Wizard: My career panel has no upper limit

The azure garden is trembling.

Every mycelium is shrinking, and every leaf is curling.

"Serafina".

"exist."

“Take 'it' out.”

The Bright-Eyed Witch did not hesitate, but her pupils suddenly contracted for a moment.

Of course she knew what "it" was.

Deep within the Azure Garden lies a secret room.

The secret chamber had no door; the entrance was sealed off by three layers of living vines and a barrier of ethereal remains.

In the past five thousand years, only Ash herself has entered, and only three times.

The first time is to put things in, the second time is to check their condition, the third time... is now.

Serafina stood before the entrance to the secret chamber, the vines slowly retreating after sensing Aisha's will.

The removal of the ethereal barrier is more complex, requiring Ashe to personally input an unlocking sequence from a distance that only her soul frequency can match.

After the barrier dissipated, a suffocating atmosphere filled the sealed room.

The smell wasn't rotten; quite the opposite, it was so fresh it was almost pungent.

An entire spring valley was compressed into a three-foot-square stone chamber, its vitality condensed to a nauseating degree.

On a stone platform in the center of the secret chamber lies a seed.

Seed of the World Tree.

It took Ash a full twelve hundred years to cultivate this seed.

From the initial concept to the repeated modifications of the gene template, to the countless failed budding experiments in the cultivation environment.

Every failure means that hundreds of years have been wasted, and every restart requires accumulating nourishment and spiritual energy from scratch.

Twelve hundred years.

For ordinary people, that was a long period of time, spanning several dynasties.

For a wizard, that is enough to complete the entire journey from apprentice to the pinnacle.

She poured all of this time into the silent seed in her palm.

A newcomer who had been in the game for less than two years forced her to use this trump card ahead of schedule.

"Ron Ralph".

She held the seed in her palm, her five fingers together.

"You really surprised me."

………………

The seed of the World Tree was placed at the center of the green tide.

That location was precisely calculated to ensure that the seed's roots, once germinated, can reach every key node in Green Tide's existing network via the shortest path.

The instant the seed fell into the soil, every running observation system on the public server detected an unusual magical pulse.

The intensity of that pulse far exceeded that of any conventional species release.

It's not like a seed falling into the soil, but more like the last burst of light released by a star before it collapses—brief, intense, and impossible to ignore.

Within the first second of contact with the soil, the World Tree seed draws out all the nutrients from a wide area.

The soil around it quickly cracked, dried up, and turned into powder, squeezed dry by an unseen hand, squeezing out the last drop of water.

In the second, the roots pierce the ground, reaching the core network of the mother flower.

The root system comes into contact with the network without any "communication" or "negotiation" process.

The roots of the World Tree directly overwrote the signaling protocol of the Mother Nest Flower.

The collective consciousness of the mother nest flower did not struggle, or rather, it did not have time to struggle.

Communication nodes disrupted by the Deep Cave Bards, the consciousness center paralyzed by the Fear Aggregate...

Those wounds that originally plunged the Green Tide into chaos have now become the entry points for the World Tree to infiltrate.

A defensive line riddled with holes is easier to breach than an intact city wall.

However, this time it was our own people who conquered it.

The tree trunk bursts through the ground and climbs upwards at a visible speed, gaining tens of meters every second.

The bark crackled under the tension of growth, splattering debris and sap, and filling the air with an intense, almost suffocating, woody fragrance.

By the thirtieth second, the World Tree had already exceeded five hundred meters in height.

The tree canopy spreads across the sky, covering the entire area of ​​several kilometers with its dense, opaque branches and leaves.

Ron witnessed all of this from the observation room.

"What's this……"

Azalea's voice was filled with surprise.

“The World Tree.” Ron recognized the structure.

Deep within the royal clan archives lies a fragment of a Third Age document marked "Top Secret".

The fragments describe a theoretical model known as the "ecological hegemony tree," a superorganism capable of incorporating plant ecology into its own control network.

The wizards of the Third Age deduced the possibility of such a thing, and ultimately concluded that "theoretically feasible, but practically impossible."

Because the time and resources required to cultivate such a seed far exceed the capacity of any single great wizard.

"Unless she has more than a thousand years to prepare."

Aishe, 5,000 years old.

For her, a thousand years was only one-fifth of her life.

After the World Tree fully unfolded, the green tide underwent a dramatic transformation.

The original decentralized, fungal-spreading, loose ecological network was completely reconstructed through the root system of the World Tree.

Each pioneer vine, each spine tree, and each mother nest flower is no longer an independent entity.

Their root systems are connected to the root system of the World Tree, nutrient cycling is uniformly regulated, and chemical signals are centrally managed.

Countless tributaries flowed into a main river, their course no longer chaotic, their power coalescing into an unstoppable torrent.

