Through all of it, the presence of the tree never faded from Ashen's life.
Every single day, without fail, Ashen went to the farm. No matter how tired he was after an expedition, no matter how many seeds he had sown in his body, no matter how badly the harvest dragged him toward sleep, he went to the tree first.
He would sit at its roots and pour his mana into the soil, watch it with Patient Eye for hours, learning every change in its leaves, every shift in its glow. He would talk to it, sometimes. Lapis teased him endlessly for it.
But the tree was listening.
He had known about its consciousness since the day it bloomed. Over the years, that consciousness grew.
At first, it was little more than a feeling. A faint warmth whenever he arrived, like a dog's tail thumping against the floor.
Then… the tree began to move.
A branch would bend toward him when he sat down. Its leaves would rustle when he spoke and fall still when he was silent. When he returned wounded from an expedition, its glow would dim with what he could only describe as worry.
There was even a time when he sat at its roots in a black mood after a difficult expedition, and a branch slowly lowered itself and came to rest on his head, as though patting him.
Ashen sat very still for a long time.
"…You're getting smarter," he said finally. "Aren't you?"
The leaves rustled.
Patient Eye agreed with him.
◉◉◉
[ PATIENT EYE ]
Target: Evolved Manaweave Tree
Caretaker: Ashen Hunt
Development: Maturing
Consciousness: Growing
Observed Conditions:
The manaweave's consciousness has continued to develop alongside its body.
It now recognizes the presence and moods of its caretaker and has begun attempting to respond to them.
It has also begun to recognize others who frequently accompany its caretaker, particularly Lapis Hunt and Misty Hunt.
Its desire to grow has transformed… It no longer grows solely to survive… It wishes to give something back…
◉◉◉
'Wishes to give something back…'
Ashen read the line thoughtfully, then smiled, patted the trunk, and kept pouring his mana into the soil.
"Grow up quick, baby. I'll be relying on you to support your daddy in his retirement."
◉◉◉
Ashen had turned eighteen for a while now; exactly eleven months ago, and that was the actual age difference between him and the twins Lapis and Cain.
Technically, they could be considered the same age, but it was practically almost a year difference.
The only reason this could be transpire safely was due to his mother's constitution, but that wasn't why Ashen was currently thinking about the age difference.
The year they turned eighteen, catching up to Ashen and Misty in age, three things happened.
The first was that Cain joined the expeditions.
He came onto the surface for the first time with all the fury of four years spent waiting. And to everyone's surprise, he was very, very good.
His Sin was Envy, and by eighteen, he had already reached the Third Step. Envy was a Sin that fattened on comparison, and Cain had been comparing himself to his brother since the day he learned to crawl.
All of that bitterness, all of those years of watching Ashen from below, had become fuel.
His Thema made him an assassin. He could melt into shadows, slip past sentries and walk through a beast's den without waking it. Places the expedition couldn't approach without a fight, Cain simply entered.
In his first expedition, he infiltrated a demi-human outpost and came back with a sack of rare herbs. He found a vein of silver in a ravine everyone else had walked past a dozen times. He crept into the nest of a cliff-drake and stole three of its eggs while the mother slept above him.
The warriors praised him, Adam praised him, heck, even Ashen praised him.
And Cain soaked it up, then turned it into a weapon.
"Oh, the farmer's back," he would drawl whenever the expedition returned and Ashen headed straight for the farm. "Going to go hug your tree, brother? Don't let me stop you. Some of us actually brought something home."
He said it often enough that the older brothers began to roll their eyes whenever he opened his mouth.
"Little brother, I don't know why… but whenever you speak lately I get this sudden urge to break your nose," Bram muttered one evening, after Cain had made a particularly nasty comment about Ashen's slow progress. "Just once… a small break… nobody will notice. It will heal in a jiffy. I promise!"
"Leave it," Ashen said.
"Ayo…! And the angel of mercy himself speaks! He's mocking you in front of everyone, Ashen."
"He's good at what he does, and he wants everyone to know it." Ashen shrugged. "Let him have it."
It wasn't that Ashen didn't notice. He noticed everything… how Cain had reached the Third Step while Ashen was still at the Fifth, and how the gap seemed to grow wider every month. Sloth was patient, and patience was slow, no matter how well he embodied it.
But he was close to the Fourth Step now, and he wasn't in a hurry anymore.
Besides, no matter how Cain flapped his mouth, Ashen simply couldn't muster a speck of anger.
'Seems Sloth is affecting my behavior more than I thought.'
Ashen was starting to realize that this authentic way of embodying Sloth was making him less prone to committing to unnecessary actions.
'If I had to pinpoint it in one word… it would probably be indifferent.'
