After deciding he had to experience higher elements instead of just reading names on a list, Root Clone started with life.
What was "life," exactly?
Every living being carried it. His own body pulsed with it; the greenhouse around him was soaked in it. Yet it wasn't the same as wood.
Wood was a basic element, tied to a single material—trunks, branches, roots, and leaves. Life was something else, something that could sit inside wood, meat, blood, or even a single cell.
A higher element. Elusive. Slippery.
Root Clone did not try to grab it directly. Instead, he chose to watch.
First he turned his senses inward.
His extended lifespan clearly came from life element. The way his organs stayed young, the way fatigue faded faster than it should—that was all connected.
But when he searched for a "lifespan thread" he could hold, he only felt a distant weight at the edge of his perception, like a number written on the sky that he could read but not touch. He could sense his years, but not observe or understand them directly.
So he turned to the plants.
He sat in the greenhouse and focused on a single vine climbing a metal frame. At first glance it was just green. Under Sacral‑style perception, he saw water, wood, and a trickle of Essence. Under Root's space sense, he saw the fine structure of its cells, the micro‑paths of sap.
Then he slowed down.
Using his control over space, he stretched his perception, just enough that tiny changes became visible. New cells dividing at the tip. A leaf uncurling by less than a hair's width. Minuscule adjustments as the stem leaned toward the light.
He watched the same vine at dawn, noon, and night.
The next day he watched a sprout force its way out of the soil.
The day after that he watched an old leaf yellow around the edges.
Patterns appeared.
When he stirred wood element, the vine thickened and twisted, its physical form changing quickly. But when he deliberately kept wood quiet and only watched, there was still a steady, invisible push.
A tiny wound he made with a knife sealed itself over hours.
A drooping leaf slowly rose again after water reached it.
New buds formed even when he did nothing.
There was something that kept choosing to repair, to continue, to grow according to a certain plan. That something didn't feel like earth, fire, water, air, or wood. It sat underneath all of them.
For a full week, he repeated this.
Morning: watch new sprouts.
Afternoon: watch mature plants shifting, drinking light.
Night: watch old stems sag and tiny parts quietly die off while the main body stayed alive.
He did not interfere, only marked every change in space like drawing lines on glass.
On the seventh day, as he traced the slow rise and fall of Essence inside a patch of healing leaves, something clicked.
He realised that what he'd been sensing wasn't a substance at all. It was a tendency—the tendency of a matter or a living being to hold a pattern together, repair damage, and resist falling back into chaos.
The moment he framed it that way, the feeling sharpened.
The vine under his hand suddenly appeared in two layers: a physical, green shape of wood and sap, and a faint second outline, shimmering, that clung to it like a ghostly blueprint.
Wherever the physical tissue was damaged, that outline remained complete, and the body was slowly crawling back to match it.
Root Clone exhaled.
"That outline," he thought, "is life."
He didn't control it yet. But by the end of that week of silent observation, he had finally stepped into the Life Element—able to sense where it was strong or weak, where it was fading, and where it gathered most densely, ready for the next stage of understanding.
***
Meanwhile, in the dark Haven fortress, garden, greenhouse.
Ankit had not moved from the greenhouse for one and a half months.
He sat on the same patch of grass day and night, wrapped in a faint barrier, quietly weaving Sacral's cool Essence and Solar's steady warmth around his chest. Today, the slow work reached a tipping point.
Without warning, his heartbeat surged.
For a single instant it felt like his heart turned into a war drum.
Thump.
Air pressure around him spiked. The calm greenhouse wind thickened into a crushing weight, nearly a hundred times stronger than before.
Glass panes trembled. Leaves pressed flat to the soil.
Even the sound‑isolation barrier Ankit had set up before starting cultivation could not withstand that heartbeat.
He had thrown it casually, more out of habit than necessity—noise had never bothered him after reaching stage 2, substage 3; he could cultivate on a high‑speed airplane if he wanted.
Under the impact of that single thump, the barrier shivered like thin glass, spider‑webbed with cracks, and then dissolved into nothing.
Thump…