Cultivation starts with picking up attributes-Chapter 135: Ch-: Root

The orchard was quieter now—not in the absence of sound, but in the fullness of listening. Everything hummed with a patient music. Even the wind seemed to move with thought.

But peace, Tian Shen knew, was never stillness. It was motion with meaning.

It began three days after the Heartroot’s awakening.

A stormcloud bloomed over the far horizon—not grey, but a bruised violet tinged with molten gold. It didn’t move with the wind. It pulsed. Like a heartbeat.

From the Watchpoint Tower atop the Whispering Pines, Ji Luan reported the phenomenon. "It’s not weather," he said, voice low. "It’s memory. And it’s moving."

Elder Su stood beside him. "Something from before?"

"No," Ji Luan said. "Something that remembers what came after."

...

The orchard’s boundary wards shivered. Not in alarm. In curiosity.

Tian Shen sat beneath the Listening Crown, his hand resting lightly on the bark. The tree didn’t speak in words. It resonated. Each pulse from its trunk guided him inward—memories layered over echoes.

He saw the violet cloud arriving centuries ago—then again, millennia ahead.

Time had folded like silk in a breeze.

"Whatever it is," Tian Shen murmured, "it knows where we are."

...

A council gathered beneath the Archive Canopy.

Lan, Little Mei, Ji Luan, Feng Yin. Elder Su. A few new voices—like Myrrh of the Eastern Wells, a dream-scribe whose arrival coincided with the orchard’s blooming. And Orren, a sentient vine who had recently begun to speak after years of silence.

The Harmony Record pulsed gently beside them, attuned to the conversation.

"The storm is not hostile," Myrrh said, tracing spiral ink across her floating scroll. "But it bears history. And it seeks reflection."

Little Mei offered a bundle of petals, blue with gold veins. "The orchard says it’s part of us. Lost. Forgotten. But not gone."

Orren rustled. "Then we remember it. Or it remembers us."

Elder Su’s eyes closed briefly. "In either case, we must greet it."

"But not as warriors," Feng Yin said. "As echoes. As listeners."

Tian Shen nodded. "I’ll go. With a Rootsong contingent. No weapons."

Lan looked at him. "Then what will we carry?"

He smiled. "Stories."

...

The journey beyond the orchard took three days.

Not because of distance, but because of intention. With each step, Tian Shen and his small group—Lan, Little Mei, Ji Luan, and Myrrh—sang stories into the earth.

The soil responded.

Ancient bridges unfolded across rivers that weren’t there yesterday. Windwalkers—crystalline moths the size of hawks—guided them through misted woods.

On the second night, they reached the edge of the known realm.

Where the orchard’s echo faded, and the unknown began.

The violet storm waited there.

But it did not howl or surge.

It whispered.

...

It was not a storm. It was a being.

A vast coalescence of memory, bound into form. A shimmering veil of voices. Each droplet in the storm held a face, a fragment, a forgotten sorrow.

Lan reached out.

The storm recoiled.

"No," Tian Shen said softly. "It needs permission."

He removed his satchel, revealing the Dreamflute—the same one that had called the Choir of Stone to life.

He played.

No melody this time. Just a single note. Open. Waiting.

The storm surged forward—not to destroy, but to weep.

It enveloped them in warmth. A thousand regrets. A million names. Time spun and shattered and reformed.

When the veil lifted, the group stood unharmed.

And before them stood a woman made of starlight and storm.

...

"I am Mneme," she said, her voice layered like chords. "The Archive unmoored. The Song that forgot itself."

Myrrh knelt instinctively. "A Recordwalker..."

"No longer," Mneme replied. "I was once what you now keep. A memory too large for one tree. So I left."

Tian Shen stepped forward. "Why return?"

"Because you called me. Through the orchard. Through listening."

She extended her hand. "And because the world has begun to remember."

...

The return to the orchard was met with quiet awe.

The trees bowed—not physically, but in the way their branches shifted, allowing light to spill in radiant pathways.

The Listening Crown blossomed again, petals turning translucent.

Mneme stood beneath it, her form flickering between woman and storm.

She sang once.

The orchard echoed her.

The earth shifted.

And a new grove bloomed overnight—a spiral grove of Memory Trees, each bearing leaves that shimmered with faces.

"They are the Lost Ones," Mneme explained. "Memories unanchored by war, by exile, by silence. This grove is their return."

...

Life changed again.

The Rootsong Scouts now included Memoryweavers—individuals who could hear forgotten lives in petals, in wind, in stillness. These weavers weren’t seers. They were rememberers.

