The Hero Tree's branches swayed gently in the night breeze, an eerie glow flickering across its bark.
Tianyi kept his Byakugan active, his vision piercing the trunk, the growth rings, and the tree's vascular channels, delving deep into the network within the enormous tree.
As his vision pushed inward inch by inch, his brows gradually drew together.
This was not normal wood grain. An ordinary tree's growth rings formed concentric circles, spreading evenly outward from the center, each ring recording the passage of years.
But the Hero Tree's internal structure took a form that utterly defied nature-all its fibers had grown wildly outward from the same side, as though some external force had pulled, twisted, and swollen them, piling them into their present shape.
It was as though the tree had been this way from the very beginning.
Tianyi's pupils contracted slightly as a thought surfaced in his mind. Could it be-!
His body slowly rose into the air, Magnet Release carrying him through the gaps between the branches and leaves. Ten meters, fifty meters, a hundred meters. At this height, the Hero Tree's full shape finally came clearly into his Byakugan's field of vision.
The whole tree looked less like something that had grown on its own and more like a broken section of an enormous tree lying across the ground.
One end was blunt and thick, cracked and covered in signs of weathering and erosion, as though some violent force had torn it from a greater whole.
The other end sent new branches slanting upward. Over the long years, those branches had struggled to grow, eventually forming its current crown.
It was like a broken branch carelessly tossed onto the soil. By chance, its wound had touched the ground; by chance, it had escaped being crushed; by chance,