A soft and bright light enveloped a deep claw mark on Orou’s scaly body. A three-meter wolf was lying in a pile of blood next to him while Orou was profusely bleeding from his side. As the light settled down on the wound, flesh began knitting itself. Orou was grimacing and hissing in pain, but he had experienced worse, and this would save him time to move forward.

Orou’s tail thrashed back and forth, but soon after, the only mark of his recent injury was a claw-shaped scar. His head was spinning, but after he was done grimacing, he started smiling. He claimed his meal, enjoying it in its entirety. As he finished his meal, he turned his head to look back, only to see a scene of destruction. Broken trees and scattered earth only showcased how fierce the battle was.

The trees here were much denser than at the edge of the forest, the sun’s rays only shone through tiny cracks, it was the perfect environment for hunting. Despite being longer than ten meters, he had no problem moving stealthily through the forest, blending in with the foliage surrounding him.

Orou’s favorite thing to do after a meal was to lie down and take a nap and bask in the sun while slowly digesting his meal. Finding a spot where the sun shone down through the cracks, he thought about what had happened after he escaped. Orou passed down soon after making it to the forest, his belly full of human flesh to make up for his horrendous injuries.

He lurked close to the edge of the forest and observed the city from a distance. He had also noticed a distinct lack of any beasts near the edge, but that was to be expected, considering how well prepared the men on the wall were. He spent his days recovering from his wounds and waiting for any adventurers to enter the forest.

He did not get to eat any adventurers, but he recovered enough to start properly moving and hunting again. He had decided in these few days that he would start going deeper into the forest, and hopefully, reach the beastman territory. He heard that they have a different type of magic, and he hoped to observe how they were different from humans.

Having made up his mind, he started travelling deeper into the forest. He wasn’t in any haste, preferring to enjoy his life in the untamed forest and practice magic in the meanwhile. After several weeks of practice, Orou practically cried tears of joy when finally, all twelve of the triangles had been assembled around the curved line and a soft, golden light shone on him.

The healing process was not pleasant in any way, shape or form. It wasn’t as bad when he only had minor scratches and injuries, but when he was bleeding out from every spot imaginable, the pain was enough to drive one mad. Orou didn’t know what he was doing wrong, as he didn’t see men screaming when Dawn healed them, but he could bear through the pain just fine.

While he succeeded in casting the healing spell, the pillar of light spell was beyond him. It required one to build an actual pillar. It was hard enough connecting the spirits to form a long shape like a pillar, but that was just the beginning. After constructing the pillar, Orou had to guide the spirits into it and fill up the entire pillar with spirits. Quite frankly, it was an impossible task for the current Orou, he couldn’t even fill up a third of the pillar, not to mention all of it.

Although it seemed hopeless, Orou was not one to give up, especially regarding spells. After every meal, he lay down and practiced his spellcasting, and this time was no exception. After devouring the wolf and basking in the sunlight, he concentrated on practicing spells. He had done this hundreds of times before and this time, it was no different. He could form the shape of the pillar with ease, but filling it up was hard. The formation wasn’t as complicated as the healing spell, but the number of spirits required was multiple times that of the healing spell.

One thing he had noticed was that it was a lot easier to manipulate the spirits while being directly under the sun. Perhaps it was due to the nature of the formation, or perhaps it was due to some other reason, but Orou didn’t mind it one bit, in fact, his rate of progress was much better when practicing under the sun.

At the halfway point, the pillar erupted and the formation dispersed, resulting in a failure. Resting for a few more minutes, he kept trying and trying, until the sun had begun to set. When Orou realised that his progress was beginning to slow to a halt, he got up and started moving deeper into the forest. His intention was both to make progress towards the land of beastmen, and to hunt for food. Although he had already eaten, he always had more space in his stomach for small critters that wandered too close near him.

Hunting and practicing spells was exciting, but Orou was growing impatient on when he would reach the end of this forest. He wondered how the beastmen would treat him, and how they would react to his collar. The humans were scared of him and it was only because of the collar that they didn’t run away in fear. He also wondered why they would be relieved by its presence, by what he had seen, it didn’t restrict him from attacking other humans, only his owner.

His thoughts drifted over to the collar, only now remembering that he still had it on him. It didn’t cause any discomfort, and often times, beasts would strike and bite at the collar, only to get hurt instead. It was made of some metal that seemed unbreakable, and if it didn’t cause him immense amounts of pain, he didn’t care whether it was on him or not.