Ashen contemplated if this change would bring about negative consequences, but in the end, he did not find any.
It wasn't like he was becoming emotionless, but some emotions were simply becoming a drag to indulge.
'Yeah… I don't care.'
So while Cain climbed, Ashen tended his tree. He spent his evenings with Lapis, his afternoons with Misty, and his rest days playing chess with his mother, who had gotten frighteningly good at it.
He was content.
◉
The second thing was that the 'wiping' changed.
Not in the routine itself. The lock, the stool, the armor, the basin and the towel all stayed exactly the same.
But Lapis started talking more while she did it.
"You've gotten bigger,"
Just like now.
Ashen had just come back from another expedition, and here he was under her care, enjoying her wiping down his shoulders.
She ran the cloth over the arc of his arm, then down across his chest. "Seriously. Every time you come back, there's more of you to wipe. Your arms are harder… your shoulders are wider… your back is…! Ummm~"
She paused, stepped behind him, and wiped across his shoulder blades.
"…Your back is honestly unfair, brother."
"Fallow Rest," Ashen said.
"I know it's Fallow Rest. I'm just saying." She came back around and knelt to wipe his stomach, her eyes wandering over the ridges of muscle there with blatant interest. "It's developing in a very… mouth-watering way."
Ashen put a hand on her forehead and pushed her head back.
"You're supposed to be wiping off the grime," he said, rolling his eyes. "Not drooling on me. You'll undo all your hard work."
Lapis grinned up at him impishly.
"No problem. I can wipe you all day long, hehehe…"
"Pervert."
"Come on, little lady, don't be shy…"
Ashen deadpanned at the sight of his little sister acting like a perverted old man and did the only thing he'd learned to do in these situations…
"I don't know. I don't see. I don't care."
"You've been saying that for three years, brother. I don't think it's working."
Lapis glanced down at a suspiciously bulging part of his body, but he didn't answer. Instead, he simply held out his other arm for her to wipe.
She laughed and wiped it in with a very smug expression.
◉
The third thing happened on the night of Lapis's eighteenth birthday.
They had celebrated with the family during the day.
Anastasia had shed tears of joy, as she amazingly did every time one of her twins reached adulthood. Adam had given a speech that went on far too long, and Misty had fallen asleep on Ashen's shoulder halfway through it.
But in the evening, when the celebrations had wound down, Lapis appeared in their room holding two bottles of wine she had absolutely not been given permission to take.
"We're both eighteen now," she declared. "We're adults. And you know what adults do?"
"..."
"Yes, they drink."
Ashen held his head. "Haah… Adults also ask before stealing from Father's cellar."
"Adults don't ask, they take~" She wiggled the bottles. "Under the tree. Come on."
So they went to the farm. Ashen knew that winning an argument was futile anyway. They'd end up doing what Lapis wanted either way.
They sat beneath the manaweave tree with their backs against its trunk, its pink leaves glowing softly above them.
The first bottle went quickly. They told stories about the real world. Lapis's fencing tournaments… Ashen's disastrous attempts at courting Alice… and even the time Akidia had chased him around the house with a slipper because he'd forgotten her birthday.
'...Hah. Good times, really.'
The second bottle went slower than the first.
Somewhere in the middle of it, Lapis ended up with her head on his shoulder, her veil discarded on the grass, and his arm draped around her. The tree's leaves rustled faintly above them, as though it were listening. Being a tree of some breeding, it was too polite to say so.
"You know," Lapis murmured, her voice soft and somewhat loose with wine, "you've been calling me 'little wife' for thirteen years now."
"I called you that once…" Ashen protested weakly. "You were the one who practically turned it into a religion."
"Tsk, tsk… bro bro… you went along with it, na?"
"Under duress, unfortunately."
"Hmph. Then what about that time, hu? You said I had juicy lips once."
Ashen fell silent, looking at her thoughtfully. "What…? I said your lips were chapped and that you should drink more water."
"That's not how I remember it."
"Really?"
By now, anyone would have realized that Ashen was drunk. Even the drunken Lapis herself could plainly see it, because there was no way a sober brother would deliberate over such a blatant lie.
"Yes… yes… really. You don't remember it because you're drunk. You even said that you'd wanna take a bite."
"Oh…? Sorry, I don't remember it. But since you said it, little sis, it must be true. Haha…"
He couldn't argue with that. As mentioned before, he was pleasantly, warmly drunk, the world tilting just slightly at its edges, and his tongue felt looser than it ever had.
'When was the last time I was drunk before this…?'
Ashen tried to remember, then gave up when the timeline surpassed twenty years.
"Husband… how can you forget such a heartfelt moment between us? How cruel~" Lapis wasn't even beating around the bush anymore, fully intent on taking advantage of his drunkenness.