The four extradimensional creations that Ron had previously released were the first to drown in this torrent.

The eternally hungry chunk of meat was the first to be dealt with.

It was still feasting on the northwestern edge of the green tide, its countless mouths greedily gnawing on the remains of the pioneer vine, completely unaware of the approaching danger.

The roots of the World Tree suddenly pierced through the ground, and dozens of wooden spears, each as thick as an adult's waist, pierced through the fleshy body at the same time.

The flesh's regenerative ability remained astonishing; the pierced tissue began to regrow within two seconds, attempting to devour and digest the wooden spears.

But this time, what it ate was not quite right.

The broken ends of those wooden spears were oozing black sap.

The corrosive genes of the Ecliptic Vine have been integrated into the World Tree's control network into its own attack methods.

The black sap doesn't damage the structure of organic tissues; what it does is far more insidious.

The vitality of organic tissues is extracted and transformed into nutrients that the World Tree can utilize.

When the regeneration rate is first caught up with the plundering rate, the volume of the meat begins to shrink at a visible rate.

From the size of a house, to a carriage, to a table, to a fist.

Finally, the hunger that had once devoured the entire Pioneer Vine Forest turned into a tiny bead of flesh the size of a sesame seed.

The aggregate of pure fear is the second target to be dealt with.

Fear itself has no physical form and cannot be eliminated by physical means.

However, the World Tree contains the genes of the Dream Flower, whose hallucinogenic spores can cause the consciousness of intelligent beings to collapse.

The upgraded spores, after being modified by the World Tree, have been given a new function: weaving a "cocoon of cognition".

The principle of cognitive cocoon is extremely ingenious; it weaves layer upon layer of false cognition around the target.

This traps the fear aggregate itself in a bizarre cycle.

It was trying to intimidate everything around it, but everything around it "thought" it wasn't afraid.

When the fear conglomerate finds itself completely sidelined, its output begins to decline sharply.

A mirror is just a blank piece of glass if it cannot reflect any shadows of the object it is reflecting.

The fear congeal gradually became transparent and thinner under the spore cocoon, eventually turning into a wisp of almost imperceptible mental remnant.

The ending of the Dream-Eating Winged Serpent carries a certain irony.

It hovers above the green tide, attempting to continue disrupting the mother flower's consciousness reorganization cycle with its dream cocoon.

But the mother flower's consciousness no longer exists.

The World Tree's consciousness operates in a completely different way than that of the Mother Nest Flower.

The mother flower is distributed, like a network of countless computers, and attacking any one node can cause a ripple effect.

The World Tree is centralized, like a monster-level supercomputer.

You can attack its peripheral interfaces, but the core processor is protected by layers of nested firewalls, making it impossible to reach from the outside.

When the Dream-Eating Winged Serpent's mental fluctuations collided with the World Tree's barrier of consciousness, it was like a moth hitting glass—it caused no pain or itch.

The inhibitor gene of the Black Bone Giant Tree has been rearranged into an isolation layer in the World Tree system.

Inhibin surged in from all directions, severing it one by one.

Ultimately, this giant crimson bird, which once fed on the nightmares of intelligent beings, found itself trapped in a dream from which it could not awaken.

The Deep Cave Bard is the last and most difficult to deal with.

Musical sounds are formless and intangible, yet they penetrate all physical barriers.

No matter how hard the wood of the World Tree is, it cannot block sound waves.

Those melodies that dissolve self-awareness still echo in the underground roots of the green tide.

Although its strength has been greatly weakened due to the unified regulation of the World Tree, it remains like a thorn that cannot be removed.

The genes of the *Xirānaria fortunei* played an unexpected role at this moment.

The World Tree extends the rewriting ability of the soil-repelling fungus to the soil layers touched by the entire underground root network.

From the inside out, layer by layer, the acoustic properties of the soil are precisely rearranged.

The geological structures that originally allowed musical sounds to propagate without loss were gradually replaced by a special matrix with high damping and strong attenuation.

Musical sounds constantly attenuate, distort, and go out of tune during their propagation.

The roots of the World Tree easily enveloped it, along with the still-bubbling sap, sealing it within an insulating layer deep underground.

Ron watched the entire process of the four extradimensional creations being subdued one by one without any change in his expression.

"Aren't you nervous?" Azalea asked.

"I'm calculating."

"What kind of?"

"Consider how many resources she invested in accelerating the ripening of this seed."

"And... just how great is the cost of artificially ripening?"

In Ron's view, the appearance of the World Tree does not mean a reversal of the situation.

It simply means that Ashe has finally revealed her hand.

Once the trump card is revealed, it is no longer a trump card.

He stood up and walked to the quiet door in the corner of the cubicle.

Compared to the heavyweight monsters that are about to be released, those four monsters were merely the vanguard for the king.

