The Sacred Tree That Became a Sword
Luiana kept her hand pressed against the sacred tree, feeling the emotions flowing from the soul inside it. In the distance, the low thunder of magic shells fired by the defense system rumbled across the night. Yet the resonance passing through her palm rang clearer than any of those sounds. The feeling wasn’t made of words. I want to protect the children. I want to be with them. If only I could move, I want to move together. It was a quiet wave that stirred the very center of her soul.
“You want to go with me?” Luiana asked softly, sensing the vibration beneath her palm.
The answer didn’t come in words. But the pulse against her fingertips grew a fraction sharper.
“Got it.” Luiana narrowed her eyes. “I’ll find a way.”
She no longer saw the sacred tree as a shackle. Instead, she had come to accept it as another version of herself—one that looked in the same direction she did. Yet simply changing how she viewed it didn’t solve anything. Before searching for answers, she first had to define the problem clearly. It was one of the lessons she had learned across her previous life, through countless hardships, collisions, and breakthroughs.
Before swinging a sword, measure the distance. Before cutting down an enemy, know exactly where they stand. The principle hadn’t changed.
The problem was simple. The sacred tree was a tree. No matter how much soul, magic, or connection it shared with her, there was no way for a colossal tree to move alongside her. Trees lived by driving roots into the earth.
Luiana calmly listed every possibility.
Move the sacred tree. Impossible. Uprooting it and replanting it elsewhere was the suggestion of someone who didn’t understand the bond between sacred tree and Dryad. It would be closer to tearing out vital organs than moving house.
Increase the connection distance. She might be able to extend it a little. But she had already tested that several times. The moment she moved beyond a certain range, the link weakened sharply, and before she knew it she was back beside the tree. It wasn’t something that could be solved by forcing it.
Take part of the sacred tree with her. Luiana considered it briefly before erasing the idea at once. She had no way of knowing how much of the root that held her would need to be removed. Even if she could separate it, she didn’t know whether that fragment could be carried around. Above all, that wouldn’t be going together. It would be closer to stealing a single piece and leaving the sacred tree behind in this place.
The emotion the sacred tree’s soul had sent was not that.
I want to be with you.
That wordless resonance still repeated quietly beneath her palm.
Luiana closed her eyes, then opened them slowly. The situation felt hopeless. She and the sacred tree were clearly looking in the same direction, yet no path forward existed. In that despair, she reached for her sword.
Not to fight. In her previous life, swordsmanship had also been Luiana’s way of organizing her thoughts. A method of straightening tangled threads into a single line. She would place scattered emotions and judgments on the tip of her blade and watch where it pointed. That was her way.
Suppressing her magic as much as possible so it wouldn’t affect the village, she began to swing the sword slowly. The power riding the blade was so faint it wouldn’t stir a single leaf.
Swish.
A pale green line traced through the air. Like a shooting star slicing across the night sky, a beautiful trajectory bloomed for a brief moment before vanishing.
Luiana gazed at the line. Watching it slowly fade, she suddenly remembered her past life.
She had formed many bonds through teaching. Some had fought beside her. But as she climbed the tower, the space next to her emptied. The strong died. The lucky died. The cautious eventually stopped on some floor or another. The closer she drew to the final stratum, the more the only thing that remained at her side was a single sword.
Even amid scattered blood and countless lines of death, the sword had always been with her. Her companion in that life had been a blade.
Then what about now?
Beyond the arc drawn by her sword tip, she saw a massive living being. The sacred tree, roots sunk deep into the earth, branches spread high into the sky. A being bound to her by soul, one that had no choice but to be together. Her companion in this life was the sacred tree.
Both were her companions. Yet the differences between them were too great.
A sword traveled with the body. The sacred tree was linked by the soul. A sword could be held and taken anywhere. The sacred tree remained rooted in one place. A sword moved as Luiana moved. The sacred tree could not move even if she wished it.
If only the sacred tree could move freely, like a sword.
The moment the thought rose, Luiana’s blade stopped.
“Like a sword,” she whispered, almost too softly to hear.
It was an absurd idea. A colossal sacred tree moving—and like a sword, no less. Anyone who heard it would wave it off as nonsense. Yet her sword tip had already halted.
Luiana looked at the sacred tree again.
“Could you… become that?”
Not moving the tree. Not tearing off a piece. If the sacred tree itself could take a form that allowed it to go with her.
She had no certainty yet. Only a small, ridiculous possibility had surfaced. But to Luiana it felt like a single faint path appearing in the darkness where nothing had been visible before.
To keep from losing that path, she looked deeper into the sacred tree.
The first thing she saw was the densely packed magic circuits. The Cartein-style Magic System. The precise, intricate, colossal flow she had personally carved into both the sacred tree and her own body had settled into place according to the tree’s shape. It stretched downward with the roots, rose in a solid pillar with the trunk, branched in every direction with the limbs, and created countless endings with the leaves.