"Heeh… sorry, sorry…"
"A sorry isn't enough." She snuggled closer to his side until her lips touched the rim of his ear. "As punishment… you have to say it again… with love~!"
"Love…?" Ashen nodded seriously. After debating the matter in his head, he found her words perfectly logical, so he did what any drunken fool with a classical education and no sense of shame would do.
No… he even went beyond!
…He began to recite.
"Lapis," he declared grandly, lifting his cup toward the glowing branches like a priest raising a chalice to a very improper god. "Lamp of this underground. Ember of my idle evenings, and arsonist of my idler nights. My sin and my sister both, which is one sin too many for any single tongue to carry, though Heaven knows mine keeps trying."
Lapis snorted into her cup.
"La-pis," Ashen continued, warming to it, rolling the syllables in his mouth like wine. "The tongue rises to the roof of the mouth for the first sound and lingers there a moment, the way a thief lingers at a window. Then it falls to the lips and lets the second slip out in a hiss, like a blade sliding free of its sheath. La. Pis."
"Oh no," Lapis giggled.
"She was Lapis, plain Lapis, in the morning, veiled to the eyebrows, one sock on and the other lost somewhere under my bed, glaring at her porridge as though it had insulted her mother. She was Lap in the training grounds, when she wanted my head on a plate. And Lap again in the evenings," he raised a meaningful eyebrow, "when she wanted everything else on a plate and climbed into the nearest available one to demand it."
"That's slander," Lapis protested, already sliding closer to the lap in question.
"She was little wife when she wanted dessert," Ashen went on, utterly unmoved by the defense's objection. "She was Miss Hunt on any parchment Father makes us sign. But on the only document that has ever truly mattered," and here he tapped, with drunken precision, the spot just below her collarbone where his name lay hidden beneath her robe, "she is Ashen's. Signed, sealed, and inked into the soul, where no clerk, no father, and no Cain can ever cross it out."
He looked down at her, at the soft glow of the leaves on her face, at her pink eyes shining up at him with drunken delight.
"But here, under this tree, with her head on my shoulder and stolen wine on her breath…"
His voice softened. The words kept slipping out without him noticing.
"…she is La Peace."
"…La… Peace…?"
"My peace."
Lapis was quiet for a long moment. The blush had long since traveled down her cheeks and reached all the way to her ears as she gazed up at him, forgetting even to blink.
She'd never pegged her brother for such a poet. 'Really… and he didn't even praise my lips yet ~.♡'
Normally, she'd be kicking the ground trying to contain her giggles at her brother's magnificent display of 'affection'. Unfortunately… she was quite drunk herself.
And she was about to give him a taste of his own medicine…
After barely regaining her composure, or what was left of it, she sat up with a sway, set her cup down very carefully on the grass, and turned to face him.
The flush never left her cheeks, and now a bright glow in her eyes accompanied it.
"Alright, Monsieur Poet," she said. "My turn."
"What turn, perhaps, are you talking about, Mademoiselle?"
"You think you're the only one who read books?"
She cleared her throat dramatically and placed a hand on her chest, right over the place where his name was etched into her skin.
"This is a confession… the truth is…"
She paused for effect, and very nearly fell over doing it.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the tribe," she declared to the empty farm, the turnips, and one deeply attentive tree, "the faintest, dimmest, most shameful of my dreams about this man is a thousand times brighter than every scandal the old bards ever sang. Brighter than every queen caught in a stable, every priestess caught in a garden, every filthy thing the most lecherous poet ever scribbled, or the most frustrated monk ever imagined alone in his cell."
Ashen's cup froze halfway to his mouth.
"…My world split in two a long time ago, dear brother," she went on, her voice dropping low and theatrical. "For a long time, I have known two genders, both of the same sex. There are men, and then there is you. An anatomist would sort you all into the same drawer, but my senses keep separate shelves. The rest of the male population is mist over a harbor. Gray, shapeless, gone by noon."
She leaned forward and tapped his chest with one finger.
"And you are the mast that rises out of it." Her eyes drifted, slowly and with absolutely no shame, downward and back up. "Every single morning, brother. Don't think I haven't seen the tent your blanket pitches. I've been sleeping beside that mast for years. A girl notices when the ship raises its sail."
Ashen choked on his wine.
Lapis didn't stop. She was leaning closer now, her voice dropping lower. Even she could no longer tell where the joke ended and her overwhelming, maddening urge to smother him in her bosom began.
"And I, unfortunately…" She paused. "No. Fortunately. I only ever cared to climb the mast."
"L~apis— ah…"
"Taboo has had me by the throat for years," she went on softly. "My body has had me by the wrist the whole time," she whispered.
