I Found a Door to the Elven Realm

Chapter 196: Totem is dead?

Same thing I guess..

The fruit doesn’t give the skill anymore because I already have it. Now it just levels it up. The second fruit did nothing at all.

The pattern was holding the basic patterns of the Evon system.

First or sometimes second exposure to a fruit type was the jackpot, everything after that was diminishing scraps. He had Physical Durability already because the Clone earned it and passed it down, so the fruit could only nudge it up a level now instead of granting it fresh or giving something new which this fruit doesn’t have at all.

It made sense but also still narrowed his enpowering plans even more.

I hate the 0 exp situation and now even fruits doesn’t seem to be the second way of getting stronger, huh..

So what am I suppose to do now?

He kept walking and chewed on what that meant for the future, because the future was where this actually mattered. If a single fruit type was worth a stat jump and a whole skill the first time, then a piece of land with dozens of different magical fruit growing on it was worth an absurd amount of permanent power.

Maybe not for farming the same fruit over and over since that part was clearly capped, but for the sheer variety. Get one of every kind and eat each one once and you’d walk away with a stack of new skills and stat boosts that no amount of normal grinding could match.

And maybe fruits wouldn’t stop giving exp or skill upgrade benefits but require more numbers so..A big safe farm in Evon and Earth full of every kind of magic plant.

That was the only thing he could come up with right now in a sweaty and excited state.

That’s the play.

And right there his mood dropped a little, because the word "safe" was the catch. A big but safe farm in Evon was actually harder than it seemed at first.

There was no safe land in this forest!

Every clearing had glowing deer that melted your brain or acid slugs or six-armed stranglers dropping out of the canopy. The only reason he survived his afternoons out here was that he was fast enough to run from most of it. You couldn’t grow a farm in a place where everything in every direction wanted to eat you and half of them had random magic abilities you couldn’t even predict.

There had been exactly one safe patch of land in this entire region.

The elf village. Protected for who knows how many centuries by the Totem’s barrier, a bubble of safety in the middle of all this where elves had lived and grown food and raised children without a Level 44 acid slug ever wandering in.

And I lived there for months and never once thought to plant a single magic fruit tree inside the barrier where it would’ve been safe.

He kicked a rock and watched it skip into the underbrush.

The Totem’s shield had been the most valuable thing he’d had access to and he hadn’t understood it until it was gone, burned down by a dragon a month ago. Now he was out here stealing capped fruit off monsters because the one place he could’ve farmed real power was a pile of ash with a dragon napping on it.

Lesson learned. Next safe zone I get, I’m planting everything.

Assuming he ever got one.

..

The village ruins came into view a little before four in the afternoon.

Eren approached slow and low, using the broken stone walls and the burned-out husks of the old elf houses for cover the same way he had a month ago. The last time he’d stood here the dragon had been awake and the sound of it had cracked stone three hundred meters out and it had turned and looked at him from impossibly far away and that look had scared him so badly he’d barely slept for days afterward.

This time the forest was quiet.

He found a low wall with a sightline to the World Tree and the Totem ground and looked. The dragon was there but it wasn’t on the tree anymore. It had moved off to the side, maybe forty meters from the burned trunk, curled up with its massive head down and its sides slowly rising and falling.

Asleep. Or something like asleep.

He couldn’t tell if it was real sleep or some kind of hibernation or a healing coma. The thing had taken serious damage in whatever fight had burned the village down a month ago. Maybe a wound that big on a creature that size needed a month of lying still to close. He had no way to know. He just knew it wasn’t making noise and it wasn’t moving and its eyes were shut.

He thought about using Observe on it and immediately decided against it.

For one thing the skill wouldn’t even work. The level gap between him and a dragon was so far past his Observe threshold that the screen would just spit out a failure message. But more than that, every memory he had of that skill near this creature was bad. The Clone had gotten spotted in the wyvern cave while fully invisible right after using Observe, like the act of scanning something powerful pinged it somehow. And the dragon itself had locked eyes with him from across kilometers the last time, right after he’d used Observe on the area. He wasn’t going to poke a sleeping dragon with the one skill that seemed to wake powerful things up.

Not worth it. Just look with my own eyes like a normal person.

He sat behind the wall for a while and watched it breathe.

A month ago he would’ve felt cocky this close to a sleeping dragon. That was the bloodline talking, the Forgotten Monarch arrogance that had crept into his head after he awakened it, the same swagger that the Clone had inherited too. But that confidence had drained out of him over the last month and slid back down to something closer to the old Eren, the unemployed guy from the apartment who got nervous about everything.

On Earth, around the others, he still acted sure of himself. But honestly most of that was for the bedroom and for keeping everyone’s spirits up. When it came to actual fighting, the truth weighed on him.

A version of him that had only existed for one month, that never even knew it was a clone and had grown into someone who could probably beat him in a straight duel. The Clone had become more athletic, sharper in combat, harder than Eren was now.

If me and the Clone fought one on one, no portal and no tricks.. I think he would somehow win with some crazy movement or fighting style. That’s a weird thing to know about yourself.

Eren had to let these thoughts go and got back to the job.

He waited until he was sure the dragon’s breathing was steady, then activated Invisibility.

Ten mana a second. With seven hundred and seventy mana that gave him over a minute of being completely unseen, which was way more than he needed. He moved out from behind the wall and crossed the open ruins toward the burned trunk, watching the dragon the whole way, ready to bolt if a single muscle on it twitched.

It didn’t move.

He reached the World Tree, or what was left of it. The trunk was a blackened ruin with most of it collapsed and charred and the Totem markings that had been carved into it were almost gone. But near the base, half-buried in the dirt, one of the big roots still ran down into the soil and it didn’t look fully dead. There was a thin line of something pale and alive under the burned bark.

He crouched and put his hand on it.

The second his skin touched the root the world dropped out from under him.

He was seeing something else. A tree the size of a planet, young and impossibly huge, its body glowing with a power he couldn’t even process, ruling over a vast territory of land and water like it was the only thing that had ever mattered in the universe. There were lights around it, cosmic shapes moving in the dark, things happening on a scale that his brain physically could not hold. It lasted maybe three seconds and then a spike of pain went through his skull so hard he yanked his hand back on reflex.

He pressed his palm against his forehead and felt something wet on his lip.

His nose was bleeding.

"Okay. That’s enough of that.." he almost whispered, wiping it with the back of his hand but keep his mouth and even nose frozen in this crazy situation.

A three-second touch had made his nose bleed despite all his Physical Durability and enhanced healing and sixty-point everything. Whatever was in that root, whatever memory or echo it had shoved into his head, it was way too big for him to be touching.

He glanced at the dragon. Still asleep. His Invisibility was still up but he could feel his mana ticking down and he knew the smart move was to leave now and not push his luck.

Come back tomorrow. Take it slow. Don’t get greedy and don’t make the dragon smell me.

Because that was still a risk. Invisible or not, he had no idea if the thing could smell him. A dragon’s nose was not something he wanted to test with his life.

He backed away from the trunk, kept low, and slipped out of the ruins the same way he’d come in. The dragon never stirred.

He didn’t open a portal right away.

Eren went deep into the forest first, to a spot he trusted, and dropped down to let his mana refill and to wait for his nose to stop bleeding. While he waited the Dungeon Heart Fragment in his pack finished charging too, soaking up Evon’s thick mana the way it always did. But he had enough of his own mana back within the hour, so he got to his feet, faced an empty stretch of trees and opened the door himself.

The portal split the air and on the other side he could see the farmhouse kitchen, warm light, somebody moving around inside.

Home sweet home finally..

He stepped through and the forest closed behind him.