Reborn in hell with a skill creation system

Chapter 21: The Garden Of Hungry Things (2)

They passed one that bore the image of a female demon, perfectly preserved, her expression caught between ecstasy and horror. As they moved past, the fruit’s eyes tracked them, and its mouth opened in a soundless scream that Mael felt in his teeth.

"Don’t listen," Kess whispered. "Don’t look directly. They’re not dead, not alive, just... recorded. The tree’s memory of what it’s consumed."

"Memory?" Mael kept his eyes forward, but Sensory Web registered the fruit’s movement, its faint heat signature, its almost-soul that flickered like a dying candle.

"The garden learns," Kess said. "Everything it eats, it remembers. Uses. The fruit is bait, yes, but it’s also warning. This is what happens to those who fail."

They moved faster after that, the final obstacle before the tree was a vine-maze, a tangle of mobile vegetation that formed a living labyrinth with walls ten meters high and a ceiling of interwoven tendrils that blocked out the light. The vines moved constantly, shifting the paths, opening some routes while closing others, and the only constant was the center, where the Envy Tree waited, its star-leaves casting faint illumination through the gaps above.

Kess stopped at the entrance. His leg was worse, the joint stiffening, his movements losing the fluid grace that defined him.

"I can’t navigate this," he admitted. "Not quickly enough. The vines will sense my injury, target it."

"Then we split," Mael said. "I go through. You find another route, or wait for an opening."

"And if I simply follow you, let you clear the path, then strike when you reach the fruit?"

Mael met his eyes. "You won’t."

"Confident."

"Practical." Mael gestured at the maze. "The vines don’t care about our alliance. They’ll attack both of us, together or separate. Following me means sharing my dangers without sharing my senses. You’ll die faster alone than you would competing at the tree."

Kess studied him for a long moment. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed, a dry sound, almost human.

"You think like a demon, hatchling. Better than most born to it." He stepped back from the entrance, his joints folding him into a resting crouch. "Go. I’ll find another path, or I won’t. Either way, the debt is cleared."

Mael nodded and entered the maze alone.

The vines were worse than he’d imagined.

Not because they were faster or stronger than expected, but because they were clever. They learned his patterns, anticipated his movements, began to close paths before he reached them based on the choices he’d made earlier. The maze wasn’t random, it was adaptive, a neural network of vegetative intelligence that improved with every second he spent inside it.

He used Last Word twice in the first ten minutes, his body executing optimal defensive maneuvers as vines snapped toward him from angles he hadn’t detected. Each use drained his stamina, his low END stat burning through reserves faster than Accelerated Recovery could replenish.

Hollow Stomach kept him moving, processing the spores he inhaled, the sap that coated his skin, converting everything into marginal energy. But marginal wasn’t enough. He was slowing, and the maze was learning, and the center, the tree, the fruit, the goal, seemed no closer than when he’d started.

Then he felt it. Syrus.

The empty signature appeared in his Sensory Web, not behind or beside him but ahead, somehow already past the maze’s thickest tangle, moving toward the center with that terrifying absence of intent that made him impossible to predict.

Mael stopped. Looked at the vine wall before him, the shifting paths, the learning intelligence that had stalled his progress.

And did something stupid.

He attacked the maze directly.

Not navigating, not dodging, but destroying. His claws raked through vine-flesh, his teeth tore at fibrous tissue, his body moving with desperate violence through the vegetation that tried to coil around him, to drag him down, to digest him alive. Hollow Stomach processed what he consumed, converting enemy mass into marginal energy, and he used that energy to fuel more destruction, a feedback loop of consumption and violence that carried him forward through sheer refusal to stop.

The maze screamed.

Not metaphorically. The vines produced a sound, high and crystalline, that made Mael’s skull vibrate and his vision blur. But he didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. Stopping meant death, meant becoming another fruit on another tree, another memory for the garden’s collection.

He broke through.

The center was a clearing, ten meters across, perfectly circular, the ground covered in soft moss that glowed with its own faint light. The Envy Tree stood in the exact center, its star-leaves casting shadows that moved independently of any light source, and beneath it, waiting with hands folded and that gentle smile in place, was Syrus.

"You’re bleeding," Syrus observed.

Mael looked down. He was. Dozens of small wounds from the vines, several deeper ones where teeth-like thorns had found purchase, his dark blood dripping onto the glowing moss and being absorbed with visible hunger.

"I’ve had worse mornings," Mael said.

"I’m sure." Syrus didn’t move from his position by the tree. "The fruit is ripe. It will detach in approximately ten minutes. After that, whoever holds it has until the Hollow closes to present it to their master."

"Why tell me?"

"Because I don’t intend to take it." Syrus’s smile widened, and for the first time, Mael saw something genuine in it, not kindness, not cruelty, but satisfaction. "My purpose here was never the fruit. It was observation. Confirmation."

"Of what?"

"That the architect’s experiment continues. That you are what we suspected." Syrus stepped aside, gesturing toward the tree with that wrong-bending arm. "Take the fruit, Mael. Claim your freedom. And when you present it to Zara, remember that some gifts carry prices beyond what the giver admits."

