Wraithwood Botanist-Chapter 206 - 152 - The Bramble

"Mira!" Mom grabbed me when she saw the reporters fall to the ground and start clawing their necks for air. I had directed all the magic toward them.

"What?" I asked. "I'll refuse their questions after I say goodbye to my family." I released the pressure, and guards gasped for breath.

One reporter wheezed and said, "You can't do that! Do you know what'll happen to you?"

Mom's face paled, but her bodyguards walked up to the woman in official Dante attire and loomed above the reporters.

"These people are under the protection of the Dante. You will show them respect."

Dad sighed. "How are we supposed to have an emotional goodbye after that?"

I sighed back. "It's impossible, so let's just keep it brief." I looked at them. "I'll bring your son back safe and sound next year. And… you should really think of coming next year. There'll be a village, and you're basically retired."

Mom's shoulders slumped, but Dad hugged her and said, "Our daughter's making a village, honey. Aren't you proud of her?"

Mom's worried face cracked into a gentle, sheepish, noncommittal smile. "I think it's great. But honey…"

"But honey what? We're retired. Didn't you just hear her? You did just say we were retired, right?"

"I'm giving you both a million hawks as allowance this year," I said.

"See, honey?" Dad said as he hugged Mom from the back and kissed her ear. "We're pocket money millionaires."

"Stop!" Mom giggled and tried to escape. "You just want an excuse to go!"

"Excuse to see my daughter," Dad corrected.

She sighed and looked at me. "I want to see her, too." She looked into the forest.

"Let's just see how Tyler likes it," I said. "Go from there."

She smiled wryly. "Okay."

I offered my arms, and she hugged me. "Oh, honey… I worry so much about you."

I smiled wryly, knowing that I was about to crank that worry to the maximum. She let go, and I hugged Dad.

"Make a castle for your mom," Dad whispered into my ear. "We'll have to bribe her somehow."

"Doug!" Mom slapped his shoulder, and I giggled.

"I love you, Dad."

I then motioned for a guard and whispered, "I'm entering the Bramble, so make sure they're nowhere near this place in twenty minutes."

He looked at me as if he had seen a ghost.

"I'll be fine. Explain it to them if they hear the news."

"Explain what?" Mom said.

"We'll take ground carriages," the guard said.

"What? Why?"

"Bye, Mom!" I hugged her dramatically. "See ya next year! Sorry to give the airport drop-off treatment."

Dad paused. "Will you be okay?"

"I'll see you next year. Have a little faith in your daughter, yeah?"

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"Come on, Ma'am," the guard said to my mom.

Dad gave me a worried glance and then turned. "I'll convince your mother. See you next year!"

I smiled. It was time to enter the Bramble.

—---

Brexton was disappointed when Mira didn't return. He had glanced at her ass when she had walked into the forest and then felt cheated when she didn't return.

That woman…

Mira didn't make the cut in the looks department—at least compared to the women that he was used to sleeping with. She was just… average. Gruesomely average. Normal. A centerpiece of flawed genetics. But even setting aside the possibility of her developing a body constitution, he found her so damn attractive.

Mira Hill was chaos, and he couldn't even imagine how much they'd hate each other if they dated. Oil and water, lit on fire and spread along every stick of furniture in a mansion. Absolute destruction.

That was his type—

So incompatible that it's almost taboo. A fantasy that's exciting simply because it couldn't happen, a concept rather than something concrete.

Brexton's viewpoint was that when you find something like that, you can never get too close out of fear that something might break that fantasy. And he couldn't imagine his life without fantasizing about the fantastically destructive and infinitely scalable life of Mira Hill.

Doug Hill shot Brexton a lethal gaze when he passed him. The man was about as dangerous as a genetically neutered lap dog, but he left an impression. And was he harmless? His daughter hadn't even hit the second evolution. Until she decided to evolve to the third, she could leave.

In a few years, she could walk out of Areswood a god. She was dangerous—and Doug had that power. If anyone touched him, Brexton was certain she would come out of that gate one year and massacre every legacy family out there.

