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    It took about an hour for the kings to leave. After fifteen minutes of no progress, the weasel king had proclaimed the lemur prince a liar and attacked. The lemur king had driven him back and the two of them had exploded into fierce combat again, with the lemur king slowly luring away his enemy.


    The prince, seemingly unsure if I was actually gone, glanced out at the clearing, but when he couldn’t detect anything, eventually gave up and left.


    Without any active scrutiny, plus the improvement in Dantalion, I was pretty confident about our chances of retreating. I turned to Daysia. “Alright, that didn’t take as long as I was afraid of, so we can still find your tree. I’ve been doing some deep recon on the area while hiding us, and I think I might have a direction for us to try.”


    Dantalion became more effective the longer you stayed in place. While Murmur used that information to more thoroughly erase traces, deepening stealth over time, I was still learning, and with all the root systems on this planet intertwined into the Primordial tree sea, my information gathering had been slowly uncovering info about the entire nearby forest as it drilled down further.


    The Dryad looked relieved. “I’m glad,” she said with a wan smile. “I was willing to give up if I needed to, I already said I’d help you and I wouldn''t begrudge you an opportunity, but if we hadn’t found something I’d have needed to bond with one of the water trees we passed. My suitability percentage with them was only about twenty percent, which would have been a huge problem.”


    I wasn’t actually clear on how suitability worked, but hearing they could detect percentages was pretty interesting. Planting my staff on the ground, I stood and offered her my hand. “Well, let’s find you something good then. I owe you one for all your help. That Tree Singing is the only reason I had a usable weapon to win that fight with.”


    I was reasonably sure, given the motivation to go all out, I could have killed the lemur prince in a bare knuckle fight, but the thing was, I hadn’t HAD that motivation. The little guy was just doing his best for his dad, and he’d been a good opponent. Technically we were both here to steal from the weasels, so it wasn’t like I had the moral high ground. I hadn’t wanted to kill or seriously injure him, but if I hadn’t been able to get my hands on a proper weapon, I’d have had to use all my strength to disengage and he might’ve died.


    Daysia beamed. “It was my honor. The Nine Lives Reincarnation Tree is only C-rank, but it’s one of the very few soul attribute spirit plants on this whole planet. Most of them are guarded by terrifying beasts. The only reason this one has remained with the weasel king is because it was still a sapling, so its rank was low. Being able to harmonize with a tree like that is a dream for most Tree Singers.”


    “Even so, I bet we can find you a really nice tree to bond with,” I said encouragingly. “Now that I’m free to focus, why don’t you tell me which trees you’ve gotten the best responses from. We can try to look for commonalities and narrow down our search parameters.”


    Once we were out of the clearing, I wasn’t too worried about being noticed. The C-rankers were fighting fiercely, so they wouldn’t be able to focus on any random spot checking for stealth, and below C-rank Murmur should be basically invincible. At that last thought, I reached over to a tree I was passing and rapped my knuckles on the bark. I’d been having a lot of those arrogant determined thoughts lately. It might’ve been recursion, but it was probably best not to keep tempting fate. I made a mental note to try to curb my ego a bit.


    We chatted as we walked about the various trees we’d seen. As I’d been searching, Daysia had been making notes about her reactions to different plants. As she’d mentioned, water plants seemed to have a pretty low suitability percentage, and dark plants, which most of the trees here were, even less. She said she had a high suitability with moon plants, but that the overlap between the three was causing problems.


    The main issue was that the mark only gave her a general area. While that area SEEMED to overlap with the Gloamwood, it didn’t necessarily mean that the tree she needed most was in this forest. Just that it was nearby. With that in mind, we decided to follow the moon attribute trees out of the Gloamwood and towards the forest where the lemur king reigned.


    “Lemur King” was a bit of a misnomer. It implied that he was the strongest of the Verdenloft Lemurs, which he very much wasn’t. There was, apparently, a Lemur Emperor further into the wilds, and all the Lemur Kings paid tribute to the B-rank beast. This particular Lemur King, the Heaven-Splitting Lemur King was a variant species that seemed to lean towards light based techniques, and the forest he ruled made this abundantly clear.


    Reaching the river that divided the two territories, it was basically night and day. Literally. And after we crossed, the suitability percentage Daysia was seeing skyrocketed.Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author''s preferred platform and support their work!


    While there was a strong moon attribute in the Gloamwood, the Lemur forest, also called the Glimmerhedge, was pretty much a mirror image. Fire, light, and eventually, sun, these were the attributes of the trees there.


    Daysia, in a turn of events that I should have expected from a Dryad with sunflowers for hair, was heavily attuned to the sun attribute in trees, and the more sun energy she found in a plant the better she seemed to harmonize with it.


