Bloodline Plant Lord: Rise of the World Sovereign

The chittering died away somewhere out in the grey, and the world went back to holding its breath.

Ren stood just inside the arch and looked around properly. Rock, in every direction — stones of every size, some small enough to kick and some the size of houses, scattered over a cracked plain that ran all the way to a horizon he could barely find. The sky wasn’t a sky so much as a lid: grey, low, smudged with a mist that never seemed to move. No trees. No water. No wind. Nothing grew here, and nothing made a sound.

Out of habit, he spread his senses — and they went nowhere.

At home, his sense rolled out past the horizon without him even trying. Here, it made it about as far as his own skin and just stopped, like shouting into a mattress. He turned that over, more surprised than worried. Different world, different laws — maybe fragments simply didn’t allow it, or maybe a dissolving world’s static drowned everything out. Either way, he was down to eyes and ears for the first time in months, and he hadn’t realized how much he’d stopped using them.

He picked a direction and walked. Three, four minutes of careful nothing: more rock, more cracks, a plain that looked like it had died of thirst a thousand years ago and never been buried.

Then, off to his right — a small, dry chitter.

He followed it around a boulder, and there it was, sitting in the open like it owned the place.

It was the size of a river fish. Mantis-shaped, mostly — folded blade-arms, a narrow head — but built entirely wrong for its size: fully black underneath, plated over in armor the same dull grey as the rocks, with a segmented tail curled up over its back like a scorpion’s, and thin lines running across every plate. It wasn’t even facing him.

’Let’s see what you are,’ Ren thought, and reached for the scan.

The panel had just begun to open when the world turned sideways.

It kept turning — rock, sky, rock again — and on the second turn he saw, standing perfectly still in the middle of the spin, a body with no head. His body. The mantis was already on the far side of it, folding its arm back down, unhurried, like it had finished a chore.

He didn’t even get to finish the thought he was having. Everything went—

— • —

—and grass caught him.

He came up out of it the way you surface from drowning, on his knees under the Worldroot, at the exact spot he’d marked for a return he’d never really believed he would need. The revival had worked. That was the good news, and it was the only good news, because coming back didn’t mean the dying hadn’t happened.

The pain arrived a half-second behind him, all of it, faithfully delivered. His hands went to his neck and found it whole, and it made no difference — the line where the cut had passed burned like it was still passing, and his body shook, and his breath came in pieces, and there were tears on his face he had not at any point decided on.

He’d been through pain before. The will trial on the way to Stage Five had taken him apart and made him watch. But that had been pain with a purpose, pain he’d walked into with his eyes open. This was different in kind, not degree — the specific, animal horror of feeling your own body end. And under the pain sat fear, the real thing, cold and simple. He’d known he would come back. He’d known. Knowing had helped so much less than he’d assumed.

’First time dying,’ he thought numbly, and some cold corner of him corrected: ’Second. You just weren’t awake for the first one the same way.’

Warmth rolled down the bond before he could go any further down that road — Kaia, wrapping around him from the inside, steady and wordless and completely unimpressed by the idea of him falling apart. He sat in the grass with his back against the trunk and let her hold the line until his hands stopped shaking. It took a while. Neither of them counted.

When he finally had enough of himself back to be angry, he opened his mouth — and the panel was already there, hanging in the air, waiting for him.

[NO MISREPRESENTATION OCCURRED.]

It had answered before he’d asked. It was pre-empting him now. He filed that under ”later” with everything else.

”It took my head off before I finished a thought,” Ren said. His voice came out rougher than he liked. ”You told me this place was nearly dead. Half dissolved. Explain how something that fast lives in a world that’s nearly dead.”

[THE FRAGMENT’S CONDITION DESCRIBES ITS STRUCTURE. NOT ITS INHABITANTS.]

[A FRAGMENT IS A PIECE OF A DEAD WORLD, OR ONE BROKEN OFF FROM ITS MAIN WORLD. IT HAS NO ANCHOR IN THE BOUNDLESS OCEAN. THAT IS WHY IT DISSOLVES.]

[ITS INHABITANTS COME FROM THE WORLD IT BROKE FROM. WHETHER THAT WORLD WAS STRONGER THAN THE HOST’S PLANE: UNKNOWN.]

[WHAT IS KNOWN: MANY THINGS LIVING IN THIS FRAGMENT ARE CURRENTLY STRONGER THAN THE HOST.]

