Chapter 633: Mapping The Quiet (End)
"I’ll sweet-talk them," he said, stepping toward a set of bell-jars with embedded runes. One jar held what looked like a violet beetle suspended midair by static mana. The creature’s wings beat so slowly it might have been swimming through syrup.
<"Caution. Unknown containment protocols.">
"I’m just looking," he whispered.
He knelt, eyes level with the beetle. At each wingbeat, micro-sparks blossomed along its carapace and vanished. The sparks traced fractal paths—too orderly to be random, too organic to be engineered. He pulled a thin stylus from his sleeve, holding it like a pen near the glass. Almost instantly, the sparks changed trajectory, clustering toward the stylus tip as though curious.
"Well, hello there," he murmured. "Do you write code too?"
Thalatha edged closer. "You speak to them?"
"Habit." He straightened. "Sometimes they answer. Sometimes they bite. Occupational hazard."
He moved on, fingers hovering above a rows of crystal vials containing sand-fine dust. Each vial glowed a slightly different hue. He recognized at least four types of luminescent spore and two that defied classification. He was half-tempted to open one, but decided not to ruin the goodwill Thalatha had just spent guiding him.
His gaze landed on a shelf of bound folios—bark-spine books with living pages. He reached for the nearest volume. The cover was cool, pulsing faintly under his hand as if echoing the beat of the tree. When he opened it, letters rose from the page like embossed ink and rearranged into Common script. He blinked. Adaptive translation? Nice!
Text scrolled across:
Symbiotic Lattice Solutions for Hardened Heartwood Fungus—by Elder Vyra.
He skimmed an illustration: cross-sections of root tissue overrun by black tendrils. Blight research. He almost forgot to breathe. This single folio might save him months of trial.