I became a legion lich

90 Birth

He used the racial ability of Yggdrasil, pillar of the world, to absorb large amounts of the world’s energy and transform it into nutrients before injecting it into the land, preventing the trees from dying and its entire territory from turning into a great desert. This happened over 1000 years ago, when the sprout was not yet as powerful as it is today.

The sprout even younger than it is today was not able to bear the burden of using the pillar of the world on such a large scale and this affected its growth. To make matters worse, the races that lived in those lands invaded and tried to destroy the sea of trees, forcing it to further improve the natural defenses to contain the advance of the barbarian races.

The sprout’s growth has remained slow ever since and even 1000 years later, it was still in the early stages of its growth. The elves who lived in Evergreen thought that this was normal and that his growth period was really slow, but Kastil knew that after 1000 years he should have reached a height of at least 1 kilometer.

A new sprout would solve all these problems. They could share the burden of maintaining the forest once it grew big enough.

“It was really worth taking you, Selena. You’re going to help me fulfill my ambitions. Even if it doesn’t work out now, we can just keep trying.” Kastil smiled imagining himself as the king of the entire continent. The baby was still the size of a grain of rice, so he would have to wait a little longer before knowing the baby’s race.

*********

As the pregnancy wore on, Selena gradually recovered. She now exited the room regularly to bathe in the sun as her body demanded. The baby drained his body of vitamin D quickly, making Kastil’s expectations soar.

He hasn’t touched her since he found out about the pregnancy, allowing her to slowly recover her psyche. Of course, she didn’t go back to the kind and cheerful personality she had before, but she became completely obsessed with her own baby. In her mind, the baby became the priority and everything else was irrelevant.

Whenever felt hungry, Selena had panic attacks believing that the baby was malnourished and ate uncontrollably until she started feeling sick or the maids stopped her from continuing. His emotions fluctuated like a roller coaster, causing sudden bursts of crying and spontaneous laughter, making the employees question his sanity.

.....

Kastil kept the pregnancy a secret from anyone except Selena’s family, who had a mixed reaction of surprise, shock and anger. They wondered if the baby would be a yggdrasil spirit like Kastil and wondered what kind of power and influence his family would have once he was born.

The only one who wasn’t overjoyed was Selena’s father, who saw the deplorable state she was in when he visited her in the sprout. He felt tremendous anger at the sight of his daughter’s condition and he started planning a way to get Selena out of the sprout.

Kastil forbade Selena from leaving the safety of the sprout and remained by her side most of the time, ensuring nothing came close to her investment.

He focused all his attention on Selena and the baby, ignoring the world. Kastil was unable to discover the baby’s race, as the diagnostic spells would be dangerous for the fetus. The light element of the spell could poison the baby while they were still in the womb and cause a miscarriage or premature birth. The only thing they could find out without hurting the baby was that it was a boy.

He was forced to wait until the baby was born, so when the water broke and Selena started having contractions, Kastil was the first to appear at his side. He immediately called the midwives he had been on call since he learned of the pregnancy.

The delivery took a long time, even with the use of light magic and use of potions to increase Selena’s vitality, it took more than 12 hours for the child to be born. Selena passed out as soon as the baby came out, making the midwives fear the worst, but they sighed in relief as they realized that Selena was fine, just exhausted.

The midwives stared at the baby with strange faces before wrapping him in a cloth and calling Kastil to see him. He became too anxious waiting for the baby to be born and interrupted the midwives more than once, so they asked him to leave and not come back until he was finished.

“So, is he a treant?” Kastil formed his avatar in front of the midwife as soon as she started talking about him. Kastil looked expectantly at the baby wrapped in the midwife’s arms, like a child opening his Christmas present.

“I’m sorry your majesty. He’s like that.” In contrast, the midwife’s expression was a mixture of pity and sadness. She unrolled the cloth from the baby’s body. making Kastil stop her arms about to catch him.

