Page 2977 (Patreon)

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Smoke still filled the area, making it obnoxious to breathe. Hector could see the scattered piles of sludge struggling to regather themselves. They weren't succeeding, though. Agrian's earthen cages were maintaining a solid grip on them.

The danger seemed to have passed.

Wow.

If only all his battles were this easy, Hector thought.

Agrian turned toward him again, sizing him up. The man said something, but there was no way in hell Hector could understand whatever language that was. Nykeirian, maybe? That was the language the books in the tree had been written in, right?

Boy, a reaper sure would've come in handy right about now. Hector wondered how Garovel was faring through all of this.

The vision began to speed up again.

It accelerated much faster this time, judging by how fast the sprout was growing now. And the natural disasters seemed to stop, too.

Hmm. Yeah, they probably hadn't been very natural at all, had they? But why'd they stop? He had a feeling that it wasn't because of his intervention. Maybe the blond dude had died in some distant country or something and therefore left Agrian alone, finally.

Hector could see him doing something to the sprout as it continued to grow. He placed some kind of bulbous orb in the middle of it, which seemed pretty weird until Hector realized what was happening.

The trunk of the sprout gradually expanded outward, around the orb. And Agrian kept replacing the orb with wider and wider ones, until finally he placed a big, wooden slab there.

This must've been how he'd managed to create such a huge room in the middle of the tree without killing it. He hadn't dug all that space out after the fact. It had been hollow from the beginning.