"...Both are pulling their own way. Every time I wiped you down after an expedition, every time I fell asleep with my face in your neck… some mornings, I'm ashamed of myself. Some nights, I'm hopeful in a way that ought to be illegal, and in this tribe, I'd be sentenced to marry you for it. My body knows exactly what it wants. My head keeps writing it letters of refusal. Neither one of them ever wins."
She was close enough now that her nose almost brushed his.
"Do you know what happens if you take the little 'a' out of Lapis, brother?" she breathed. "The little gasp in the middle?"
Ashen, whose drunken mind was laboring heroically over the spelling, simply stared at her.
"You're left with lips," she whispered.
"…That's a terrible pun."
"I've been waiting six years to use it." Her eyes dropped to his mouth. "So tonight, I think I'll stop reading the letters, and give you these lips you keep pretending you never praised."
Ashen didn't move.
He should have… he knew that. Somewhere at the back of his mind, a sober voice was screaming at him to push her head back like he always did, to roll his eyes, call her a pervert, and tell her to drink some water.
Alas, drunken Ashen had his grubby hands on the controller right now. And so… he didn't push her back.
The tree's leaves rustled softly overhead, and then, with great tact, went very still.
And the last of the wine went from one lip to the other.
◉◉◉
They never talked about it afterward.
Not the next morning, when they woke up tangled together beneath the tree with Monica standing over them holding a watering can with an unreadable expression; nor the day after, or the week after.
But a door that had been held shut for years now hung open, and neither of them seemed to be in any hurry to close it.
Lapis stopped making quite as many jokes; Ashen stopped repeating his mantra.
…They both pretended not to notice either change.
◉◉◉
It happened a few weeks before Ashen's nineteenth birthday.
He was sitting at the roots of the tree as always, pouring his mana into the soil, when Patient Eye suddenly flickered, as if asking him to look in a certain direction.
He looked up.
At first, he didn't see anything unusual; the leaves glowed their soft pink and the branches, as always, coiled and twisted overhead.
Eventually, he noticed that one of the branches hung lower than it had the day before. It bent toward him, almost to the height of his face, and at its very tip, nestled among the leaves, something hung.
A fruit.
It was small, no bigger than a plum, its skin a deep translucent gold that glowed faintly from within. Through the skin, Ashen could see something swirling slowly inside, like light moving through honey.
He looked further up.
There were two more, hanging lower on two other branches.
Three fruits.
'Is my baby… finally grown up…?'
Ashen sat still; his throat had suddenly gone tight.
Above him, the tree's leaves rustled, gently and expectantly, and the branch bearing the first fruit dipped a little lower. It lowered itself into his reach like an offering held out by a child who wasn't quite sure he would accept it.
Take it~
Ashen reached up slowly and cupped the fruit in his palm without picking it. Then he turned Patient Eye on it.
◉◉◉
[ PATIENT EYE ]
Target: Manaweave Fruit
Origin: Evolved Manaweave Tree
Caretaker: Ashen Hunt
State: Ripe
Concept: Ripening
Origin of Concept:
Born from fourteen years of patient care, the tree has absorbed its caretaker's conviction that all things bloom in their own season, if only they are tended.
This conviction has taken root as a Concept of its own.
Effects When Consumed:
The fruit carries the eater's growth into its natural season.
The 'Late Bloomer' manaweave within the eater, if present, ripens into full bloom at once, without the risks of premature blooming. It blooms as though tended perfectly for the entirety of its natural span.
Comprehension of the eater's chosen Concept, which would otherwise require years to mature, ripens within days.
Should the eater's manaweave be sufficiently compatible, as is the case for those who carried it from birth, the bloom may grant the conditions necessary for the eater to develop a derivative Concept of their own.
Seed:
The fruit's seed is fertile.
Planted and tended, it may grow into a new manaweave, carrying a portion of its parent's nature.
Remarks:
The tree offers this fruit willingly. It has grown for this.
◉◉◉
'Really…'
Every child in the tribe was born carrying a Late Bloomer manaweave. Anastasia's constitution had made sure of that.
And none of them had bloomed yet.
A single one of these fruits, given to the right child, could turn that child into something no human of this era had ever been.
And the seed could grow another tree.
Suddenly, Cain's face as he diligently wrote every contribution he made on a parchment appeared in his mind.
"Hehehe… poor guy… pfft!"
Without realizing it, he broke into a fit of giggles on his own. After enjoying the good laugh, he wiped the stray tear and stopped thinking about Cain entirely.
He leaned his head back against the trunk, still holding the fruit gently in his palm, and closed his eyes.
"…Thank you," he whispered.
Above him, the leaves rustled warmly, feeling clearly pleased.