100x Rebate Sharing System: Retired Incubus Wants to Marry & Have Kids-Chapter 376 - 375- World Tree

An hour passed.

Then two.

The fire burned down. Olivia came once, quietly, to add wood and take the empty tea service. She moved through the room with an unhurried grace that said she’d learned to occupy space without intruding on it, and the faint smell of incense in the fabric of her robes mingled with that green clean undertone that seemed to permeate everything in this building.

Celestia had not asked again when Viktor would arrive.

She understood, with the particular comprehension of someone who had spent sixteen years reading power dynamics, what was happening. A nephew who had been abandoned by his mother’s family. Who had survived exile and built ’this’ and healed a man’s severed leg before breakfast. Who had known she was coming, months in advance, and had written to tell her so.

He was not being rude.

He was establishing, wordlessly, that he was not sitting somewhere waiting to be called upon. That she could wait.

She found, to her mild surprise, that she didn’t find this offensive.

She found it interesting.

Her youngest soldier — new, twenty at most, still wearing his enthusiasm more openly than was fully professional — had been quiet for two and a half hours and had reached his limit.

"Commander," he said. He was looking at the corridor rather than at her, which meant he was aware he was about to say something she might not want to hear and was choosing tactical positioning accordingly. "Should we — I could ask the servant when the lord intends to —"

"Go ahead," Celestia said.

He blinked.

"Go," she said. "Ask."

He went.

He returned in four minutes with the expression of someone who had received information that raised more questions than it answered. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

"The servant says," he began, and paused to confirm the words in his own head, "that the lord is currently — ’growing a world tree.’ For the people of Millbrook." He looked at her. "And that he asks for the commander’s patience, as the process requires his full attention until completion."

The room held very still.

Celestia looked at her soldier.

"A world tree," she said.

"That’s what she said, Commander."

Mard, from the opposite side of the room, set his cup down slowly.

Celestia stood.

’’’

She moved through the manor at pace, out through the side door that the servant indicated, across a side garden that smelled overwhelmingly of living things — not the manicured green of noble estates but the dense layered smell of actual growth, soil and moisture and something pungent and alive.

The garden opened onto the east grounds.

And there she stopped.

Viktor was seated cross-legged on the bare earth forty feet away, his back straight, his hands resting on his knees with the particular stillness of someone in deep meditative contact with something large. His eyes were closed. His hair moved slightly in a breeze she couldn’t feel on her own face.

Before him, the tree.

It was already — ’already,’ in however many hours it had been growing — already larger than the manor. The trunk rose from the earth with the unhurried certainty of something that had always been here and was simply becoming visible, the bark silver-green and smooth in a way that living wood didn’t normally look, lit from within by a very faint luminescence that wasn’t quite visible if you looked at it directly but became apparent in peripheral vision. The roots were surfacing through the soil around Viktor in long curved ridges, the exposed wood smooth and dry, weaving outward in every direction before disappearing back under the earth.

And above.

The canopy was — ’it was still growing’ — spreading with each moment, the branches reaching and branching and reaching again, each terminal twig putting out leaves that were already full-sized, the dense deep green of mature growth rather than the pale yellow-green of new leaves. The shadow it cast across the grounds was already enormous, the light through it dappled and warm and carrying that green quality that Celestia had been sensing all morning in the energy of this place.

Fruit was appearing on the upper branches.

She could see it from here — round, gold-tinted, the kind of fruit that looked like the product of a painter’s imagination rather than an actual tree.

The townspeople were coming.

They appeared at the garden’s edges singly and in clusters — coming from the road, from the square, from wherever the news had reached them, moving toward the tree the way things move toward warmth, not hurrying, not crowding, just ’coming,’ drawn by something Celestia could feel herself as a pull in the chest, an unreasonable wanting to be ’near’ the thing.

One by one, they knelt.

Not theatrically. Not at a signal. Just — one, and then another beside them, and then the one behind, like a slow wave reaching a shore, the people of Millbrook going to their knees in the shadow of a tree that had been a seed this morning and was now the size of a cathedral.

Viktor sat at its root, eyes closed, hands still.

Breathing.

Celestia walked toward him.

She stopped ten feet away.

She could feel it properly now — the emanation from the tree was not subtle at this distance. Warmth, but not temperature-warmth. The ’vitality’ quality she’d sensed in the manor, but direct now, undiluted, pressing into her chest with the insistence of something that meant to be felt. Every shallow injury she carried — the old ache in her right shoulder from the joint that had been dislocated three years ago and never quite healed back correctly, the constant faint tension in her lower back from sixteen years in armor — both of them were simply ’absent.’ Not improving. Absent. Like they’d been removed, quietly, without asking permission.

She stared at the tree.

’He grew this today.’

Not — the tower was a dungeon structure, spontaneously manifested, the boy had been lucky to be nearby. This was ’not that.’ This was Viktor, sitting cross-legged on the ground, having ’grown this today,’ and the people of his town were kneeling in its shadow while it healed them passively through proximity, and the fruits appearing on its upper branches had a quality to them that Celestia’s Second Survey told her were extraordinary in ways she was not going to be able to report accurately because she didn’t have the vocabulary.

She thought about the letter. ’I merely know, as I have always known, what happens next.’

She thought about the fat unhappy boy in the carriage.

She thought about the man who had watched her ride into his town with the expression of someone who had seen this coming for months and found it exactly where he’d predicted.

Her hands moved to her helmet.

The buckle came undone. The strap loosened. She lifted it free, holding it at her side.

Her grey hair fell loose, short and ash-silver, the temple streaks that had come with age and armor and too many hard winters. The morning air touched her face, cool and clean.

She stood there for a long moment, looking at her nephew’s tree with her helmet in her hand.

’We abandoned him,’ she thought. Plainly, without softening it. ’We left him in this place and we turned our backs and whatever this is — whatever he has become — none of it had anything to do with us.’

The tree breathed.

Or something breathed — the canopy moved in a wind that was only present around the tree, the leaves turning in their thousands, the gold fruit swaying.

"Is he really a God...?" The words came from her mouth without going through her head first. The unguarded voice of someone for whom the performance had simply run out.

The helmet fell from her hand.

The sound it made on the ground was very loud in the quiet.

Forty feet away, Viktor did not open his eyes.

But the corner of his mouth moved.

Just slightly.

’System... It seems we have to meet our heroines, soon.’