# Chapter 940: The Root Network
The clang of hammer against steel was Grak's prayer. It was a rhythm as old as the mountains, a percussive liturgy that spoke of fire, sweat, and the unyielding will to shape the world. His forge, carved deep into the bones of a Crownlands hill, was his sanctuary. The air was thick with the scent of hot metal, coal smoke, and the sharp, earthy tang of quenched iron. For generations, his family had worked this stone, and he knew its every mood, its every whisper. But today, something was different.
He was folding a billet of high-carbon steel, preparing the core for a new blade for a Ladder champion. The process was meditative, a dance of heat and force. He'd heated the steel in his hearth until it glowed the color of a setting sun, then drawn it from the coals. As he brought the hammer down, a note rang out, clearer and more sustained than any he had ever coaxed from the anvil. It wasn't just the ring of well-tempered steel; it was a hum, a resonance that seemed to hang in the air long after the impact faded, vibrating in his teeth and bones. He paused, his heavy arm held aloft, and listened. The forge was quiet, save for the crackle of the fire and the faint, almost sub-audible thrumming that seemed to emanate from the very metal on his anvil.
He set the hammer down and ran a calloused, soot-stained hand over the glowing steel. The heat was familiar, but beneath it was a strange vitality, a feeling of… life. He plunged the billet into the quenching trough. The water hissed and screamed, throwing a plume of steam into the air. But instead of the usual violent reaction, there was a harmony to it, a musical chime that accompanied the steam's ascent. When he pulled the blade out, its surface was not merely hardened; it seemed to shimmer with an inner light, the grain of the steel tighter and more intricate than any he had forged in fifty years of work. It was stronger, purer. It was perfect.
A shiver traced its way down his spine, unrelated to the forge's heat. He knelt, placing a palm flat against the cool, packed-earth floor of his workshop. The thrumming was stronger here. It was a slow, deep pulse, like the heartbeat of some slumbering giant buried miles beneath the hill. It was faint, but undeniable. A rhythm that matched the hum of the steel, the chime of the water. It was the World-Tree. He knew it in his bones, the same way a sailor knows the tide. The stories said its roots spread across the globe, a myth to explain the new green of the world. But this was not a myth. This was real. The roots were here, beneath his feet, singing their song into the stone and iron, remaking the world from its very foundation.
Over the next few weeks, Grak became a prospector of secrets. He spoke in hushed tones with other artisans, the weavers, the masons, the carpenters. They had all noticed it. A stonemason from the newly rebuilt walls of the capital spoke of granite that cleaved as if guided by a thought, revealing flawless, unblemished faces. A shipwright in the Sable League's port city described lumber from the northern forests that was unnaturally light yet stronger than iron, resistant to rot and shipworm. A weaver claimed that wool from sheep grazing in the new pastures took dye with a vibrancy that defied logic, the colors seeming to glow from within.
They were all witnessing the same miracle. The World-Tree's root network was not merely a passive system; it was an active, planetary-scale alchemy. It drew the latent magic of the healed world into its roots and exuded it back into the soil, the stone, the water. It was purifying the very elements, enhancing them, weaving a new and stronger reality into the old, broken one. The age of scarcity was ending not just with food and peace, but with materials of a quality that bordered on the magical. Tools lasted generations. Buildings built now would stand for millennia. It was a renaissance of craft, a golden age for the makers of the world.
Grak threw himself into his work with a feverish passion. He forged tools for farmers that sliced through the enriched soil like butter, hinges for gates that would never rust, and nails that drove straight and true, never bending. He felt like a conduit, his hammer the instrument through which the tree's will was made manifest. He was no longer just a blacksmith; he was a partner in creation. The rhythmic pulse from the earth was his new metronome, and his forge sang with a joy he hadn't felt since he was a boy.
But in every perfect creation, there is a shadow. One evening, while digging a new drainage trench for his slag heap, his shovel struck something hard. It wasn't bedrock. The sound was dull, sickly. He cleared the dirt away and found a vein of ore, but it was unlike anything he had ever seen. It was iron, certainly, but it was twisted and blackened, shot through with veins of a sickly, pulsating purple. The air around it was cold, and the faint, rhythmic pulse he had come to cherish was warped here, distorted into a discordant thrum that set his teeth on edge. He reached out a hesitant hand, not to touch the ore, but to feel the air above it. A profound sense of wrongness washed over him, a feeling of ancient hunger and decay.
This was the tree's work, too. He knew it with a certainty that chilled him to the core. It was the other side of the coin. For every vein of purified, singing iron, there was a line of this corrupted, weeping metal. For every piece of resilient, living wood, there was a pocket of petrified, brittle stone. The World-Tree wasn't just healing the world; it was digesting it. And like any great process, it produced waste. It was concentrating the old poisons of the Bloom, the ancient griefs and sorrows of the world, into these dark places, sequestering them deep within the earth.
He stood up, wiping his dirty hands on his leather apron. He looked around his forge, at the perfect tools hanging on the walls, at the glowing heart of his fire. He thought of the king's pilgrimage, of the whispers of a withered leaf on the tree of life. He had dismissed it as a peasant's superstition. Now, he wasn't so sure. The tree was remaking the world from the bedrock up, a magnificent, terrifying process of creation and purification. But what was it purifying? What was it pushing down into the deep, dark places? The thrumming beneath his feet suddenly felt less like a heartbeat and more like a pressure, a weight. The tree wasn't just a source of magic. It was a filter, and the world was being poured through it. He wondered what else, besides ore and stone, it was changing beneath their feet. What ancient things were being stirred up in the deep, and what would happen when they finally broke the surface?