Cultivator in a Zombie Apocalypse

Chapter Thirty - Precious Teardrops

One of the mutated plants in Nathan's cottage garden was a delicate looking tree with no leaves, but transparent fruits shaped like tear drops and sparkling like crystals as the sun cast it's light upon them. Although Ren Zexian had long since noted the thin spiritual energy within it's roots, thin trunk and spindle branches, it had been quite pure and without taint, so Ren Zexian had never considered it further.

Yet now, one of those teardrop fruits was lying upon the ground, unbroken by its fall yet crackling with lightning that seemed to be trapped within it's shell. Ren Zexian surrounded his hand with spiritual energy before tentatively reaching for the crystal. There was no change in the core lightning, it didn't attempt to leap to his flesh to burn him, so he carefully lifted it from the ground. The crystal had well and truly trapped it in its midst.

He passed the crystal to Dexter, who looked wary, but took it from his hand with trepidation. Feeling no pain nor heat, just the tingling of static upon his palm, he shivered as his inner sea began to react to it. "What do you think?" Ren Zexian asked him and the other man looked at him, the surprise upon his face apparent to see.

"It's effecting my powers," Dexter admitted in awe. "I feel like... I think that if I meditated with it, my cultivation would be greater."

Ren looked speculatively at the crystal fruits. There were about ten or twelve upon its branches at first glance, not a large amount and each completely precious if his theories were even remotely close to being true. "We need to speak with Nathan about the crystals," he decided. He would not offend such a priceless specimen with his rising greed. Both men glanced at Tyler who grumbled about being a messenger boy, before leaving to persuade the boy to come to his personal garden.

"What are you thinking?" Dexter asked him curiously. But Ren Zexian simply smiled and answered;

"We need fire or a flame, not created by myself," Ren Zexian mused.

Nathan came into the garden having been encouraged by a carrot and stick method, if the carrot could be considered answering Ren's summons and the stick considered something occurring within his cottage garden to one of his precious plants. He hurried in, his eyes landing first upon Ren Zexian before flickering about the garden to see if anything was out of place. He sighed, there was no sick plants to fend for, no deceased ones to mourn. And so he returned his attention back to the man with the long black hair of silk.

"Nathan," Ren Zexian called to him in his soothing voice and Nathan closed the gap between them without thought. "Has this tree ever shed its crystals?"

Nathan glanced at the simple tree with its sparkling fruits and shook his head. When the tree first lost its leaves, he had been sad, thinking that it had died. But when he had placed his hand upon its thin trunk, he felt like he had assumed wrongly that the tree was dead. He did not know why he felt this way, but decided to leave it be. And then slowly had those teardrop crystals developed upon its branches.

Each had resembled a bead of dew, at first, poised at the point of dripping from the branch, but not actually doing so. And slowly, one by one the crystals grew, stopping at their current size before a new one began to form. It had taken the first crystal almost a month to grow, but then as his waters permeated the soil about its roots, the crystals grew more rapidly, perhaps one growing in a one week period. But the last time he counted, there had been ten. The rains must have caused more to grow overnight.

"Would the tree allow us to take a few?" Ren Zexian asked him and immediately, the boy directed this thought at the tree, placing his hand upon the bark. The tree shivered beneath his touch and five crystals dropped only to be caught in Ren Zexian's swiftly moving hands. If his theory was right, letting them fall to the ground would be a waste. "Thank you," Ren Zexian bowed to the tree, even as he clasped the precious fruits to his chest.