Chapter 269: Spatial Earth Yuan Fruit
.Chapter 269:
News, as it turned out, traveled faster than Jiang Chen could out-fly it.
By the time he touched down back at his farm the following morning, Da Huang greeted him at the gate not with his usual delighted bark, but with a look that Jiang Chen could only describe as deeply judgmental — ears flat, tail unmoving, staring at his master as if to say I know what you did.
"Don't start," Jiang Chen muttered, stepping past him.
The Time-Space Annual Ring Tree stood exactly where he'd left it, its bark still spiraling through impossible seasonal colors, utterly indifferent to the chaos it had caused. He approached it with considerably more caution this time, arms crossed, studying it the way one might study a loaded crossbow left carelessly on a table.
"You," he said flatly, "are dangerous."
The tree, naturally, offered no rebuttal.
He opened the system panel again, forcing himself to read the fruit descriptions with the clear head he'd sorely lacked three days prior.
[Time-Space Annual Ring Tree]
Effect 1 (Spring Fruit): Applies a specific state to the user for 3 days.
Effect 2 (Summer Fruit): Amplifies the intensity of the active state by 50%.
Effect 3 (Autumn Fruit): Minimizes negative side effects of the active state.
Effect 4 (Winter Fruit): Extends the duration of the active state by 7 days.
Reading it now, sober and rested, the mechanism was obvious in a way it hadn't been while half-delirious. The fruits didn't create a state from nothing — they locked onto whatever mental or physical condition was most active in the user at the moment of consumption and then amplified it. He'd eaten three Spring Fruits in a row while thinking about Yu Caiqing. Of course it had locked onto that.
"If I'd been thinking about cultivation instead," he said slowly, a new idea forming, "it would have locked onto that instead."
He glanced at the two remaining Autumn Fruits and the single Winter Fruit still sitting in his storage — the ones he hadn't touched, out of sheer self-preservation, during his three-day ordeal. Autumn minimized negative side effects. Winter extended duration.
Properly sequenced — Spring to trigger a state, Summer to amplify it, Autumn to stabilize it, Winter to extend it — this wasn't a curse. It was a tool. A terrifyingly precise one.
Applied to a breakthrough attempt, he thought, or a deep meditation state, or Spirit Sense expansion...
The implications were staggering. Handled recklessly, the tree had nearly cooked him alive with his own hormones. Handled deliberately, it could compress cultivation bottlenecks that normally took months into a matter of days.
"Note to self," he said aloud, mostly for Da Huang's benefit, though the dog still refused to look at him. "Think about cultivation before eating the fruit. Not after."
He spent the rest of the morning cataloguing the tree's yield with fresh diligence — counting buds, mapping which branches corresponded to which season, estimating how long a full fruiting cycle would take. It was, he reflected, exactly the kind of research he should have done before his reckless gamble with the Spirit Finger three nights ago.
By midday, the humiliation had faded enough that he could almost laugh about it himself.
Almost.
He was halfway through recording the tree's dimensions in his ledger when a shadow passed overhead — Wang Ze's unmistakable, lazily circling flight pattern, descending toward the farm with the particular eagerness of a man who had, without question, already heard every detail from Yu Caiqing.
Jiang Chen closed his eyes and sighed.
"Here we go."