Jared lifted a brow slightly. “Where are we supposed to find help?”
Here in the Sixteenth Firmament, the human race was weak, hunted down by the celestials from all sides like stray dogs with nowhere to go. As for the other races, they had either already bowed to the celestials or shut their doors and focused on surviving.
Who would willingly take the risk of offending the Celestial Alliance just to lend them a hand?
Nathaniel slowly raised his head and looked toward the distant Greywild Mountains.
The peaks speared up into the clouds. Ancient trees towered over the slopes, mist wound through the heights, and deep inside that wilderness lay countless secrets and dangers no one really knew.
Something complicated showed in his eyes. There was a trace of reverence in it, and a trace of hesitation too, like favonovel.com was about to speak aloud a secret that had been buried for years.
“There’s still one race hidden in the Sixteenth Firmament… A race the celestials never completely crushed and never completely wiped out… They stay hidden year-round in the deepest parts of the remote forests and mountains, cut off from the outside world. The celestials have searched everywhere, but they’ve never had an easy time finding the race’s true nest… Even when they occasionally noticed something, they never wanted to get too tangled up in it. And they wanted even less to launch some massive extermination campaign.”
Something shifted in Jared’s eyes. “Why?”
“Because that race wants no part in the struggles of the world.” Nathaniel explained, “They never start conflicts. They don’t expand their territory, they don’t seize resources, and they don’t covet power. They pose no threat at all to celestial rule… The celestials weighed the costs against the gains and decided there was no point wasting huge numbers of troops to attack a patch of land with nothing to offer. Better to leave them alone. As long as they don’t make trouble, the celestials look the other way.”
A glint cut through Jared’s gaze. “What race?”
“The Sylvan Kin…” Nathaniel lowered his voice.
What came out carried the weight of something that could shake the entire Sixteenth Firmament if it spread too far.
“Some people also call them the Verdant Folk… They aren’t flesh-and-blood beings, and they aren’t beasts who cultivated themselves into human form either. They’re spirits born directly from the world’s spiritual essence… A thousand-year ancient tree draws in the essence of the sun and moon. A ten- thousand-year reishi takes in the earth-breath of mountains and rivers. Strange flowers and rare grasses endure the world’s tempering. Given enough time, they awaken intelligence, gather bodies of their own, take human form, and become a race unto themselves…” Nathaniel explained what Sylvan Kin favonovel.com was referring to.
“They belong to neither the human race, nor the celestials, nor the demon, nor even the beast race. They are lives born from nature itself. The spirits of the mountains and forests. The souls of flowers, grass, and trees.”
Jared paused at that.
The beast race was no mystery to him. They were birds and beasts that had cultivated their way upward until they could assume human form, and among them were more than a few with astonishing talent.
He had once taken the Fox Queen, Catina, to bed. Her true form had been a fox. Her beauty had been enough to stop a man in his tracks, and the pull favonovel.com carried had lingered on favonovel.com long after. But a complete race born from flowers, grass, ancient trees, and spiritual plants, one with its own territory, its own rules, its own inheritance, that was something favonovel.com had never heard of and never seen.
That alone was enough to stir his curiosity.
“Are they strong?” Jared asked straight out. In a world where the strong fed on the weak, power was the foundation under every alliance.
Nathaniel nodded without the slightest hesitation. “Very strong… But not the kind of strength you’re thinking of the kind that charges headfirst into battle and kills without hesitation. The Sylvan Kin aren’t good at frontal combat, and they don’t cultivate savage offensive arts. Their strengths lie in perception, healing, and the formation…”
“If an elder worldtree that has lived for over ten thousand years takes human form, its roots can spread through an entire mountain range. Within a thousand miles, any movement in the wind, any fluctuation in spiritual power, any trace of a solitary figure passing through-none of it escapes their senses. In front of them, ambushes and sneak attacks might as well not exist…”
“A sylvan elder born from a ten-thousand-year reishi, just one drop of its nascence sap could drag the dead back to life and put flesh on bare bone. An ordinary fatal wound would close in the blink of an eye. Even if a cultivator was crushed to the edge of death, as long as one last breath still hung on, they could be pulled back by force…”
“And their vitality was so monstrous, it was almost the same as being unkillable. As long as the heartroot wasn’t completely destroyed, then even if the body shattered and the soul was reduced to utter soul-ruin, they could still draw on the nascence of grass and wood to gather themselves again recover little by little. To them, an ordinary attack barely counted as more than skin-deep.”