Number 06, Time-Devouring Leech (Mature Form).

Ron stood in front of the isolation chamber, gazing at the absolutely still space behind the sealing layer.

In that vacuum where time does not flow, the Time-devouring Leech maintains the posture it was in when it was captured.

The leech shape is composed of hundreds or thousands of extremely thin slices of time stacked together, each slice frozen in "this moment".

It had no idea how long it had been imprisoned.

In stillness, the concept of "how long" does not exist.

Are you sure you want to let it out?

"When we subdued it last time, it ate a few seconds of your memories," the dragon soul reminded you.
"That's under the condition that you personally control the situation and suppress it at close range."

"Now you need to put it on the server and let it run freely in an environment without your intervention."

"It doesn't obey commands and doesn't recognize its owner."

How do you plan to control it?

Ron remained silent for a moment.

"Not under control".

"……What did you say?"

“I said, don’t control it.”

His fingers gently traced the surface of the seal.

What is the core logic of the World Tree?

Ron turned around, leaning against the seal layer with his arms crossed over his chest.

His question was directed at Acelia, but his tone was more like he was asking and answering himself.

"Unlimited growth," he replied.

"As long as there is sunlight and nutrients, the World Tree will never stop growing."

Its roots extend to the ends of the soil, and its canopy reaches the edge of the sky.

This is its designed purpose, and the entire meaning of its existence.

"And what about the leech that devours time?"

"Eating Time".

It doesn't care whether what's in front of it is a tree or a stone, a living thing or a dead thing.

It recognizes only one thing—'the time it existed'.

"A tree that has grown for a thousand years is food that has been stored for a thousand years in its eyes."

Ron looked up, his gaze piercing through the seal of the isolation chamber and landing on the solidified leech.

"The longer the World Tree grows, the more 'time' it accumulates within it."

"The World Tree is no enemy in the face of the Time-Eating Leech."

"It was a feast."

"I don't need to control the direction of the Time-Eating Leech; it will find the most abundant food on its own."

"And in the entire public server, nothing could tempt a Time-Devouring Leech that has been starving for who knows how long, more than a World Tree that has just matured and is filled with thousands of years of growth."

Acelia was somewhat helpless:

"You..."

"Ok?"

"Never mind, it's nothing, just put it away."

Ron chose to place the item at the outermost node of the World Tree root system network.

From a dendrological perspective, the root rings there are the most densely packed.

For the Time-Devouring Leech, the growth rings are delicious rings.

The seal was broken, and the still space rippled slightly.

The Time-Devouring Leech quickly awoke and began sniffing around for its food.

The price of the World Tree's forced ripening is written in its dense, impenetrable root system.

Each root carries a simulated age far exceeding its actual growth time.

This is probably what it's like to have a twenty-year-old person infused with all the memories and experiences of a seventy-year-old.

The body is young, but the weight of the soul is far beyond what is acceptable.

For the Time-Eating Leech, this was the most abundant prey it had ever encountered in its life.

The Time-Devouring Leech began to move.

Under the influence of the slowing force field, the spatial distance between the Time-Devouring Leech and its target will be distorted due to the unevenness of time.

Time is almost frozen where it is, but time continues to flow in the space in front of it.

Between two regions with different flow rates over time, an effect similar to "pressure difference" is generated.

From the perspective of an external observer, it simply appears to be suspended in place.

However, the distance between it and the World Tree is shrinking at an incredible speed.

When the edge of the slow force field finally touched the outermost root system of the World Tree, a change occurred.

………………

In the Azure Garden, Ashe's body suddenly froze.

The outermost root system of the World Tree is becoming "younger".

The wood fibers are softening, the growth rings are dissolving, and the cell wall structure is collapsing from a mature state to a juvenile state.

Something is devouring the time of these roots, bite by bite.

"chief!"

Serafina's voice came through the communication channel, filled with extreme suppressed anxiety.

"The outer nodes of the World Tree are failing on a large scale! The connectivity of the root network is decreasing at a rate of 0.3% per minute!"

The World Tree sensed a threat.

Under Aisha's control, its first reaction was to counter "time reversal" by "accelerating growth".

If you consume me for a year, I will grow new tissue for two years.

If you reduce my root system by ten meters, I will extend new roots by twenty meters.

This strategy was indeed effective at first.

The World Tree, after all, has the entire Green Tide as its source of nutrients, and its growth rate has reached its limit under Aishe's full-force encouragement.

New roots surged forth from the depths of the main trunk like a torrential downpour, heading straight towards the direction of the Time-Devouring Leech.

The problem is that the leech that devours time not only eats the old roots, but also the newly grown ones.

The two forces collided at the base of the World Tree.

One is creating frantically, the other is devouring greedily.

