Dark red liquid gushed from the tear with even greater pressure than before, spraying onto the pit wall. The rock began melting the instant the liquid touched it, and the molten stone mixed with the liquid and streamed downward, like a dark red waterfall flowing in reverse.
Chisen's glasses were completely smeared with liquid. His vision had become a field of dark red.
He could no longer see the incision, but his blade was still in his hand, and his blade still remembered the incision's shape and position.
He made a third cut.
As the third cut went in, the main root made a sound.
It was not the sound of an earthquake or rock shattering. It was something alive, enormous, and anguished, rising from the deepest reaches of the earth.
That sound did not travel through the air. It traveled through the main root itself. Chisen's foot rested on the root, and the sound rose through his sole, through his leg bones, through his spine, through his skull, and exploded inside his brain.
Its frequency was almost too low to hear, but the body could feel it. Bones vibrated with that frequency, organs resonated with it, and the heart beat twice as fast as usual beneath its influence.
That sound was speaking-not in words, but in vibration, in pain, in something more primal, more immense, and more irresistible than human emotion. It was saying that it hurt.
The God Tree's main root was in pain.
It had grown beneath the soil for thousands of years-perhaps longer, perhaps longer than human history. Its roots spread deep through the earth, through rock, through mineral veins, through underground rivers, through fissures in the crust, like an enormous, silent web covering the entire continent.
It had never felt pain.
Nothing could hurt it.