    With the lemurs across the river having a turf war, exploring the Glimmerhedge was surprisingly easy, and we managed to find a perfectly suitable tree with a whopping ninety six percent suitability near the center of the forest. The tree we found was seemingly incredibly old and VERY large, being at the high end of C-rank itself, though not as rare or powerful as my new staff since it was missing the unique attribute.


    The tree was called a Dawntreader Elm, and it had rich brown bark and metallic golden leaves shot through with veins of blazing light. Plant attribute, I had learned, was very similar to the naturally occurring runes that had developed on that water stone I’d seen in the early days on Callus. It worked a lot like natural formations, only self contained, and was kind of the plant version of a bloodline.


    Existing in an environment heavily steeped in a specific kind of energy would influence the environment directly. As I’d found during my own Ascension stats, barring those created with wishes, were made up of renown, and the belief and renown that composed them could affect the way they behaved. This was the core concept behind recursion, the belief using the stats as a medium to alter the mental state of an Ascendant as the stats take up a larger and larger percentage of their being.


    It was kind of a chicken or egg issue, whether the environment influenced belief to alter the basic nature or whether it changed as the belief altered the stats in the area, but whichever was the case, environmental factors had a big influence on plants, animals, and minerals.


    Animal bloodlines were formed in a similar way, with sub D-rank animals mostly lacking sapience and being passively influenced by external factors. Obviously, that was just influence, and bloodlines passed down biologically as well as culture all played a role, but the combination of the three could produce some interesting results, like the Moment Chopping Lemur Prince. The more I learned about cultivation, the more intricate and complex it seemed, and the more the things that had happened to me in the past made an odd kind of sense.


    Daysia, meanwhile, was spinning around the tree, humming a cheerful tune as she wrapped the trunk in garlands of…her hair, as far as I could tell. At least it looked the same, sunflowers on long green vines very different than sunflowers normally grew on. As she sang, the wood of the tree reshaped itself into gently curved hooks that she hung the vines across.


    Once she finished, she stood in front of the tree and continued her song. The tree bark and wood receded like water flowing off an emerging turtle, opening to show a doorway. Daysia walked forward into the hollow, and as soon as she was gone, the tree just…closed up.


    I stood, staring at the trunk. That was interesting. No one had warned me that would happen. With a sigh, I sat down, leaning against the tree, Murmur began to settle, deepening the stealth I was under, and to keep myself amused I started throwing acorns for Archie to try to intercept in midair.


    Archie, getting bored with this quickly, landed on my shoulder. He trilled in annoyance. I raised an eyebrow at the bird. “What? No, that’s not her house, it’s a TREE.” He chirped in annoyance, and I had to pause. “I…I guess they do all live in trees. But that’s not what I meant. No, it’s not her house, she’ll be back soon.”


    I assumed. I didn’t know anything about this ritual, but I was at least mostly sure it wasn’t supposed to take too long, since speed was the priority in the ceremony. Sure enough, after only about an hour, the bark of the tree peeled back, revealing that same archway, and Daysia emerged, beaming in triumph. Literally, she was glowing now, her veins shining under her green skin like the vessels in the tree leaves, as were the petals of the flowers in her hair.


    “Well, that was dramatic,” I said with a laugh. “I assumed it would just be a quick conversation, not all that pageantry.”


    She shrugged. “It can be. But normally, Dryads can’t bond with trees of higher rank. It requires a ninety plus percent suitability and a special ritual. Tree Singers are a necessary part of that, though the tree also has to help. Molding living C-ranked wood is pretty much impossible without active assistance from the tree. I had to pledge myself to the tree heart, which is kind of complicated. But I did it.” She spun, gesturing down at herself. “I’m now a Dawntreader Dryad! Are you ready to head back?”


    I could tell from her demeanor that she was eager to show off. She’d worked hard on this, both to help me and for herself, and I was betting her results were out of the ordinary. Especially after hearing that rank up bonds required such high suitability. I was guessing that wasn’t exactly a common thing to find.


    Turning to look at Archie, I jerked my chin toward her. “What do you think, can you be a bit more careful carrying her this time?”


    Daysia, who had originally been confident and self assured, flinched in the corner of my eye. I held back a laugh at the horror that slowly dawned across her face as she realized she would be a passenger on air Archie again.


    I had to hand it to her, she didn’t complain about it, just grabbed his legs and closed her eyes as he took off with a trill of challenge. My wings beat the air twice, hurling me up in a pair of strong updrafts before I leaned forward and fell into a glide. I’d give him a headstart this time, just so he wasn’t too sulky later. But as soon as we got back, I’d have to bring the staff directly to Tasha. I couldn’t wait to see what it would be capable of when it had been properly refined into a staff.