That night, they made camp beneath the glowing canopy.
Ashen lay on his back with the core on his chest, staring up at the leaves shining faintly above him, and the question that had been nagging him since the morning finally slipped out.
"How is this place still alive?"
A few of the brothers looked over at him.
"Everything out there is dead," Ashen went on. "So how did a forest this big survive? Why hasn't anything come here and torn it apart?"
Orin answered while chewing on a glowing fruit, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
"Because of the Sacred Beast."
Ashen's face didn't change.
He nodded, made a small sound of understanding, and kept looking up at the leaves.
Inside, his mind had been thrown into complete turmoil.
'A Sacred Beast. Welp. Why not?' He really wanted to sew his mouth shut. 'Every time I ask something, they slap me with the most outrageous claims…'
Last time he asked, it was an Outer God; this time, it was a Sacred Beast.
'Hehehe… what's next, a World Ender?'
But even with all the miserable jokes he kept spewing to himself, he couldn't stop his body from trembling.
How could he not? He was in the domain of such a creature.
A Sacred Beast was a beast that had evolved seven times over. Seven times, its body, its mana and its very nature had broken apart and rebuilt itself into something greater, until at the end of it all, it gained a demi-human form.
Ashen had heard of only one other beast that had ever made that climb.
Noctari, the ancestor of the Vampires.
It had begun its life as a mere bat and ended it as the first vampire. And Ashen knew exactly how much that meant, because he had once possessed one of its sons, and he had tasted the extent of their power firsthand.
The endless lifespan was the least of it. Blood concepts came to them as easily as breathing, as though their bodies had been made to understand them. Their mana was an ocean. Even their blood was as precious as an elixir that could pull a dying man back to life.
And that had only been the offspring of a Sacred Beast. Ashen had never come close to the beast itself.
He had seen other monsters. Terrible ones. The World Ender, hibernating beneath his territory back in Solmara. Hammon, the Sky-Ram that the Custodian Order had used to hold back the Outer Gods themselves. Both of them had gained concepts, and both of them were powers that could go toe to toe with the human race of the present if they so liked.
And yet neither of them came anywhere close to a Sacred Beast.
Their minds had never caught up with their power. They remained beasts, dull and regressed beside a true human intelligence, swinging their strength around like a club.
A Sacred Beast evolved in every part of itself with each step of its climb, its mind and its intelligence included. Seven evolutions of a body that also thought.
'And we're sleeping in its backyard.'
Ashen swallowed and kept his voice light. "And this Sacred Beast… doesn't mind us being here?"
"Not really," Bram said lazily from where he was sprawled against a root, still recovering. "It doesn't care who comes and goes, as long as we don't cause too much destruction. Take some fruit, hunt a few beasts, and it won't even look at you."
"And, hypothetically speaking, if we cause too much destruction?"
"Then we die."
"…Good to know."
"Oh, and if we run into it while it's hunting," Orin added, "then there's going to be a very bloody fight. Very short, too."
"Thank you, Orin. That's very comforting."
The brothers laughed.
Ashen laughed along with them, and goosebumps crawled up his arms all the same.
They were inside the territory of an entity that could kill every single one of them whenever it pleased, and his brothers were munching on its fruit and joking about it.
With each passing day, Ashen was coming to realize anew that this bunch of brothers of his were more… let's say brave… than he had ever given them credit for.
Or reckless. He honestly couldn't tell which.
But whichever it was, he couldn't bring himself to blame them. The more he saw of the surface, the more he understood that their choices were the only ones that let them keep living. When the enemies waiting for you were mechanical armies, Catastrophe-class Narkals and Outer Gods, there was no such thing as a safe place to stand. There were only places that would kill you now, and places that would kill you later.
He sighed, set his hand back over the core and closed his eyes.
'Rest. Just rest. Resting Forge works better when I'm calm.'
It took him a long time to fall asleep.
◉◉◉
The days that followed went by in a blur of hunting.
The forest teemed with beasts, and every one of them was a treasure in its own right.
Antlered things as tall as horses with bark growing along their backs. Boars covered in plates of glowing moss. Long, eel-like creatures that swam through the soil as if it were water and burst out of the ground at the worst possible moments.
The brothers hunted them with brutality that bordered on art.
Each kill was beheaded on the spot and strung up by the hind legs to drain the blood, and the carcasses were hauled back to the carriages once they had run dry.
Ashen had wondered at first how they planned on keeping all that meat from rotting. The carriages turned out to be laced with chilling mana that kept their insides as cold as a winter cellar. On top of that, the mana still flowing through the beasts' bodies held them together long after death, keeping their flesh from dissolving far longer than any ordinary animal.
"A month," Lucan told him, slapping the side of a carriage loaded with meat. "That's the earliest any of this goes bad."
Of course, the beasts weren't the only things they took.
Every evening, the sacks came back heavier with fruits, roots, herbs and flowers. The seeds would be kept for planting back home, and the rarest plants would be dug up whole and replanted directly.
Which was how Ashen found out that his brothers had absolutely no idea how to dig up a plant.
"Stop! Stop, stop, stop!"
The brother in question froze, his fist still wrapped around the stem of a silver-leafed shrub that he had been in the middle of yanking out of the ground like a weed.
"You're tearing the roots!" Ashen dropped to his knees beside the poor thing. "Look at this! Look! This one's half gone. Do you know how long it takes a root system like this to grow back? Do you have any idea?"
"…A week?"
"A year, if it survives!"
The brother looked over at Adam for help. Adam pointedly looked away.
From that day on, every rare plant they found went through Ashen first. He dug around them with his bare hands, loosened the soil inch by inch, wrapped the roots in damp moss and cradled each one into the carriages as if he were carrying a newborn. Within three days, the brothers had started calling him "Mother Ashen" behind his back.
And sometimes, not so behind his back.
Ashen didn't care. He was happier than he had been since leaving home.
But every now and then, while kneeling in the soft glowing moss with his hands buried in the earth, he would feel the faintest prickle along the back of his neck. A distant pressure, as though something with a very large presence had turned its head in their direction for a single moment, considered them, and lost interest.
Each time, Ashen kept his eyes on the plant in front of him and did not look up.