The chamber air thickened like congealing blood. Lin Moyan's pulse hammered against the newborn roots threading through his forearm as he stared at the sprouting seed in his palm. Tiny filaments of silver and gold pulsed beneath its translucent shell, weaving between his fingers with unsettling sentience. The warmth radiating from it matched the rhythm of the roots embedded in his flesh - a syncopated heartbeat that made his teeth ache.
Haiyu's fingers dug into his elbow hard enough to bruise. Her healed wrist had developed an unnatural flexibility, the bones beneath her skin shifting like river stones when she moved. The name she'd signed earlier - Kainan - hung between them like a blade suspended by a hair.
Jian Luo coughed wetly. The transformation had accelerated; his fingernails had fully hardened into curved talons, the webbing between his fingers now stretching to the second knuckle. When he grinned, his teeth looked sharper in the golden light. "Well," he rasped, "this is awkward."
The chitin-clad Warden stepped forward. Her armor plates clicked like beetle shells, shifting with each movement. Water dripped from her clawed fingers, each drop hitting the pool's surface with unnatural precision - forming perfect concentric circles that refused to ripple outward.
"You carry the mark of the First," she intoned, her voice echoing from multiple throats. "But the seed remembers what you have forgotten."
Moyan's vision doubled suddenly. The chamber walls seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting like living lungs. Between one blink and the next, the floating doors reappeared - but now they showed different visions:
The first doorway revealed the Celestial Vine Sect's ruins overgrown with crystalline trees, their branches heavy with silver fruit.
The second pulsed with the rhythm of a heartbeat, showing an endless cavern where thousands of Wardens hung suspended in root-woven cocoons.
The third had gone dark, its surface reflecting only their distorted faces back at them.
The roots in Moyan's arm spasmed violently. Golden light erupted from his skin, illuminating ancient carvings along the chamber walls - scenes of a great tree's birth, its roots drinking deep from a pool of black water.
The child's voice whispered from everywhere and nowhere: "The First Gardener comes."
Jian Luo's talons scraped against stone as he fell to his knees. "Oh hell," he gasped. "That's not good."
The pool began to boil.
Not with heat, but with movement - countless root tendrils breaking the surface like the grasping hands of drowning men. The water itself darkened, becoming viscous as clotting blood. Moyan's boots sank slightly into the suddenly soft stone beneath them.
Haiyu moved first. Her damaged hand plunged into the darkened doorway, the muscles in her forearm twisting like vines under skin. Her mouth opened in a silent scream as the vision took her:
A clearing at world's dawn. The First Tree stood bare of leaves, its bark peeled back to reveal weeping flesh beneath. A figure kneeled before it - not the child, but a man with Kainan's broad shoulders and Jian Luo's sharp smile. His hands worked methodically, grafting something silver and squirming into the tree's wounds.
Moyan tried to pull her back, but the roots in his arm had anchored themselves to the chamber floor. The sprouting seed in his palm pulsed faster, its rhythm matching the distant heartbeat from the second door.
The chitin-clad Warden tilted her head. "You begin to see."
Jian Luo staggered upright, his transformed body moving with unnatural grace. "We need to go. Now." His amber eyes tracked something moving in the water that Moyan couldn't see.
The pool's surface shattered.
Not broken - inverted.
The black water rose in a perfect sphere, suspended above them like a floating wound. Within its depths, shapes moved - not Wardens, not harvesters, but something older. Something that made the roots in Moyan's arm recoil in recognition.
The child's voice came again, no longer whispering:
"CHOOSE."
The word vibrated through stone and flesh alike. The floating doors pulsed in response, their edges bleeding black ichor. The sphere of water began to rotate, slowly at first, then faster - until the chamber filled with a sound like grinding bones.
Moyan looked down at the sprouting seed. Its roots had pierced his palm completely now, weaving through his flesh without pain. They pointed unmistakably toward the second door - the cavern of sleeping Wardens.
Haiyu wrenched her hand free from the dark doorway. Her fingers had fused together slightly, the skin between them taking on a rough, bark-like texture. Her lips shaped two words:
Not yet.
Jian Luo grabbed Moyan's shoulder. His talons drew blood, but his voice was eerily calm. "They want you to wake them. All of them."
The chitin-clad Warden spread her arms. The sphere of black water pulsed in time with her movement. "The cycle continues. The Gardener returns. Choose, or be chosen."
The roots in Moyan's arm blazed with sudden, searing light. Knowledge flooded his mind - not as thoughts, but as lived memories that weren't his own:
A silver seed pressed into a younger Haiyu's hands.
A version of Jian Luo plunging a dagger into his own chest.
Kainan standing over a sleeping child - a child with Moyan's eyes.
The chamber shook. Cracks spread through the ancient stone, revealing glimpses of that same black water between the fractures. The floating doors began to collapse inward, their edges fraying like rotting cloth.
Moyan made his choice.
He turned toward the third door - the darkened one - and stepped through.
The last thing he heard before the world dissolved was Jian Luo's laughter, sharp and bright as breaking glass.
Then -
Silence.
Darkness.
And somewhere in the void between, the sound of roots growing.
The darkness swallowed him whole. For three terrifying heartbeats, Moyan existed only as fragmented sensations - the taste of copper flooding his mouth, the prickle of roots knitting through his flesh, the distant echo of Jian Luo's laughter dissolving into static.
Then the world reformed in jagged pieces.
