Chapter 87: Chapter 87: Dola’s Soil Analysis

Elarwyn had never felt this unnervingly silent. Usually, the great boughs of this city would vibrate with the rhythmic footsteps of thousands of workers and the constant, musical babble of irrigation water flowing through elevated wooden canals. But that afternoon, the only sound was the wind—a low, mournful whistle that cut through the withered branches, carrying a heavy, musty odor that stuck to the back of the throat.

Dayat stood at “Ground Zero” of the Hanging Fields, a vast expanse that now resembled a mass grave for vegetation. The Manaferum Sativa, which should have towered with golden husks of energy, was reduced to brittle, blackened stalks. Whenever a gust of wind passed, these husks shattered into fine, dark dust, scattering like ashes over a tomb.

“This soil isn’t just dry, Dola. It’s… it’s devoid of life entirely,” Dayat murmured.

He knelt, letting the gray dust slip through his fingers. He didn’t see a single earthworm, no magical insects, not even the hardiest of mosses. It was as if the ground itself had been sterilized by a silent, invisible fire.

Dayat closed his eyes for a moment, summoning the dormant memories of the biology labs from his brief university days in Jakarta. To solve this, he needed precision—not just the desperate intuition of a dying race. The signature sapphire-purple light began to glow in his palm, a swirling vortex of imaginary particles that he now directed to form analytical instruments.

Slowly, a Polymer Soil Probe materialized—a long, slender cylinder made of reinforced carbon-polymer, cold and efficient. Following it was a rack of Borosilicate Glass Test Tubes, their transparent surfaces gleaming with a clinical clarity that felt utterly alien to the organic aesthetics of Verdia.

With a sharp, forceful thrust, Dayat drove the probe into the earth. A faint crack echoed as the tool breached the hardened, crusty surface. He twisted it, feeling the resistance of the dead minerals, and pulled it back up, bringing with it a soil sample from a depth of exactly one meter.

“Dola, I need your eyes. Full spectrum. Don’t give me a general summary—I want to see the architecture of this decay,” Dayat commanded.

Dola stepped forward, standing so close that Dayat could catch the faint, clinical scent of her synthetic skin. Her electric-blue pupils began to dilate, spinning with a subtle, mechanical whirring sound. The light in her eyes shifted from blue to a sharp, piercing ultraviolet as she activated her deep-range UV-Mana Scanner.

“Initializing microscopic scan. Master, please prepare for visual data synchronization,” Dola stated flatly.

Dayat nodded, though in truth, he was never truly prepared for the sensation.

ZRAAAP!

It felt like a flashbang exploding directly inside his cranium. Dayat’s vision turned a blinding white for a fraction of a second before a new, terrifying reality unfolded before his eyes. Through the neural link with Dola’s processors, Dayat no longer saw the soil as a clump of dirt. He saw it as a vast, distorted cosmos.

There, amidst grains of minerals that looked like massive, jagged meteorites, he saw them.

Thousands of microscopic entities, their forms as grotesque as broken, twisted protein chains. They were pitch black, wreathed in a pulsating, sickly purple aura that throbbed with an irregular rhythm. They weren’t static. These parasites moved like apex predators, coiling their shadowy forms around the fine, crystalline channels of Mana that flowed through the earth. Dayat watched in horror as a faint stream of golden Mana—likely a recent injection from a Druid ritual—was ruthlessly severed by a parasite.

They didn’t just consume the Mana; they cut the connection, using the residual energy to trigger a rapid, violent cellular division, multiplying their numbers in seconds.

“These are Abyssal Spore-Parasites,” Dayat whispered, his voice trembling with a mix of awe and disgust. “They aren’t just killing the plants, Dola. They’re severing the very nervous system between the soil and the World Tree. This is high-level biological sabotage.”

As the observation continued, Dayat felt a profound, low-frequency vibration beneath his boots. This time, it wasn’t a mechanical hum; it was a groan—the sound of a dying god. The World Tree of Elarwyn, a sentient entity of unimaginable age, seemed to sense Dola’s presence. Even if Dayat didn’t fully grasp it, the tree recognized Dola’s frequency. There was a primal fear and a deep, aching reverence radiating from the roots toward the “Maiden” essence dormant within Dola. The tree wasn’t groaning because of the parasites; it was weeping because it felt it was in the presence of an entity far more dominant than itself.

Dola froze for a millisecond, a flicker of corrupted data passing through her primary sub-routines. Deja vu. The energy signature of these parasites… it felt like a ghost from a war fought millions of years ago. But before the memory could form, she suppressed the data, locking it behind her deepest firewalls.

“Big Bro! Over here! Quick!” Kancil’s voice shattered their concentration.

Dayat broke the link, the sudden withdrawal of data leaving a sharp throb in his temples. He sprinted toward the irrigation canal where Kancil was standing. The boy was pointing at a massive, exposed root that served as a primary arterial vessel for Elarwyn’s water supply.

