Read Novel Full Chapter 784: The Rootheart
Chapter 784: The Rootheart
On the other hand, Natalia and the gang crossed the scarred plain at first light, nine people walking toward a pull that had been tugging at every sense sharp enough to feel it since the day they’d first spotted it.
The ground grew warmer with every step, cracked earth healing and splitting in the same slow rhythm, and by the time the source finally came into view, none of them had words ready for what they were actually looking at.
It wasn’t a monster. It wasn’t a tree, or a maze, or anything built with intent at all.
It was a heart.
Vast beyond anything a body could have ever properly held, half-buried in the scarred ground, red-black and still, impossibly, beating, and from it roots spread out in every direction, threading through soil and stone alike, the same wrong-jointed crimson trees that had haunted every mile of this whole dimension.
"That’s the Gravemaw’s root," Jian said quietly, tracing one massive vein with his eyes. "And that one. That’s the Hollow Warden’s grove."
"And that," Maya said, pointing to a third, thinner thread pulsing faint silver among the red, "is the Weftmother’s silk."
Natalia understood before anyone said it aloud. "Everything we’ve fought," she said. "All of it. Grew out of this."
The heart shuddered, slow and enormous, and every root across the whole scarred plain shuddered with it.
[The Rootheart has noticed you.]
It did not rise to fight them. It simply pulled, the way it had always pulled, and the ground beneath all nine of them split open at once, roots surging up in numbers that made the root-wraith’s single desperate lunge look like a child’s first attempt at violence.
"Formation!" Natalia shouted, Huntress’s Brand already burning gold across her vision. "Mark, hold, and don’t let it drag anyone under!"
Marcus’s Breakline drove a spear of pure momentum through the first surging wall, and Kayla’s Ashbloom scoured a path clear behind it, but for every root they cut, three more rose in its place, the whole plain answering to a single will that had been patient for longer than any of them could properly imagine.
"It’s not attacking us," Jian said, Thunderquake splitting earth beneath a dozen more roots at once. "It’s remembering how. This thing hasn’t had to fight anything in longer than it can recall."
"Then let’s remind it what that costs," Julian said, Cinderstorm turning a whole grasping cluster to burning ash in one sweep.
They fought for the better part of an hour just to hold their ground, nine people and thirty-six decks between them, and it was not enough to do more than that. Every root they burned or froze or bound simply grew back, slower each time, but never once stopping entirely.
"We can’t out-damage this," Marcus called, breathing hard. "It’s not a creature. It’s a wound. Wounds don’t die from being hit."
Kira’s Glassveil rained crystalline shards across the worst of the surge, buying a moment’s breath. "Then what does a wound need?"
Kayla’s answer came slower, quieter, the healer in her finally understanding what the fighter in her had missed. "It needs to close," she said. "Not be beaten. Closed."
The heart answered their patience the way it answered everything, with more of itself, and the ground beneath Noah gave way without warning, roots wrapping tight around both legs and dragging him toward the heart’s own vast, red-black surface.
"Noah!" Kira’s voice cracked across the plain.
His Bladestorm cut three roots free before a fourth caught his sword arm, and the pull only strengthened, dragging him closer to a surface that pulsed with the same slow, terrible rhythm as everything else in this place.
Emma’s Dawnbreaker lanced down in a single blinding beam, burning a path through the roots holding him, and Maya’s Echofracture detonated at the worst cluster’s center, but the heart simply grew more root to replace what it lost, patient and endless in a way nothing they’d fought before had ever quite managed.
"It’s not trying to kill him," Maya realized, Farsight Loom straining to read a will this vast. "It’s trying to remember what it felt like before it was hurt. It wants to pull everything back into itself."
"Then it doesn’t get him," Natalia said, and something in her voice went very quiet and very certain.
She marked the heart itself, Huntress’s Brand burning gold across a surface too vast for any single hunter to properly claim, and felt, for the first time since destroying her old decks, the full weight of exactly how large a thing she’d just decided to hunt.
"Everyone," she said. "On me. All of it. Now."
What followed was not a fight so much as nine people finally, completely refusing to be anything less than what they’d spent every single day in this place becoming.
Marcus’s markers wove through the chaos, finding every root’s single point of connection back to the source, and Jian’s lightning grounded through every marked point at once, current racing down a thousand veins toward the one true heart feeding all of them.
Kayla stopped attacking entirely and started healing the ground itself, Ashbloom’s green fire pouring into cracked, scarred earth the way she’d once poured it into Julian’s burned shoulder, offering the wound the one thing nothing had offered it in longer than any of them could guess.
Mercy.
"That’s not a weapon," Julian said, staring at her.
"It never needed one," Kayla said. "It needed someone to stop hurting it back."
The Rootheart’s vast, ancient pull faltered at that, roots slowing across the whole plain at once, and in that fractional hesitation, something in all nine of them finally, simultaneously, broke through.
[Fifth Deck Manifested: Natalia — Warsong Absolute] [Fifth Deck Manifested: Marcus — Vanguard’s Requiem] [Fifth Deck Manifested: Maya — Truthweave] [Fifth Deck Manifested: Kayla — Edenroot] [Fifth Deck Manifested: Jian — Skyfather’s Judgment] [Fifth Deck Manifested: Julian — Wildfire Eternal] [Fifth Deck Manifested: Noah — Endless Blade] [Fifth Deck Manifested: Kira — Eternal Frost] [Fifth Deck Manifested: Emma — Nova’s Crown]
Nine decks arrived together, not from desperation this time, but from something steadier, and Kayla’s Edenroot swept out across the whole scarred plain in a wave of green so total it silenced every grasping root at once, offering healing to a wound old enough to have forgotten it ever deserved any.
The Rootheart shuddered one final time, and stilled, and the pulsing red light bleeding through the whole sky above them finally, slowly, began to soften toward something closer to dawn.
[The Rootheart has been released.]
[X-rank Potential: Confirmed.]
The notice hit all nine of them at once, the same held-breath weight the family back home had felt twice already, and Natalia stood in the settling quiet of a plain that no longer pulsed at all, and let out a breath she felt like she’d been holding since the day she’d first suggested destroying everything they owned.
"We did it," she said, disbelieving even as she said it. "We actually did it."
Julian sat down hard in the now-still dirt, staring at hands that had just finished healing something instead of only ever burning it. "I never thought mercy would be the thing that finished this," he admitted. "I came here for power."
"You got both," Jian said, offering a hand down to pull him back up. "Turns out they weren’t as separate as we thought."
Kayla knelt at the heart’s now-quiet edge, one hand resting against ground that had finally, truly stopped hurting, and something in her face had gone soft in a way none of them had seen since long before any of this began.
"Rest now," she said, to a wound that could finally afford to.
Natalia looked around at eight people who had walked into a dimension built to kill them with nothing but raw stats and stubborn will, and were walking back out of it with five decks each, X-rank Potential confirmed, and something steadier in every one of them than power alone could ever have accounted for.
"Let’s go home," she said. "I think it’s time the rest of the family found out exactly what we’ve been doing out here."
The Bloodroot Wilds, quiet for the first time in longer than any living thing could remember, let them walk away without a single root rising to stop them.