Chapter 35: City Exploration

Ashlock hummed to himself as he could finally enjoy the pleasant autumn morning since the constant sound of fighting had ceased.

Diana and Stella had taken a training break, and both passed out on the sandy training courtyard floor while gasping for breath in puddles of their own sweat. Stella's blonde hair was practically glued to her face, and Diana smiled as she rested.

While the girls had fun training, Ashlock had spent the morning busy with his Qi Fruit Production menu.

When Stella returned home, he'd planned to begin production of his fruit again as she would need food, and now with its increased grade providing him with a {Demonic Tree Seed} option, he was excited.

Ashlock hadn't been a tree expert back on Earth, but even he knew trees had two ways to reproduce. One was through seeds, which had evolved over millions of years on Earth, to be dispersed in every way possible, and the other was asexual reproduction, where the trees cloned themselves through their roots.

"Can I clone myself?" Ashlock knew for a tree to clone itself, it needed roots far away from its main body, and they needed to be in fertile soil. Otherwise, the cloned tree would steal resources from the original tree.

"But all my roots are stuck inside a mountain right now." Ashlock had been keeping an eye on his root's progress through Red Vine peak. Ever since he gained a Soul Core, the progress had increased by over ten times, and it wouldn't be long until he reached the mountain's base.

"Perhaps I can try to create a clone of myself once I reach the base... or will I need a skill for that?" Ashlock grumbled to himself as he thought of skills. They felt like features locked behind a paywall to him, which was frustrating, to say the least.

"Anyway, back to the seeds." Ashlock scrutinized the menu that floated in his mind. He clicked on the option to create a new fruit, and the user interface flickered as it brought up a blank space. Selecting the {Demonic Tree Seed}, a dark red seed with black dots appeared floating in the menu.

"Now, how do I want this seed to be distributed? Wind, water, and even animals can bring seeds away from the original tree."

Ashlock could try and create a way for his seeds to be dispersed by the wind, but just from a simple look around, he realized that wouldn't be possible. There simply wasn't any space for another tree to grow up here as he dominated the sky, and the pavilion took up most of the land. The walls would also trap the seeds so they couldn't escape to the ground thousands of meters below.

Deciding an animal eating the seed was the best choice—Ashlock created a perfect-sized fruit for a bird and grew them on his uppermost branches. They were bright yellow, tasted sweet, and even had a little Qi. But the majority of the fruit was the {Demonic Tree Seed}.

Then Asklock added just a tad of poison that would be hard to detect over the fruit's sickly sweet smell and succulent Soul Fire realm Qi. "It would be bad if the bird went and deposited the seed too far from me, so poison is the way to go."

Happy with his new fruit, Ashlock created a few more that didn't contain poison and others too big for a bird to take, so the girls had a fruit to eat. His grand plan was for birds to eat the poisonous ones, die an hour later, and then the demonic seed could use the bird's corpse as fuel to grow.

"I could also ask Stella and Diana to take some seeds with them when they go out to the wilderness again." Ashlock mulled but then shot down the idea. He couldn't even talk, so conveying such a complex idea would be impossible.

The corpse he had left to the side for trying to communicate still lay there. However, looking at Stella and Diana's condition, Ashlock doubted they wished to wake up to a monster trying to communicate with them.

"Maybe Maple could take some seeds for me?" Ashlock found the sleeping squirrel and decided against waking up the fur ball that had made Larry scramble away in fear—oh yea, Larry. "Why don't I ask my new mind-controlled spider friend?"

Ashlock mentally focused on the black qi tether—it went in the direction of the town. "Oh no..." Ashlock was worried Larry had gone and feasted on some people so he cast {Eye of the Tree God} and took to the skies.

Instantly, he could feel the difference the single-stage increase had on his view range. The very edge of a new mountain peak became clear in the far distance on the other side of the town—

"Yea, that is definitely not a town."

The town devastated by the supernova was merely a slice of a sprawling city that filled up the valley. Even with his increased view range, Ashlock couldn't see the end of it. However, although it had been a year since the attack, Ashlock could still see large areas still wrecked.

"But the progress in reconstruction after only a year is impressive." Ashlock could see hundreds of men in brown robes lifting and hauling beams of wood, many times their size, over their shoulders, and Ashlock couldn't detect any Qi from them. "Mortals are that strong in this world?"

In a way, it made some sense. If a cultivator at the 9th stage of the Qi realm could break a boulder in half with their bare fist, it only made sense that mortals who were eternally stuck at the 1st stage of the Qi realm could still perform impressive feats.

The ambient Qi in the air seemed to affect all life on the planet. Ashlock had already noticed that plants grew faster than expected, so wouldn't that include crops? And if crops are filled with Qi, wouldn't the mortals eating it absorb even a little Qi every time?

