Ashlock had never thought about it, but in a twisted way, cultivators were more degenerate than video game addicts back on Earth, no matter how he looked at it.
If you removed the context and danger of the world, cultivators were junkies that refused to eat or sleep in favor of chasing the high of immortality.
The trashed, overgrown, and in disrepair pavilion was a perfect example.
Without hundreds of housekeepers tending to a cultivator's needs, they allowed their surroundings to mirror their nonexistent attentiveness to self-care.
It was easy to look at Stella or Diana and see a human, they walked and talked like one, but that is where the similarities ended, and the mysteries of their biology began—it was so alien due to the presence of Qi that they would baffle scientists worldwide back on Earth.
They could survive weeks without food or water. Their delicate skin wouldn't blemish even if a bowling ball smacked them in the face, and they could effortlessly travel at speeds that would cause a regular human to pass out from the sheer g-force.
Stella and Diana shot up the mountain as balls of fire with enough speed to cause sonic booms that echoed throughout the peaks, causing birds to flee by the dozen.
Literal fire twisted by a physical manifestation of their soul gushed out their skin and empowered them beyond what should be possible. They were the peak of human evolution. Superhumans—on the edge of demigod status.
The pair sheepishly entered the courtyard hesitantly for an unknown reason—they took every step carefully while scrutinizing their surroundings.
Stella's eyes, in particular, scanned between his branches, and she tensed up when Larry's scarlet eyes peered through the dense canopy.
"Larry, back off." Ashlock ordered his pet spider, "They are scared of you, but leave the corpses carefully on the ground. I need them in peak condition."
Ashlock didn't know why, but the girls had also freaked out when they saw Larry back in the forest.
Stella had made her displeasure for Larry clear from the beginning, but to be terrified of him seemed unusual for cultivators of their caliber.
The behemoth spider slowly crawled back, hiding from view, and the sack of corpses was carefully lowered to the ground by a silk thread.
Ashlock had a lot of things to say, but he was unsure how to go about it. However, before Ashlock could even cast {Root Puppet} on the corpses, Stella stood defiantly before him.
It took a moment, but she eventually gathered the courage to ask him a question.
"Ash, are we friends?"
"They know my name!" Ashlock was thrilled.
Somehow they had translated his previous message, "But why is she calling me Ash? Was there a mistranslation?"
Ashlock naturally flashed his lilac Qi a single time to indicate yes.
All the unusual tension in the air dissipated, and Stella relaxed, a smile blooming on her face.
"Phew! I was worried over nothing. With all the demonic trees sprouting up and Larry coming to meet us, I thought you had gone against us."
Ashlock was... baffled. What kind of leap of logic had occurred inside Stella's mind to come to that conclusion?
All he was doing was spreading out his demonic trees to hopefully link up with them soon through his roots now that they had reached the mountain's base.
In fact, he would have done that already if the mineshaft and rats hadn't distracted him.
"Anyway. I assume that's a sack of corpses, just like last time? Let's find a nice wall for you to write on..."
She looked around at the overgrown and half-destroyed courtyard. All of the white walls were obscured with vegetation and mold.
Mushrooms sprouted through the cracks, and despite the midday sun, Stella squinted her eyes as she approached them. "Are these glowing mushrooms?"
"Seems so." Diana shrugged, "Never seen mushrooms grow this high up before."
"Okay, whatever—this all needs to go. Diana, can you clean this wall? Unfortunately, my spatial Qi and lightning Dao don't assist much here."
Diana rolled her eyes, "Sure. But this is a perfect example of why we need more people."
Blue flames erupted from Diana's open palms and bathed the wall in its wrath. But to Ashlock's surprise, the fire morphed into something else entirely—a superheated mist.
Meanwhile, Stella walked up to the bundle of silk and slashed it with her dagger. She reeled back in anticipation of the rancid smell of rotten corpses, but to her surprise—
"These are fresh?"
Ashlock hadn't been keeping tabs on his pet spider all that much, but he had to agree the corpses weren't even slightly decayed and, therefore, likely fresh. Had he nabbed them from a village on the way or something?
Stella grabbed the one on the top, a woman with plain features. It was obvious how the woman died.
Her mouth was filled to the brim with ash, and there was a sizeable hole through her stomach as if one of Larry's legs had impaled her.
"Hey Ash, is this corpse good?"
Ashlock didn't know how he felt about Stella calling him Ash.
If anything, he preferred the name Tree. It felt more endearing to him due to its history.
"They grow up so fast! It felt like only yesterday that Stella hugged me happily, saying Tree over and over again until I dropped fruit on her head to shut her up."
"Ash, are you listening to me?"
Oh shit.
Ashlock flashed his Qi once more to indicate yes.
"Why is communication so tiresome." Ashlock sighed as he watched Stella drag the corpse to the newly cleaned wall.
Diana stepped back and admired her handiwork as the steam dissipated in the violent mountain winds.