The baby’s right side was green, just like a Treant should, but the right arm was shorter than normal, its right ribs were deep, the baby seemed to be breathing hard because of this. The right side of the skull was deformed and deep, Kastil suspected that the baby had mental problems. His right eye was a small brown sphere and appeared to be blind. Little green spikes protruded from her head where her hair should have been.

The baby had the characteristics of both a high elf and a treant. The truth was that two sperm had fertilized Selena’s egg, one of them inherited her mother’s genes and became a high elf and the other kept her father’s genes as a spirit. The spirit’s sperm died during the first week and was absorbed by the high elf.

“What is it?” Kastil asked as she looked in disgust at the baby now in her arms. The midwife mistook Kastil’s pause for him hesitating not knowing how to pick up the baby properly, so she carefully placed the baby in her arms.

The baby started crying in her arms and Kastil frowned at that. He felt only disappointment as he looked at him. The baby seemed to choke at times, its only lung unable to withstand the constant crying.

‘It’s a failure, huh. Well, I would have to be very lucky to get it right the first time. I just need to keep trying.’ Kastil dismissed the baby as useless and began to think about how long it would take Selena to recover and have another.

The baby’s constant crying started to bother him and disturb his thoughts, so he cast a calming light spell to make him sleep, but the effect was surprising. The baby’s green skin absorbed the light generated by the spell and the baby immediately stopped crying, his breathing returning to normal.

‘Photosynthesis? It looks like the plant side is still functional, even if it’s incomplete. It might be worth keeping it in reserve if I don’t get another one anytime soon.’ Kastil re-evaluated the baby from a failed product to an emergency measure.

“Well, I should think of a name for you. How about-” Before Kastil could continue, immense pain hit him, followed by the sound of an explosion and a tremor that shook the entire bud.

“What??” Kastil felt a deep pain in her true body and immediately began to expand her senses to search for the culprit, at the same time she began to heal. He’d focused so much on the baby, he’d forgotten to keep an eye on his real body.

2-3 meter purple orbs appeared at the top of the sprout, high elves wearing black uniforms and carrying wooden crossbows with loaded ebony arrows shot the sprout leaves, before starting to fall to the ground.

The arrows were hollow and filled with a black liquid that was released the moment they hit the leaves. The liquid was an alchemical poison created from the condensed element of darkness. The magical poison poisoned the bud’s leaves, weakening it while inhibiting the sprout’s natural ability to absorb world energy.

“You motherfuckers!!” Kastil screamed angrily, the aura emanating from his body crushed all the midwives around him into a paste of flesh, but he still had the mentality to protect Selena and the baby in her arms. His amber eyes lost their glow, before most of the energy the avatar had flowed into the sprout, which then released an aura that crushed the air elves against the ground like flies.

The spirits possessed two sources of energy, the mana core and the energy they naturally absorbed from the environment. But contrary to what most humans believed, the energy absorbed from the environment did not stay in the avatar, but in a crystallized form in the spirit tree that would act as a second core, like an amber gem, a golden fruit and the like.

When spirits separated their consciousness from their physical bodies, they could send all or part of this crystallized energy, obtaining bodies made of energy that they could physically interact with. An avatar’s physical prowess depended solely on how much energy they had.

Of course, as the second core was physical, it could be forcefully separated from the spirit, reducing its strength and causing the excruciating pain of having a part of itself ripped out.

A pulse of amber energy purified all the concentrated poison and the naturally drawn energy began to heal him. But the expression on Kastil’s face did not soften. The royal guards flew around the bud looking for enemies, so when a second wave of purple orbs appeared, they immediately fired their spells at them.

Unfortunately for them, the second wave was just a decoy and the spells passed harmlessly through them.

Kastil spread his senses across the capital, finding where the culprits were hiding. He found high elves carrying teleportation crystals hidden in strategic places where newly hatched trees were growing and therefore their senses would be weaker.