Oliver's consciousness stirred within the largest fruit, golden hair floating in the nourishing liquid. Around him, the other infants blinked in eerie unison, their Asura-colored eyes shimmering with scattered remnants of his stolen essence.
A shiver of awareness ran through him. They're feeding off me… he realized. But a darker thought followed. Then I can feed off them.
He drew in a sliver of Qi from the nearest fragment, the process painless but consuming. Slowly, the smaller infants began to shiver, their tiny bodies trembling as their golden hair faded, their limbs shrinking. Their skin turned translucent, pulsing inward, and their forms condensed—infants first, then fetuses, then embryos, curling into tight, dormant seeds. Their eyes closed, their life suspended, leaving only fragile, crystal-like cores floating in the liquid.
Oliver's own fruit glowed brighter, his body swelling as he absorbed each fragment's essence. The liquid around him churned, shimmering with stolen Qi. Pain lanced through him briefly, a reminder of the strain—but he gritted his teeth, forcing it to fuel him.
The first twitch of growth came in his legs.
Muscles stretched, bones lengthened, flesh solidified.
His tiny hands thickened into fingers, his limbs strengthened, and the infant form grew steadily into a toddler. His golden hair spilled past his shoulders, glowing faintly like molten sunlight.
Another surge, and the toddler grew into a boy, then a young teen.
Every heartbeat, every pulse of sap-laced Qi accelerated the transformation, filling out his frame. His new body fused with remnants of the peach liquid and fruit tissue that surrounded him, giving him a subtle, clear sheen to his skin and a faint, peachy aroma.
The fruit trembled violently as his growth accelerated, cracks spiderwebbing along the translucent surface. Sap leaked from the fissures, dripping onto the ground below, as though the peach itself mourned the loss of its occupant's infancy.
Finally, the peach groaned under the strain. Oliver, now a late-stage teen in form and mind, felt every muscle, every bone realign, and every root pulse harmonize into a perfect vessel for his consciousness. He braced himself as the crystal shell around him shattered.
With a resounding crack, the largest fruit burst open. The liquid inside hissed as it met the air, dripping across the ruined grove. Oliver emerged, fully reborn—half-human, half-plant still, but refined, youthful, and impossibly potent.
Thud!
"Oliver!?" Luna called out; she was the first one to run to his side as he fell out of the tree. Her hooves trotting fast as she rushed towards him—kneeling down on all fours as she held his bleeding head.
She was trying to talk to him, but Oliver wasn't paying attention.
He inhaled, tasting the air thick with ash, burnt ferns, and the lingering Qi of the alpha macaque. Every breath filled him with raw, unfiltered power. He reached out and flexed his fingers, feeling the strength of the stolen energies coursing through him, shaping his body into a perfect weapon of life and destruction.
Above him, the smaller embryos—the former infants—drifted inert in their crystal vessels, now nothing more than dormant seeds, their stolen essence fueling his rebirth.
A faint hum rose from the roots beneath the grove, an echo of the earthly treasure acknowledging its new master.
"Oliver, Oliver, are you okay?" Luna asked with worry, her hands caressing his head, "Can you hear me? Are you—"
Oliver set forward, ignoring her voice—his headache had become more bearable as sap and blood flowed through his skin, the ruined grove stretching around him like a battlefield frozen in time. His gaze swept over the devastated forest, over the girls still frozen in awe and terror, and he allowed a savage, triumphant grin.
"Now…" he muttered, voice low but brimming with power, "I'm truly reborn, and the road past mortality feels farther within reach."
The grove was a graveyard now. Broken roots jutted from blackened soil, leaves shriveled into ash, and the once-sacred air was heavy with the musk of charred ferns and blood.
Oliver pushed himself upright, sap and blood coursing together through his veins, glowing faintly beneath his skin.
His flesh was etched with vine-like whorls that pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat, each thrum a reminder of the fusion that had remade him. Luna's hands trembled as she steadied him, her voice pleading, but he barely registered it.
Every inhalation drowned her words. Every exhalation fed the fire in his chest. The drained embryos hovered overhead, their crystal shells collapsing inward until nothing remained but shriveled seeds—hollow vessels robbed of their chance to grow.
He looked upon them and smiled.
"Now," he whispered, voice low and resolute, "I'm truly reborn."
The ground quaked, roots bowing to his presence as the tree's heartbeat thudded in time with his own. For one terrifying moment, he was not man, not cultivator, but something fused with the treasure itself—an incarnation of will sharpened to cut against the heavens.
The girls watched, caught between awe and dread.
"This… this is beyond crazy…" Sana muttered, her senses piercing deep, finding countless versions of him—his buried corpse, his fractured doubles, his unborn shadows.
Oliver's grin widened. "Tell me," he teased, eyes burning, "what part of your journey so far hasn't been?"
His gaze snapped to the base of the tree. There, among shattered husks and roots, lay fallen talismans glimmering faintly with a coating of whatever the liquids in the peach he fell from were. He reached out, and his spirit sense surged through them. Not originals, but clever imitations of his teleportation seals—yet refined enough to be usable.
The memory of the oni-kin's silhouette flashed behind his eyes. He cast his sense outward, hunting, scouring every inch of the grove.
Nothing.
Was I hallucinating? The thought cut across his mind. No—thoughts like that are nothing more than weakness. Illusion or real, it makes no difference. I should always prepare for the worst.
His fingers tightened around the talisman, ambition sharpening into something lethal.
"Hey, girls..." He turned his head, a faint smile curling his lips. "Help me collect all the undamaged ferns. The one who gathers the most can ask me to teach them any one of my techniques."
Even as he spoke, he felt the wound at the back of his head knitting closed, flesh stitching with sap and blood alike. Before them, the peach tree stirred—new buds swelling, ready to blossom into exact copies of himself, each one cradling the talismans he had been encased with below.
If I'm going to keep playing this game, he thought, stretching his body as he spotted a patch of untouched ferns, then I'll need to be more daring… to see how far we can push into the unknown.
He crouched low, plucking his second pill ingredient with deliberate care. A soft laugh escaped him.
"Also—who's hungry? We've got plenty of meat to get rid of~."
At his words, the roots of the peach tree writhed like serpents, breaking through the soil and lashing around the littered macaque corpses, dragging them closer as if the earth itself obeyed his hunger.