Immortal Druid

With the forest as our witness, we battled.

Long Xue appeared to my left in a flicker of mist, the telltale shimmer of short-distance teleportation betraying his move before he even fully materialized. I didn’t hesitate. “Take him,” I ordered, my voice steady despite the adrenaline surging through my veins. “Rip, destroy, and reduce him to waste until there’s nothing left.”

Several Thorn Whips burst into motion, lashing out with barbed fury to ensnare him. Vines thick as my arm whipped through the air, aiming to bind his limbs and roots digging into the soil for leverage.

But Long Xue merely flexed his fingers with casual grace. Thin strings of water qi sliced through my whips like razors through silk, severing them cleanly. Droplets of severed vine sap splattered across the undergrowth.

“Plant beats water, idiot,” I muttered under my breath, drawing on my phytokinesis for finer control. New Thorn Whips surged from the ground and from my staff, weaving a denser barrier that absorbed the incoming water blades. The liquid qi hissed and steamed as my plants drank it in greedily, converting the attack into harmless nourishment. I didn’t even need to waste another spell.

Long Xue appeared to my right in another blink, but a quick perception check revealed the faint distortion in the air. It was an illusion. The real threat was behind me. The fact that I still beat him in raw stats brought me a small, grim comfort.

I thumped my staff hard against the earth. “Ironwood Spike!”

A massive spike of reinforced, iron-hard wood erupted from the ground directly behind me. It earned a startled grunt from Long Xue as he barely twisted away in time. The enormous spike grazed his cheek instead of puncturing his torso, drawing a thin line of blood that trickled down his jaw.

He laughed, a rich, genuine sound that echoed through the canopy. “Marvelous. Introduce yourself, cultivator of the leaf!”

Since he wanted to talk, I decided to indulge the question that had been gnawing at me since this mess began. “The seeds. Where did you get them?”

A bored look crossed his face, as if I had just asked the most obvious thing in the world. “Now, this is just disappointing. You should know the answer. After all, your village was the reason these things exist.”

He placed one hand over his chest, right where I could sense the nasty seed pulsing with corrupt energy. “A powerful tool, suitable for cultivation, and to refine as a sacred treasure. What did they do with it? They abandoned it, which almost caused its species’ extinction. Why? Because of their damn rules. No grace at all.”

I sighed, exasperated. “My village? I am sorry, but I have no village. The Hidden Village of Leaf is unrelated to me.”

Long Xue threw his head back and laughed again, louder this time. “Is that so? Perhaps you can enlighten me. What are you doing here, then?”

I tightened my grip on my staff, the living wood warm and responsive in my palm. “I have a list. One, your people disturbed my good night’s sleep. Two, a pitiful crying girl asked me to save her people, and now, obviously, it seems I’ve failed. Three, that nasty seed inside you is upsetting the balance, and keeping the balance is part of my whole identity. I am going to purge it from you.”

Through my Druidic Insight, I could feel the true nature of the seed. It was a parasitic thing that twisted life force into something foul, feeding on its host while promising power. It reeked of wrongness, like rot hidden beneath blooming flowers.

Long Xue’s eyes narrowed with amusement. “You claim to be not of the village, but what difference does it make? Like them, you lack grace—”

I cut him off sharply. “That thing is polluting your mind, feeding on your soul, and its mere presence distorts the circle of life. There’s a greater balance in the world that must be kept. Things like good and evil have nothing to do with it. Co-existence ultimately is about finding the middle, and only in harmony can there be true peace.”

The druidic part of me was speaking now, the ancient instincts woven into my soul urging me to restore order. But I wasn’t wrong. My Druidic Insight had revealed exactly that much.

I leveled my staff at him. “You didn’t answer my question. Where did these seeds come from?”

Long Xue’s smirk faded, the faintest trace of it vanishing like mist. His voice dropped, carrying a weight that made the surrounding trees rustle uneasily.

“From the end of all.”

Long Xue suddenly vanished, trying to get the jump on me with another one of his slippery teleportations. I didn’t wait to see where he would reappear. “Entanglement,” I cast, and thick roots burst from the earth to my right, snaking upward with vicious speed. They caught him mid-materialization, wrapping around his legs like iron cables.

“Rip him apart,” I ordered coldly.

The Thorn Whips that had been waiting in the canopy and undergrowth burst into motion, lashing toward him with barbed hunger. But the moment they struck, Long Xue’s body exploded into a cloud of mist. Thin, razor-sharp strings of water qi wrapped around my throat from behind.

“Farewell,” he whispered, voice dripping with mock courtesy as the strings tightened like a garrote.

My Shedding ability activated. The ‘me’ that stood there was beheaded in a spray of illusory sap and leaves. The decoy withered instantly, crumbling into a pile of dead foliage as I slipped away, reappearing just beside the real Long Xue with my staff already pointed at his head at point-blank range.