“Look at this, Bang. I found it while I was looking for a spot to sit,” Kancil pointed to a small, jagged puncture in the bark of the ancient root.

From the wound, a thick, viscous purple sludge was oozing out. It smelled putrid—a stench that bypassed the worst sewage of Jakarta. It looked like an infected, festering wound. Dayat knelt, examining the marks around the hole. The edges were too clean, the angle too precise to be an accident of nature.

“Was this stabbed, Big Bro?” Kancil asked, his face a mask of morbid curiosity.

“Yeah, Cil. But this wasn’t a random strike. It was a surgical injection,” Dayat said, his voice dropping an octave. “Someone who knows the exact anatomy of these roots deliberately introduced the parasite host into the main circulatory system. This is a calculated plan to paralyze Elarwyn from the inside out.”

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THE SACRED ROOT?!”

Caelmir’s voice thundered from the upper boughs. The Governor of Elarwyn descended with a lingering Elven grace, followed by three senior Druids clutching glowing wooden staves. Caelmir’s face, which had previously looked merely exhausted, was now flushed with a raw, unadulterated fury. He looked at Dayat’s glass tubes and polymer instruments as if they were blasphemous relics polluting the most sacred site in his city.

“Stop this instant, Outlander!” Caelmir commanded, a thin, emerald aura of Mana beginning to swirl around his frame. “I granted you asylum, not the right to dissect the World Tree with your forbidden iron tools!”

“This isn’t iron, Caelmir. It’s polymer,” Dayat stood up, forcing himself to remain calm despite facing an emotional authority figure. “And I’m not destroying anything. I’m finding out why your rituals are failing so miserably.”

“Our rituals are a tradition that has sustained Verdia for ten thousand years!” a young Druid behind Caelmir shouted, his voice cracking with indignation. “You, an outsider, dare to insult the way we commune with nature? Your cold, dead tools bring nothing but calamity to our soil!”

Dayat let out a sharp, bitter laugh. “It’s your ’traditions’ that are keeping these parasites fed, Caelmir! Look at these fields! Have you noticed that the more Mana you pump into them, the faster they die?”

Caelmir went silent, his breathing heavy. A flicker of doubt crossed his amber eyes.

“Because your soil is infested with Abyssal parasites so small you can’t even see them with your naked eye,” Dayat pointed toward the purple sludge. “Every time your Druids sing a Mana-song or drench the soil in energy crystals, you aren’t healing the plants. You’re providing a luxury feast for the very things killing them! You are literally breeding the monsters that are devouring your city!”

“Nonsense!” another Druid yelled, but Caelmir raised a hand, silencing him.

The Governor stepped forward, looking at the purple sludge Kancil had discovered. He touched it tentatively with the tip of his finger and recoiled instantly. He felt a corrosive, oily coldness—a sensation that had no place in the natural energies of the forest.

“Dola, show them. Let them see that this isn’t magic—it’s biology,” Dayat ordered.

Dola stepped forward. Without warning, she projected a high-resolution holographic beam onto the surface of the test tube containing the soil sample. The light formed a translucent, rotating image that showed the Abyssal parasites in real-time. The Elven leaders watched, frozen in horror, as the black, worm-like entities tore through the crystalline threads of Mana.

Caelmir stumbled back, his face turning a ghostly pale. For centuries, the Elves believed that all environmental problems could be solved with harmony, song, and prayer. Witnessing a microscopic reality this brutal and chaotic shattered the very foundations of his world.

“How… how can something so small bring down a titan like Vaelith?” Caelmir whispered, his voice broken.

“Because a billion small enemies are more dangerous than one dragon, Caelmir,” Dayat said. He deactivated his manifestation, the tools dissolving back into purple sparks. “You can’t use magic to fight something designed to eat magic. You need a different weapon.”

Dayat turned back to Dola, his mind already weaving a new plan. “Dola, search the database for chemical disinfectant compounds capable of breaking Abyssal protein bonds. Something lethal to the parasite but safe for the tree’s cellulose structure. We’re done with rituals. We’re moving to chemical irrigation.”

“Master, database search complete. We require sulfur compounds and specific alchemical concentrates that can be manifested in liquid form,” Dola replied.

Dayat looked back at Caelmir, whose arrogance had been replaced by a hollow, desperate ruin. “Caelmir, if you want Elarwyn to survive, you need to give me total control over the irrigation channels. And one more thing… find out who has had access to this root sector in the last week. Because these parasites didn’t walk here. There is a traitor in your palace.”

Dayat walked past the stunned Governor, leaving the scent of denim and the cold logic of Earth in the middle of the dying fields. He knew the battle for Elarwyn had only just begun, and this time, the enemy was invisible to the naked eye.

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