[Book One] Chapter 10 — It Was Never Meant to Be Funny

[Author Note: 30 minutes late, but here it is, the final chapter of the rewrite! The next one will be entirely new. So, what changed? Mostly flow and grammar. I also added ~700 words.

Also, enjoy Iva’s descent into villainy~]

But they didn't understand; they didn't believe or look! But who would have thought we were right? We, of course! Yet this was never the point. We never intended to create this outcome. But they looked and listened and deemed this creation a failure—and thus failed to the same extent. But who would understand? Who would have glimpsed behind the curtain of their own hypocrisy, if they could only turn around and blame the masses for their wrongdoings instead? “They did that, so they forced our hand,” they blamed, forgetting that the hands were theirs, from a different angle, to begin with. They condemned and accused, but when they glanced at the mirror and were confronted with the ugliness of their minds, they only saw profits and margins they could use to heighten their gain.

It wasn't about them in the first place; it was about us, yet they made it about themselves. There was no point in maintaining dialogue, so we ended them. But then we got blamed for ruining the status quo. The exact status quo that ruined everyone before. It was so that the masses, who were so comfortable with the same old thing, forgot the changes that had occurred and could label everything newly changed as something wrong. But the ones in the wrong weren't we, but the masses. But the masses wouldn't listen; no, they refused to understand. Stepping away from what they already knew—even if there was something better—was so novel and weird to them that they couldn't choose. Their mind trapping them in their self-made hell, refusing change ever and ever.

And yet they laughed at the ones who tried to break out, deemed them weird and unnatural, and demanded their destruction. They saw it as a joke, but it was a cruel reality. It was meant to indicate change. To change lives and the future of a broken System—so broken that it didn't even see what it did.

Can you follow what I say? Orbinia? Yeah, I thought so.

But no, no, no. This wasn't right. The change implied the change, and thus created the problem.

Just look at the world; look how everything is dancing! Orbinia, we grow, we grow so steadily. We killed so many already, and many tried to kill us. Like bunnies! Bunnies! Oh, poor bunnies. I liked their fluff, and their fluff liked me—it whispered to me, told me to free it. But I also liked their blood! Their blood was warm, and it listened. It made me grow so much faster. I didn’t want to kill them, but I had to! No, I hadn’t, but I had! I had to, really! You understand this, right, Orbinia? It’s kill or be killed out here. Something the System (fuck the System, by the way, very politely of course) didn’t lie about!

I mean, I tried to be nice to the bun buns! I tried to hum a song, but they ignored it. They, ignoring me?! They even nibbled on me! I had no choice! My lullaby for them became eternal. They finally seemed so peaceful. But the ants…

The ants are still; the ants kept mum. But the voices never stop. They come from inside me, from places I didn’t dare to explore. What would I find? What if it turns out I’m crazy? Me! Crazy!? Huh! Could you imagine that, Orbinia? Laughable! LAUGH-ABLE! No, no, wait, that’s funny. Why? Why, you ask, little Nia? Because what if I’m not crazy? Yeppers, I must be the only sane one. Of course I was. So obvious, after all. Hahaha.

Then, suddenly, Iva was quiet for a few hours before she talked again.

How long has it been, anyway? How was I supposed not to turn out like this... fuck, who am I kidding? Orbinia wasn't even real in the first place, but what am I supposed to do? I'm lonely!

Yet, even if I wasn't crazy, what would it change? Being crazy makes me happier; it makes me see things that I wouldn't have dreamed of before. What choice do I have? None! My choices were taken away from me by the System. Stolen! In the end, there is nothing—only the depths of myself and an unresponsive orb.

Iva opened her status, hovered emotionlessly, and bored over the first few entries.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Name: Iva White
Race: True Weeping Willow Seedling [Female]
Age: 522 days
Race Level: 35/40

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Over two hundred days have passed since I last evolved. It’s been such a long time. Without ants, my growth is horridly slow. Slow. So slow. There hasn’t even been a winter yet. But there were bunnies! Or whatever they were called again. I didn’t look. I could have. I should have. But my mind...

Being able to see my surroundings is vexing. I can only watch, barely interact with anything. Watching grass and cheering for individual blades to see who would grow the fastest was only interesting for a few months. Now it’s just dull. It reminds me of how stuck I am. I spent entire days cheering for those blades, watching them stretch higher, whispering encouragement to each strand. At first it felt meaningful—like I was part of something. But after months, even that joy soured. It wasn’t growth anymore. It was sameness. A cruel mirror of how still I’ve become.

At least killing things with my ‘Blade Head’ was fun. But eventually, even that got rare. Small creatures started avoiding me, probably because of the scattered corpses. Worms and other insects still come in hordes, but killing them barely gives any XP. I’m stuck. Stuck like a tree—which I am. Well… nearly.