He spent the whole night wandering through the forest, immersed in his own thoughts. What snapped him out of his trance was the sun rising, which signalled that it was time to seriously hunt for food. The wolf in his stomach could last him a few days, but Orou liked the process of hunting and the thrill of battle, so he didn’t care that he was half-full.

He found a small clearing in the forests from a distance and decided that it would be a nice place for him to look for prey. Slowly slithering closer and closer to the clearing, he saw something that shocked him. The clearing was devoid of any trees except for a single tree standing in the middle of the clearing. It was by far the largest tree he had seen in his life, and that wasn’t the most unique feature about it. The leaves of the tree were made entirely out of silver, reflecting the sunlight around it. Not a single leaf was on the ground, instead, it looked barren and devoid of any life, as if doing everything it can do to emphasize the beauty of the tree.

Orou absentmindedly slithered closer to the clearing, wanting to get a better look at the tree. The leaves looked like someone sculpted multiple pieces of silver into leaves and put them on this tree. As a gust of wind blew through the clearing, a sound that could only be described as ghastly wailing resounded through the clearing.

An apple, made entirely out of silver was inconspicuously hanging out of the tree, if one didn’t pay attention, you could mistake it for another one of the tree’s leaves. Orou wouldn’t have noticed this if it wasn’t for an ape, its fur also made out of silver, staring at the apple with greedy eyes. It wasn’t paying any attention to Orou as it continued to stare at the apple, impatiently waiting for something.

Orou didn’t know what to make of the situation, this was the first time he had seen anything as bizarre as this. Turning on his spirit vision didn’t help to clear up the situation in the slightest. Each of the leaves had a spirit inside of it, only, it wasn’t like any spirit he had seen before. It was a weird amalgamation of shapes, constantly changing size and shape, looking completely different each second. The spirits were travelling from the roots of the tree into the leaves, and then from the leaves into the apple. Once they reached the apple, they melted together, becoming slightly bigger each time.

Both Orou and the ape were obsessed over the apple, probably for two completely different reasons. He watched the apple absorb spirits, and once the spirit became as big as the apple, it compressed itself. Orou would describe the spirit looking “purer” and “shinier”, though he didn’t know what was happening to the spirit itself.

He looked over at the ape, and he realised that the ape had stopped staring at the apple, but was staring at him instead. Its expression twisted in rage, it let out a shriek of anger and smashed its hands against the barren ground. The impact was like a small meteor landing on the ground, launching dirt everywhere.

It started charging at Orou, but to Orou it seemed like a slow jog. Maybe it was due to the silver fur weighing it down but each step it took made the earth slightly tremor. It got halfway to Orou when he finally reacted, his first reaction was to retreat back, gain some distance and observe the ape closer.

Orou was much faster than the ape as he started circling around the tree, the ape mindlessly chasing after him. It tried to attack him multiple times, but none of the ape’s blows connected on Orou’s body. The wind produced from the immense blows only made the shrieking from the tree worse, his ears were ringing by the time the ape swung for the fifth time and missed.

Orou had enough of this farce and after the ape missed once again, Orou used his full momentum to swing his tail straight towards the ape’s body. The result left Orou retreating back in pain and the ape still chasing Orou, even angrier now than before. It seemed like the ape was made entirely out of metal as Orou knocked the ape a few meters back, but it was unharmed besides that.

After each exchange, Orou was the one more injured despite the ape not landing a single blow on him. His fangs couldn’t penetrate his silver fur and his tail couldn’t hurt him. He had conjured light in its face, but that only made it angrier, thrashing the entire place in its blind rage. This pointless exchange happened for a few more minutes before Orou started realising that something was strange.

At all times, Orou made sure he had a direct line of sight on the tree. He wasn’t worried about the ape as its slow speed made it unable to chase Orou even if it wanted to. The wind had picked up and the wailing had gotten worse, but that wasn’t what worried Orou, instead, he saw the leaves begin to softly shake.

The shaking became more intense as time passed, the tree looked like it was going to be uprooted at any moment. The spirits in the leaves were restless, moving about in the constraints of the leaves. The wind had stopped, but the wailing continued, resembling some sort of twisted song. For a second, Orou could see a face appear on the trunk of the tree and wickedly grin at him.

