Lena and Azar began discussing something in private which Micro couldn’t quite catch, so he turned his attention back to the blue and yellow creatures to his left. Trill’s wings were buzzing as he tried to lift himself up off the ground, but his efforts were futile. Blue was looking around with an impatient glare, still unclear about the task. Though she was doing her best to absorb energy to recover her strength, she seemed distracted.

  “What’s wrong, Blue?” Micro asked.

  “I’m annoyed,” she replied while counting something on her fingers.

  “Do you not like mushrooms?” Micro asked. “Apparently they’re good with almost anything.”

  “I have two cards mastered so far,” she replied with narrow eyes. “You have six, right?”

  “Six? Yes, that’s right,” Micro replied as he quickly did the math on his own clumsy fingers.

  “I can’t remember how many cards I just threw away…” she growled, summoning her slingshot without a word and firing a small projectile straight at Micro’s head. “I didn’t know they were so much fun!”

  “Ouch—” He said instinctively as it hit him before he could summon his turtle armour, but he paused when he realized it didn’t hurt. “Oh, right! The Armour Trait!”

  “Huh?” Blue shouted in frustration, her slingshot fading away as she ran out of energy again.

  “I was wondering what the difference between a trait and a skill was,” Micro replied, tapping himself on the head with his knuckles. “It seems like traits are always switched on. The difference between skills and arts is less clear though.”

  “Who cares?” Blue shrugged.

  “At the jade level, arts and skills aren’t very different in practice,” Lena suddenly interjected. “As cultivators advance, arts become more akin to their way of life, while skills remain tools to be used at their discretion.”

  “Thanks, I think…” Micro said as he turned to bow to Lena, obviously confused by what she had said.

  “You could say, in simpler terms, that arts are more flexible in their potential applications,” Lena added. “Skills are not so easily modified.”

  “Oh, that makes more sense,” Micro replied with a nod. “Thanks, Lena.”

  “The fact that you just mastered four cards, one of which is a trait, is beyond the realm of reason, strange hero,” Lena said, shaking her head in awe. “Skills and arts do take some effort when binding them to one’s soul, but traits typically require modifying your own self image. To freely alter your state to such a degree… That cannot simply be the product of countryside magicians…”

  “If the magicians had such abilities, they’d have long since destroyed us,” Azar added with shock and fear in his own eyes. “If a hero with a higher level core had the same ability…”

  “I told you I’m not a Hero,” Micro asserted, mildly irritated by their description. “I’m a Micro. At least, I was. Now I’m just Micro. Why is this always so hard to explain?”

  “You refer to your original vessel?” Lena asked.

  “I was summoned by mistake by Nora,” Micro continued. “She put me in this body, and I had to make a new core. Now I have to make friends with Lo, represent Kel’s sect in a tournament, and find a way home.”

  “But you are clearly a hero,” Lena argued. “Your body still stinks of the chaos energy used to create it.”

  “Sorry about the smell, but it’s not a body I chose,” Micro answered bitterly.

  “Please don’t get him started on that!” Blue shouted at Lena from behind Micro.

  “But vessels are constructed according to the soul’s previous form. We know that much,” Lena replied. “You were not the intended soul for that vessel?”

  “No, I was just bringing the old man to town, and some stupid boy on his phone wandered into traffic!” Micro spat angrily, the scene becoming vivid in his mind. “Now I’m stuck here, and the old man doesn’t have a truck…”

  “Then your vessel wasn’t created with a core capable of consuming Core Cards like they were treats…” Lena wondered aloud. “Your soul—What kind of monster were you?!”

  “Umm…” Micro raised an eyebrow at her question. “Feng was a lot easier to talk to about this sort of stuff. Can we focus on the trial? I need to get to the tournament.”

  “The trial?” Lena asked in a daze. She noticed an anxious aura to her right, but Azar didn’t speak up. His face remained pale as he returned to a meditative state, but he was still clearly shaken by what he had just witnessed. Lena cleared her head with a deep breath and clapped her hands. “Yes, of course…”

  “Wait, is Trill okay with this sort of thing?” Micro asked Blue.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  “I’ll walk him through the whole core things” she reassured him. “It shouldn’t take long.”

  “The pixie…” Azar mumbled, unable to keep his eyes closed after hearing Blue’s words. “It has a jade core?!”

  “Focus, Azar.” Lena reminded Azar, who obediently closed his eyes again.

  “The trial, and then the questions,” she whispered sternly to Micro. “It had to be a Dark energy dungeon… It’s a particularly finicky element to deal with…”

  “Good luck.” Micro shrugged.

  “I must ask, Micro,” Lena asked with a slightly more respectful tone. “Are you sure the pixies will be able to complete this trial?”

  “Blue should be fine,” Micro answered quietly. “She’ll help Trill.”

  “They have names…” she whispered in surprise. “You trust them?”

  “Of course I trust Blue,” Micro said. “She’s a good passenger.”

  “And you understand the trial?” Lena asked with doubt in her voice.