The intersection of creation and consumption forms a terrifying vortex.

The core area of ​​the Green Tide suffered the most severe losses in this storm.

Many plants are unable to adapt to the disruption and are directly "dropped" from the food chain.

The mycelial network breaks down, the pollination chain is interrupted, and the rhythm of the groundwater cycle is completely disrupted...

The collapse of any link in the chain will trigger a chain reaction in dozens of downstream links.

"Biomass in the core area decreased by 12%...15%...19%..."

Darius's projection silently watched the data plummet.

"20%...24%..."

The numbers are still climbing.

"Chief, we have to make a choice."

Serafina pleaded almost imploringly:
"If we continue to use accelerated growth to combat it, the time vortex will only get bigger and bigger."

“The losses in the core area will increase from 30% to 50%, or even more.”

"The World Tree is not enough to support an endless tug-of-war. We are using our limited resources to feed that satiated giant worm."

"So what do you think I should do?"

Ash's voice showed no emotional fluctuation.

But Serafina had been by her side for two thousand years and was all too familiar with the anger hidden beneath that calm.

The anger at this moment is actually directed more inward.

To put it bluntly, it's impotent rage, anger at oneself for making a wrong judgment.

She shouldn't have used the World Tree Seed at this time.

Based solely on the arrogance of "crushing newcomers," they hastily threw years of preparation into a war that could have been avoided.

But regret is useless on the battlefield.

"shrink."

Ashe gave the instructions.

"The World Tree has stopped investing in the growth of the outer nodes and is recycling all its nutrients to the core area."

“Abandon two-thirds of the root network in the western and northern areas.”

"Establish a triple isolation zone in the core area. Use the inhibitors from the Black Bone Towering Tree to build the first layer, the corrosive defense line from the Withered Glory Vine to build the second layer, and the third layer..."

She sighed:
"Let the World Tree actively peel off its outermost thousand-year 'annual rings' as bait."

"Lure that worm to the bait and let it eat its fill."

The decoy strategy worked quickly.

The growth rings that were peeled off from the World Tree were transported by the root system to a low-lying area outside the main trunk.

In the perception of the Time-Devouring Leech, the aura of time emanating from that piece of bark was even stronger than that of the World Tree trunk itself.

The Time-Devouring Leech changed direction without hesitation.

It abandoned the newly sprouted roots it was nibbling at and moved toward the bait in that bizarre way that distorted space.

As it continued to feed, the number of time slices in its body began to decrease visibly.

From the initial thousands of floors, it gradually decreased to hundreds of floors, and then to dozens of floors...

When the last ring of the tree was completely devoured, the Time-Eating Leech's body had become extremely thin.

Of those layered time slices, only a dozen or so remain now.

It was full and tired, and fell into a deep sleep.

………………

After the war ended, all parties entered a period of development.

On the holographic projection in front of Ron, data was refreshing like a waterfall.

Green tide: shrinking from 8% to about 6%.

The World Tree survived, but degenerated to a "middle-aged" state, and its control range shrank by nearly half.

The biomass loss in the core area exceeded 28%.

Iron Tide: Taking advantage of the internal turmoil of the Green Tide, it expanded its territory on a large scale, increasing its territory from 5% to about 8%.

However, Ron knew very well that this number was inflated.

Iron Tide's expansion may seem rapid, but its actual control is far less solid than the numbers suggest.

They are managed by multiple wizards on a rotating basis, and there are already disagreements within the team regarding resource allocation and strategic direction.

Serafina's intelligence network exploited these gaps.

Forged resource reports, tampered communication records, and perfectly timed leaks of "insider information"... every move hit the most vulnerable spot in Tiechao's management.

As a result, although the Iron Tide had occupied a large area of ​​new territory, the various factions within the organization were arguing endlessly about how to manage these territories.

The instructions received by the mechanical units in the newly occupied areas were contradictory, and in some areas, the absurd situation even occurred where the same plot of land was claimed by two different squads at the same time.

The expansion speed is very fast, but the digestion speed is ridiculously slow.

Meanwhile, to the south of the public service server, the Abyss School's aberrant beast horde has once again experienced a periodic "abnormal tide".

A large number of individuals frantically devoured each other during the genetic collapse, and their wreckage covered their territory.

The intensity of this wave of distortions is more severe than any previous one.

Part of the reason is that during the battle between the Time-Eating Leech and the World Tree, most of the aftershocks radiated southward, interfering with the already unstable genes within the Aberrant Beast.

Genetic disorder accelerated the outbreak of mutations.

The territory of the Abyss Descent has also shrunk slightly, but as is the rule of all aberration tides—the survivors are stronger than their predecessors.

The remaining elite individuals were all brutally tempered in the purgatory of genetic collapse. (End of Chapter)