Mael didn’t move. "You’re letting me win."

"I’m allowing you to proceed to the next stage of the test. Different thing entirely." Syrus began to walk away, toward the far edge of the clearing where another path, one Mael hadn’t seen, led into darkness. "We’ll meet again. In the Ashfields, perhaps. Or the Iron Courts. Wherever the experiment requires observation."

He paused at the clearing’s edge, looked back once.

"The guardian was right, you know. The Hollow is interested in what is not written and you, Mael, you are the most unwritten thing this world has seen in a very long time."

Then he was gone, and Mael was alone with the tree, the fruit, and the slowly pulsing light that matched his heartbeat.

He approached the Envy Tree.

Up close, it was more beautiful and more terrible than he’d imagined. The bark wasn’t black or gold but both, simultaneously, shifting between states in a way that hurt to observe directly. The star-leaves weren’t just lights but actual fragments of something, distant suns, dead gods, memories of places that had never existed in Hell. And the fruit...

The fruit was perfect.

It hung at eye level, pulsing gently, and as Mael watched, the stem began to thin, to weaken, the tree releasing its hold on the thing it had nurtured for a hundred years.

He reached out.

The fruit detached into his palm, and the world changed.

The collar around his neck flared with heat, then cold, then simply fell away, landing in the moss with a sound like a sigh. Mael felt the absence immediately, not just physical, but existential, a weight he’d carried so long he’d forgotten it was there, suddenly lifted.

His system screen exploded into visibility, no longer constrained by the collar’s suppression.

SYSTEM FULLY RESTORED

Slave collar removed

Host status: FREE

Souls: 115.6

New skill slots available

New skill tier available

He stood in the clearing, the fruit warm in his hand, the collar cold at his feet, and felt something he hadn’t experienced since the void. Something that might have been hope, or might have been the simple absence of despair.

The Envy Tree shuddered. Its star-leaves began to fall, slowly, like dying fireworks, and the bark cracked with sounds like breaking bones. It had given its fruit. Its purpose was complete.

Mael turned toward the path Syrus had indicated, the one that led out of the garden, out of the Hollow, back to the Pit and Zara and whatever came next.

But before he could take a step, Sensory Web screamed a warning, and Gorr crashed through the vine-maze’s shattered edge, his armor torn, his body covered in wounds that should have killed him, his eyes fixed on Mael with that simple, childlike hatred.

"Master Thane," Gorr rasped, his voice ruined by something he’d swallowed in the garden. "Promised. Heart. Mine."

He charged.

Mael had no Last Word, cooldown still active. No Leech Mark, Gorr was too far, moving too fast. No time to create a new skill, no souls to spend even if he had.

He had the fruit in one hand, his freedom in the other, and a demon twice his size running at him with the last of his strength.

Mael did the only thing he could.

He ate the fruit.

The taste was...

Everything.

Power, knowledge, memory, desire, all compressed into a single moment of consumption that overwhelmed every sense, every thought, every concept of self. He was Mael, he was the tree, he was the fruit, he was the Hollow itself watching champions come and go for centuries upon centuries.

And beneath it all, a voice. Not the system’s mechanical coldness. Something older, something that spoke in constellations and gravity and the slow death of stars.

Ascension is not elevation, the voice said. It is transformation. Are you prepared to become what you consume?

Mael had no answer. He was dissolving, becoming, changing in ways that his scientist brain couldn’t track or predict.

But somewhere, in the fragment that remained himself, he felt Gorr’s hands close around his throat, felt the pressure as the larger demon tried to crush the life from him, and he reacted.

Not with skill. Not with system. With something deeper.

The fruit’s power, redirected.

Gorr’s grip loosened. His eyes went wide. His body began to shrink, to wither, to fold in on itself like the fruit’s stem, all its strength, all its mass, all its accumulated power flowing into Mael through the contact point at his throat.

It wasn’t Devour. It wasn’t any skill Mael had created.

It was the Envy Tree’s gift. The ability to take what others had, to grow from their diminishment, to become more by making them less.

Gorr collapsed, a dried husk, and Mael stood over him, changed.

HOST STATUS

Name: Mael

Tier: Lesser Demon — Stage 2

Souls: 1,115.6

STATS

STR: 150

AGI: 180

VIT: 200

END: 100

INT: 25

Skills Active: 5

New skill tier unlocked

He looked at his hands. The dull grey skin had darkened, become more polished, more like Zara’s smooth black. His claws had lengthened, curved, gained an edge that shimmered faintly. And his eyes, he could feel the change in his eyes, the yellow deepening to gold, flecked with the same starlight that had lived in the tree’s leaves.

Stage 2.

Not the ascension Zara had sought. Not the tier jump the fruit was supposed to provide. Something else, something the Hollow had created by combining the fruit’s power with his system, his human soul, his demonic body.

Something unwritten.

Mael gathered Gorr’s remains—there was nothing left to Devour, the fruit had taken everything—and walked toward the exit, the path, the return.

Zara was waiting.

And he was no longer her slave.