The blinding darkness of the Tree Sovereign’s memories began to dissipate, as if the light of a thousand suns were filtering through dense foliage.
Lohan felt his consciousness return to his physical body abruptly, as if he had been hurled back into reality by an invisible hand.
The first thing he noticed wasn’t the sweet scent of Mana from the Astralis tree, but the intense heat emanating right in front of him, the heat that apparently was the reason his mind couldn’t stop believing he was facing a thousand suns!
Lohan opened his artificial eyes and froze. Lisa was just a few centimeters from his membrane, her mouth open and filled with crackling white flames, ready to be unleashed.
The glow of her spiritual fire reflected off Lohan’s blue gelatin, creating patterns of dancing shadows on the white walls of the guild headquarters.
The white fox had her ears pinned back and her golden eyes half-closed, exuding a predatory tension that Lohan had never sensed coming from her before, not even in the most desperate battles.
The Slime was a little frightened by the way she was looking at him.
It was a gaze that blended deep fear with lethal resolve, as if she were ready to incinerate her best friend the very millisecond she realized that the "thing" on the pedestal was no longer Halon.
Lisa stared at Lohan for a few more seconds in an oppressive silence, with only the hiss of her fire breaking the stillness.
She watched his pupils dilate and focus on her with clarity and awareness. Only then, after confirming that the glow of his core still bore his signature, did she close her mouth and dissolve the flames into a puff of white smoke.
"Alright... looks like you’re still in there," Lisa transmitted through the mental link, her voice tinged with a relief she could barely hide. "For a moment, Halon, the Mana that came out of you didn’t seem like yours at all. It was something... ancient, smelling like rotten wood."
Lohan vibrated his gelatinous body, trying to compose himself. "Sorry about that, Lisa. That Boss’s memory was way heavier than the Elites’. I felt like time was trying to crush me under centuries of isolation. Being practically cut off for centuries in a cave is an experience I definitely don’t recommend to anyone, a 2 out of 10."
Lisa snorted, sitting up on her hind legs and pointing her snout toward the base of his body. "Well, now that your sense of humor is back, I can really breathe a sigh of relief... it looks like the Sovereign left a parting gift before vanishing from your mind. You’d better take a look at yourself."
Lohan was confused.
He felt his body was heavier, but didn’t notice any immediate change in his 360-degree vision. Without hesitation, he used partial division to generate a tiny clone, which rolled in front of him and acted as an external camera.
Through the clone’s view, Lohan was completely shocked to see his current appearance.
Instead of being just the usual round, smooth, bluish sphere, his body had now undergone a visible physical mutation.
A thin, polished white wooden shell, identical to the wood of the Astralis tree after its upgrade, had formed around his entire base.
It resembled an organic wooden chalice rising up the sides of his gelatinous form, as if serving as a natural support.
The strangest part was that this bark wasn’t static; Lohan could see, through the clone, that small root-like filaments were climbing up his membrane, growing slowly as if they intended to cover him completely.
"Is this trying to trap me inside here? Why? Is it some kind of protective instinct? Or a loss of control trying to take over me?" he thought, confused.
Frightened by this and fearing that the wood might restrict his movements or, worse, turn him into a plant statue, Lohan instinctively sent a mental command for the wood to retreat.
The result was surprising.
With a frightening naturalness, far beyond any control he had previously exercised over the wood, the white bark reacted to his thought.
With virtually no effort, and without the massive drain on energy he’d felt before, the wood simply receded, retracting into Lohan’s biomass and from there flowing back into the trunk of the Astralis tree in a fluid motion, as if his bark and the guild tree were now a single organism.
Lohan vibrated the membrane, amazed.
He commanded the wood to grow again, and in less than a second, the white wooden chalice sprouted around him, offering protection that seemed perhaps only slightly less sturdy than the obsidian exoskeleton, but with a different, organic flexibility.
Lohan immediately noticed the change this brought.
Unlike before, when he had to expend a large amount of Holy Light and Mana to control plant fibers slowly and clumsily, the amount of energy required had now been reduced by at least half.
At the same time, the precision and speed of his control over the plants had more than doubled...
Doing some quick calculations, Lohan realized that, if he used the same amount of energy as before, his control over the Wood element had at least quadrupled after digesting that Boss core!
"To be honest... this is way too OP," Lohan thought to himself, feeling the connection with the Astralis tree pulsing rhythmically. "I feel like I can hear the sap flowing through every branch in this place now."
As he digested this core, Lohan sensed that the Boss’s Mana Stone was far denser, more powerful, and richer than those of Elite monsters.
His mind really did have a harder time processing the flood of information and plant-based instincts he’d absorbed, which explained Lisa’s stress, but he felt that the energy he’d managed to absorb was also much more intense. That was the real reason behind such a drastic and immediate improvement.
Curious to see the impact this would have on his stats, Lohan opened the evolution menu and focused on his skills.
[Core of Holy Light Lv 2 → Lv 4]
Lohan felt a deep, comforting warmth radiating from the center of his core. The Sacred Light, which had previously been a flickering golden flame, now resembled a stable, solid pillar of light within his biomass.
He felt that his affinity with the world’s pure energies had reached a new peak!
Lisa observed the color change in his gelatin, which now glowed with a much purer sky-blue hue, and smiled with her eyes.
She was genuinely happy to see him this much more powerful, realizing that the gamble they’d taken in the level 15 dungeon was paying off in ways that would likely bring them great benefits.
However, seeing that Lohan was a bit lost in thought, probably calculating every new bit of power he’d gained, she decided to give him some space.
She knew this Slime well and knew that once he started calculating his own gains, he’d stay there for quite a while without hearing a word she said.
"Right, Halon. I’ll leave you alone with your numbers for a moment," Lisa said, standing up and shaking out her white fur. "I’m heading down to the lower lobby to explain the visual changes to the tree to the guild members and what they can expect from the recovery bonuses now. Try not to blow up the headquarters while testing out your new tricks, okay?"
Lohan gave a thumbs-up with a small, bluish hand that he quickly formed. "Count on it, Lisa. And thanks for not incinerating me while I was sleeping."
Lisa let out an amused snort and left the main hall, leaving Lohan alone with the silent pulsing of the guild’s core.
Lohan took a deep breath (figuratively) and focused all his attention on the evolution interface. His biomass reservoir was overflowing.
Despite having spent a large amount of biomass to sustain the guild members in combat in the dungeon, as well as digesting the corpse and the Boss’s own Mana Stone, Lohan had accumulated an amount that would make the "Halon" from a week ago weep with joy.
It was time to stop scrimping and finally invest heavily in his growth after so long.