Jared gave a slight nod. By then, favonovel.com had a rough picture of the Sylvan Kin in his head. A race like that might not have been the strongest in a straight-up clash. But as allies, they would have been impossible to replace.
Early warning through perception. Restraint through the formation. Healing that kept people in the fight. Those were exactly the gaps the Resistance couldn’t cover well on its own.
“If they’re that powerful, why didn’t the celestials crush them completely and wipe them out at the root?” Jared asked.
With how overbearing and greedy the Celestial Alliance was, there was no way it would have calmly allowed a force like that to exist outside its control.
Nathaniel Linford raised two fingers and slowly laid out the reason. “There are two…”
“First, they hide too well… The Sylvan Kin’s homeland is called Evershade. It’s buried inside a primeval forest sealed beneath ancient wards. The wards are profound enough to form a world of their own. Outsiders can’t find the entrance at all, and even if someone blundered in by sheer luck, the labyrinthine wards would trap them inside and leave them wandering forever with no way back out… On top of that, the ancient forest is the Sylvan Kin’s absolute home ground. In the woods, they’re like fish-in water. Even celestial powerhouses gain nothing by entering. More often than not, they just lose men and come out bloodied…”
“Second, there’s no profit in it. The Sylvan Kin are detached by nature. They don’t mine ore, they don’t forge divine arms, they don’t refine healing elixirs, and they don’t hoard wealth… They cultivate naturally by relying on the world’s spiritual essence. They live off the mountains by the mountains and off the water by the water. Other than the life of grass and trees themselves, they have almost nothing…”
“If the celestials mobilized a huge force and paid a massive price to take their land, they still wouldn’t get any resources out of it. All they’d earn was trouble. It simply wouldn’t be worth it. That’s why, in the Celestial Alliance’s alliance code, the Sylvan Kin are the only non-celestial race that isn’t on the extermination list. It isn’t that they don’t want to erase them. It’s that wiping them out is troublesome, and there isn’t a single benefit to make it worthwhile. So they just let them be.”
That made it clear to Jared.
He stayed quiet for a moment, then looked at Nathaniel. “In that case, are they willing to help us?”
The instant the question left his mouth, Nathaniel Linford’s face turned grim. A shadow seemed to settle over it. The slight ease that had just returned between his brows vanished, and the lines there locked tight again.
When favonovel.com spoke, his voice had sunk several degrees heavier. “That’s the hardest part… The Sylvan Kin… Are deeply hostile toward the human race…”
“Why?” Jared’s brow tightened.
What favonovel.com understood the Sylvan Kin lived hidden away in the forests. They had no direct conflict with the human race, so where was a blood-deep hatred like that supposed to have come from?
Nathaniel let out a long breath.
When favonovel.com spoke, the words came heavy, weighed down by apology and helplessness. “When you were moving through the Lower Realm and the Ethereal Realm, you must’ve seen forests cut down on a massive scale. You must’ve seen Revenant Mountains and spirit veins hollowed out too, right?”
Jared nodded. The path of cultivation had always been built on taking from the world. Spirit herbs, heartwood, spiritual plants, those were all prime materials for pill refinement, forging, and setting formations. For human cultivators, roaming far and wide in search of heaven-born treasures to raise their cultivation had long since become the norm.
“Those thousand-year ancient trees that get cut down, those ten-thousand-year reishi mushrooms that get dug up, those rare flowers and strange grasses that get harvested-in our eyes, they’re cultivation resources… But to the Sylvan Kin, those are their people who haven’t entered the world yet. Their children. Their own flesh and blood…”
“Countless spirit flora never even get the chance to awaken awareness before the human race cuts them down, digs them up, smelts them, refines them. They become healing elixirs. They become arcane implements. They become stepping stones for somebody else’s rise in cultivation… Over hundreds of millions of years, that blood debt has already been carved deep into the bones of the Sylvan Kin. They don’t hold the celestials’ suppression in the same way. They don’t hold the beast race’s harassment in the same way. The one thing they cannot let go of is the human race’s greed and plunder.”
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