Time stretches beyond belief. My will is ragged and long gone, but I keep advancing. The other seeds try to communicate with me even as we lose contact with the data streams from the village, but their voices and images fade into background noise.

Nothing that they try to reach me works.

An eternity later the single finger with which I can use to cross the gap slips and there is no recovery from that. For I needed a perfect record to succeed and a moment later I hit the ground as one of those new fangled orange system screens pops up.

Another flash and I’m laying on the ground in yet another place.

All that I’m and can do is gone for the next minute, but even in my weakness, as oxygen refills my veins the morning sunlight wakes me.

I sit up.

A quick broadcast and I find the nearest roots pinpointing my location. Another moment and I learn the time while the inbox of my runic messaging buffer updates.

A third instant and the realization arrives.

I failed.

I gave it my all and I failed.

There were a pair of contingency plans in place but nothing I think is very likely to succeed.

And now… this far away from everything, I couldn’t even ask for a ‘loan’ to cover what the village’s treasury couldn’t.

Not in the remaining few minutes.

For the first time, I let myself take a break. A real break.

“You are a barrel of laughs, did you know that?”

So he finished even faster than I thought.

“Come on. What a way to pound down the guy who is down.” I say to the metallic being blotting out a spot in my perception field.

“Don’t worry, your best shot of returning to earth was not before I showed up. I saw your preparations. I didn’t think it was possible, but you did get a decent map and everything else you needed.”

I frown trying to piece together why he is so calm even as he approaches as slowly as he can.

“So… I still have a shot.”

“No, you are to still have the only shot you ever had.”

“But you said…”

“Ohhh, it won’t be easy, but you overcame the two basic requirements. A map and a way to keep your resources up. On your last try… even with everything that you accomplish, which is already orders of magnitude more than I expected, you barely made one percent of the way out before slipping. Even when you fail catastrophically, you amuse me. I’m not sure how you are going to fare against the third hurdle or the second depending on how you see things. Even with you being a newly integrated system protected entity you will only find out if your parachute design works by jumping off the cliff. But I still would bet on you making it. You proved to me once again you are a cockroach. I mean even don’t dare touch that thing and you were practically smooching with it.”

“Well, it just looked dangerous, but why worry about a few droplets of black goo, if so little can’t even burn my skin?” I say looking at my arm.

He twists his head with thoughts that I could not comprehend running at speeds I couldn’t conceive of. With a snort and not even trying to overcome whatever limitation the system had in place, he takes a breath before continuing:

“Don’t worry about the Judge, given you aren’t remaining in the instance. But I can delay no longer. It is time to leave.”

I open my mouth, but time really has run out as I’m teleported out before I squeak.

The infinite void stretches beyond belief and a wave tries to knock me out, but I resist. Something much stronger than stopping my regeneration coupled with a deep sense of tiredness. Those are still there like the very first time I step in the void, but a second later a second pulse hits me ten times stronger than the baseline.

But even if it is harder, that just means I pull a little more vigor from Aspen to remain topped up and it will distract me a little while I don’t get used to it. Something bubbles up in my chest. A heat that I can’t fail to notice as I realize that the trip back will likely be fairly similar, if harder to remain awake.

Just like he told me. I can do this. I can come back to Pando.

He is not going to die.

Why the hell did I think that doing it like this would be a failure?

A different gong from the system hits me. Strong enough that it would have concussed me a year ago even without a physical component, now… it was just hard to ignore so I oblige the system and open the message:

Quest: Sickness of the wolves.

Find out the reason they are so aggressive and solve the problem.

Quest failed.

Penalties deferred (Early integration user)

Shit, I forgot about that… again. Though it's not like I had the time with everything that was happening.

Ever since I was hit with the judge’s decision to cut my stay short, this was probably the only choice I could have made. Where did I note this down? I don’t remember running across it in any of my dozen times planning things out.

Another task lost in the maelstrom.

Still, it was unlike I would have given it much thought with everything else going on. It was interesting, but it sounded like a gigantic time sink. The ten thousand wolves in my inner world were proof of that. Onix saw potential in them and they were on the way to overcoming whatever the system had done by themselves. So this becomes another one amid a thousand threads I couldn't pull on and examine to my heart's content.

The limitations of not being omnipotent. The limitations of being human.

But I had made my choices.

The one that hurt me the most was to leave a certain black cat as obstinate as a diamond, but I didn’t have eons to wait for him to turn from a metastable diamond phase back into a more pliable graphite, nor can I roast it until the diamond burns or any other way to force the issue.

A faint pull starts directing me somewhere. Turning on my steam thrusters to speed up the process in the same direction a dozen instruments of living wood step out of the void to surround me.

I use my senses and anything they pick up trying to locate myself on the map. Especially given that it was implied that making my way back was hard, so the system wouldn’t be throwing me back in the exact direction of my goal.

