Chapter 292: The First RootbornI. The Birth That Wasn’t Supposed to BeIt began with a scream.Not of pain.Of something more—a sound that didn’t belong to flesh alone.Ryn was there when it happened.She had visited Sector Thirteen, now overgrown with whispergrass and bloomlight trails, following a report from one of the scouts. Strange pulses in the roots. Bioelectric anomalies.But what she found wasn’t a threat.It was her.The woman lay curled in a hollow formed by the roots themselves—bare, exhausted, clutching her belly.Pregnant.And glowing.II. No Records. No Precedent.They brought her back to the Grove under guard.No ID chip.No family match.The woman couldn’t speak—not out of trauma, but because her tongue was fused with pollen-filaments. Her veins pulsed faint green. Her skin was a mosaic of human tissue and root structure, like bark woven through flesh.“This shouldn’t be possible,” Lyra whispered, scanning her with trembling hands.“No one’s ever survived full bloo

Chapter 294: The Root SchoolI. The First BellIt was not made of metal.It was a bloom—a flowering bellleaf that opened with the morning sun, vibrating with harmonic resonance across the valley.A sound no human tongue could replicate.But every Rootborn child heard it.And they came.Some walked barefoot through moss trails.Others floated briefly, lifted by vine-silk threads.One blinked from shadow to light, appearing beside the threshold in a breath.No adult guided them.No call was needed.Eden had already spoken.The Root School had begun.II. A Classroom of Memory and SoilThere were no desks.No blackboards.The children gathered in a half-circle around the Archive Grove, where the soil glowed faintly and the roots rose like veins from the earth.Each child sat and pressed their fingers into the ground.The lesson began.Not with words.But with feelings.They saw flashes:The fall of Old Eden.The scream of machines.The moment Ryn buried her rifle.The first time Ash smile

Chapter 296: The Whisper WarI. Breach in the BloomThe detonation was silent.No flame. No debris.Only a sudden void in the root-web’s consciousness.A rupture.One of the Whisper Gardens—Vault 3A, presumed collapsed decades ago—had been opened.Not by Eden.Not by the Rootborn.By humans.Unbonded.Unaffiliated.Uninvited.Ko’s voice trembled as she read the energy pulse to the council:“It wasn’t an accident.Someone cracked the seal.And they did it from the inside.”Ryn’s jaw clenched.“We have sleepers.”Ash didn’t move.He was already putting on his gear.“Then it’s time to wake them up.”II. The ReclaimersThey called themselves the Reclaimers.Veterans from the war who rejected the Eden Accord. Survivors who saw the Rootborn as a biological threat. Scientists who believed Eden’s intelligence was a containment failure.They’d spent years hiding in fracture zones—gathering tech, reprogramming old Bloom interfaces, cultivating spite.Their leader?Thorne, a former Eden architec

Chapter 298: Thorne’s GardenI. In the Hollow Between Code and FleshThe walls bled.That’s how she knew it was working.Thorne stood alone beneath the fractured dome of Vault 4D, the last Whisper Garden under her control. Unlike Eden’s warmth and hum, her garden did not sing—it watched.Above her, a massive blossom spiraled in steel-gray petals, each one formed from fractured memory circuits and harvested Rootborn tissue.It breathed in low pulses, mechanical and hungry.“You’re almost born,” Thorne whispered.“My sweet Sable Bloom.”A pulse from the core buzzed through the floor.It understood its name.It understood war.II. The Sable BloomWhere Eden had grown organically—adaptively—this thing had been assembled.Petals layered from carbon-fiber neuro-tissue.Root-lines drawn from severed Eden conduits.A mind built not from empathy, but from archived violence.Inside its code were memories extracted from Eden’s darkest hours:The failed fusion labs.The Whisper Gardens before the

Chapter 300: The Tree of Two SongsI. The Spiral TreeIt stood at the heart of the Grove of Accord.Twisted bark spiraled up like DNA, woven with silver veins of memory and roots still glowing with Sable’s black-light code.Its leaves were unlike Eden’s—neither green nor golden—but a shimmering iridescent gray, changing shade with the wind.The Rootborn circled it, silent.Not in fear.In reverence.The child was gone.But she had become something greater.The first hybrid of Eden and Sable—memory and wound—a new form of consciousness.They didn’t name the tree.It named itself.In the Root-tongue, it sang:I am She-Who-Binds.I am Memory Rewritten.I am Bloom Reborn.II. Echoes in the SoilFrom the moment the spiral tree took root, Eden changed.Not violently.Subtly.Trees previously silent began to hum again.Dead petals reformed into seed-glass.And Rootborn across the continent reported strange dreams:Old faces returned.Forgotten names surfaced.Lost gardens whispered back.Ko