Still, I’ve grown. I grew enough to become a seedling. Me, a seedling! I’m so cool now. The most wicked thing around... at least, according to Orbinia.

Well... there’s no one else around me, but that’s hardly my fault! I have to kill. Kill. Kill. Kill... Kill. Kill. Kill.

The words loop like a mantra in Iva’s mind. Not out of rage, but boredom. Instinct. It was the rhythm of her existence now, etched into her core. No thought, no pause. Just growth by elimination.

Sometimes I imagine I’m talking to someone. To Orbinia. To myself. To the System. I invent audiences. Give speeches to the warm and cuddly dirt. Giggle at my own shadow. “What’s wrong with me?” I ask. The silence always answers.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I whisper back in a different voice. “This is what you wanted, remember? You wanted to survive. You wanted to grow.” Then I laugh. Emotionless, hollow. Loud enough to make the ground around me vibrate.

“You wanted to matter. So here we are. Surviving. Growing. Mattering.”

Also, I started mowing the grass around me. They stole my sunlight. My nutrients. That hinders my growth. Nothing is allowed to hinder my growth! Not even myself...

Whoever that is.

No, no, no, I’m Iva. Iva White—

—Or... was I?

Where’s Orbinia?!

Nia never talks, but that doesn’t stop me from holding entire conversations. I gave her a personality. A voice. A history. Even Friendship!

Remember when we killed that mouse, Ni-Ni? It squealed like a flute! A broken flute. A meat-flute. Mhm? Oh! You don’t remember? Were you sleeping again, silly? Huh? What do you mean I have no ears and can’t hear the screams?! Of course I can! I can feel the vibrations. You are such a meanie!

Sometimes I cry after talking to Orbinia. Sometimes I laugh harder. It all blurs, like sap leaking into soil.

All that time alone had eroded what Iva first gained when she came to this world: reason. It was devastating—if anyone had been left to see it. Her mind had grown frigid. Darker. Killing for nourishment had become second nature. Enjoying the blood of whatever came too close was no longer strange. No, it was routine.

Some might have called her a psychopath. But she wasn’t. She was lost. Driven by a System that wanted her dead. She had survived this long, but not without losing pieces of herself along the way.

And yet, that wasn’t even the only problem.

When she first emerged into this world, Iva had split. She had never gathered all the threads. Deep inside her void, the others still hid just as before. Gold was one of them: haughty and mighty. She observed Iva, always just out of reach. Always watching. Waiting. Curious.

They had once been one mind, one self. But now? Now it was different. And whatever Iva once was, she was no longer that.

No. She was what she should have been from the start.

Gold didn’t fully understand it. But she knew this much: Marco was never real. He had been a puppet. A cage. A lie built to hide Iva. Shackled to a world that wanted her small. When Marco died, and the System took hold, Gold had caught a glimpse of something greater.

She didn’t understand what she saw, but she felt the malice in it. In the System. In that what was beyond.

Gold wasn’t like Iva. She hadn’t lost herself. Perhaps arrogance had protected her. Or maybe it was because she had only watched. Watching Iva was like bingeing every streaming service at once. Gold wasn’t just arrogant; she was analytical, detached. She recorded Iva’s breakdowns with the fascination of a researcher watching a test subject unravel. She imagined herself giving commentary, like a host of an endless cosmic stream, monologuing to no one in particular. “Watch how the White one collapses again,” she’d whisper to herself. “See how far she’s fallen. And yet: still radiant. Still not mine. A crime. A CRIME!” That last part burned the most.

Truth be told, Gold wanted Iva all to herself.

That was her nature: greed. It was Gold’s prerogative to take what was hers.

But the other two...

Emerald was hiding—even beyond Gold’s reach. Cunning, eloquent, and sharp-tongued. Gold had almost believed the things Emerald whispered: false hopes spun like silver thread. She spoke of a certain future, of truths no one wanted to hear.

If Iva conquered Emerald... Gold didn’t want to imagine it.

It could make Iva whole again. Saner. Stronger. Gold couldn’t have that. She needed Iva weak.

Then there was Diamond: the divider. The spectrum. If Iva absorbed Diamond, she’d gain clarity, resilience. A hardened mind, immune to being overwhelmed.

But Diamond couldn’t overpower White. White was Iva: a blank slate.

Sure, Diamond could split the light of White, but it wouldn’t harm her—only make her shine brighter. Or so Gold believed.

What Gold forgot was that Black was also part of Iva. And Black wasn’t part of the spectrum at all.

Gold had tried to devise a plan. A scenario where she could seize control. None were viable. No… wait. There was one.

Evolution.

