The fusion lasted three full days and nights.
For those three days, Sen lay facedown on the icy stone floor of the underground greenhouse.
Without moving a muscle.
His old T-shirt had long since been soaked with the oily sweat expelled from his body.
Until it was blackened and sticky.
It gave off a rancid, animal stench mixed with the smell of old grease.
Layers of dead skin began cracking and peeling off his body.
Like a snake shedding its skin, he left great patches of thin, grayish-white flakes on the ground.
Meanwhile, outside the greenhouse.
The whole of Barren Mountain had gone completely wild.
The divine tree chakra spilling out of Sen's body, as thick as a green fog.
Surged through the cracks in the stone.
And seeped into the roots of every tree and every weed.
Crack, crack, crack...
Ordinary shrubs whose trunks had once been no thicker than rice bowls grew into towering monsters that would take several people linking arms to encircle, all in just three days.
Even the tiny, palm-high weeds on the ground shot up to two meters tall.
Rows of black, hacksaw-like barbs sprouted along the edges of their leaves.
Rustling in the wind.
At that moment, the leaked power had turned all of Barren Mountain.
Into a primeval forbidden zone where no one dared tread.
Three days later, at dawn.
Sen's tightly shut eyelids twitched slightly.
He slowly opened his eyes.
Whoosh!
An extraordinarily deep, rich golden-green light flashed in the depths of his pupils, then vanished.
Those dead-fish eyes that had always looked half-asleep.
Were now as dark as an ancient, icy pool with no bottom.
Sen braced himself against the ground and slowly sat up.
He scratched at the dead skin still clinging to his face with a fingernail, then