Godslayer Lysette: Chapter 209

Chapter 209: Cultivation Rebuilding

Jules broke the awkward silence which followed Lysette’s declaration.  “So, what exactly happens now?  I mean, you said you were going to give us your ability to grow plants, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do through all of that.”

“I want you to try to Cultivate.  And I will do the same.”

“Joint Cultivation?” Katie asked.

“No.  That would be too dangerous in the state you’re in.  Honestly, joint Cultivation between me and most others is a risk I’m not willing to take.  Mirae is one of the few for whom it’s safe.”

“Then we’ll both take your word for it,” Jules said.  “I pray for your success in this endeavor.”

“Thank you,” Lysette said.  “That means a lot.”

Lysette turned nearly the entirety of her attention inward, leaving her avatar alone to keep watch over the outside world.  A moment later, she stood once more in a garden which had grown tremendously over the past month.  Nearly two thousand small patches of various small grasses— adherents of Lysette’s who were not Cultivators— lay interspersed between nearly a hundred shrubs and trees of various sizes.

Some of those shrubs— the manifestations of various Cultivators who’d been nurtured by Lysette over the preceding months— were small, only reaching to the middle of her thigh.  Others had grown quite a bit in the past two months, now taller than Lysette in some cases.  Yet others who’d spent more time with Lysette and received more of her direct attention, such as those of Kiarra, Dani, Nicholas, were tall and hearty, forty to fifty feet in height.  But even the largest of these plants, Rayleigh’s Bubblevine— itself perhaps eighty feet tall— paled in comparison to the two largest within the soulscape garden.

Off somewhat to the side lay a colossal wWillow with branches which glowed with a conflagration of ever-changing colors.  Mostly oranges and yellows, but whites, greens, golds, and reds of every hue imaginable and many more which could not exist in the outside world.  For hundreds of feet, Serrena’s Spark shot into the air as it ascended toward the heavens.  And it sprawled a diameter of nearly a time and a half that height, the eternal flames of her Spark’s Ambition bathing the entire space in warmth. 

And her own Tree stood triumphantly within the center, taller even than Serrena’s, but only by around ten percent.  Both of them, had they been in the outside world, would have dwarfed even the largest and oldest of the giant redwoods native to Aimarion.

And just like with Serrena’s Willow, leaves spanning nearly every color of the rainbow sprawled high overhead with iridescence that glimmered rainbows down upon the fields below.  And next to it, with roots intertwined, was a twinned but considerably smaller clone of the same, her avatar made manifest within her soulscape.

Wrapped around Lysette’s rainbow Tree was Mirae’s Ivy, encircling it, entwined through its myriad branches, reaching up toward the heavens while both supporting and being supported by Lysette.  And so it was in reality as the two demigods held hands in both places while preparing for the task still in wait.

“It’s beautiful, love,” Mirae said within their joint Cultivation realm.  “The fruits of all your hard work these past several months.”

“Not mine.  Ours, and Serrena’s, and Saffron’s and Dani’s and everyone in Ciricu and so many, many, many more people.  Even Karchek, in his own way.  This is a metaphysical representation of our journey so far and a blueprint for everything still to come.”

“Have you found Jules and Katie yet?” Mirae asked.

“I did.”

Lysette teleported the two to a pair of small brown shrubs, wilted, clinging to life.  With but a thought, a sphere of watery Essence, an inch in diameter, condensed out of one of the branches high above and appeared in her hand.  And very slowly, drop by tedious drop, Lysette trickled the Essence into the roots of the shrub pairs.

“It seems to be working.”

“So far, yes.  But we’ll need to be precise.  There’s a lot of tissue damage as well, and we’ll need to identify exactly where the perforations are and patch them up before this will do any good.”

“Perforations?  What happened?”

“My Essence Siphon.  It, quite literally, reaches into a person’s Spark and pulls the Essence out of it.  I didn’t realize it at the time Karchek and I developed it, but it seems to work just the same as any other syringe.  Which is to say, it has to pierce a small hole through the Spark of its target and pull the Essence directly out.”

“Incredible.”  Mirae stood in shock.  “How did you develop such a technique, anyway?”

Lysette pointed down at the single root of her Tree that descended deep into the bottomless abyss beneath what passed as the soulscape’s floor.  There, at the nadir of the root, a single spiral of pure black surrounded by black-lit fluorescence pulsed ever so slightly at Lysette’s command.

“This is a technique borne of my demon side.  Rather than building up toward the Celestial, I burrow down toward the Infernal.  It would be much the same as if you were to build a basement to your Ice Palace, rather than building new rooms out or up.”

Mirae paused for a moment.  “Can I even do such a thing?  I know you’re a demonic Godslayer and all, and so was Karchek.  But do other demons exist?  Can anyone choose to follow the path of a demon?  Or do they have to have those abilities unlocked by someone first?”

“I–  I have no idea, love.  I’d be hesitant to give this power to anyone else, though.  Maybe it’s selfish of me.  No, it definitely is.  But I also know better than anyone else the temptations that come with having such abilities.  I think those temptations are why Zarielle had me reborn as a demon in the first place.”

“I wonder if Zarielle really has completely forsaken you.”

Lysette shook her head as she got to work with Jules’s and Katie’s Cultivation, restoring it to a fraction of their former vitality.

“It’s just,” Mirae continued.  “Zarielle invested a lot into you.  At least, you mentioned she said as much.  And I don’t see any reason to disbelieve that.”

“Fair enough.  I was under the impression she was cutting her losses.”  Lysette began stitching up the damaged tissues in Jules’s shrub’s woody stem.

