I Found a Door to the Elven Realm

Chapter 197: Totem: World Tree

The kitchen smelled like warm bread and something burnt.

Lyra was at the counter with flour on her hands and a tray of something golden-brown cooling on the stovetop. She looked up when the portal split the air behind him and didn’t even flinch because at this point the portal opening in the kitchen was basically a doorbell.

"You’re back early." She wiped her hands on a towel. Then she looked at his face and stopped wiping. "Is that blood?"

He touched his upper lip and felt the dried crust still there. He’d wiped most of it in the forest but apparently not well enough.

"Nosebleed. It’s fine."

"A nosebleed from what?" She put the towel down and came closer with her eyes going from his nose to his shirt collar where a few brown drops had dried into the fabric.

"I touched something I shouldn’t have touched." He walked to the sink and turned the faucet on. Cold water because the hot water heater in this farmhouse had a twenty-minute warm-up time and nobody remembered to turn it on before they needed it.

That was one of the things that genuinely bugged him about living here. The property had two hundred elves with combined ages adding up to probably forty thousand years and not a single one of them could remember to flip the boiler switch in the morning. They tracked deer through kilometers of forest by smell alone. They built shelters out of bark and vine that could survive monsoon-level rain. But a switch on a white metal box on the wall defeated them completely.

He’d put a sign above it two weeks ago in both Turkish and Elvish that said FLIP THIS IN THE MORNING. Nobody flipped it.

He splashed cold water on his face and rubbed the blood away while his reflection in the window above the sink stared back looking tired. Lyra slid a plate of fresh bread toward him across the counter. She did this every time he came home through the portal. It was her version of saying "welcome back" and honestly Eren had started depending on it because her bread was so good it had no business existing on a planet that also had wheat.

"Where’s Emily?" He tore off a piece and chewed while still dripping.

"Resting upstairs." Lyra pointed at the ceiling. "Her back was hurting so Selena made her lie down about an hour ago."

Her back again. Emily’s belly was barely starting to round but her body was already doing things that surprised both of them. She was a Level 51 hunter who could sprint through a forest at speeds that would make an Olympic runner just quit the sport entirely but pregnancy apparently didn’t care about your level. Her lower back had been tightening up for the last week and she’d been stretching against doorframes every morning while pretending she was just "leaning."

She’s gonna be like this for ten more months..

[I can smell your blood from here.] Rury’s voice popped into his head from somewhere outside. [Are you dying?]

"I’m not dying Rury."

[Good. Because if you die I need to know who handles the feeding schedule. It’s important to plan these things.]

He ignored her and grabbed another piece of bread because Lyra’s bread deserved a second serving and also because he hadn’t eaten anything since the wet almonds this afternoon. The bread was still warm and it had that slightly sweet crust that happened when Lyra used Evon honey in the dough.

"I’m going up," he said.

Lyra nodded and went back to her tray. She was pulling apart the edges of whatever she’d baked, testing the crumb texture with her fingers the way she always did before calling something finished. Two hundred years of baking had turned her fingers into quality instruments more sensitive than anything the food industry on Earth could build.

..

Emily was on the bed in the upstairs room with her boots still on and one arm thrown over her face. The last of the sunset was coming through the window and hitting the wall behind her in a strip of orange and she looked like she’d fallen asleep trying very hard not to fall asleep.

He pulled her boots off without waking her. The new hiking boots from the shoe store in town, already scuffed on the soles after only a week of use. She was going to need another pair by next month.

Emily’s eyes opened when the second boot came off. She blinked twice, looked at him and grabbed his wrist.

"You smell like the forest." She pulled him closer and sniffed his shirt with the casual efficiency of someone whose nose was almost as good as a wolf’s. "And blood. Why blood?"

"Long story." He sat on the edge of the bed and her hand went to his thigh because Emily’s version of "I’m listening" always involved physical contact.

"I found something at the village ruins."

She propped herself up on one elbow. Her blonde hair was everywhere and the beanie had come off during the nap so both her pointed ears were showing. She tucked a strand behind the left one without thinking about it.

"The Totem?"

"The World Tree. Or what’s left of it." He looked at the far wall. "The trunk is burned and most of it has collapsed and the old carvings are almost gone. But one of the big roots is still running into the soil and it doesn’t look dead. There’s something pale and alive under the bark."

Emily’s eyes sharpened. Whenever the conversation touched the forest or anything that grew from soil her whole face shifted into the hunter focus that made her look ten years older and twice as serious.

"You touched it." She wasn’t asking.

"Yeah. Three seconds. My nose started bleeding and I backed off."

"What did you see?"

He tried to explain it. A tree bigger than a planet, young and blazing with power, ruling over a huge stretch of land and water. Cosmic shapes moving around it in the dark. The sense that he was watching something from the very beginning of.. he didn’t even know what. Everything maybe.

The words sounded stupid when he said them out loud.

"..like watching the opening cutscene of a game except the game was the size of a solar system and the cutscene gave me a nosebleed," he finished and rubbed the bridge of his nose where a faint headache was still hanging around.

