I Found a Door to the Elven Realm

Chapter 198: Nisann?

Three weeks changed the farm.

The solar panels were up and running on the main building thanks to Toris who had apparently decided that human engineering was just fancy carpentry with wires. The plumbing worked in four of the seven structures now.

The chicken coop behind the tool shed was producing eggs every morning thanks to the birds Rosa had bought from the nearest town and Rury had kept her promise to protect the chickens instead of eating them, though the chickens still looked terrified whenever she walked past.

The money was the problem.

Eren checked the numbers on his phone while eating breakfast alone in the kitchen at six AM. After last month’s renovation costs and three weeks of feeding and supplying two hundred plus people who needed everything from soap to socks the account was at a hundred and forty thousand dollars.

That sounded like a lot until you divided it by two hundred mouths and multiplied it by the months until he had any real income flowing in. Kalina’s early sales of Evon spices and wine had brought in a trickle but not nearly enough to offset what two hundred elves consumed in a week.

I went from unemployed to broke CEO of the world’s weirdest commune in six months. Career growth.

The elves didn’t complain. Most of them had spent decades eating whatever grew near the village and wearing clothes they’d patched so many times the original fabric was gone. For them a farmhouse with running water and a grocery store twenty minutes away was luxury beyond anything they’d known. But Eren looked at their patched clothes and their carefully rationed portions and felt something ugly in his chest every time.

They deserved better. He didn’t know exactly when he’d started thinking of two hundred elves as his responsibility but the feeling was there now and it wasn’t going away.

Every two or three days he went through the portal with Fury.

The wolf waited near the ruins while Eren crouched beside the burned World Tree trunk and put his hand on the living root. The dragon never moved. Its massive body was in the same spot week after week, breathing slowly, healing or sleeping or whatever wounded dragons did. Fury kept his nose pointed toward it the whole time and every visit the report was the same.

[It breathes. It doesn’t move. The smell is getting weaker.]

"Weaker how?"

[Like something leaving a body.]

Eren didn’t know what that meant but he filed it away.

The first week he could hold the root for five seconds before the pressure in his skull forced him to let go. By the middle of the second week he was at eight seconds. By the end of the third week he could hold on for almost fifteen seconds before his nose started dripping blood.

And with every second the visions got clearer.

..

The first few visits showed him the same thing from different angles. An ancient version of Aradne, billions of years ago maybe, with no life on it at all. Just rock and water and volcanic dust covering a planet that looked like Mars with oceans. And somewhere on the surface a speck of green that shouldn’t have been there.

A plant. Tiny, barely the size of Eren’s fist, growing out of the bare rock near a thermal vent.

He watched it grow in fast-forward across what felt like millions of years compressed into seconds. The plant spread roots into the volcanic soil and pulled nutrients out of the rock itself and expanded from a fist-sized sprout into something that covered acres, then square kilometers, then entire landmasses. Time moved so fast in the vision that he could see oceans shift and mountains form and erode while the plant kept growing underneath everything.

"..that thing was here before anything else was alive on this whole planet," he muttered while walking back to the portal point after his fourth visit. Fury trotted beside him and didn’t comment because the wolf had learned that Eren’s muttering was usually him talking to himself.

He told Emily about the visions over dinner but kept the details vague because he wasn’t sure what he was looking at yet. She listened with her hunter eyes and asked one question.

"Is it showing you these things on purpose?"

He hadn’t thought about that.

The second week of visits changed everything.

Eren held the root for twelve seconds on a Tuesday afternoon and the vision jumped forward by what he estimated was several million years. The plant wasn’t just growing anymore. It was doing something else. The root network under the surface of Aradne had spread to cover most of the planet by this point and somewhere in that spread, in a node deep underground, something new was happening.

The plant was thinking.

Not thinking the way humans or elves thought. It was more like a computer running its first program. Input from a billion root tips spread across a continent, processing the data, generating a response. Then another input, another response, faster each time. Over millions of years the processing got complex enough that Eren could feel an actual mind forming in the root network.

It wasn’t just a plant anymore. It was a plant that had turned into a brain the size of a planet.

A brain made of roots.

But that wasn’t quite right either because the vision showed him something he hadn’t expected.

The plant wasn’t native to Aradne. It was a branch. A single broken branch from something much bigger that had been here before, something that existed in the Evon Universe as a massive living structure. The real body, the actual World Tree, had been part of an ancient civilization so big that Eren’s brain couldn’t hold the scale of it. He’d seen a flash of it in his very first vision weeks ago, the tree the size of a planet with cosmic shapes moving around it.

That was the parent organism. And at some point it had left.

Not died. Left. Pulled itself out of the Evon Universe or moved to another dimension or whatever the cosmic equivalent of moving to a different city was. But when it left a single branch stayed behind. One piece of the original that got caught in Aradne’s soil and couldn’t follow.

"..so the village Totem is a leftover branch from something that left the universe millions of years ago," he whispered while resting against a tree after his seventh visit. His nose was dripping blood onto his shirt again. "And it grew a brain."

Fury pressed his nose against Eren’s leg. [You bleed every time. This isn’t good.]

"Yeah well it’s the only way I’m learning anything." He wiped his nose with his sleeve and started walking.

On the farm, life continued.

Emily’s belly was getting rounder. She’d stopped pretending the back pain wasn’t there and let Selena make her a support wrap from repurposed fabric. It looked ridiculous and she wore it under her shirt where nobody could see it.

Every night Eren put his hand on the bump and felt nothing because it was too early for kicks but he kept doing it anyway. Emily would grab his wrist and press his palm harder against her skin and say "you’re not pushing hard enough silly" and he’d kiss the side of her neck until she stopped bossing him around. Which was never. She never stopped bossing him around.

Mel had graduated from cooking videos to action movies and was now trying to recreate fight choreography in the field behind the tool shed. She’d convinced Nimbo to be her sparring partner and the sounds of a teenage elf getting repeatedly knocked on his ass echoed across the property every afternoon.

Oldir had organized a group of older elves into a construction crew and they were rebuilding the collapsed barn with a mixture of elven woodworking techniques and hardware store supplies. The result looked bizarre. A barn that was half Turkish countryside and half magical forest architecture but it was solid.

The money kept dropping. Groceries alone for two hundred people ran about three thousand dollars a week and that was with the elves eating mostly rice and vegetables and whatever Rury hunted on the property’s edges. If something didn’t change in the next two months the account would be dangerously close to empty.

But the visions kept getting worse.

On his ninth visit, three days before the end of the third week, the vision jumped again.

The branch that had been left behind on Aradne had done something terrible.

Over millions of years of growing a brain in its root network the Totem, he was still calling it the Totem even though he was starting to realize it was something much older than that name, had started running experiments on other things, never on itself. The Evon system, the universal framework that governed levels and skills and energy on Aradne, had a rule that Eren could feel in the vision without fully understanding it. Whenever the Totem moved its own body, its actual physical root structure, the system punished it hard. Energy drained, growth reversed, connections severed. The system treated the Totem’s body as an illegal object because it was a piece of a World Tree that wasn’t supposed to be here anymore.

The universe itself didn’t want this thing here but it couldn’t kill it because it was too deeply embedded in the soil.

It just gets punished every time it moves, huh..