Reborn as a Demonic Tree-Novel

However, it was a power that hadn't come cheap, as he had stunted his cultivation at the peak of the Star Core Realm and pledged his soul to the eternal light. With his healing abilities, his body hardly aged despite centuries passing, but Lucius was not and never would be truly immortal. By his cultivation base stalling in the Star Core Realm, he could never enter the Nascent Soul realm and create an infant soul, which other cultivators used to escape the shackles of time.

To Lucius's surprise, the giant spider stopped fleeing and turned to face him despite the rapidly expanding ball of pure light Qi gathering on his palm that would be enough to wipe out a small sect once fully charged.

Lucius was about to cook the stupid thing to death, but a ripple of spatial Qi on another level to anything Hammond had emitted drew his attention. Three enormous portals materialized simultaneously on the palace's roof, and Lucius felt the sudden presence of two beings in the Star Core Realm and one Soul Fire, but they didn't feel human.

One was a giant marble statue with eyes of heavenly gold and white leaves forming a glorious head of hair and a magnificent beard. Beside the living statue was a titan of black wood twice the size of the already colossal marble statue that could stand beside the palace and casually gaze in. This black wood titan had eyes of blazing lilac fire, and a large canopy of scarlet leaves sprouted from its hunched back, which cast a looming shadow upon Lucius and blocked out his god's radiant light.

The third and final head that looked down at him as if he were an ant was a beige-colored wooden turtle, which made his skin crawl as it had no apparent eyes, yet it had human-like hair in the form of black vines and a weirdly human form as if it were some cursed mismatch between turtle and man.

"Do you think a mere walking tree can stifle me from my god's light?" Lucius pulled upon his connection with the sun, and the beam's intensity increased tenfold, illuminating the evening sky and causing the scarlet leaves on the titan's back to ignite into a spontaneous blaze. The titan's bark also seemed to show signs of burning, but a sudden burst of lilac soul fire that covered its back saved it.

The white marble statue pointed its finger to the sky, and darkened clouds began to form on the horizon that were soon filled with flashing lights and roaring thunder.

He first targeted the white marble statue as he didn't like the look of the storm system forming overhead; his entire arm lit up, and a beam of focused light shot from his palm in complete silence and instantaneously obliterated the marble statue's raised arm and brightened the evening sky. The beacon of light pierced through the distant clouds, and the storm system began to calm down and dissipate, but Lucius wasn't done—he wanted that thing dead. So, with the light beam from his hand still going and piercing the heavens, he slowly lowered his hand and enjoyed the overwhelming power as the ray carved into the marble statue's chest.

Strangely, the statue didn't even flinch while being burned alive. Its heavenly golden eyes remained fixated on Lucius as if it were mocking him.

Lucius decided to test that theory as he raised the scorching beam up and went for the things smug face. Still, it didn't flinch, even as its face was scorched in two. In fact, it smiled at him, and in another act of defiance, it raised its remaining arm and called on the clouds once more.

"Bastard, are you mocking me?" Lucius yelled as he raised his other arm and was about to put everything he could into blasting this fucker into the afterlife when something barreled into him, throwing him off balance.

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"Who dares?!" Lucius grimaced as he felt a wound in his side rapidly close up due to the permanent Healing Glow. Only now did he notice the entire room had become engulfed in a storm of swirling ash that encircled him like a hurricane.

The spirit beast was missing, but its presence was still overwhelmingly there, lurking deep in the ash.

Suddenly, two people came flying out of the ash. One was shrouded in flames of darkness and flanked by shadow copies, while the other was a blonde-haired girl on the defensive, effortlessly deflecting every blow with a calm expression. Lucius instantly recognized the two as Nox and Roselyn and was somewhat surprised to see Roselyn holding up on her own.

The sounds of clashing blades faded into the background as their fight took them back into the swirling ash, leaving Lucius alone and still confused about what had stabbed him in the side. Had the void creature recovered somehow? That was the only thing he had seen so far that genuinely worried him and might be able to kill him even while harnessing the unlimited light of a star.

A sudden whistling noise drew his attention as a sword of excellent craftsmanship engulfed in lilac flames lashed out from the ash to his left, held by what could only be described as a black thorn-covered vine. Moving instinctually, Lucius tilted his head to the side and winced as the sword, traveling at surprising speed, cleanly sliced through his cheek and reeled back into the swirling ash.

Lucius rolled his shoulders to calm himself. Whatever that was, it would take many such swords to stab him all at once to have any lasting impact, so he returned his attention to the hole in the roof and noticed the clouds blanketed the entire sky overhead. The black wood titan had also put its whole body over the hole, and the strange beige wood turtle shook the palace as giant rock walls from all sides loomed into view.

The light gave Lucius unlimited power—the blazing glory of a literal star. It filled his body to the brim with so much Qi he didn't even know what to do with it.

And then it was gone in an instant. Lucius's spotlight was shut off as if day had turned to night. Had another god snuffed out the star like a mortal would to a candle flame? Lucius's eyes widened at the storm overhead that had grown suddenly dark; the rock walls connected and fully formed a dome of grey stone, and the swirling ashen storm entirely engulfed him all at once.

"No..." Lucius raised his hand to the sky and felt no warmth. The light was gone. He almost immediately felt his body explode with pain as light Qi was forcefully pulled from his Star Core to compensate for the lack of light from his god that had been fueling his transcendent form.