“Except, that’s the part that doesn’t make sense.  What exactly are her losses?  You’re continuing to wreak havoc upon Asterion’s forces and those of his allies, and she knows as well as you do that you two both have a mutual desire for revenge against him.  I just think she has a lot more to gain by continuing to work with you than taking back a portion of her power and going off on her merry way.”

Lysette raised a finger and the entire realm went silent.  For moments, the only motion in the entire shared soulscape was the subtle twinges of Lysette’s fingers as she made tremulous movements, stitching together vascular tissue at the cellular level using her Essence.  Even with five partitions of independent consciousness entirely focused on her singular task and boosting her fine muscle control far beyond human limits, it was still time-consuming and exacting to weave microscopic strands of Essence together and restore the plants’ lost functionality.

She finally spoke after about ten minutes of fixing the smallest of the seven punctures.  “How are they looking?”

“No signs of any stress or pain or injury on any of them.”

“Glad to hear it.”  Lysette willed herself away by a couple of feet to take a quick break.  “Going back to the Zarielle topic, if you really think she’s not our enemy, then why would she attack us?”

“As the one who is Devotion incarnate, I never sensed within you the same Devotion for her that you show toward me or that I show you.  You were allies, yes.  But allies of convenience rather than ones where there was true loyalty in either direction.  And I think her attack six weeks ago was a test.”

“Well, if she wanted to test where my loyalties truly lie, then she saw firsthand.  They lie with you, Serrena and the others, and the people of Ciricu.  You before the other two groups, and both of those groups equally.”

“Not a test of loyalty.  Apologies, my earlier wording did imply as much.  A test of your power.  I think Zarielle expected you to be far more unrestrained with your demonic nature.  And she was concerned that her investments into you were failing.  So she needed to ascertain for herself exactly how much strength you’d gained following your own path.”

“I just…  I led myself to believe that this was Zarielle closing ranks with her fellow deities to nip my revolution in the bud.  That she’d rather deal with herself being diminished as a god, than to see the entire system of gods and mortals upended.  No different than how the nobles of Domark would band together if the nobility as a whole was ever threatened.”

“That may be true.  But it doesn’t explain one crucial fact that’s been bothering me for the past month.”

“And that is?”

“How uneventful it is.  I can buy the excuse that the Archduke of Terea is cautious and doesn’t want to commit the entirety of his army to a full-scale invasion to wipe us out, especially when tensions throughout the continent are at a boiling point.  But I just don’t see that being the case for the gods inhabiting the Celestial realm.  Were I in their shoes, I would have gone after you with anything and everything I could muster all at once and stomp out a potential threat before it could develop into something problematic.”

“I see your point.  You think Zarielle has something to do with it?”

“She and-or other deities are likely doing something to protect you from the shadows, to ensure you can continue to do what we’ve been doing.  The truth is that we simply don’t know about the situation between all the various gods, nor the interrelation of the Celestial realm and Aimarion, nor the exact effects of the Aestori Ban.  So all we can really do is speculate.”

“Not knowing makes it hard to prepare.”

“We just have to prepare for everything we can think of, and trust that our preparations are enough against anything that we couldn’t think of.”

“I suppose that’s all we can do.  I’m going to get back to working on their Cultivation again.”

And Lysette did.  For four grueling hours, Lysette devoted every spare mental process to her task of painstakingly stitching up the various tissues and trickling Essence into the recovering shrubs.

The one saving grace throughout all of her work was that the puncture wounds were fairly localized.  Unlike how Amalia’s Spark had been completely savaged by her injuries— her rebirth, in a sense, considering she was revived by phoenix root— Jules and Katie had far less extensive damage.  And as a result, Lysette did not have to use her own Tree as a substrate for grafting the stems of either shrub together.

She did still have to graft her plant growing technique onto Jules’s Spark as agreed upon, but the task was considerably easier and required far less precision than repairing the damage her Essence Siphon had inflicted.  After a further half hour of grafting and another twenty minutes of solidifying and buttressing the formed bond between the two, Lysette finally stood up and sighed, collapsing into Mirae’s arms.

“You did good, Lyse,” they said.  “I’m proud of you.  Just as I always am.”

“Are you worried?”

“About?”  Mirae tilted their head.

“You are the one who embodies Devotion, love.  Do you sense any lingering loyalties toward their former lieges?  I have restored both of their abilities to Cultivate.  But I do not think I could restrain my rage if they used this gift to harm me, you, or especially the people of this town.”

“I sense that they are hesitant, cautious.  They still retain traces of their former loyalty, yes.  But their desire to help you and their subordinates is sincere as well.  As long as you continue down your current path and act in a way consistent with your stated desires to help them, I believe their Devotion to your cause will grow in kind.”

“I can accept that.”  

Lysette took Mirae’s hand and together, the two headed back to the physical realm and greeted their detainees.

“How did it go?” Jules asked.

“As well as I could hope for.  I have restored your ability to Cultivate and granted you the ability I have to manipulate and bolster the growth of plants.  However, it will take time for your Spark to fully settle in after the extensive work I had to do to it.  As much as I know you both are eager to help, I will ask that you both remain here for at least one more week while I monitor your progress.  Once I am satisfied that your Sparks are stable and healthy enough to begin, I will teach you to the best of my ability.”

“Thank you.  Thank you both,” Katie and Jules said in unison.  “We won’t let you down.”

Chapter 208: https://www.patreon.com/posts/112440642

Table of Contents: https://www.patreon.com/posts/101896170

Chapter 210: https://www.patreon.com/posts/112440650