That form was completely different from a sword that stood as a single line.
A sword had a center line. From hilt to blade, from blade to tip—one continuous direction. The sacred tree was the opposite. Its roots spread downward, its branches outward and upward, its leaves formed innumerable ends.
Because they were so different, Luiana did not try to force them to match. Instead, she first took a slow breath. Then she began to read.
Among the countless spreading circuits, she focused on a single visible line. Following it with her gaze, she found older grains beneath it. The circuits were what she had carved, but what supported those circuits was the sacred tree’s own body. The flow of sap beneath the bark, the growth rings layered inside it. Deeper still, she felt the direction of life that had carved its own path over long years.
The magic circuits Luiana had drawn were like a title written on a cover. The true sentences existed within the time the sacred tree had lived.
She read those sentences line by line.
The sensation of first roots clutching the soil. The memory of a young sapling swaying in a torrential rain yet rising again. The time it had stood firm even after shedding leaves in the dry season. Wounds torn and gouged by beasts’ claws, crashing lightning, fierce gusts. The places where those wounds had healed and grown tougher.
All those flows were different from one another. Yet “different” did not mean “disordered.”
Luiana knew from learning the sword that a sword path was never made of straight lines alone. Every bend, every turn, every pause came together to create a single direction in the end.
The sacred tree was the same. Its roots spreading sideways had not been flight. They had been a choice to support the body. Its branches splitting in every direction had not been chaos. They had been paths to receive light. Its leaves creating countless endings had not been scattering. They had been the way it touched the world in order to live.
Luiana traced each divergence. From the tips of leaves to branches. From branches to trunk. From trunk to roots. Then from roots back to trunk. In the rising and falling flow, she realized the sacred tree was not simply a living tree. It was an axis of life steeped in the origin of the elves.
Hearts that had grown weary, grown afraid, yet still longed for a nest. That origin had soaked into the spaces between the tree’s rings. Some lingered near the roots, some climbed the trunk, some reached the ends of the branches. Those origins had gathered and awakened the Dryad’s soul.
Luiana felt a soul different from her previous life—gentle and slow. That soul was still worrying about the children. The elves who flinched at every roar of cannon fire. The children burying their faces in Hyacinth’s embrace. The spirits trembling as they gathered around the sacred tree. It felt all of it with her.
Luiana tightened her grip on the sword. But the strength was not to push down—it was to hold on. Each time the flow scattered, she gathered it with the sense of Stopping. Like stopping a sword, like stopping magic, like seizing the will before it rushed ahead. She did not cut off the sacred tree’s flow. She simply confirmed where it began, where it split, and where it gathered again.
The mages of the Tower watching her could barely breathe. Pale green lines kept rising across the entire sacred tree before vanishing. Luiana, eyes closed, checking and tuning the flow. The sight looked so solemn it seemed almost like she was performing a ritual.
That solemnity soon reached the elves as well. Not many knew exactly what was happening. Most did not understand what the Cartein-style Magic System was, or how absurd it was to read the flow inside the sacred tree. But they could tell that Luiana was searching for something together with the tree. That was enough.
Hyacinth knelt first. The child in her arms lifted its head. The child stared at Hyacinth’s face for a moment, then copied her small hands and pressed them together. Soon other elves bowed their heads one by one. Elders, spirit mages, even craftsmen whose hands were still stained with dirt—all looked in the same direction.
The sacred tree and Luiana. The object of their prayers was not divided in two. The colossal tree and the Dryad standing before it had already become a single mother to them.
No one spoke aloud. They simply wished in their hearts.
Please let it go well. Please don’t let Mother be hurt. Please don’t let the sacred tree suffer. Please let this forest and these children smile again.
Small prayers gathered and soaked into the air. They were not spells or magic. But that was how elves prayed. When earnest wishes became one wind and reached the sacred tree, a miracle was born. Just as when a Dryad had been born here.
A faint warmth joined the pale green magic. Luiana could not hear the prayers directly. Yet within the sensation of reading deeper into the sacred tree, she felt a warm current quietly flowing in. The flow did not urge her. It simply held her, so she would not forget there was a place to return to while she searched for the path.
Luiana’s consciousness descended further into the sacred tree. Growth rings parted layer by layer, and time receded beyond them. Decades, centuries—perhaps even longer—all of it might have rushed backward at once.
When branches were not yet branches. When the trunk was still too small to be called a trunk. When the roots had not yet gripped the earth deeply. And finally, Luiana saw it.
There was a single seed. A large, round, brown seed. Its hardened, dried surface was covered in tiny scars. The seed had slept quietly for a long time inside a small pit. Then one day, a crack appeared on its hard surface. A tiny root reached downward. A tiny sprout rose upward.
In that instant, Luiana understood. The root heading down and the sprout heading up pointed in different directions, yet they were not separate lines. One went down to hold on. One rose up to advance. It was how a single life first established itself in the world.