Emily was quiet for a while. Her hand was still on his thigh and she squeezed it while she thought.

"The World Tree in my village wasn’t the only one," she said. "The elders used to tell stories about a time when every continent on Aradne had its own World Tree. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. All connected underground through root systems that ran deeper than any cave or dungeon."

He looked at her. "Connected? Like a network?"

"Like a forest." She pulled herself upright and crossed her legs. "In a real forest the trees aren’t separate. Their roots grow into each other underground and they share water and nutrients through the soil. The old elves used to say the World Trees did the same thing except across the whole planet."

He thought about that for a second. His brain was already trying to build a map of it.

"So when I touched the root and saw that giant tree.."

"You probably saw the source. The original one." Emily scratched her ear. "Whatever grew first before all the others spread from it. That’s just elder stories though. My village only had one World Tree and it was already ancient when even our ancestors were part of an ancient elven empire. So we don’t know.."

"..the root showed me what the system looked like before everything went to hell," he muttered to himself quietly.

If the World Trees had been a connected underground network and the Totem drew its power from that network and the system ran through the Totem.. then the experience lockout in this region wasn’t just about one burned tree. It was about a damaged connection point in something that used to cover the entire planet.

So basically the exp system runs on tree wifi and our router got smashed by a dragon?

It sounded ridiculous even inside his own head but the logic actually worked.

Emily watched his face while he worked through it. She’d gotten used to these moments where Eren went quiet and his eyes went unfocused. She’d told him once that he looked like her stepfather Henner right before the old hunter figured out which way the wind would shift. Eren didn’t know what to make of that comparison.

"The root is still alive though," he said. "That’s the part that matters. The trunk is burned and the dragon is right there sleeping but the root goes underground. If even one root survived.."

"A tree can regrow from its roots." Emily said it like it was the most obvious thing in any world.

"Even if the whole top is burned off?"

She gave him a look. "Eren. I grew up in a forest. Trees lose their tops all the time. Lightning and storms and big animals pushing them over. If the roots are healthy the tree comes back. It takes years but it comes back."

He stared at the ceiling.

The World Tree can regrow.

That changed everything he’d been thinking for the last month. The Totem wasn’t destroyed. It was damaged. The system wasn’t gone from this region. It was disconnected from its power source because the trunk that worked as the connection point was gone. But the root that tied it into the underground network was still alive and still holding on.

If the tree could regrow then the Totem could reactivate. And if the Totem reactivated then the experience system would come back and he’d stop getting 000% from every kill and months of fighting in the forest would finally start paying him back.

But the dragon was forty meters from the trunk.

"I need to go back," he said.

Emily’s grip on his thigh tightened. "Not alone."

"The dragon’s been asleep for a month straight. Its wing is broken or something and it moved away from the tree. I used Invisibility and walked right up to the trunk and it never even twitched."

"Today." She jabbed her finger at his chest. "Today it was asleep. What about tomorrow? Or the day you get stupid and stay too long?"

She had a point and he hated that she had a point.

"I’m not going to fight it. I just need more time with that root. Three seconds gave me a nosebleed but maybe if I build up to it, ten seconds then thirty, I can figure out what it needs to start growing again."

Emily looked at him for a long moment. Her green eyes in the last of the sunset light were doing that thing they did when she was deciding between being his wife and being the hunter who assessed risk for a living.

"Take Fury at least for the forest exploration." She crossed her arms over her belly. "If the dragon moves or some other threat get too close wolves can smell them before you feel it. I know your new cat bloodline skills are helpful but they are natural at this." Her face looked like she would love to come and join him in the other side. Emily didn’t tell him that much but she was concerned about her step father Henner.

"What do you think?" She came closer and touched his body and it triggered too many hormones in his body. And her earlier words were smart. Fury’s nose could detect threats from distances that Eren’s Apex Predator Awareness couldn’t match and the wolf was probably the fastest member of their team after Emily herself.

"Deal." He leaned over and kissed her forehead.

She grabbed his face with both hands and pulled him down because Emily didn’t accept forehead kisses as real kisses. Her lips were warm and she tasted like that herbal tea Selena had been making her every afternoon, the one that was supposed to help with the back pain.

The kiss lasted longer than he planned. Emily’s hands went from his face to the back of his neck and then to his chest and she was pulling at the collar of his bloody shirt.

"Take that off," she said against his mouth. "It stinks."

"I’ve been rolling around in a-"

"I said take it off silly." She was already yanking it over his head.

He let her.

The shirt came off and Emily ran her fingers across the old yellowish spot on his lower back where the Phantom Grip Strangler had slammed him into a tree weeks ago. Her touch was light and then her nails dragged across his stomach while Eren touched her big belly and some parts underside.

She triggered me first, I’m not guilty..

"Be my pregnant sleep bear and hug me." Eren french kissed him and licked inside his mouth with his whole strength while taking off her cloths to sleep naked later.

Emily had a special place in his heart.