Chapter 104: Breakthroughs!
Word of the garden’s Legendary-rank bounty spread through the group fast, and Beatrix and Solenne didn’t waste a second of it.
They settled cross-legged among the glowing rows, fistfuls of pulsing fruit and root cradled in their laps, and let the density soak into their cores in slow, careful waves.
Solenne broke through first, shadow and starfire flaring bright around her as the last resistance in her foundation gave way. Beatrix followed within the hour, Maelstrom Anchor settling into her bones with a weight that felt less like new power and more like a long-overdue arrival.
Tom claimed his own share without asking permission from anyone, curled around a cluster of roots with his eyes shut, and rode the surge all the way to the peak of Legendary-rank before he so much as twitched.
[Tom: Acceptable. Finally room to breathe.]
Aidan and Isolde needed something heavier.
Divine-rank progression didn’t come from soaking in ambient density the way Legendary-rank did. It demanded a Divine Core, forged deliberately in the life nexus from either twenty thousand Divine-rank Spirit Stones or an equivalent weight of raw, potent energy, condensed and folded inward until the lifeform itself changed shape.
Around them, Ordun and the others simply settled into meditation instead, letting the garden’s rich air feed their existing foundations without attempting anything so drastic. Refinement, not breakthrough. They’d already paid the price this garden was asking of Aidan and Isolde.
The two of them worked the garden’s edges together, gathering berries that hummed faintly Divine and flowers whose pollen alone could have powered a lesser Hunter’s entire cultivation. The pile between them grew steadily, promising, close.
Then Isolde reached for the fruit hanging from the garden’s central tree.
The tree’s bark split down its length with a sound like grinding stone, gold light pouring out of the wound. By the time Isolde had finished stumbling back, the tree wasn’t a tree at all anymore.
Roots tore free of the soil and reformed into legs the size of pillars, branches folded into clawed limbs, and a face opened in the trunk’s center, wooden and ancient and furious.
[Guardian Bloomheart. Late-stage Divine-rank.]
Across the garden, every conversation in Bram’s group died at once.
"Late-stage," one of the Final-stage elf muttered, the same voice that had argued for a fight earlier. "Let’s see how he walks his talk."
"Get back," Aidan told Isolde, already stepping in front of her.
He rolled his neck, faced down something that could have leveled a lesser Hunter with its opening breath, and reached for Halcyon Iridescent Verdict first.
Joy answered, and Fiery Spark rolled through him in a slow, deliberate wave, stats climbing steadily to meet what a Late-stage Divine-rank fight actually demanded.
The wheel’s aspects sat ready underneath it, waiting to be spent.
He grinned like he’d been handed a decent warm-up.
The Guardian came first, a wooden fist the size of a boulder crashing down in a strike meant to end the fight before it started. Aidan caught it on crossed forearms, Halcyon’s Joy lacing fire through his knuckles, and the impact drove him back three full strides through churned earth without breaking his footing once.
’Heavy.’ He shook the sting out of his arms, still grinning. ’Good. Been a while since something hit back properly.’
The Guardian pressed the advantage, roots erupting from the soil in a ring around him, a dozen grasping tendrils converging from every angle at once.
Aidan let them close instead of dodging, and the tendrils wrapped tight around both arms and both legs, hauling him off the ground with the casual violence of something used to winning by sheer mass.
"He let it grab him," someone in Bram’s group said, alarmed.
"Watch," Bram said quietly.
Aidan didn’t fight the grip at all. He simply let Thunder Blitz Lord answer through every point of contact at once, lightning riding straight down each captured limb and back into the Guardian’s own trunk, Gravity folding in behind it to turn the charge into crushing, compounding weight instead of a simple shock.
[Conceptual Technique: Voltaic Reckoning.]
[Power Rating: 141,720.]
This was a conceptual technique he had comprehended yesterday.
The Guardian’s whole body seized, wood splitting along a dozen internal fault lines as lightning and weight fought each other for space inside its trunk, and the tendrils holding him snapped apart on their own, releasing him mid-fall.
Aidan landed on his feet, unbothered.
"He turned its own grab into the attack," the argumentative Final-stage voice said, quieter now than it had been all night.
"He’s not even drawing the scythe," someone else added.
"He doesn’t need to," Bram said. "Not yet."
The Guardian staggered upright, gold sap weeping from a dozen internal cracks, and its trunk began knitting itself shut almost immediately, bark regrowing in slow, visible waves.
"It regenerates," Isolde called out, tense.
"Saw that." Aidan’s grin sharpened. "Good thing I’ve got something that doesn’t care."
He crossed the distance in a blur of wind, Duskrend Scythe finally unfolding into his grip.
[Conceptual Technique: Shadowfrost Oblivion.]