It was all so exciting.

But for now…

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Those guards hurried them away quite quickly… he thought. It's almost as if… they don't want them to see what's about to happen.

He grinned further, took a drink, and watched and watched for the next twenty minutes. Many left, thinking he was reflecting upon natural philosophy the vicissitudes of the human experience, but the people who knew Brexton trusted he wasn't just daydreaming. So they watched, too, and they were rewarded for it.

It was half past midnight when they heard the snap. Then the entire forest came alive, writhing and twisting and snapping as it closed down the pathway to hell.

Someone had entered the Bramble.

And that someone was Mira Hill.

—---

My life was a paradox.

Brindle's memories made it clear that I was lucky for not entering the Bramble on my own. If anyone could enter it with some basic soulmancy and a fancy core, people would have conquered it a hundred thousand years ago. It was far worse than you could possibly imagine.

I took one step off the path, and the entire forest came alive.

The roots of thousands of plants shot out of the ground and tried to hold me in place as the trees closed in on me and birds screeched, and vines and ground cover tried to wrap around me.

All of these plants were extravagantly poisonous. I could smell it in them. I could remember them. Simply getting touched by these plants would kill me, and hundreds were shooting above me and behind me on the other end of the Bramble.

There was no escape.

But the paradox was that with Brindle's memories, the Bramble's dangers were irrelevant.

Because Brindle had a contract with the Bramble's souls—and I inherited it.

I activated Brindle's synchronization spell, the same one that locked their contracts, and my aura and mana spread to all of the plants in a massive pulse, soaking into the roots, spreading through the soil, and moving into the forest.

The plants that had almost wrapped around my leg uncoiled and retracted as I took my first step.

Then, all the roots retracted underground, and the groundcover moved out of the way.

The Bramble was alive.

I could hear the souls within it. They screamed in a cacophony when they learned there was an intruder, but once the plants felt that frequency, the contract, they settled into a confused hush.

I heard their questions. One word echoed in a twisted chain—

Who? Who? Who?

A tree uncoiled, and thick vines as thick as anacondas pulled away from me, slinging away like chains tied to sinking anchors.

"Mira Hill," I said. "I'm Brindle's apprentice—and the new guardian of this forest."

I entered a moonlit meadow where long purple ground cover writhed like Kraken tentacles. Once I entered it, a full Omoxillian formed fifty feet high.

Birds flew above the meadow.

I connected to Brindle's contract. Protect me.

The Omoxillian shot tree roots at the birds. Two of the birds dodged, but the Omoxillian pierced one and wrapped around it like a boa constrictor. More birds shot out, and the Omoxillain shot out hundreds of massive roots in the nighttime sky and grabbed them. Trees helped out.

I walked past the Omoxillian, pushing a root up as I crouched under it and pressed on.

It was surreal to walk through the Bramble, but it was also nostalgic. Due to the way that soul magic worked, Brindle's memories, in a way, became my own.

This is the reason that you must cleanse meat of neara and why individuals cannot enter the Diktyo River without a core strong enough to cleanse the neara in the souls. It can give you split personalities, making you believe you're two people at once.

Brindle was a master soulmancer, so I didn't have that complication. I was Mira Hill, a human who loved people. But I also gained access to a broad range of information and soulmancy.

It wasn't quite so simple.

I couldn't use a fraction of Brindle's spells, as my soul core was pathetically weak. And even if I could, I had to contend with the fact that I wasn't Brindle. I had my own fighting style and life and muscle memory. Simple memories couldn't make me stronger than Hadrian and the top legacies. I'd still have to earn it.

But for something like this—injecting myself into a pre-existing contract that my memories had intimate knowledge of—it was simple. So I kept walking, weaving through the forest with the memory of where everything was.

I didn't stop until I reached another meadow that was filled with dead plants.

"What happened here?"