“Sunlight Orb.”

A blazing sphere of condensed solar energy erupted from the tip of my staff. His head burst into mist once more, but even as it did, another figure materialized from behind the fading illusion I just killed. A cerulean sword, gleaming with lethal water qi, thrust straight toward my abdomen.

Did he think I had a dantian or core like cultivators? I almost laughed at the assumption. Xing Ning’s lectures about the importance of the dantian flashed through my mind for half a second.

“Wild Shape: Primal Nature Elemental.”

Silver-wood texture rippled across my skin, bark-like armor forming as vibrant flowers bloomed across my body and robe. The sword struck with a resounding thump, but it bounced harmlessly off my reinforced form. The damage was completely canceled, and the initiative swung back to me.

Without hesitation, I shifted again. “Wild Shape: Tyrant Lizard King.”

My body exploded in size and power. Bones cracked and reformed, muscles swelled, and in an instant I became a towering T-rex, jaws lined with serrated teeth the size of daggers. I lunged forward and chomped down on the space where Long Xue had been standing, nearly taking his entire upper body with me.

He barely escaped, teleporting away in a panic. When he reappeared in the distance, he was mostly intact but missing an arm, blood spraying from the stump.

I cast Entanglement silently this time, roots erupting to pin him in place once more.

Long Xue teleported upward desperately, trying to gain distance as he barely dodged the roots, but I was ready. I let the Thorn Whips surge forward, consciously amplified by my phytokinesis. Over the course of hunting down his subordinates, I had been seeding the entire battlefield with Thorn Whips. The forest was no longer just a forest; it was my domain from every vine, every root, and every thorn answering my will.

The whips caught him mid-air. He sliced through them with his remaining arm and that strange cerulean sword, but it bought me the precious seconds I needed.

I canceled the T-rex form and Wild Shaped into an eagle in one fluid motion. With a piercing cry, I burst upward, soaring past him on powerful wings. As I cleared his position, I drew in a deep breath of qi and roared the next transformation.

“Wild Shape: Steppe Mammoth!”

My body ballooned into an enormous prehistoric behemoth, gray hide thick as armor plating, tusks like ancient spears. I crashed down on him with the force of a falling mountain, creating a massive crater that sent shockwaves rippling through the forest floor.

I stomped.

“RRRRROOOOOOAAAAAARRRRR!”

I stomped again.

“HRRRRNNNNNGGGHHHH—BOOOOOM!”

And again.

“GRRRRAAAAAHHHHH—CRRRRAAAAASH!”

The ground trembled violently with every impact. Long Xue struggled beneath me, teleporting in frantic bursts and throwing up watery and shadowy illusions to confuse my senses. His thin strings of qi finally managed to bind my massive legs for a few critical seconds, giving him just enough room to slip away.

I canceled the mammoth form instantly and thumped my staff hard against the shattered earth. “Rip him apart!”

Long Xue had unknowingly retreated straight into the thickest concentration of my thorny vines. They surged over him like a living wave, tearing into flesh and qi alike. He screamed as they ripped him apart, slowly and viciously, but he still managed one final, desperate teleport, reappearing several dozen meters away.

He was in terrible shape. Bruises covered what remained of his body, deep lacerations wept blood, and he doubled over, puking dark crimson onto the forest floor. Yet he was laughing a shrill and unhinged sound that echoed through the trees.

“Forget about interrogating you with the knowledge of the Shén,” he gasped between coughs of blood, “I might die like this, huh?”

He was far more resilient and slippery than I had imagined. His subordinates hadn’t lasted even a minute against me, but this man… this was a first for everything.

I studied him carefully through Druidic Insight. The seed inside his chest was beginning to activate, its extradimensional energy pulsing like a cancerous star. It didn’t belong to this world. Its mere presence twisted the natural flows of qi and life force, upsetting the sacred balance that the druidic half of my soul cherished so deeply. I had no idea what it would do if it fully awakened, but I knew it couldn’t be allowed.

In the blink of an eye, Long Xue healed. His injuries vanished completely with bones knitting, flesh closing, and blood drying as if time itself had reversed for his body alone.

He straightened up, rolling his newly regenerated shoulder with a satisfied grin. His laughter took on a darker, more excited tone.

“I guess I should take this more seriously now.” His eyes locked onto mine, gleaming with genuine interest. “Tell me, long ears. Who are you? I must know the name of the one that has pushed me this far!”

The forest waited in tense silence as Long Xue’s question hung between us.

“And why should I do as you tell me?” I asked, staff still leveled at him.

Long Xue’s bloody grin widened, his eyes gleaming with a strange sincerity even as the corrupted seed pulsed in his chest. “When two forces meet with opposing ideals and conflict has to come, the least they could do is to preserve their dignity and know the person they would kill or would be killed by. In other words, it was the decent thing to do… a human thing.”

