100x Rebate Sharing System: Retired Incubus Wants to Marry & Have Kids-Chapter 377 - 376- Meeting Celestia Ktorian

The tree finished growing.

There was no ceremony to the moment — no final dramatic surge, no sound. The canopy simply ’held,’ the leaves going still in the way of something that had reached completion and settled into what it had always been becoming. The golden fruit hung heavy on the upper branches, the light through the leaves had found its permanent quality, and the roots, visible in long smooth ridges through the soil, stopped moving.

Silence.

Then Viktor opened his eyes.

He stood with the ease of someone rising from a chair rather than from two hours of whatever had just happened — no stiffness, no adjustment required. He turned.

Celestia was ten feet away, her helmet on the ground beside her boot where it had fallen, her grey-streaked hair loose at her temples in a way that it clearly wasn’t meant to be. She was looking at him with the expression of a woman who had spent sixteen years being the most prepared person in any room she entered and had just arrived in a room she was not prepared for.

Viktor looked at her.

"Greetings," he said. His voice was easy. The voice of someone who had been doing something ordinary and was now moving on to the next thing. "How are you?"

The question landed in the quiet of the grounds with the blandness of weather.

Celestia stared at him for a moment.

"You knew I was coming," she said.

"I guessed that much." He glanced past her, toward the line of armored knights at the garden’s edge — still standing in formation, still watching him with the particular alertness of people who had seen something they couldn’t categorize and were waiting for more information before deciding how alarmed to be. "You were always going to be the one they sent. Anyone else would have been an insult, and House Ktorian doesn’t make that kind of error when they actually want information."

Celestia absorbed this.

She was trying to read him — Celestia could feel it, the Second Survey extending outward, the professional habit of sixteen years reaching for the shape of a person’s intention. His face gave her nothing to catch. Not hostile. Not warm. Not performing neutrality — just ’present,’ the quality of someone who had no particular need for the conversation to go any specific way.

It was, she realized, the most disarming thing he could have done. More disarming than aggression, more disarming than charm.

He simply didn’t need anything from her.

"How many more of those do you have?" she said. She meant the tree. The healing. The whatever-that-was.

Viktor turned and looked at the World Tree.

The people of Millbrook still gathered at its edges in the slow organic clustering of something that would take the rest of the day to reach its full shape — not a crowd yet, just a continuous arriving, the town slowly learning that something was here that wanted to be come to. A woman was already reaching up to the lowest branch, and a fruit came into her palm without resistance, its gold skin warm in the morning light.

Viktor looked at the scene for a moment. Something moved through his face that wasn’t quite emotion but sat adjacent to it — the expression of someone watching a calculation resolve correctly.

"Should we go inside?" he said. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

Celestia looked at the tree. "Inside ’what.’"

He was already moving.

The door appeared in the trunk the way a door appears in a familiar wall — like it had always been there and you simply hadn’t looked at the right angle before. The wood around it was seamless, the same silver-green living bark as the rest of the trunk, but the door was shaped from it, frame and panel and simple iron-ring handle, all of the same material, warm to the touch.

Viktor opened it.

The light from inside was different — softer, greener, the quality of light that had passed through many layers of leaf before arriving. He stepped through.

Celestia looked at the door.

She looked at her knights.

"Hold here," she said. "All of you."

Ren opened his mouth.

"All of you," she repeated.

She went through.

The inside of the World Tree was not what a person expected from the inside of a tree.

Celestia stepped through the door and stopped.

The hall was — it was a ’hall.’ Cathedral dimensions: high vaulted ceiling that was also the interior of the tree’s living wood, the grain of it rising in long smooth arches overhead, the knots and rings of it visible in the amber light that came from — she looked — from the wood itself, a very faint bioluminescence in the grain, distributed evenly, no source visible. The floor was smooth root-wood, the natural undulation of it polished to a surface that was both level enough to walk on and entirely organic. Along the walls, the wood had grown into shelves, benches, protrusions that served as ledges without having been carved — just ’grown,’ the tree having been asked to make these shapes and having complied.

At the center of the hall, two chairs.

Also grown. High-backed, wide-armed, the kind of seating that communicated ’sit here,’ shaped with the unconscious authority of furniture that had decided its purpose. Viktor had already taken one. He gestured to the other.

Olivia stood near the wall, hands folded, her golden robes lit warmly from below by the wood’s glow. She’d entered quietly, the way she always seemed to do things — without marking the moment of her entrance, just ’there.’

Celestia walked to the chair.

She sat.

She looked up at the ceiling — the vaulted living wood of it, the roots of the canopy translated into interior architecture, the smell of it green and clean and unlike anything she’d been inside before.

"How did you do this?" she said.

The question came out honest rather than professional. The voice of someone who had suspended the interrogation mode briefly in favor of a more fundamental curiosity.

Viktor looked at her.

"I don’t trust you enough to tell you," he said.

The words were not rude. They were not apologetic. They were the words of a man stating a fact about the current state of available information.

Celestia held them for a moment.

"That’s fair," she said.

A pause.

"So." She looked at him. "What do you want, nephew?"