Ashlock had found it rather ridiculous how a civilization could sustain itself with superhumans running around, but if ambient Qi made sickness rare and famine a near impossibility, wouldn't the world suffer from overpopulation instead?

The vast city followed a similar theme as the part he had seen before. Chinese-style pavilions flanked cobbled streets with people going about their daily business. However, Ashlock could feel a sense of tension in all the people as they went about their lives, something he had noticed when watching interviews of people living in wartorn countries back on Earth.

Cultivators in snow white and dark green robes wandered the streets as if they owned the place—pushing their way into stores and restaurants with their heads held high and hands clasped behind their backs. Ashlock noticed the main offenders were younger-looking cultivators who had apparently let their family's victory get to their heads.

The occasional more senior cultivator would holler at them to act respectful to the mortals, but they would just run off like misbehaving kids. If there was one thing Ashlock hated, it was teenagers that thought they knew it all, so the whole thing left a sour taste in his mouth.

After a few minutes, Ashlock found a particularly interesting pair heading toward the city's outskirts. Both were Evergreen cultivators by their clothing, and they looked somewhat similar. "Are all cultivators in a family related?"

In his brief overlook of the city, Ashlock found it hard to believe that he had counted hundreds, if not thousands, of cultivators roaming the streets of the vast city, and they were all part of just two families?

As Ashlock was watching the cultivators walk, he saw a thin line of black Qi. "Larry?" Ashlock raced along the line. It led him outside the bustling city and around the far side of the ex-Ravenborne mountain. The sound of shouting and clanging of tools on stone filled the air.

"Is this a mine?" Ashlock watched a stream of mortals coming out of an enormous hole built into the side of the mountain. Pickaxes and bags filled to the brim with silvery rock were in their hands as they marched in single file. A Winterwrath cultivator with many spatial rings on his fingers stood to the side on a raised platform.

A clipboard was in his hands, and he gave the man waiting before him a once over with about as much enthusiasm as a store clerk from Ashlock's previous life.

"Name?" The cultivator said with a sigh.

"Barry yale." A large man at the front of the queue answered respectfully.

The Winterwrath cultivator held out his hand, and Barry handed him the sack filled with the silvery rock with a grunt due to its weight. The cultivator weighed the bag up and down effortlessly, and some white Qi shrouded his hand.

"About fifty silver crowns worth of spirit stones. Next!" The bag of spirit stones vanished from the cultivator's hands, and one of the many golden rings flashed with power before dimming.

"They are called spirit stones!" Ashlock finally knew the name of that silvery rock found in his mountain. "But how do they have so much? Each person here carries as many spirit stones as I find every thousand meters. Are there more spirit stones deeper down? Or is my mountain just deprived of resources?"

Ashlock felt he may have just stumbled upon the reason nobody cared for Red Vine peak. Was it useless to the cultivators?

Barry didn't move. "Sir, under the Ravenborne family, that same bag fetched me eighty silver crowns at least—"

The Winterwrath cultivator tilted his head and sneered—his scarlet eyes flashed with amusement. "Mortal, don't make this harder than it has to be, alright? You and I both know how this world works."

Barry gritted his teeth and opened his hand. The cultivator's ring flashed, and fifty small silver coins appeared, which Barry quickly pocketed with a scowl before stomping off.

"Next!"

Ashlock watched as Barry made his way to a pathway and chose to go right—which was the opposite way from the city. As Barry walked down the well-trodden path flanked by trees with golden brown autumn leaves, Ashlock looked ahead and saw a vast wall in the distance. It was constructed of grey stone, and Ashlock could see cultivators wandering along its top as they looked out into the vast wilderness, likely for incoming beasts.

Between the back of the mountain and the stone wall was an expansive land overflowing with fields, dense patches of forest, and the occasional village nestled in between, consisting of only a dozen houses. A river flowed down from one of the mountain peaks, making it a scenic view.

There was just one problem. Barry was walking into a patch of dense forest, and Ashlock could see the black Qi tether that led him to Larry. Using his skill to move on ahead, Ashlock saw up in the trees a few meters into the forest was Larry.

The car-sized Ash Spider was happily building a network of webs throughout the patch of forest and munching on an animal's leg. "Larry! What are you doing here so close to the humans? I told you to go hunt in the wilderness! Come back right now." Ashlock tried to speak with Larry through the tether, but the distance affected the message. Larry looked toward Red Vine peak but tilted its head in confusion.

"I never told Larry what counted as a snack, did I?" Ashlock watched in dread as Barry entered the forest, unaware of the monster lurking within. Ashlock was ready to declare Barry a dead man. But then he saw the two Evergreen cultivators he had noticed earlier trailing not far behind and entering the forest only a moment after Barry.

Now Ashlock was worried for Larry.