The mushrooms Ashlock had cultivated to lighten up the place were gone, and so were the overgrown weeds that had sprouted from the cracks. A shame, but he preferred the now clean wall—it would be his canvas for communication.
As Stella stared blankly at the wall with her jaw moving as if on the edge of forming words but not quite there, Ashlock cast {Root Puppet} on the female corpse.
The process still creeped him out, especially since he could feel every millimeter of the woman's flesh from the inside out. The body shuddered as it shakily stood up with the support of the wall.
Ashlock noted the puppet's lack of a Soul Core. "Tsk. Late stage of the Qi Realm, this corpse won't last long."
He made the corpse frantically gesture to the wall.
"Okay, a simple question first." Stella said as she crossed her arms and eyed the corpse.
Ashlock waited, and Stella took a deep breath.
"What are you?"
The corpse stood utterly motionless.
"How is that a simple question?!" Ashlock wanted to shout.
To be fair, for most things in the universe, that was a simple question. But he was a tree with a unique backstory that made answering such a question tricky.
What was he supposed to say?
They seemed to think he would become the future world tree, but nothing in his status explicitly said he was anything but a [Demonic Spirit Tree] with a magic system from god knows where.
But even calling himself a demonic tree was a stretch. Ashlock had observed the ones he had fathered, and they all naturally turned the soil acidic and bore poisonous berries.
Two things he had never done in his nine years as a tree.
So if he wasn't a world tree, nor a typical demonic tree... what was he?
Human? The thought of still identifying as a human felt wrong.
He no longer had human desires such as accumulating wealth or chasing after jade beauties. And it was not only a mindset shift but a biological one too.
Ashlock didn't feel even an ounce of lust for anything, only a love for nature and a desire to protect those he cared about. While an immense hunger to devour corpses festered in the back of his mind, he also enjoyed poisoning birds to spread his seed.
He may operate on human logic, but his emotions? All dulled. People could be gutted before him, and he wouldn't feel a thing.
Only a few emotions still had much effect, such as crippling loneliness.
Ashlock made his decision, and the corpse approached the wall. Biting off the end of her finger, the corpse got to work writing out a message in squiggly lines before bursting into lilac flames.
Stella kicked the flaming corpse to the side and scrutinized the words with her hands on her hips.
The language Ashlock wrote wasn't English. He thought in English and intended to write in English, but the result was apparently some ancient runic language that looked very different from the letters he remembered from Earth.
"Must be my {Language of the World} skill interfering. If it upgrades to A grade, would it give me access to more written languages?"
Stella sat on the floor. Her golden ring flashed, and papers covered in scribbles encircled her.
"What does it say?" Diana stood behind Stella and asked over her shoulder while looking at the paper in her hand.
"I don't know."
"What was the point of you spending so many months learning it if you can't understand—"
"No, Diana." Stella cut her off and pointed at the wall, "It literally translates to I don't know."
Diana tilted her head in confusion. "Ashlock doesn't know what he is?"
Stella nodded.
Diana turned around and appraised the tree. "Would a world tree know it's a world tree?"
"I don't know, and clearly, neither does Ash."
Stella huffed to herself and massaged her temples. A while passed before she apparently decided on the next question.
"Ash, what is your goal."
Ashlock was starting to wish he'd never attempted communication.
Conversations with mouths were easy, the words just rolled right off the tongue, but this reminded Ashlock of when he tried texting his crush in university.
He had to carefully think about every word. He felt as if he was staring at a blank text box with a flashing cursor, taunting him for his hesitation.
What was his goal? Another tricky question, but at least he had some viable answers to pick from. He had many plans.
Devour the strong, obtain more sacrificial credits, upgrade and unlock more skills, acquire new summons, and have Larry evolve to A and then S rank. Transcend this world, become the next world tree, and lord over all creation...
And never be alone again.
Was there a single sentence? A compact phrase to describe his insatiable greed for power and desire to grow while consuming all possible resources... all while being surrounded by people to help him along the way?
Ashlock looked at the two women, the desolate pavilion fit to house thousands, the empty training courtyard, and the beautiful surroundings.
This would be his home for a long time to come.
The last thing he wanted was for some demonic cultivators to come by, trash his little pocket of paradise, and enslave or chop him down.
The answer had never been so simple.
A corpse rose—a burly man with likely a bright future torn away to serve a cruel fate as nothing more than a simple messenger.
With the Soul Core, he likely cultivated carefully over his short life cracking, the corpse stood before a blank section of wall, and he wrote a decree with his still-warm blood dripping from his torn finger.
Stella and Diana watched in anticipation as the corpse spelled out a single sentence that would change the course of Red Vine peaks history.
With the final swish of its finger, the corpse stood back and marveled at's handiwork before the wrathful flames of its ungrateful master
reduced him to ash.
A fitting end considering the message.
"To found a sect named Ashfallen."
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