Hold the earth, face the sky. That had been the sacred tree’s first line.
Luiana grasped that line. The single direction that began deep in the roots, pierced the center of the trunk, and reached the highest branch. No matter how many roots, branches, and leaves existed, this one line ran through them all. The path the sacred tree had lived, and the new path it could become.
“Found it.”
Luiana’s voice was small. But the moment the words left her, the entire sacred tree answered by shining. A single pale green line rose from deep in the roots. It climbed the center of the trunk and reached the tip of the highest branch. Even among countless branches and leaves, that line did not blur. Instead, every flow began finding its proper place with that line as its standard.
Luiana gazed at the line. The small possibility she had first conceived had now become certainty.
Not moving the tree. Not tearing off a piece. Taking every direction the sacred tree had lived and reestablishing it on a single center line.
Luiana looked down at her sword. Then at the sacred tree.
“Sword.”
A single word that symbolized her previous life. This time it was not a word that burst forth from desire. It was the answer that would let her be with the sacred tree.
At that moment, the sacred tree’s soul pulsed very softly beneath her palm. As if it had been waiting for that answer for a long time.
The moment the answer connected, the first line meshed with the Cartein-style Magic System. The pale green line no longer stayed inside the sacred tree. Light that began at the ends of the roots climbed the trunk, and the flows that had scattered into branches and leaves returned to the center line.
Luiana held her breath. No—not only her breath. The hand gripping the sword, the palm touching the sacred tree, the flow of magic, the will filled with desperation. She gathered all of it at a single point.
Stopping.
What was needed now was not a pushing force. It was the act of setting an end so the flow could change shape on its own.
The sacred tree shook. Dust rose, and branches spread against the night sky burned with pale green light. It was not the shaking of something about to collapse. It was the movement of a body waking from long sleep and stretching for the first time.
Small gasps rose among the elves. Yet no one stopped their prayers. Hyacinth bowed her head deeper with the child still in her arms. The elders closed their eyes and gathered their hearts toward the sacred tree and Luiana. Even the Tower mages could not speak. The scene before them was too unreal for words.
Leaves dissolved into light. Branches returned to flow. The magic circuits inside the trunk did not collapse—they grew clearer. A colossal structure capable of moving an entire city was being rearranged so it could fit inside a single sword blade.
It should have been impossible. Yet the elves’ origin held the sacred tree steady, the sacred tree’s soul chose the direction itself, and Luiana caught the end of every flow with Stopping.
Three wills looking in the same direction meshed together. The meshed wills created a single miracle.
The roots did not tear free from the earth. The deep time and origin left behind became pale green afterglow that quietly wrapped the ground beneath the village. The sacred tree was not disappearing. The traces that had embraced the village remained here, and only the body that needed to move gathered as light into Luiana’s hand.
The shadow of the sacred tree that had blocked the sky grew smaller and smaller. In its place, a single sword took form.
The hilt retained the grain of the roots. The blade stretched straight, resembling the center of the trunk. Inside it, complex magic circuits flowed like pale green veins. The blade was layered with the countless grains the branches and leaves had formed, compressed into thin sheets.
It was neither metal nor wood. It was what had been a tree. What had held a soul. What had been born from prayer. And now, what had become a sword in order to move with Luiana.
The final light gathered at the sword tip. For a moment, the entire night forest fell silent. The distant cannon fire, the elves’ breathing, the trembling of the spirits—all of it seemed to stop at once. Then the light settled.
In Luiana’s hand was a sword. Long, quiet, and strangely warm.
The moment she gripped it, Luiana knew. The sacred tree had not disappeared. It was in her hand. More precisely, it was no longer that she stood beside the sacred tree. The very moment she held the sword was being beside the sacred tree.
The connection between Dryad and sacred tree had not been severed. It had grown far closer. A pulse traveled up her palm. It was the same resonance of the soul she had felt beyond the bark moments ago.
I want to protect the children. I want to be with them. If I could move, I want to move together.
That resonance now beat very clearly inside the sword hilt.
Luiana slowly lifted the sword. The elves all raised their heads at once. On their faces, awe rose before any sense of loss over the vanished sacred tree.
Where the colossal sacred tree had stood, no tree now blocked the sky. But the afterglow of its roots remained. And in Luiana’s hand rested another body their mother had chosen.
Hyacinth murmured in a trembling voice.
“Mother…”
It did not matter who the word was meant for. It was for Luiana, and it was for the sacred tree that had become a sword.
Instead of answering, Luiana gripped the sword lightly. Pale green light pulsed quietly inside the blade.
Then Luiana turned her head. In the distance, the faint silhouette of the tower appeared like a shadow. From the gate beneath the tower came the cries of monsters once again.
That place was no longer a symbol of unreachable despair.
Luiana lowered her sword tip. And for the first time, she took a step forward together with the sacred tree.