Chapter 220: The Gift

The nights settled into a new rhythm after the box knocked back.

Days belonged to the Meridian Realm and its seams. Nights belonged to the sea.

And every shift since, Ren had stopped by the covered district before going hunting, crossed the cleared square, and pressed the disc against the box — the sealed dark cube keeping one drowned neighborhood lit and alive.

Every time, the answer was the same.

One low sound rolled up through the stone, rose slightly at the end, and stopped.

’A month of ignoring me, and now you won’t stop asking,’ Ren thought, palm flat against the dark surface. ’You and every other mystery I own.’

"Still working on it."

Then he went hunting.

He was floating above the tower roads that night, deciding which streets still needed clearing, when he realized something was wrong with the song.

Ren stopped.

The whale-song had become part of the sea by now. He’d fallen asleep to it for a month. Hunted to it. Worked beneath it long enough that he’d learned its shape without ever meaning to — voice over voice, deep enough that sometimes he couldn’t tell where one giant ended and the next began.

Tonight, there was a hole in it.

One voice was still singing, but barely.

Thin. Cracked. Always a little behind the others, like someone trying to sing with a hand around their throat.

Ren hung there and listened.

Once.

Twice.

Long enough to be sure.

Then he changed direction.

— • —

The damaged voice led him past the final towers and out into open water, where the drowned city finally gave up pretending there was more city left.

The whale wasn’t hard to find.

It swam below the others, slower than the rest of the pod, its enormous body tilted slightly to one side like a cart carrying too much weight.

Something was sticking out of its back.

At first Ren thought it was debris. A broken mast, maybe.

Then he got closer.

The thing was black shell, taller than a house, buried deep into the whale at an angle that made his skin crawl. Flesh had swollen around its base into a mound of old scar tissue, and beneath the skin, dark lines spread away from it in every direction.

Roots.

Of course they looked like roots.

[SCAN: SONGLEECH. DANGER TO HOST: SEVERE.]

[IT DRINKS THE VOICE.]

Ren stared at the second line.

"That’s the worst thing you’ve ever shown me."

A beat.

"And you once wrote GEOLOGY on my death certificate."

The System offered no defense.

It didn’t really need one.

The parasite wasn’t drinking blood.

It was drinking the whale’s song.

The deep voice these creatures used to speak, to greet each other, maybe to remember things — whatever it actually was, the leech had been feeding on it for a long time.

Long enough that there was almost nothing left.

The whale slowly turned one enormous eye toward him.

It didn’t run.

Didn’t threaten him.

It just watched.

Then, very carefully, it rolled enough to present the wounded part of its back.

Ren stared at it.

The gesture was painfully familiar.

Like someone holding out a splinter because they’d finally found the one person nearby with steady hands.

’A patient the size of a street,’ Ren thought. ’And I don’t own one proper medical tool.’

He rolled up his sleeves anyway.

— • —

The problem was obvious once he got close enough.

The Songleech wasn’t sitting on the whale.

It was rooted into it.

Stormsever would remove the parasite.

Stormsever would also remove a considerable amount of whale.

Not ideal.

This wasn’t a battlefield problem.

It was surgery.

Surgery in open water, on a creature large enough to have neighborhoods measured against it, while the rest of its pod slowly gathered around them to watch.

Because of course they did.

Watching was practically the national sport down here.

Ren ignored the audience.

He did it the farmer’s way.

Slow.

In order.

First, the roots.

Gravebloom seeds spread across the whale’s back, following the dark lines beneath the skin. Wither-petals opened one after another, fed with Death, touching only where Ren needed them.

Then he waited.

And worked.

And waited some more.

Hour by hour, the buried roots changed.

Fresh became old.

Flexible became dry.

What had been sunk deep into living flesh started loosening like weeds left too long under autumn sun.

The whale’s song trembled whenever a deeper root gave way.

It never moved.

Ren had treated much smaller patients who complained considerably more.