I didn’t expect him to say such things. The words sounded almost noble coming from a man who had just tried to garrote me with water qi strings. For a moment, the battlefield felt oddly civilized.

I lowered my staff slightly and answered, “I am the mightiest of druids, keeper of balance, listener of the Voice of the World… Nevle Drol Diurdhcra.”

The ancient name rolled off my tongue with surprising weight, as if the forest itself recognized it. I continued to consult with my Druidic Insight even as I spoke. I had fought the entire time like I did in the inherited memories of Nevle as the ideal druid, using moves that shouldn’t be possible in normal combat. Things that could only happen in a cutscene: dropping on him as a mammoth, using phytokinesis for impossibly fine control over my spells. But I had decided it was time for a different approach.

I had always found myself closer to my gamer side.

Long Xue’s expression shifted into something like respect. He opened his mouth to reply, “I am Long Xue, a Nascent Soul realm cultivator in service of the—”

I never let him finish.

“Dark Murky Swamp.”

The ground beneath us transformed instantly. The once-vibrant forest floor turned into a bubbling, treacherous bog of dark, viscous mud that reeked of decay and trapped qi. Trees groaned as their roots sank, and the air grew heavy with oppressive humidity.

Long Xue’s eyes widened in genuine surprise. “What is this? You dare use such a filthy technique after speaking of honor and balance? Have you no shame at all?”

I canceled the Dark Murky Swamp with a flick of my will, the bog vanishing as quickly as it had appeared and leaving the ground soft and treacherous. I recalled a glitch back in Legacy World Online where you’d get stuck between the map if you did this exact sequence. It was patched later on and turned into a proper combo spell.

“Entanglement.”

Thick roots burst from the softened earth in every direction, leaving no room for error. They surged like living spears, wrapping around anything in their path.

Long Xue swung his cerulean sword in a frenzy, cutting through dozens of roots in a single sweeping arc, water qi flashing like blades. But when he realized he couldn’t escape them all, he teleported upward and flew into the sky, putting distance between us.

“To think you have no honor,” he called down, voice laced with disappointment. “It seems I expected so much from you—”

“Sunlight Orb,” I interrupted, pointing my staff at him and launching the projectile spell in a blazing streak of golden light.

He cut it cleanly in half mid-air.

“Sunlight Orb.” Another one. He sliced it apart again.

I spammed the spell relentlessly. Smile upon me, goddess of RNG.

And she did.

One of the orbs lit up with brilliant intensity as it scored a critical hit, the golden light flaring with extra power and afflicting a status ailment that slowed his movements for a precious moment. Sunlight Orb was low-cost, and this qi-rich environment replenished my reserves far easier than mana ever had back in the game.

That small window was all I needed.

I activated Nature’s Stride, teleporting through the network of plant life across the battlefield and buying myself precious time. The next spell had a really long casting time, something I was still reluctant to use in the heat of battle because I wasn’t fully comfortable fighting in this form yet. It would take a good couple of minutes before it was ready, time that could be fatal in an intense fight where every second mattered.

A powerful burst of qi overflowed from my body as I uttered the words. “I summon thee—”

I coughed blood as a sword suddenly poked through from behind me, piercing just below my ribs. Two crimson petals hovered above Long Xue like a sinister halo as he grinned triumphantly.

I gritted my teeth and finished the spell anyway, forcing the words out through the pain.

“Spirit of the World Tree.”

I thumped my staff hard on the ground.

The entire forest answered.

Ancient power surged upward from the earth, roots thicker than ancient pillars bursting forth and intertwining into colossal living structures. The canopy above us expanded and twisted, leaves glowing with ethereal green light as the domain of the Spirit of the World Tree took hold. Massive World Tree limbs rose like guardian titans, flowers the size of houses bloomed instantly, and the air filled with the overwhelming presence of primal nature itself.

Long Xue’s eyes widened as the battlefield transformed completely around us, his teleportation flickering uncertainly as the World Tree’s domain began to suppress his water qi and restrict his movements.

The forest was no longer just watching.

It had become my weapon, my fortress, and my judgment.

And in that moment, with blood dripping from my side and the Spirit of the World Tree rising behind me like a living god, I finally felt the full weight of the existence known as Nevle Drol Diurdhcra.

“And I will strike thee down with the fury of the heavens and the wrath of the earth, for thou hast disturbed the sacred balance!”

Power surged through me as I activated Wild Shape once more. My body shifted and refined under the World Tree’s blessing, transforming into something far greater than a mere Primal Nature Elemental. I had become a Primal Nature Spirit, a Fairy King straight out of legend. A crown of living twigs rested upon my head, my skin turned to flawless porcelain ivory, a flowing silver mane cascaded down my back, and ethereal butterfly-like wings shimmered behind me.

I leveled my gaze at Long Xue and spoke with quiet finality.

“In other words… you are dead.”