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Chapter 628  The Thin Line Between Existence and Nonexistence

He had no way of knowing how accurate it was, but at least the practice kept him sane. Time had proven a difficult concept to communicate to the trees, who seemingly lived forever and saw no point whatsoever in dividing days into hours, minutes, and seconds, or years into months and weeks. The only thing the trees cared about were seasons; there was a season to sleep and a season to grow. Everything else was superfluous to them.

Currently, he was laying on the soft grass, trying and failing to fall asleep. Not only was he excited by his impending rebirth, but the role he had played in the creation of new life had his thoughts in a tizzy. Though the trees had done all of the work of birthing the new species, Joon-ho had given them the final piece of the puzzle necessary for those births to happen: a spark of inspiration.

Oftentimes, the barrier between success and failure was simply the knowledge that success was indeed possible. And humankind’s mere existence had given the trees that knowledge, which they used to successfully birth individual lifeforms that were separate from the collective communities that the trees had formed on their first attempt.

From what he had gathered, humanity’s advancements in genetic engineering were kindergarten-level to the immortal trees. No, not even that, humanity wasn’t even in the same ballpark!

If it had to be compared to something, humanity was a newborn infant that hadn’t even learned to open their eyes yet, much less crawl, walk, or run. That, he thought, might be a fairer comparison, though he was tempted to put it even farther back in a human’s development cycle. Perhaps humanity’s knowledge of genetics and evolution placed them on the level of a sperm cell, whereas the trees were adult olympic sprinters.

They were so far advanced, in fact, that they couldn’t even explain their knowledge in terms that could be understood by humankind. Everything Joon-ho knew about evolution told him that it took millions of years for a species to evolve, all the way back from when the first single-celled amoebas living in the primordial soup devoured the even smaller mitochondria and developed a symbiotic relationship to the present. Millions of years passed as evolution worked its slow, inevitable magic on developing and pushing forward the species.

(Ed note: The endosymbiotic theory is a hypothesis for why mitochondrial DNA is completely different from nuclear DNA, to the point where they aren’t even shaped the same. Mitochondrial DNA is a ring of about 16,500 base pairs and 37 genes, while nuclear DNA is a strand of about three billion base pairs divided into 23 pairs of chromosomes. Mitochondrial DNA is entirely inherited from our mothers, while nuclear DNA is a random mix we inherit from both parents. It’s an interesting field of study, to say the least.)

And when he had asked the trees, their response was simple: “We just let them grow.” They were either unable, or unwilling, to elaborate further. Joon-ho suspected it was an inability to couch it in terms he could understand, as the trees were otherwise incredibly forthcoming in their answers to his other questions. They held nothing back from him, and even forthrightly told him that it was their compensation for having killed the science team and “eating” his physical body.

When the trees had brought that up, he’d wholeheartedly accepted their apology. He figured he might as well get upset at a newborn puppy making a mess by pottying on the floor. The trees hadn’t known any better anymore than that newborn puppy, so his fate wasn’t something he could exactly blame them for. Sure, it had taken him a while to come to terms with being eaten and all, but he’d never blamed them for it.

His thoughts continued racing until, without realizing it, he crossed the line between wakefulness and sleep, then completely lost consciousness. It was almost as if a light switch labeled “Lee Joon-ho, human awakener” was flipped from on to off as he ceased to exist.

The moment he lost consciousness, a vast torrent of mana was forcefully thrust into his “body”, which slowly broke up into particles of pulsing light. If anyone were present that cared to count, they would see more than 37 trillion small blinking dots that drifted up into the sky above the timeless meadow before being gathered into a stream and fed into what looked like a very small black hole.

Before all of the particles had been absorbed by the black hole, the cypress turned her attention to the last little bits of what was formerly known as “Lee Joon-ho, human awakener” and a distinct sense of fondness projected from her to the particulate stream. It was almost... maternal in nature; obviously, the cypress was the one who had been most affected by the trees’ interactions with the young awakener.

The trees themselves appeared to have been physically present in the meadow, and they took a different exit. Instead of dissolving and flowing into the sky as a stream of particles, they slowly sank into the loamy soil until there was nothing left of them above the ground. Soon, all that remained of the timeless meadow that Joon-ho had grown so familiar with was nothing but a large, grassy meadow lit in a dim light that seemed to have no individual source and cast no shadows.

If Joon-ho had been conscious, he might have mistakenly thought that his mother had come to join him in his last moments, which would’ve been quite confusing. He was five light years, more than forty-seven trillion kilometers, away from Earth, where his mother still was!

But he wasn’t conscious. In fact, his entire existence was still in question and he may have crossed over the line between life and death instead of that between wakefulness and sleep.