trying to calm himself, but it only half works.

“Then let me enlighten you. You are an insignificant being standing in our way. I may not know how someone that only stayed on the instance for a month is this strong, but it doesn’t matter Aether Wielder.”

Amidst everything, I can sense his vocal cords almost moving and strange mental images hiding behind his primary words, and I make sense of most of it with the help of my other self and his bonded seed.

“You can see my Aether?” I say spinning my index finger in a circle but moving my Aether over my other shoulder in a dazzling and wild pattern at a much higher concentration than normal. Although it is subtle, I sense his smugness just underneath the surface with my perception field but he is looking at the wrong spot.

“Yes. We are no new arrivals, scrambling for scraps of knowledge, we are the mighty Elves. We command an empire that ranges this whole galaxy.”

“Just this galaxy?”

His eyes narrow, but this time he doesn’t take the bait.

“I reiterate my question. Why do YOU dislike us, beyond what you already mentioned.” I say while spinning a few roots around without mana or Qi.

He eyes me wearily, but he already saw me using magic without the accompanying Mana, so this shouldn’t be any different. He points at a few roots slowly moving.

“You try to control something that is beyond your station.”

I bore my gaze on his eyes and say:

“I saw the result of your nurturing. The branches on the walls and half the constructs in your village. All that nature is screaming to be left alone, trying to return to its normal shape.”

“How did… you are not a tree singer. You blasphemous…”

His words start soft and confused, but then outrage and determination build such momentum, I fear he will have a stroke.

“Ohh come on. Everyone has their secrets and the system helps to bridge a lot of gaps.”

His lips are even more firmly pressed together and I sense that I will get nothing more today.

“If that is how you would like this to be, then fine. You cooperated a little bit, so you get an extra half an hour of sun at noon for say… a week. Try to kill yourself or anything like that and I will take your privileges away. Maybe we can barter for a plant or two tomorrow while I’m over here.”

His smoldering eyes try to turn me into cinders but fail. So I simply turn off the portals and magic that made it look like I was inside the inner world and poof out of existence like I teleported away. His mind seems to ruminate on our conversation, though he now knows, things are more complicated than he expected.

“Tree singer. What the hell are tree singers?” I speak aloud.

They have at least a few elves that can feel the effects of their actions. Elves that told the rest of their race of the painful nature of their actions. Yet they do nothing to address it. Hell, why do they take the harder path fighting against nature instead of letting it flow naturally actually conscripting the help of the plant you are trying to alter?

That questions try to burn into my mind. And it continues to burn after all the attacks which luckily all went relatively smoothly. But without more to go on, I need to move on for now, so I fold them up and put everything into a neat little box t unpack later.

Now, I will keep drawing the potential from my body, my mind and anything else that makes itself manifest.

My stats are already absurd when compared to anyone near my level. Not even someone with multiple Mythic subclasses and a Mythic main class this early in the game could really match me if my informed guesses at the actual number of stats were anywhere near correct.

Still, like with most things I put my time into, I knew that I could squeeze a few more points out of my training and maybe even come up with a novel strategy to open up a new branch.

All that added to the change in the natural Aether field mean something. There is untapped potential there, but it is still unripened, not the time for me to cut it in half and enjoy the sweet treat.

I quickly go over a few important things that I added to my list.

My second mind, whenever I wasn’t doing something that precluded those activities, should be growing meditating and recharging my resources. It won’t achieve full effectiveness, but it will help. Furthermore, there is plenty that he could do while I further increased my control of things outside the system like the direct spatial control needed for increasing the Inner World size.

For that matter, I need to figure out my class upgrade. For now, I’m holding out, but after the enemy crossed the level 100 boundary, their skills would also cross the first threshold and I didn’t want to face them even if I was willing to show my full potential with the inner world in full view.

Then I need to find a way to upgrade my book. Just like last time, I didn’t have concrete steps on how to improve it, but with the bit of Mithril that I had, I could simply do a straight upgrade in ‘raw power’ and speed’ that it could take in information.

It wouldn’t be the largest step, but it might be enough. Still, my gut was telling me to wait a little further, so I lower its priority until I figure out what exactly was missing. Further exploration of the new dead zones around Earth should also yield better materials or even find ways to implement gems into our designs. Because it didn’t make sense that only metals could affect the magical realm.

“Where are my gems?? I want a wizard staff with a big ass gem on top.”

Sitting at my favorite spot, opposite the entryway in my home with my back touching Pando’s heart tree, I let the relaxation fill me once again. Further thoughts on that can come later.

I spread my awareness without any effort, just letting my mind wander for a minute or two before I come back to myself and then I start in earnest.

System prompt:

Congratulations, You have acquired the skill:

Dual-mind Lv. 34 ( High tier skill)

This skill lets you split in mind in two while portioning out your mental stats to it. The greater the number of stats temporarily sacrificed, the greater its potential.

Damn, level 34 in a couple of hours, high stats and experiencing a high stress situation really pushed me. Melding my second mind to a seed also provided quite a bit of help.

But now that I have the time, I want to learn all the little facets of my new skill.

