(This time, that scared you, huh?)
Goddess Garden was probably the place with the richest life aura I had ever seen. Everything here was alive, even the tables, chairs, roads, and walls. Lush green vines wove themselves into neat vertical walls, and the strange, soft, thick lawn beneath our feet was as comfortable as a carpet. Massive round logs scattered everywhere served as the garden's tables and chairs—though the wild Ding Dangs living here treated them as public squares.
"These stumps are actually branches from the World Tree," Jia Jia told me as she sat in midair. "Cutting down trees that are still growing hurts them a lot. I couldn't bear to do that anyway. These are branches the World Tree shed on its own. Everything in the temple is made from this stuff."
The thickest branches required several people to wrap their arms around them, while even the cross-section of the thinnest leaf stem was large enough to serve as a sofa for a normally sized person. Why did these little things, with an average height of 0.1 Pandoras, insist on growing such enormous trees?
Sitting on a horizontally laid World Tree leaf stem that had been split into a semicircle, I looked around Goddess Garden. Everywhere I looked was covered in plants, with dazzling exotic flowers and strange grasses filling the view. There were almost no traces of artificial, lifeless things. Such an environment inevitably brought to mind the depths of an uninhabited primeval forest. A normal person would probably find it difficult to imagine what it felt like to live in such a place, but perhaps this was the most comfortable environment for the Life Goddesses. Their favorite beds were always soft plant buds, and their favorite bedrooms always had to grow among vines. These little things