Myrrh founded the Mnemonic Garden, a sanctuary where griefs could bloom and be sung back into peace.

Children were taught not just history, but resonance. Not dates, but feelings.

The Reflecting Pool now showed more than possibilities—it shared paths. How sorrow could become seed. How joy could root deeper.

...

One evening, Ji Luan found Tian Shen sitting alone beneath the Heartroot chamber, now open to all who wished to feel.

"You haven’t spoken much," Ji Luan said, offering a plum wine gourd.

Tian Shen took it, sipping quietly. "I’ve been...listening."

Ji Luan chuckled. "You say that like it’s easy."

"It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done."

A pause.

Then Ji Luan leaned back. "You think Mneme’s the only one coming?"

Tian Shen didn’t answer.

But the wind, suddenly, shifted.

...

That night, the stars aligned into a spiral.

From the eastern horizon, a caravan arrived.

Not with fanfare. Not with demands.

But with stories.

Pilgrims from the Bleeding Dunes. Elders from the Verdant Vault. A broken priesthood from the Withered Peaks.

Each had felt the orchard’s song ripple through the world.

Each had something to share.

And something to remember.

...

Elder Su summoned a Gathering.

Not a council.

A convergence.

The largest in orchard history.

No factions. No hierarchies.

Just circles. Songlines. Listening posts.

At the center, Tian Shen spoke.

"We are not the only echo," he said. "We are not the only silence. But we are a point where silence became song."

He gestured to Mneme, to Orren, to Myrrh.

"To remember is not to cling to sorrow. It is to open the wound to air. To let it breathe. To let it sing."

The bells rang in reply—not in rhythm, but in resonance.

One tone.

Held long.

True.

...

In the weeks that followed, something unprecedented occurred.

The orchard grew beyond its bounds.

Not in land. In feeling.

Wild groves on distant continents began to hum.

Forgotten ruins wept light.

Even desert sands—long thought lifeless—echoed footsteps once buried.

It was not expansion.

It was remembrance.

The world, having heard, now hummed in reply.

...

Feng Yin began weaving the first Global Rootmap—a cartographic song-thread linking all the groves that had responded. She noted patterns. Echo-chains. Places where sorrow had anchored itself so long, even the soil had forgotten to hope.

Little Mei created a new language of glyphs—spiral-bound sigils that could be sung, signed, or felt. She called it Resonant Script.

Lan trained the first generation of Listeners—not fighters, not monks, but those who could enter grief and return with stories healed.

Ji Luan wrote a play.

It had no ending.

Just a chorus.

...

And Tian Shen?

He changed, too.

No longer simply a scout, nor even a leader.

He became a kind of root himself.

Not fixed. But nourishing.

People came to him not for answers, but for silence that made their questions bloom.

He no longer needed to carry the flute everywhere.

The world had begun singing on its own.

...

One day, atop the ridge that bordered the orchard’s eastern edge, a boy stood alone.

He had no name.

Only a memory—a song his mother used to hum before she vanished in the War of Severance.

He hummed it.

Softly.

Not hoping for a reply.

But receiving one.

The Listening Crown stirred. Across the orchard, a note rose.

It was not his mother’s voice.

But it was a reply.

And in that moment, he knew—

She had been remembered.

And in remembering, he had become more than alone.

...

And somewhere, far beneath, the Heartroot pulsed again.

Not in urgency.

But in joy.

Because roots, once forgotten, were touching sky.

And the sky—finally—was listening back.

...

In the days that followed, the orchard entered a kind of waking dream.

Not all who arrived sought healing—some came bearing silence, deep and brittle, carried too long. Others brought fragments: a broken flute, a half-remembered lullaby, a shard of pottery etched with a name no one else recalled.

The orchard welcomed each as it would a rain after drought.

Children began weaving garlands from memory-leaves, gifting them to strangers who wept without knowing why. Memoryweavers sang lullabies to the wind, and the wind carried them to the corners of the world where forgotten grief waited patiently to be seen.

At night, beneath the bloom-lit boughs, Tian Shen often sat with newcomers in silence. He had learned by now: sometimes the deepest remembering required no telling, only presence.

And every so often, beneath the Listening Crown, a soft hum would rise unbidden—new harmonies twining with old.

It wasn’t a song that could be written.

It was a becoming.

And the Heartroot, pulsing gently beneath their feet, knew it too.

This was not the end of a story.

It was its unfolding.

Where memory was no longer what had been lost—but what was still willing to grow.