So I let go of the seed slightly connected to us for a minute and call another. He is also young and I try to form that same connection with the skill after whatever changes my Aether made to it taking it away from its intended use.

Instead of the nearly effortless connection, two impressions hit me.

It is like I’m trying to fit a square peg into a duck shaped hole. The skill is ever so slightly malleable and with enough strength, I could make it fit. But my second realization comes intertwined with the first, that forcing this connection… would make us lose all the ease of connection to the first seed he bonded. And I don’t think that getting in the habit of forcing skills to change at a rapid pace is very healthy.

So yeah, I hadn’t ‘chained’ and lost all opportunity to meld with another seed until I managed to turn this skill into a tri mind or multi mind type of deal, but also not something to do at the drop of a hat. For proper integration, it might even take weeks for this transition.

Still, even with things as they are this specific seed seems happy to go along. Then an amazing idea shows up and I talk to the seed connected to my other half:

How would you like a brain to rival Aspen’s or even Pando’s?

Uhhhh. Yes. Giant brain. Very useful for me. Very useful for you.

And you don’t mind being stuck with me? Or my other half?

In a thousand seasons, I may drift away. In the current one, helping you is as vital as the sun.

So then I get the Band back together. With Aspen’s Pando’s and my full efforts helping to grow something with as much care as I could apply to something. Even beyond the distributed large scale brain vats I dug underground for Pando. Not that other seeds or Pando didn’t deserve better. But with well over a thousand in the inner world me and a decent number being carried by others in their bodies as faux inner world anchors, I simply couldn’t dedicate the days at a time for each otherwise I would never get anything done.

But each and everyone of them had a least a seed of brain to work with, and if they worked hard, they might even create a path I never dreamed of. A path in which we would both would gain instead of them using my capabilities as a crutch. I even saw a single seed that was slowly developing its own brain way beyond the ‘limits’ I set as he grew the very ‘skull’ to accommodate his larger brain. It was slow and methodical and I even felt a hint of danger. But worst case scenario, I could patch him back together to his starting point.

I wield my avatar skill with the precision of a hard drive head. Beyond the mortal realm and reaches into what should only be the realm machine, where even a hundredth of a millimeter is a fatal error. Not even a human hair width, but some of the thinnest plastic film.

All that I’m converges around this new brain. Barely the size of a melon with neurons that weren’t microscopic, but a web that most people could parse out with sharp eyes and precision tweezers. Such are the limitations of my skill.

Considering the ‘neurons’ as large as a knot on a hair strand and similar thinness connections, if this had been the main vehicle that they used to think of, the seeds would be all but useless. But they have a preexisting cognitive function in another realm entirely. This simply adds a little speed and a few random memories and impressions from me. Even those memories changed over time.

I try to find that same center that I only needed one time after returning to Earth to help Pando to grow a brain of his own and it comes easily.

I dig out space around his brain the deep underground in my inner world so it can grow.

Now all other seeds, including Aspen, had gotten a slightly different version of this ‘brain’ with the main difference being size, but I’m not content with that for one that is going to become an integral part of my second self for years to come, maybe even forever.

So I dig around the deep underground for a central pocket large enough for a ‘standard’ meter wide brain vat that could develop into a large brain. Pando had chosen to connect smaller brains all around the world, while Aspen kept everything in a single vat, though admittedly a much larger one. This time, I feel in my bones that it will take ideas from both and maybe even take them further.

So I don’t create the start of a brain and set a few limits based on the quality of my effort and time investment so it can grow up to a certain size I know to be safe in a vat of nutrients. Instead, I use his current brain as a template with its development and changes what his growth induced. I manually grow the main brain before working on a sphere surrounding it some 3 meters from the center, as a web of other smaller ones around each of these secondary brains. A courtesy from my other half. A web links all to each other imitating the smaller network that Aspen had inside his own vat.

I use the connection to this new seed, Aspen and Pando as a compass. As the large brain in the middle integrates with dozens of watermelon sized ones, I feel that he is not quite content with the current state, and after only a moment of thought, I agree that it is missing more. So I expand once again. Instead of stopping at the 2 layers beyond the main brain, I analyze and add more watermelon and chimp sized ones in a double sphere.

Then, I’m the one to notice something missing. So I let Aether flow as I take the patterns and twist everything ever so slightly, trying to make the entire thing more closely approach a fractal pattern. The smaller sub brains each get one more layer of smaller and smaller helpers in a cycle the smallest one is only comprised of ‘knot’ of 3 neurons.

Then I’m done.

A masterwork that he can probably only tangentially use, like a noob on a race car. But it is as closely tunned to him as I could make it and I somehow managed to imprint a faint natural Aether field matching my own. He grows eager to push all the buttons and figure out how to take this toy to its logical limits. But even as he dives in I already start to have ideas of how to improve it further after my skills grow.

To get everything just the way I want will take work, but I’m going to do it because now I can ‘operate’ on ‘my own brain’ with little fear of screwing up and enhancing my capabilities beyond what 2 pounds of grey matter can support.