Damn! I was strong enough to forget about the feeling of pain at this point. And yet not just my glaive failed to cut through the shield, but I also got hurt instead.

As I repeated such a process at many trees, I failed to do anything to these shields. In the end I had to accept such a result and returned to the seat of spectators and watched what was going on without doing anything else.

In the next few hours, all that happened was for these fruits to grow darker in colour and show more lines as if they wrinkled.

If my guess was correct, then these fruits were getting ripe and soon they’d fall out.

I imagined many scenarios for what was going to happen next. I pictured that race to come out from these fruits the same way baby birds would come out from their eggs.

Or perhaps they’d act exactly like any tree, and let these fruits cut off and fall from such height to the ground.

Would they crash after landing? Would they get hurt from the fall? Or that fruit would protect the ones inside, and would break apart later on?

I had many guesses, but none of these happened.

After five hours of waiting, these trees suddenly showed signs of ageing. The all green leaves started to grow pale, turn from green to yellow before shrinking and getting smaller in size as if they were dying.

This wasn’t just exclusive to the leaves, also the branches and the tree trunk showed the same signs. The branches and the trunk started to grow thinner and smaller, showing lots of wrinkles over its outer surface, while turning into black in colour.

It was like these trees got into a wild and long fire, turning them into something close to charcoal.

The before tens of metres in height trees turned into mediocre trees of around seven or eight metres in length. As for the rich and thick canopy from before, all vanished by this point.

All the leaves turned dark brown in colour, fell to the ground and became ash after that. The branches that appeared after the fall of the leaves had the same changes the entire trees had.

Instead of the proud crowns that previously expanded in dignity changed and turned into weak looking thin branches that pointed towards the ground, as if it was kneeling down to someone.

Amidst all this, the only branch that didn’t show any changes yet was the thick central one that extended from the top of the long gone canopies into the sky, carrying the fruits.

Then in the next couple hours, this branch showed a new change. Instead of shrinking down and getting weakened, these branches started to grow thicker.

It seemed under the work of the increased weight of these branches the entire trees began to shrink again. Or perhaps it was another sign of ageing or something.

In the next four hours, the entire trees became so tiny and small, not even exceeding three metres in height. As for the thick branches carrying the fruits, they also got shorter and were only one metre in length or even shorter.

I knew it was almost this close for these fruits to show up what was inside. The fruits kept getting darker until it turned from pale red in the beginning to pitch black in the end.

They got many deep running and densely packed lines that alternated between silver, red, and white in colour.

I waited on the side and watched attentively what was going to happen. I stayed for long hours there, and it was time to see what all this was about.

As things become this close from ending, I was ready to call out my personal army of warriors at any given sign of danger.

p I couldn’t tell if the ones appearing from these fruits would be friendly to me and my people. If they weren’t, then exterminating them would be an option.

I could also take Stephen’s thoughts into account, try to dominate and bind these with my threads and contracts instead of killing them.

After giving it more thought, it was better to take them under my control instead of wiping them out.

To make things easier and faster, I spread tons of bones around. I also activated my first technique and used both hands to make things a bit faster.

I didn’t want to get forced to kill these folks here. Before doing all that, I made sure to use my pillar’s skill and created a grand and growing shield that was enough to prevent those inside from going outside.

But as my moves were quite limited by the light that was still coming out from Stephen’s chest, I decided against moving around and expanding that shield for now.

*Crack!*

A single crack echoed in the middle of the world before lots of cracking sounds erupted in succession like waves.

I looked around and saw the tons of fruits showing deep cracks all over its surface. It was like an egg going to burst open, and what was inside was about to come out.

It finally started!

I was all tense, waiting for either a blessing or a disaster to happen. The fruits kept issuing loud cracking sounds. Then parts of it started to fall like it got peeled by a knife or something.

Small pieces began to fall off, and I instantly used my HawkEye skill and looked closer to a few fruits to see what was inside.

What I saw was a thin semi-transparent red membrane that enveloped what was inside. It looked like a sac surrounding an embryo, but these embryos were indeed huge to begin with.

Parts kept falling, and sacs began to appear. I could see some sort of fluid filling these sacs, with silver white light shining from what was inside, turning these fluids into red torches.

It was a weird scene. And I stood on my chariot motionless, attentively watching such a miraculous event.

*Flop!*