Chapter 713 — Plant

Her eyes were half closed, and she gave no reaction to the uninvited guests around her or the flickering lights. In her arms she clutched a strange, heavy tome—it seemed that book was what she had strained every effort to protect before losing consciousness. And beside her, Gao Yang sensed an exceedingly distinct fluctuation of magic.

It was indeed a healing spell.

She was ceaselessly casting healing magic outward, and the entire Solin Giant Tree, under her influence, was also communing with the magic of nature, generating an uninterrupted life field—directly causing the whole Solin region to revive completely within a few days and nights, its vitality rebuilt.

"Doesn't seem to react at all..." Amber carefully observed this eerie woman before her. She knew the other had once been a dark, cunning fallen druid, but now her form was closer to that of a dangerous monster. "Is she casting healing spells... operating with her eyes closed, curing illness in a dream, saving lives in her sleep?"

Gao Qi frowned, observing this bizarre sight and speculating on the cause of Beiyila's strange state. He glanced up at that mass of coiled, tangled roots, and a vague association took shape in his mind.

"There should be something behind this," he said suddenly. "Open up these roots."

Soldiers stepped forward at once and began clearing away the gnarled, interlaced roots, while Gao Yang turned his head to glance at Beiyila, who still had her eyes half closed as though asleep. On her face... he saw not the slightest change of expression.

The hierarch of the Ember Necropolis had all but become a true plant, and plants have no blood and no tears.

The tangled roots proved tougher than expected; the soldiers labored a long while before they finally opened a gap. One soldier poked his head through, took one look, and immediately cried out at the top of his voice: "There really is something back here! A hidden chamber!"

Behind the entrance veiled by roots lay a hidden chamber.

The chamber was piled full of black "objects" whose original forms could no longer be made out—only the rough outlines of human bodies.

The sight was enough to make one's scalp crawl: hundreds of human-shaped things were heaped inside the chamber, countless interwoven vines winding and growing around them, joining their flesh and blood, joining the roots upon the nearby walls. Their vitality had clearly been severed long ago, yet the vines attached to them were lush and verdant—and Beiyila, outside the chamber...

...was still casting healing arts, over and over, upon these already dead cultists of the Ten Thousandfold Silence.

These healing arts were not meaningless: she had forced these lifeless human-shaped things into a state of neither living nor dead, and had sealed the last fragments of their spirits within this colossal plant.

Now Gao Yang finally understood where the dream that had befallen Bard had come from.

Amber also poked her head in for a look; the eerie scene inside raised goosebumps all over her, and the half-elf swiftly shrank back, muttering beside Gao Yang in a small voice: "This thing is way too sinister... I don't have any fondness for these cultists, but the way they ended up is just too horrifying, isn't it?"

"Madmen met mad ends in the end," Gao Yang said, withdrawing his gaze from the chamber with a soft sigh. "Judging by the timeline of the Crystal Cluster Legion's loss of control, it took about half a month of confinement for that man-made god to go from madness to tearing fully out of the earth. During that time this underground palace was sealed shut, the last of the Ten Thousandfold Silence cultists locked in the dark beneath the earth together with the monstrous horrors they had created... After madness came distortion, and after distortion came mutation. This giant tree covering half of the Solin region is their final end."

By now he had vaguely worked out how this giant tree had come into being.

"How should we deal with this?" Amber looked at Gao Yang. "Leave them in this state? Or set a fire?"

"Even though they're already dead... if this continues, no one knows whether they might undergo some unforeseen change," Gao Yang shook his head. "As for setting a fire... that may not be necessary."

As he spoke, he walked over to the "Beiyila" who had already turned into a plant.

Plants truly have no blood and no tears.

But plants are not the ones who dream.

"Stop. They're all dead already," Gao Yang said to Beiyila.

Beiyila still kept her eyes half closed, utterly unresponsive to the sounds of the outside world.

Gao Yang raised an eyebrow. "Pretending to sleep won't solve anything. Or would you like me to teach you how to be human one more time, back in the real world?"

After a few seconds of silence, Amber and the others were astonished to find that Beiyila's healing arts had actually stopped.

The "field of vitality" saturating the surrounding space still held—it seemed to have become some property of the "Solin Giant Tree" that could not easily dissipate—but the healing arts Beiyila had been maintaining in this underground space had truly ceased.

At last she slowly opened her eyes, and in a strange, slow, deep-toned voice she looked at Gao Yang and said: "So... it really is you..."

What she meant was that "dream encounter" at the border of the Gondo Wasteland. Back then he had fooled and bluffed his way past her by disguising himself as the founding monarch of Augustus, but clearly Beiyila had now finally realized the truth.

Only, even if she had figured everything out now, it no longer meant a thing.

Gao Yang suddenly felt a stir of emotion.

He truly had not expected to meet Beiyila again under these circumstances, to witness the final end of these dark druids under these circumstances.

These mad, fanatical, extremist cultists had in the end destroyed themselves with their own distorted divine arts.

They had become the grass growing on the grave of the Ember Necropolis sect... grass on a grave in the truest sense.

Though this particular patch of grave-grass was a little large in scale.