They were never trying to trap him but rather deprive him of light.

Lucius clenched his teeth as he felt his Healing Glow wear off, and his body began to break down and wither away from the rampant light Qi still left in his body. His puny mortal vessel wasn't designed to hold this amount of Qi; if he didn't expend it soon, he would involuntarily go supernova sooner or later.

Raising his trembling hands to the sky, he unleashed one of his most costly techniques, "Disintegration ray," Lucius hissed through the pain as a beam of light over a meter wide superheated the swirling ash, blasted through the rock dome, and pierced the clouds, causing cinders and molten rock to rain upon him. None of this mattered to Lucius as he cast Flash Step to instantly travel via the ray of light to stand upon the dome. So long as there was light, he could move short distances at the snap of a finger.

His gaze drifted to the setting sun on the distant horizon, but before he could embrace the light again, that accursed marble statue's head popped up with a grin as if saying hello and consumed his entire view.

"Get out of the way, you stupid golem," Lucius reeled back his fist to finish the job when his world went white, followed by roaring thunder as heavenly lightning arced out from the clouds above and struck him square in the chest, sending him falling back down into the hell that was the darkened room.

He crashed onto the palace room's floor and was left in a smoldering crater, looking up at the darkened sky. He saw the earthen dome rumble closed, sealing the hole he had created, followed by a heap of ash that descended on him.

"Nox!" Lucius cried out to his only ally while coughing up blood. His entire body was in terrible pain, and he was seriously growing concerned. In his current state, regaining his connection with the sun seemed his only hope, which made no sense. How could he be losing to some unknown group in some backwater demonic sect? He had walked these lands for thousands of years, delved and conquered treacherous rifts single-handedly, and even wiped out a family from the celestial empire.

His spatial rings flashed as healing pills of various kinds appeared, and he gulped them down without a second thought—anything to dull the pain so he could concentrate on escaping.

Lucius had been foolish and tried to escape from a spatial cultivator once in the past and would never make such an amateur mistake again. While he had been on the run for a week straight, expending his Qi to slaughter monsters and Flash Step to cover as much ground as possible, the spatial cultivator had been relaxing and drinking tea back home. Waiting for him to be worn out before utilizing a teleportation array and appearing before him a week later fully rested.

Shaking his head and pushing himself up from the ground, Lucius barely twisted his body to the side in time to dodge multiple tree-vine-wielded swords aiming for his neck. He tried to flatten the swords with his Star Core gravity as they retreated back into the ash. But the spatial Qi-coated vines made it impossible to wrestle away control of them as he had with spatial cultivators in the past who bragged about controlling a hundred swords with telekinesis.

"They appear without warning," Lucius mumbled as he scrutinized the ash swirling around him. It did an excellent job of masking the tiny ripples of spatial Qi from the portals closing and the swords disappearing again.

In fact, it did such a good job that Lucius almost missed eight portals opening in a circle around him. He enshrouded his legs with Qi and lept up at the last second.

There was a loud clang as the eight swords impacted each other just below his feet, and the many vines became briefly entangled. "Agh," Lucius hissed in pain as he landed awkwardly to the side. His body struggled to contain the light Qi running rampant as he hadn't had enough time to adapt his spirit root to handle the sudden influx of light Qi, and his Star Core didn't have enough capacity to contain it all.

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So why should he hold back any longer?

"Nox, brace yourself," Lucius shouted as his eyes and mouth leaked light as if a sun was trying to escape from within, "I'm going to end this myself."

He had refrained from unleashing everything as it would greatly diminish Nox's ability to fight, but Nox was no longer his concern. The useless bitch was struggling to kill Roselyn, who was barely in the Star Core Realm and was even an alchemist! The blonde girl had likely never learned to fight and spent years with her nose buried in books...

Lucius narrowed his glowing eyes. Things weren't adding up.

It wouldn't be the first time he was betrayed, and it likely wouldn't be the last.

Lucius's skin began to glow as he stepped forward, and the stone floor cracked beneath his steps. A blade of light manifested in both of his hands, and he activated Healing Glow without restraint. He then turned in the direction he heard fighting.

"Blazing Radiance," Lucius uttered with as much enthusiasm as one would when describing the weather, and a blast of light pulsed out of his body in every direction. The blaze disintegrated the swirling ash, the walls exploded outward, and the ceiling collapsed.

But Lucius didn't care for the destruction; with the annoying ash and confining walls gone, he could now get a clear view of everything. With the entire east wing of the palace now destroyed, there was nothing but a mountain peak of rubble that gave way to a bustling forest of scarlet leaves and black-barked trees that went down the mountainside until Darklight City in the far distance.

And scattered against these trees was everyone else. They seemed to have suffered severe burns, but Lucius could see them all moving. Meaning they were alive.

"Tsk, annoying," Lucius clicked his tongue as he used Flash Step to get closer and then caught something in the corner of his eye.

Nox was fleeing into the forest.

"You betraying bitch—" Lucius felt the words die in his throat as a sudden pressure not only descended on him but the entire mountain peak. As his knees buckled under the pressure, his head snapped toward the source, which turned out to be an unassuming demonic tree like the rest of the forest suddenly ablaze with lilac soul fire that Roselyn was leaning against.

If things couldn't get any more strange, Lucius felt a chill run down his spine as a mysterious white fog appeared at the edge of his consciousness, and then a thousand voices spoke to him.