Cold answered that didn’t just wound, it argued with the wound’s right to close at all. The blade opened the Guardian’s flank in a single arc, and frost climbed in behind the cut, branching white through living wood and freezing the regrowth solid before it could finish knitting.
The Guardian staggered, half its trunk locked in creeping ice, and swung one final, desperate blow.
Aidan ducked under it, planted the scythe’s haft against the ground, and let Gravity and Shadowfrost fold together into something neither aspect had managed alone.
His eyes glinted with a spark of insight.
[Conceptual Technique comprehended: Winter’s Judgment.]
[Power Rating: 168,930.]
The technique rose through the Guardian’s frozen core in a single, patient pillar, weight and cold compounding each other until the ice stopped simply spreading and started crushing inward from every direction at once.
The wooden giant froze entirely, every root and limb locked mid-motion, and cracked apart into a widening web of white fractures before collapsing into drifting gold motes that scattered across the garden floor.
[Guardian Bloomheart defeated.]
The garden went quiet except for the soft patter of settling motes.
Bram’s whole group stood frozen for a long moment, staring at the space where a Late-stage Divine-rank guardian had stood seconds earlier.
"Three Conceptual Techniques," the argumentative Final-stage voice said slowly. "In one fight. He just soloed a Late-stage Guardian at peak Legendary-rank like it was an afternoon’s work."
"I noticed," Bram said, and something in his tone had shifted permanently since the standoff.
It went down in under a couple minutes from the moment it first moved, wooden limbs scattered to gold dust, and the fruit it had guarded so poorly dropped free and rolled to a stop at Aidan’s feet.
"That was fun." Aidan dusted off and cracked his neck.
Bram’s group was already finishing their own harvest, and the dwarf lifted a hand in acknowledgment rather than complaint.
"We got what we needed." He gathered his people with a nod. "Fair trade, all things considered. Good hunting to you."
"You too." Aidan raised a hand back and grinned. "Let’s meet again soon."
"Haha...I hope not."
Bram’s group filed back through their original door, gold light swallowing them one at a time, and the garden settled into something quieter.
...
Forming a Divine Core wasn’t a process that forgave mistakes.
Aidan and Isolde sat facing each other across the harvested pile, and both drew the energy from resources inward with the same slow, deliberate care, folding it toward the life nexus one careful layer at a time.
A rushed pull could scatter the whole reserve in an instant, twenty thousand stones’ worth of effort gone in a single wasted breath, forcing a restart from nothing.
Neither of them rushed.
The energy condensed inch by inch, resistance building the deeper it folded, until a final, resonant click echoed somewhere behind Aidan’s ribs that had nothing to do with sound at all.
[Divine Core formed. Rank ascension: Divine.]
[Breakthrough quest complete. Reward: 1 x Mystery Box]
Isolde’s breath left her in a long, shaking exhale a moment later, her own core settling into place with the same quiet finality.
Both of them succeeded in forming the Divine-rank in their first attempt.
"First try," she said, sounding faintly disbelieving of her own words.
"First try," Aidan agreed, rolling his shoulders against a body that felt subtly, permanently different now.
—————
[Player Aidan]
[Level: 800 (1%)]
[Rank: Transcendent-Median]
[Titles: The One Beyond Despair (X)]
—Attributes—
[Attack = Divine-1]
[Speed = Divine-1]
[Defense = Divine-1]
[Health = Divine-10]
[Control = Divine-1]
—Talents—
[Power Bond (SS|???)]
[Exotic Summoner (X)
—Inventory—
[50 x Omni-Slot Machine]
[1 x Mystery Box]
—————
—————
Enough resources still sat in the pile for one more breakthrough, and Aidan didn’t have to think hard about where they belonged.
"Arthur. You’re up."
Arthur didn’t need telling twice. He tore into the remaining pile with the enthusiasm of a dragon who considered eating and cultivating to be roughly the same activity, and his Divine Core formed clean and fast, dense with borrowed density from the garden’s richest offerings.
Then something in his frame hesitated.
[Cybercraft Sentinal X: Ascension incomplete. Requires additional condition.]
Arthur’s Digi-Data Bank flickered through the requirement, and his enormous head swung toward Aidan with an expression that managed to look both apologetic and hungry at once.
"My lifeform’s demanding something extra," Arthur admitted. "Humanoid. Intelligent. Consumed, specifically."
Aidan blinked, then grinned.
"Well." He clapped Arthur’s flank once. "I’m sure we’ll run into plenty of people who’d love to volunteer for that."
Arthur brightened considerably.
"So we’re done here?" Ordun asked, dusting off his knees as he stood. "Not much left in the air worth absorbing anyway."
"Yeah." Aidan glanced once more around the picked-over garden, satisfied. "Let’s keep moving."
The group crossed back to their own door, and one by one, they stepped through it and left the empty garden behind.