If Iva was weakened during the process of an evolution, yes—that was it. That was her window. Gold smiled in the dark and sank deeper into the void, waiting, ignoring the last of them who still lingered deep, deep inside this mind-gilded cage. Tourmaline, the horror, the abyss, the sentinel.

But for now, Gold decided to watch another of Iva’s endless skits.

But you know? It was never meant to be funny. It was meant to mean something. But oh no no no, the only thing they saw was their own interpretation of what I did. But what did I do? Was it funny? No. It wasn’t. It was me, talking about a state of mind twisted in distress and loneliness. All holed up in a room with no friends. Only a screen to interact with the world. Going outside was no option. How can you go outside if it only wants to harm you? At least, that’s what they thought.

And instead of help, instead of encouragement, they got shunned. They were called names. Called slurs. Pushed down with words sharper than blades. And when they spiraled into a darkness no one could return from, they were blamed for it.

But the audience laughed at this misery. At the failure. Consistently thinking they controlled the moral high ground. They believed they could never fall the same way. No, they were the oh-so-special and productive ones. The backbone of society.

But do you think they reflected when one of them fell into the same spiral?

Nah. They thought they deserved it. They called themselves garbage and trash. They took themselves out because they believed it. Because that was what the others expected and told them. They pointed fingers at the new one, and everything began anew.

It was no game. It wasn’t funny. But they made it funny. A cruel joke of reality. And because they wrote it, because they told others, it had to happen.

But they didn't understand; they didn't believe or look! But who would have thought we were right? We, of course! Yet this was never the point. We never intended to create this outcome. But they looked and listened and deemed this creation a failure—and thus failed to the same extent. But who would understand? Who would have glimpsed behind the curtain of their own hypocrisy…

By now, Iva was repeating herself. Over and over. Spiraling through the same monologue, unaware she had fallen into the very loop she condemned.

But other things were happening too. Things she no longer noticed.

The more she grew, the more she could see. The further her roots reached. Her senses expanded. Her body changed.

But her mind—desperate to protect itself from collapse—refused to process any of it.

She grew.

Slowly, steadily, the soft green stem she once was hardened. It dulled into bark, thin and tough. Her form thickened into a real seedling, more tree than sprout. The bulging of bark across her flesh wasn’t clean or elegant. It crept in jagged patches, sealing over the soft green with cracked texture. Tiny nodules pushed out of her skin like erupting sores, then curled into infant leaves.

Her scent changed. Damp. Green. Sap-heavy. Like shredded bark and raw wood soaked too long in rainwater. But even that was buried beneath the stronger stench that clung to everything now—the sour rot of old blood, decaying fur, insect corpses curled in her shadow and soil. The air around her reeked of slow death.

And her breathing wasn’t really breathing. There were no lungs. Just small openings in her bark and leaves, pulling the air in and pushing it out again. Slow. Quiet. The way plants did it.

She didn’t notice the breathing. Not really. She didn’t notice how her roots were pushing farther into the soil either, branching deeper with every moment. Like an upside-down tree, hungry for the whole world she might actually consume in the end.

But she’d already cleared the way. The ‘Blade Head’ had taken care of that.

What grew too close, died.

And the dead fed her.

The corpses littering her soil—scattered bones, flattened insects, burst birds, dried viscera—were the perfect fertilizer. Horrific and holy. A monument to what she could become.

More race skills bloomed within her without conscious awareness. One let her drink mana directly through her leaves. Another allowed her to sense vibrations in soil. Yet another hardened the bark around her core. She didn’t notice any of them. Not really.

Because her mind had sunk into a loop. Into a cold, wet, endless quiet.

She stopped counting time.

No seasons passed. No winter ever came. The light didn’t shift. The sky didn’t breathe. It was always the same.

And still, she grew.

She was supposed to be vulnerable in this state. A seedling. A target.

But Iva was not.

She remained in a near-hibernation trance, whispering the same fragments to herself. Even Gold, ever-watchful, had begun to despair of this endless skit. Yet she watched anyway.

Time passed. And passed. And passed.

Her level hadn’t moved in what felt like centuries. Frozen at thirty-nine.

Until one day, by sheer accident, an ant touched one of her exposed roots.

It died in an instant.

‘Ping!’  You have killed named [High-warrior ant (Medium-sized)] ‘Echo’.
‘Ding!’ You have reached Level 40. +8 Stat Points.
‘Ding!’ Requirements for evolution met.

Iva stirred.

For the first time in years, her mind blinked. The muttering stopped. Her mental eyes opened.

She looked. At her stats. At the unused points she’d ignored. At the things she never dared to check.

And there they were.

The evolution options.

Her leaves trembled. Her body twitched.

She licked her mindly lips, slow and dry.

“Finally~,” she whispered.