Most of them had been Ren.

Sometime after midnight, the Songleech realized it was dying.

The spike jerked.

The whale flinched beneath him.

Then every remaining root pulled at once.

Not upward.

Down.

The parasite stopped trying to stay attached and started trying to bury itself deeper.

"There you are."

Snare-blooms erupted around the spike.

Life-fed flowers wrapped it in seconds, thick green growth locking around black shell like fists.

Ren was already moving.

He reached the wound with Heavenpiercer in hand, laid the edge beside the thickest root, and fed Death through the cut.

The root greyed.

Cracked.

Collapsed into powder from the inside.

The Songleech thrashed once.

Ren grabbed the spike with both hands.

Planted both boots against the whale.

And pulled.

For several extremely unpleasant seconds, nothing happened.

Then the whole thing tore free.

It came out like a fence post being ripped from wet ground, followed by a cloud of dark rot and dead root.

Ren let it sink two meters.

Then cut it in half.

Just to be sure.

— • —

The hole left behind was large enough for him to stand inside.

Ren floated down into the wound.

"All right. Weed’s gone."

He put both hands against the raw flesh.

"Now the ground."

Life answered.

Green-gold light spread from his palms, flowing through torn muscle and damaged channels like water finding dry cracks. Flesh drew together beneath his hands. Torn edges closed. Old scar tissue softened where the law touched it.

Slowly, the whale’s voice changed.

The broken note steadied first.

Then deepened.

Then, for the first time since Ren had found it, the whale sang without anything choking the sound.

Kaia pressed close through the bond.

Warm.

Quiet.

She stayed there while he worked.

His father had taught him something simple in the family fields years ago.

You didn’t pull a weed and walk away.

You closed the soil afterward.

Ren closed the soil.

— • —

When it was done, the whale rose beside him.

It turned until one enormous eye was level with his entire body.

Then it sang.

One note.

At that distance, Ren didn’t so much hear it as exist inside it.

The sound went straight through him — bigger than the greeting he’d received before, fuller, no crack hiding inside it now.

And then the rest of the sea answered.

One whale.

Then another.

Then dozens.

The missing place in the song filled all at once, the choir closing around the returned voice until the water from horizon to horizon seemed to be carrying the same enormous chord.

Something inside Ren shifted.

Not painfully.

Not violently.

It simply—

clicked.

[WATER LAW: 1.47% → 3.02%.]

[CAUSE: THE SONG.]

Ren stared.

Then read it again.

Then a third time, because apparently the numbers had decided they needed supervision.

More than one and a half percent.

In one night.

More Water comprehension than every crate, corpse, graft, and harvested material of the last month put together.

Given to him by a whale saying thank you.

"Cheaper than a law hall," Ren said weakly.

Nobody answered.

’Somewhere on campus, there’s a graded cultivation room with a months-long queue and a merit price I still can’t argue with.’

He looked at the whale.

’And I just got out-taught by a whale.’

— • —

Ren was still floating there, tired enough to feel it and pleased enough not to care, when the sea beneath him moved.

He looked down.

Not a current.

Something else.

The darkness itself seemed to rise.

Slowly.

At first his mind tried to make it another whale.

Then it kept coming.

And coming.

Water shoved against him from the amount of mass displacing it below, and eventually his eyes simply stopped trying to understand the full shape.

A back surfaced from the darkness like a drowned hillside.

Fins followed, vast and slow, like sails from some old story written by someone with no sense of reasonable proportions.

Then came the eye.

Ren knew that eye.

Pale.

Patient.

Wide as a plaza.

The same eye that had opened beneath him on the first night the whales truly acknowledged him.

Only now he could see what it belonged to.

The eldest rose until that eye was directly in front of him.

Ren looked very small.

That was fine.

He’d been small before.

The whale didn’t sing.

Didn’t move closer.

It simply watched him.

Waiting.

Ren looked at it for a few seconds.

Then he swam forward.