I put my hand on the ground and gave it a pulse. Mana deprivation… the Bramble's uneven. I'll need to prune it.

I'd have to spend a summer out here soon. It had been over a hundred thousand years since it was last pruned. It would be a beast, but I would do it.

I pushed on and then sighed when I saw my equipment.

"Of course it would be in a patch of Rakas," I muttered. There was a palette in the center of a sprawling sea of snaking vines. Brindle had called these Coiling Rakas after the name of a snake, and they were somewhere between quicksand and a Chinese finger trap. Once you enter them, they start coiling and bringing you in, and the more you struggle, the tighter they get. It's a knotted hellscape, and a simple contract wasn't enough to unearth a section of jungle vine that looked like a hill of spaghetti.

"I'll need to make a new contract…."

I put my finger on the ground and activated a contract ritual.

The rakas came alive, shifting and twisting and gnarling like a maggot-filled wound. It was a truly disturbing sight.

"I just need my equipment," I said.

It thrashed around its tendrils.

I sighed. "I'm not strong enough for this…"

I had a first evolution core. I couldn't overpower it.

"I didn't want to use this." I took off my backpack and pulled out a small jar with the plant that I got from Tranea Crypt. Khor, the spirit within, told me that planting it would help me control soul plants in an area. That memory flashed in my mind. Then I looked at the equipment.

"Should I just wait until I evolve?" I thought about it. "No…" I looked toward the Kana Mountains, where Lake Nyralith was. I didn't know what it was like. Brindle didn't give me every memory he had. My brain would implode from sixty thousand years of memories, and the ones I had were in the last century of his life before he crossed the Sixth Ring.

It would be dangerous to go there, but more than anything, I had a feeling that I wanted my teleportation circle when I went. It would be a long trip, so if I needed to do something on that mountain, it could take years to accomplish it—and my tribute prevented that.

I need that equipment… I thought as I knelt and planted the root. I packed earth on top of it, closed my eyes, and sent nourishing energy and water into the ground.

As the plant uncoiled underneath the earth and branched out, a thin pulse of energy shot underneath the soil, and the forest vibrantly shifted.

—---

Tyler had watched the Bramble close in horror. He started screaming, "Mira!" only for Kline to jump and slap him in the face with a paw in his house cat form.

The scene was so comical that the whole mass of people Mira had recruited that year calmed down long enough for Cassain to say:

"Mira shut down the harvest so she could enter the Bramble. And judging by Kline's annoyance, she's fine. If she wasn't, he would've gone with Mira—and he'd be panicking right now. So just calm down."

"She can seriously enter the Bramble?" Tyler asked.

"It seems that way," Cassain said. "So just calm down."

That was about a half hour ago. Now, he was watching nervously. It was quiet. Too quiet. Was she dead? People always claim they can do something, but there's always a chance. And this was the Bramble. She would have to be a god to walk through it, right? What if she got poisoned? What if she broke an ankle? Okay, that was dumb. She wouldn't just break an ankle. But still. Those birds were going wild, and the entire forest was still slithering around them.

"It's okay," Felio said. "She'll be back."

"Do you really believe that?" Tyler said. "Confidently. Can you say she will?"

Felio clammed up, and Asail jumped in. "Just… calm down. We'll set up camp. Everything will be—"

A thin pulse of energy came from the forest, and while the trees and roots stopped silently swaying, there was another form of panic. Silence. He thought it was quiet before, but now it was dead still, and everyone in the camp had stopped talking around their campfires and looked into the forest.

Tyler's heart thumped. Then he heard it. Terrifying screeches and roars and then colossal creatures shot out of the forest. Four flew toward the gates—one flew right at them.

"W-What the hell is that thing?"

Tyler didn't know who had talked, but panic broke out, and people jumped to their feet. They didn't make it very far. None of them did. The creature that flew toward them was so fast that they didn't get to run before it was upon them.

The creature blocked out the moon and sky as it stretched its wings.

"I-Is that a fucking dragon?" Tyler stammered.