novelraw Chapter 115 : The Dream Beneath the Roots
Chapter 115 : The Dream Beneath the Roots
(Rooga Valemont’s POV)
At first, there was nothing.
No sound. No light.
Just the cold stillness of water without depth — the kind of silence that made me forget if I was breathing.
Then, a heartbeat.
Not mine.
It came from somewhere vast and gentle, echoing through the dark like thunder muffled by earth.
Boom.
Boom.
Each pulse stirred the stillness, and faint motes of green light began to appear, drifting around me like fireflies.
When I tried to move, my body didn’t follow.
Only my thoughts did — soft, slow, like they were wrapped in fog.
Where… am I?
The lights trembled.
Something ancient stirred.
“Finally,” a voice whispered. “You wake.”
It was soft — calm, like leaves brushing against one another in a breeze — but beneath that calm was an exhaustion so deep it could only belong to something older than the world.
I turned toward the sound, though there was no direction to face.
And then I saw it — not with my eyes, but with whatever part of me still remembered being alive.
A vast network of roots spread endlessly in every direction, glowing faintly with green mana.
They pulsed like veins, and through them ran light — warmth — life.
And at the center of it all, a figure sat against the great trunk of a colossal tree.
She looked like a woman made of sunlight and soil, her hair trailing like vines, her skin marked with the soft shimmer of bark and moss.
Eyes older than any god’s turned toward me — eyes that held forests, oceans, and time itself.
“Maori,” I whispered.
She smiled faintly, though her eyes were shadowed.
“This is not my true form,” she said. “Only what you can comprehend without breaking.”
I looked down — or what counted as down in this dream — and saw that I was only light myself.
My hands flickered at the edges, threads of mana unraveling like smoke.
“Am I dead?”
“Not yet.”
Her voice was soft, but it carried the weight of mountains.
“You are between breaths — between the flow of life and the silence of its end.”
I tried to steady my voice. “Then… can I go back?”
She hesitated.
Her expression wasn’t that of a goddess — it was of someone who had been holding her breath too long.
“I am trying,” she said. “But your mana core—” she paused, her gaze falling toward my chest, “—it’s fractured. Not destroyed, but frayed. And that is not something even I can fix quickly.”
She reached out, and the dream shifted.
We were suddenly inside something vast and hollow.
Before us floated a sphere of light — cracked through with dark lines, each one pulsing weakly.
I knew without being told that this was me — or what kept me alive.
“This is your core,” Maori said softly. “The place where your mana, your spirit, and your will converge. When the sword struck, the mana inside you recoiled — it tried to shield your body, but in doing so, it split itself.”
I stared at it. The cracks looked like glass ready to shatter.
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“If it breaks completely…”
She nodded slowly. “You will return to the earth.”
I swallowed, though the motion felt unreal. “Can’t you heal it?”
Her gaze softened. “I can mend the shell. But what lies within must decide if it still wishes to live.”
The light around us dimmed.
The roots shifted, curling close as though listening.
Maori placed her hand over the cracked sphere.
“Your body still breathes,” she said. “Your family still waits. But you must want to rise, Rooga. I cannot force the core to beat if the heart refuses to.”
“I do want to,” I said instantly.
Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Do you believe that? Or do you only fear the pain of leaving them behind?”
The question stopped me cold.
For the first time, I felt something inside me tremble — a weight I hadn’t noticed before.
The villagers’ scorn.
Elara’s challenge.
Mother’s fury.
Father’s silence.
All of it mixed together, heavy and suffocating.
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “I don’t know anymore.”
Maori closed her eyes. “Then rest. Until you remember why your heart beat in the first place.”
She stood, and the light of her body began to fade back into the roots.
Before she vanished entirely, I heard her voice one last time — soft, like the wind through leaves.
“I will hold your pieces together until you choose. But hurry, my caretaker… even trees cannot keep the dead warm forever.”
The world folded inward, light draining into shadow, until all that was left was the faint pulse of my broken core —
and the distant sound of the forest weeping.
For a long time, there was only the slow rhythm of the cracked core pulsing in the dark.
I floated there, half-awake, half-gone, listening to the sound of it breaking and mending, over and over again.
Maori’s words echoed in the emptiness.
“I cannot make you live. You must choose it yourself.”
Choose.
What else was there to wait for?
Shapes began to drift out of the darkness — not this world’s shapes, but the ones I had buried deep inside.
A small apartment window with morning light.
The faint hum of a television.
Voices, ordinary and precious.
“Did you eat? You look too skinny again,” my mother’s voice scolded gently.
A man’s chuckle followed. “My son, work anywhere you want, as long as you’re happy,” said my father.
Then another voice — teasing, familiar. “It’s fine, she’s just a brat anyway. Don’t take it so seriously,” my sister laughed, ruffling my hair.
I had forgotten those sounds, the warmth behind them.
I had left them without ever really saying thank you.
In that old life, I had drifted through the days — never caring enough to live for myself, but never ending it either, because their love held me back from the edge.
I never repaid it.
Not once.
A lump rose in my throat.
“I still owe them,” I whispered into the dark. “And this time… I’ll make it right.”
The cracked core in front of me began to glow faintly — not green, not gold, but a color I couldn’t name.
Something warm.
Something familiar.
From within it, I felt a pulse that wasn’t from this world at all — a heartbeat that belonged to the life I’d left behind.
Light flared.
It grew brighter, thicker, until it formed a second sphere beside the broken one — small at first, then expanding, pressing against it like a twin trying to protect its sibling.
The air — if it could be called air — vibrated.
Maori appeared again, her form blooming out of the roots, her face lit by the glow.
Her eyes widened, wonder breaking through the fatigue.
“This… this is not possible,” she breathed. “A second core—no, a third. Human, elf, and now… something else.”
She reached out her hand, and the light from the new core spilled over her fingers.
“This mana… it’s ancient, yet young. Refined, but unspent. What are you showing me, my caretaker?”
I looked at the sphere — at the thirty years of life I had once wasted and the will that had finally condensed from it.
“It’s the mana of my old world,” I said quietly. “The life I never used. The years I let slip away.”
The two cores began to orbit each other, threads of energy weaving between them, pulling them close.
They merged slowly, painfully, until one new heart pulsed before us — a radiant, triple-layered light that shimmered like a sunrise.
Maori stared at it in silence, then at me.
“Rooga,” she said softly. “No body should be able to hold three cores. You will burn yourself from within.”
I stepped closer — or maybe it was my soul that did.
“I will hold them,” I said. “For them — the family I left behind. For me — the life I was given again. And for you, Maori — the goddess who calls me caretaker.”
Her eyes widened. “You would risk everything?”
I smiled. “I already did. But this time, I won’t fail.”
The world erupted in light.
The new core pulsed once — twice — and the rhythm matched my heartbeat perfectly.
Then the two sounds became one.
The roots shivered. The dark began to fade.
I could feel warmth returning to my body, breath finding its way back into my chest.
Maori’s voice trembled between pride and fear.
“Then wake, my caretaker. Carry what no one else can — and let the world see that even lost lives can bloom again.”
The light swallowed everything.
And somewhere, far above, I heard the forest breathe.