The ape was oblivious to this happening behind his back, he ignored everything besides Orou in his blind rage and because of that, he didn’t notice his doom. The silver leaves shook and one by one, the started falling from the tree. As the first leaf fell from the tree, the rest followed, but they weren’t aiming to hit the ground below them, instead, the leaves shot out towards the ape and Orou.

The leaves were flying towards them at a rapid pace as Orou started slithering backwards, hoping to use the ape as a cover from the leaves. The ape didn’t notice them before it was too late, it turned its head around, only to shriek in terror and try to dodge. With its speed, there was no way to dodge the leaves, so the only thing it could do was to brace for impact. What it didn’t expect was for the leaves to come out of the other side of his stomach, completely dyed in blood.

Countless leaves struck the ape’s body, every single one of them piercing through his body, continuing their flight towards Orou. The ape looked at his stomach in disbelief, before several more leaves completely dissected his brain, the rest of his body falling down to the ground. Fortunately for Orou, the ape’s body slowed down the razor-sharp leaves enough for him to get out of their path.

He fled to the edge of the clearing and hid behind several trees, hoping for them to slightly slow down any incoming barrages. After a minute of waiting, Orou slowly and stealthily made his way back to the clearing and cautiously observed the tree. The tree had ceased to shake and the wailing had stopped, if one didn’t look at the ape’s corpse, it was like nothing had happened. In his spirit sight, he observed the apple for any changes. The “purifying” the spirit was still in process, as was the process of absorbing spirits through the tree’s roots.

Orou slowly used his tail to cross the boundary of the crossing while he observed the tree, ready to flee if anything unusual happened. His tail was fine and the tree didn’t react as Orou slowly started slithering over to the ape’s corpse. The leaves barely encountered any resistance as they passed through the ape’s body while Orou couldn’t even injure him. If those hit his head, he would be in the same shape as the ape.

He dragged the ape’s body back outside of the clearing and situated himself in a tree, observing the tree and what would happen to it. Hours drifted away as Orou was enchanted by the spirit he saw in the apple, it was constantly changing like the others, but he could see that the more times it shrunk, the longer it took for the spirit to change shapes, instead, it assumed one shape per cycle.

At some point, Orou had also eaten the ape’s corpse. For some reason, the fur was not as tough as Orou expected when devouring it, but he had already eaten it, so there wasn’t much of a point of pondering about this issue. He desperately wanted to approach the apple closer and inspect it in much more depth, but he had seen what happened to a bear that approached the apple.

Similarly to Orou, it was attracted to the scene before it and wanted to take a bite out of the apple. The reaction from the tree was much quicker this time, without any wailing or any faces appearing on the tree, multiple silver leaves dissected the bear into multiple pieces before returning back to the tree.

Another hour or so passed before he saw something new. A single root, entirely covered in silver, came out of the ground and pierced the bear, slowly but surely draining it of all its blood. For a split second when the root was absorbing the bear’s blood the quickest, he could see a thin strand flowing from the bear’s body to the root. Orou could swear that the second the root absorbed the strand, it grew bigger than it usually was.

After it was done absorbing the blood, the root easily picked up the bear and threw it to the edge of the clearing. Orou wondered why he hadn’t seen any corpses lying by the edge and why the air didn’t smell of rot. Using his tongue to smell the air, he could pick up some sort of sweet scent coming from the tree. It wasn’t that obvious at first, but it definitely wasn’t here when Orou came here.

The longer he spent observing the tree, the thicker the scent became. He saw numerous beasts come up to the tree only to die without fighting back. His mind was getting clouded, his mouth watered at the thought of eating the apple and his body started moving forwards, once more entering the clearing. At the last moment, his cloudy eyes saw one of the beast carcasses lying next to the tree and realised that his sense of danger was screaming at him to get out of here immediately.

He turned his body back and started fleeing, but the tree was one step ahead of him. As soon as he started turning back, the tree sent out a new barrage of silver leaves, threatening to cut him up. His head was still dizzy, but his body reacted instinctively by lunging forwards, narrowly avoiding the first barrage of leaves. The second and the third barrage came at the same time, and each time a barrage approached his body, he narrowly avoided his doom.

Orou let his body do all of the work as he stopped thinking altogether, relying purely on instincts to survive. The moment he got out of the clearing, the furious assault stopped and the tree regained its serene appearance. His heart was still pounding as he recalled his near-death experience and he vowed to never come near this tree as he continued his journey towards the land of beastmen.