He stood in a cavern that shouldn't exist. The air smelled of lightning and wet stone, thick with the electric charge before a storm. Bioluminescent roots draped from the ceiling like grotesque chandeliers, their glow revealing walls covered in carvings that shifted when stared at directly. At the chamber's center stood an altar of black basalt, its surface crisscrossed with deep grooves that pulsed faintly gold.
The sprouting seed in his palm shrieked.
Not metaphorically - an actual, piercing sound that made his eardrums throb. The roots in his arm lashed like whipped snakes, their tips elongating toward the altar. Moyan tried to step back, but his body refused to obey. His legs moved forward of their own accord, carrying him toward the stone slab where-
A figure lay waiting.
Not the child. Not a Warden.
Kainan.
Or what remained of him.
His father's body had been rearranged. Roots burst from his mouth and eye sockets, weaving through his flesh like stitches holding together a poorly made doll. His chest cavity gaped open, ribs splayed outward like a butchered animal's. Within that hollow space, something silver and pulsing grew.
The seed in Moyan's hand answered with a violent throb.
"Finally."
The voice came from everywhere at once. The roots on the ceiling, the grooves in the altar, the thing growing in Kainan's chest - all vibrated with the words.
Moyan's jaw unlocked against his will. "What are you?"
A wet, cracking sound as Kainan's corpse turned its head. The roots in its eye sockets writhed. "The first mistake. The last solution." The voice shifted, taking on fragments of familiarity - Haiyu's sharp consonants, Jian Luo's mocking lilt, the child's eerie calm. "The story must continue, Lin Moyan. Even if it kills you."
The roots in Moyan's arm surged forward, plunging into Kainan's chest cavity. Agony erupted through his nervous system as the two growths connected - his living roots and that thing inside his father's corpse. Visions flooded his mind:
A great tree splitting the sky. Not the World Will - something older, hungrier.
Nyxara's dagger plunging not into earth, but into a man's heart.
Generations of Wardens kneeling before this very altar, each receiving a silver seed pressed into their palms by a black-haired child.
The truth unfolded like a poisoned flower:
The Verdant Abyss wasn't a prison. It was a feeding ground. And the Wardens weren't guardians.
They were fertilizer.
Kainan's corpse sat up. The roots holding it together gleamed wetly in the eerie light. "There's always three choices," it said with his father's mouth. "Kneel. Fight. Or wake the Gardener."
Moyan's vocal cords vibrated without his consent: "You're not my father."
The corpse smiled. Roots snapped like piano wires. "No. But he's still in here somewhere. Would you like to hear him scream?"
The thing inside Kainan's chest pulsed faster. The sprouting seed in Moyan's hand answered, its roots now burrowing up past his wrist. He could feel them worming between his bones, rewriting him from the inside out.
Somewhere beyond the chamber, something vast shifted. The ground trembled. Dust rained from the ceiling.
The Gardener was waking.
Moyan did the only thing left to him.
He laughed.
A raw, broken sound that startled even himself. The roots in his arm hesitated for half a heartbeat - long enough.
With a strength that tore muscle, he wrenched his arm free from Kainan's chest. Flesh ripped. Something inside the corpse howled. Moyan stumbled back, his transformed arm now a ruined mess of blood and golden fibers.
The chamber shook harder. Cracks spiderwebbed across the altar. Kainan's corpse twitched violently, the roots controlling it going suddenly slack.
In that moment of freedom, Moyan saw it - a flicker of awareness in his father's remaining eye. A spark of the man he'd known.
Kainan's lips moved. No voice came, but Moyan read the shapes perfectly:
"Burn it all."
Then the roots reanimated with violent force. Kainan's body contorted, bones snapping as it rose fully from the altar. The thing in its chest pulsed like a diseased heart.
Moyan ran.
Not away - toward the collapsing altar. His ruined arm hung useless, but his good hand found the dagger at his belt - his father's old hunting knife, the one that had survived the Floating Tomb.
The corpse lunged.
Moyan ducked beneath its grasping arms and drove the dagger into the pulsing mass in Kainan's chest. The blade sank in to the hilt. For a terrible second, nothing happened.
Then the world exploded in golden light.
The last thing Moyan remembered was the sound - not a scream, not an explosion, but something between a sigh and a seedling breaking through soil.
Then-
Darkness.
Consciousness returned in fragments. The smell of wet earth. The taste of blood. The feel of roots cradling his broken body.
Moyan opened his eyes to sunlight.
Actual, honest-to-gods sunlight filtering through green leaves. He lay at the base of a young tree - its bark silver, its leaves edged in gold. Around him, the jungle looked different. The twisted spirals had straightened. The air smelled clean.
Haiyu knelt beside him, her transformed wrist now threaded with living vines that matched his own. Jian Luo stood behind her, his amber eyes watching the horizon where-
Where the ruins of the Celestial Vine Sect should have been, there was only a field of silver saplings stretching toward the sun.
Jian Luo grinned his too-sharp grin. "So. What now, Warden?"
Moyan touched the fresh scar on his chest - where the sprouting seed had buried itself deep. It pulsed warmly against his fingers.
He looked at the changed world around them, then at his own transformed flesh.
"Now," he said, "we find out what grows next."
The tree above them shivered in a wind that smelled of nothing but earth and green, growing things. Somewhere in its branches, a bird sang - a sound the Verdant Abyss hadn't heard in centuries.
The first note of a new cycle.