[THE REVIVAL ALLOWANCE OF 2 PER DAY DERIVES FROM THE DISSOLVING STRUCTURE ONLY. IT SAYS NOTHING ABOUT WHAT LIVES THERE.]

Ren ran the old panels back in his memory, looking for the lie, and couldn’t find one. The fragment wasn’t a strong world — it wasn’t a world at all anymore, just a snapped-off piece of somewhere else, drifting with no anchor to hold it together, which was the only reason it was dissolving at all. How strong that somewhere else had been, nobody could tell him. What could be told, apparently, was that plenty of its leftover tenants were stronger than he was — today, right now, at the stage he’d been so proud of a week ago. ”A warning would still have been nice,” he muttered.

The System said nothing, which he was learning was its favorite answer.

So he sat there and sulked, honestly and thoroughly. He had fought corrupted hybrids, trial after trial, people and monsters both, things that should have killed him a dozen times — and a bug the size of a fish had taken his head off while he was opening a menu. That fact was going in a hole, and the hole was getting buried. Not the girls, not Cassian, not anyone, ever.

The bigger problem sat underneath the embarrassment, and it didn’t care about his pride. If the small ones were like that, then the apex — the one carrying the core — was something he currently had no business standing in front of. And the worst part was that he knew exactly why. His techniques were the problem. Every skill he owned had been built for the stages he’d already blown past, learned back when his output was a fraction of this; at his current stage they leaked most of his real strength on the way out, and he’d been papering over the gap with raw stats for months. Out here, raw stats had lasted four minutes.

The general had said the pipeline was his — send categories, ask for what he needed. Fine. Tomorrow the ask was getting stretched: techniques. Real ones, built for Stage Five and up.

That was the smart plan, and he’d made it calmly, and then he looked at the arch and thought: ’One revive left today. One careful look. I won’t go ten steps from the door.’

— • —

He got one full breath this time.

Long enough to step through, long enough to catch movement by a cracked boulder — something small and shelled, low to the ground, one claw grotesquely oversized for its body — and then the air snapped, one short crack like the world’s smallest thunder, and the grass under the Worldroot caught him again.

The heart one hurt differently than the neck one. He lay flat in the grass, shaking, adding this to a growing body of expertise he had never wanted, while Kaia’s warmth poured down the bond with a distinct edge of exasperation in it this time.

And when the pain finally loosened enough for thinking, the thing his brain chose to process first was: ’That was a shrimp.’

A shrimp. Small, shelled, one huge claw. It had snapped that claw and put a rock through his heart from a distance he never measured, faster than his eyes at their current, senseless worst. He’d been killed — permanently, if not for a miracle function — by seafood.

’INSECT-BASED,’ the panel had said. ’Based,’ Ren thought, staring up at his own kind, gentle, non-murderous sky, ’is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence.’

As if to comfort him, a new panel slid into view.

[NOTE: THE PASSAGE PLACES THE HOST AT RANDOM POINTS IN THE FRAGMENT. BOTH ARRIVALS OCCURRED NEAR SUPERIOR SPECIMENS.]

[THE FUNCTION DOES NOT CONTROL THE HOST’S LUCK.]

So the whole world wasn’t wall-to-wall death after all — it was his luck, personally, rolling him onto the doorstep of the two worst neighbors in it, twice in a row. Somehow that made it worse. ”Thanks,” Ren said flatly, and the panel faded with what he could only describe as satisfaction.

Both revives gone. The day was over, whatever the clock said. If he died again before tomorrow, there was no grass waiting on the other side of it, and so help him, he was not going to be the first person in history to lose everything to a shrimp.

He lay there a while longer, questioning his life choices with real sincerity. All he wanted, in this exact moment, was to give up ambition entirely and live out his days as a salted fish — dry, flat, aspiring to nothing, safely inedible. His past life’s gamer brain supplied the rest without being asked: he was a level ten character who had walked into a level one hundred hidden dungeon, except the dungeon had been gift-wrapped and handed to him as his very first pull, and there was no one in the universe he could file the complaint with.

’One month,’ he thought. ’One month, and the small ones one-shot me.’

Eventually he peeled himself off the grass, left the world, and crossed his room without stopping. Pride was a fine thing, but he’d just been murdered by a shrimp, and the general had said to ask for what he needed.

He dug out the grey card for the second time that night and called.

This time, the list had exactly one thing on it.