  “We can only use our feet to connect ourselves the grass,” Micro replied. “I was confused by the part about roots, but watching Azar helped.”

  “You learned to extend roots of energy into the ground by watching a sapphire level cultivator do it once?” Lena said with a laugh. “I’ll try not to kill you when I take you apart later. I like you.”

  “It’s hard to concentrate with you talking so much…” Micro sighed. “We have to connect to all of them at once, so this will take a while.”

  “Getting on her good side wouldn’t hurt,” Blue whispered to Micro. “The whole reason we jumped in here was to escape from those punks.”

  “Oh, right.” Micro gasped. “Staying alive is tricky.”

  “My apologies, Micro,” Lena said with a bow. “We’ll discuss this outside of the dungeon.”

  She took a quick look around him at the pixies, and realized the blue one had already assisted the yellow one in creating a core. It was frail and weak, but it was unmistakably a functioning core with which Trill would be able to channel energy. Deciding to leave the matter alone for the time being, Lena closed her eyes and joined Azar in channelling her energy into the ground.

  Micro followed, ignoring the guards and pixies to either side of him, and focused all his attention to the soles of his feet. As with the turtle armour he could summon, it wasn’t difficult for him to manifest his energy beyond his body, but it took many attempts before he could form something resembling a root. The way Azar had so quickly extended roots of energy several meters in every direction in such a short time gave Micro confidence that it was possible, but his four tires had never transferred more than the feeling of the road to his passengers.

  “Roots…” Micro mumbled to himself as he struggled to visualize them. He went through the memories he could now freely access of his long life as a truck, and one example came to him with a wave of optimism. “Like a tree!”

  “What was that?” Lena couldn’t help but ask as Micro mumbled happily.

  “I watched a tree spread its roots all over the place once,” Micro replied excitedly. “I remember how annoying it was to drive over the parts of the driveway where its roots had crawled under. I’ll try something like that.”

  “You watched roots grow…?” Lena remarked with her eyebrows raised. “That sort of training is rare these days…”

  “There were times when the old man didn’t leave the property much, so I could see a lot of things change from the garage.” Micro smiled as he saw the nostalgic scene with his eyes closed. “Those darned roots…”

  “What sort of—” Lena began, but she was interrupted again.

  “Be quiet now, please,” Micro said as he utilized the memory of the tree next to his garage to visualize roots extending downward and outward from his own feet.

  “Of course…” Lena mumbled. “My apologies.”

  “Thanks, Lena,” he whispered as his efforts finally paid off. Slowly but steadily, he extended a single tendril of energy straight down into the ground, and he felt the exact moment it made contact with the root of a blade of grass. He could suddenly feel the complex process the grass was performing in converting the light in the sky into a dense form of energy he could readily absorb. Instinctively, he absorbed all of the energy it could offer, but the root he had attached himself to suddenly began to wither.

  “Don’t be greedy,” Lena whispered to Micro, her own eyes still shut. “We need to share our energy with the grass, not eat it like a salad.”

  “Thanks, Lena…” Micro replied, and he tried again. This time, he extended two roots from his right foot, which quickly met the roots of several blades of grass. Rather than extract all the energy they held, he simply allowed the energy flowing through the roots to bleed slowly into his own. He realized at the same time that some of his own energy had begun to flow back into the roots. The energy he was left with was only slightly more than he had started with, but it was such a relaxing process that he rushed to repeat it. He sent another root out from his left foot in a hurry, but as he focused on his left foot, the roots beneath his right foot disappeared.

  “Don’t try to focus on each one you connect yourself to…” Lena whispered. “Only feel the energy you exchange…”

  “Thanks, Lena…” Micro replied again.

  “Unbelievable,” Azar growled quietly as he continued to spread his own network of roots in every direction, many of which were now beneath Micro and the others. “Tutoring the greatest threat to our world in a forgotten dungeon…”

  Following Lena’s advice, Micro allowed himself to relax a little more, and let the roots he created mingle with the roots in the ground without much thought. In time, he found himself connected to every blade of grass within a meter of his feet. In his excitement, some of the connections broke, but it began to feel natural to allow them to regrow and feel their way forward.

  “Cool,” Micro thought aloud.

  “Yep,” Blue added.

  “This is so wrong,” Trill mumbled, but his own progress was steady.

  It surprised Micro the first time his roots mingled with one of Blue’s, as the energy they emitted felt less relaxing than the grass roots’ energy, and more like a static shock. The guards’ roots emitted a powerful yet disciplined flow of energy which Micro was slightly intimidated by.

  The energy roots of Azar, Lena, Micro, Blue, and eventually Trill, all mingled as they spread farther and farther across the plains. As he had made a habit of doing, Micro soon lost track of time. Without anything to distract him, as still as any tree he’d ever been parked beneath, he simply enjoyed the sensation of being a single conduit in an infinite array of connections. Even the guards he’d been running from moments before entering the dungeon now felt less like enemies and more like a constant, familiar presence in his life.

  “This is nice,” Micro said, and then time continued to pass.