Deep steel nozzles poke a hundredth of an inch out of the inner world soon to lose even that minuscule extrusion. The metal bell guides and propels steam so hot that it glows. A little bit of water with a generous portion of mana shooting it out as fast as I could make it. It wasn’t enough to make the water in the lake disappear any time soon and I had a hundred containers more before I even touched on the tons of soil and other stuff in the inner world. Though using solids wouldn’t be quite as convenient as using simple water.

The will of a dozen seeds keeps running through the instruments outside, which sate the system. The inertial and gyroscopic positioning stream their data into a bank of runic computers. Though in truth they are not much more than calculators, but even a thousand abacuses add up to something impressive.

I keep heading in that same direction, faintly letting the direction the system was pulling direct me, as I just speed up the process.

But as the speedometer reaches a little over 3 km per second, I start to feel the faint effects of something. Something that I had just felt before leaving the instance.

As I stop the steam engine, the weight is gone. I keep my speed and something else starts bothering me. I slow down until the pressure on my soul is gone.

Then I start slowing and speeding up several times, even pushing more steam than before.

Not a blip at slower speeds, but as soon as I cross what my instruments estimate 3.065 km per second the pressure comes back proportional to my acceleration.

I just keep climbing, knowing that even the advantages of the Void, mainly that each meter I fly here corresponds to a much larger distance in the real universe, 3 km per second is laughable and wouldn’t get me anywhere this millennium.

As I guessed, the rate at which I accelerate seems to make quite a bit of difference being directly proportional to the strain on my soul.

Soon the experiments ran their course. I even try to use my book with its wonderful properties for more context, but little shows up.

I had gotten used to thousands of people that used the network constantly streaming all that they learned in my book, which returned a significant amount of information that sat outside the restricted knowledge base in the instance.

Now, with just what I could learn, it would return a few tidbits here and there. Too bad the comm array couldn’t even contact the instance when I left it, let alone now several hours and tens of thousands of kilometers away.

With a long trip ahead and everything in the immediate term already done, I lay back and start to go through the list.

I had no idea what would make a difference when I actually got to Earth. But even a plan that was wrong still probably would have a thousand things going right and so I could adapt it speeding up the whole. Even more fundamentally than that, I could strengthen my allies, experiment with my seeds, and learn about the universe. But before it all, perhaps a nap would serve my purposes optimally.

Each second that I accelerate is a second that I feel the mild strain but as everything I needed to accomplish for now is in place, I let exhaustion creep in.

I hadn’t exactly cut on my sleep, but I did come over after nearly 2 days awake which was nearly as long as I could keep up before the mild effects of sleep deprivation tended to rear their head in.

Aspen, make sure to wake me if the alarm clock isn’t enough.

Yes. Wake you after the alarm clock.

--------------------------------

Aspen’s POV

“Ahoy, Nash is asleep now is time to party.”

My mind instantly imagines his shaking head if he knew this is the very sign a few of my progeny wanted to get up to after absorbing so much knowledge and acquiring brain facsimiles.

Especially given that for as much they learned from human culture the interests of human teenagers, their baseline was simply too different.

They start growing different colored leaves before one tries to outcompete the other in how elaborate they can make parts of themselves. Bright colored flowers bloom in every shape and size. A display that the rabbits and wolfs watch from a distance.

The oldest seed that was part of the competition had not even half my age, and even its most complex and well thought out plan was barely a fraction of what I could develop in a few seconds. No sense in crushing their will to compete.

Still, underground I grow and develop my own experiments and training to get used to the thousands of new additions to my biology, whatever that word meant.

Time passes in a breeze and the “alarm clock” he mentions does go off, so I watch his reaction. Not a twitch.

Vibrations through his ears, heat and cold through his skin. Even a small wooden implement repeatedly bangs against his head, but nothing gets his attention.

He is not naturally asleep, not even close.

I pull on our connection, something that was always there in the background, linking me to him. It rises and builds until he becomes a little appendage in my body, and then I AWAKE him.

It takes a couple of tries for him to really come back. He flails around and tries to call out in the void, but then he realizes our connection and he sends through:

Did I fail to wake up even with the alarm?

Yes. The mechanism worked, but you slept through it all.

I feel Nash struggling against the eye in the sky every few seconds, but he quickly grows used to it.

Ok. I guess that is just one more reason that nobody else seemed to think I would be able to travel back to Earth.

The confusing mess of images and concepts that I only recently started to get used to goes over my head, but understand the gist of this.

You will manage. I will work, a thousand of my brothers and progeny will work, and together we will return to the first grove.

Yes, together we will.

Without another word each of us starts exploring something before we actually make our way back.

And though I will do everything I can, I’m glad that Nash is taking care of figuring out which direction Pando is, because if I had to do that by myself, I would need thousands of years to explore the mind boggling distances he referenced even if I had an infinite supply of soil and nobody trimmed my roots.

Given how harsh the world tended to be, somebody would surely trim my root tendrils if they didn’t come all the way to my main body to try trimming my very core.

Yes, I’m very glad for Nash. He is so much better at dealing with nasty people encroaching on our territory.