The Great Core's Paradox

Erik brought his weapon down, letting the heavy head smash the ground apart. Vibrations rocked up the shaft, dampened by both the leather grip and his mana-enhanced durability.

“Skies,” he hissed in annoyance, noting the null-water moisture beneath the fragmented ground. It was probably a bad spot for a seed. With any luck, the roots would bull through whatever resistance the tiny amount of null-water could put up; without that luck, though, they might find themselves plunging into more null-water than they could handle. A normal plant, one without mana, might have been able to handle that. Not the ones that the Little Guardian created and controlled.

Those were so filled with mana that they might as well have been mana itself. For some of them, still, it might have been fine. The smaller of the Little Guardian’s plants didn’t anchor themselves so deep; they held on to tiny fissures and micro-fractures in the ground, the plants small and light enough that naturally-occurring crevices and cracks were enough. The bigger examples of the plants that made up the Groveways, though, needed more than that. They needed to run deep, to bury themselves beneath a kind of weight that could support their own without threatening to topple over.

To present a real threat against the warriors of Virtun and their mana-enhanced transportation, those bigger examples would be greatly needed. In particular, the great trees that now served as homes for many of the downtrodden citizens of Erandur - this time, used as a weapon rather than shelter.

Still, Erandur itself made that extremely difficult. The place was like a stonemarsh of null-water, the dangerous liquid running through the entirety of the cavern’s feet like nothing Erik had ever seen before. Beneath them, solid ground might as well have been an illusion. The porous rock was infested with hidden reservoirs of null-water, like spiderwebs of liquid woven beneath their feet, ready to catch any material that broke through.

Luckily, it wasn’t everywhere. It was just spread so far and so thin that it simply felt like it was. As long as they were careful, the plants could still spread. The cavern of Erandur’s strange biome simply meant that some areas were thinner than others, too anathema to the presence of mana to support more than the shallowest of roots and the lightest of plantlife.

It seemed that Erik had found one of those spots. He rifled through his pouch, searching for a seed that didn’t need to anchor itself so deep, and carefully placed it within the crack. It would grow, or it would not.

Erik couldn’t do anything about which of the two it would be.

On the way back out of the small fissure, he moved slowly, cautiously, so as not to brush against the small droplets of null-water with his gauntleted fingers. The earthen mana trapped within wouldn’t be leeched out by such a small amount, but it could contribute to a minor weakening over time, and the enchantments that made Erik’s armor such an effective defense weren’t easy to make.