The fruits bounced on the river’s dark waters, watched closely by astral projections of hundreds of scouts that were marking their way downward.
Very soon, the fruits were noticed by countless hungry beasts in the water and in the sky. First, they were suspicious and fearful of poisons and other means of defence, but then the first of them found bravery and lunged for the precious fruit!
One by one, the fruits began disappearing under the water surface when the fish-beasts lunged for them. Then, some courageous dragons swooped from the sky to grab a few of them.
The fruits that were larger than a bee’s head were almost bite-sized for dragons. Although smaller dragon-beasts could be satisfied with a few of them, many others quickly noticed more interesting prey—all the other beasts attracted by the fruits’ sight and smell!
Now, some dragons were diving toward the water not for the fruits, but for the fish-beasts that were reaching for them; others were attacking other dragons instead.
The area of the river where the usnea fruits were swimming on became an every-man-for-himself combat zone!
And the more the beasts were busy attacking and devouring each other, the more fruits could escape and travel downriver.
However, even for the fruits that were eaten, it was often not the end. The usnea seeds had a shiny, tough shell, and if not chewed properly, could pass through a digestive tract without harm. This way, dragons—whose teeth were for tearing pieces of meat and grabbing prey, not for chewing—could spread the seeds even farther away from the area.
Malevolence was told by a gardener bee that the Champion Tree—the usnea tree with the best genes of them all—developed the gene for these fruits so they could both feed the bees and serve as another weapon against the deer that almost destroyed all of the usnea trees.
It served her well now, too.
Her distant scouts that watched the path that Malevolence’s army travelled already told her that not only were the usnea trees spreading naturally from the patches her people planted, but some predators helped them to spread even wider.
Most of them died when entering the usnea trees’ groves, but some were immune or highly resistant to cold. Those who liked to eat usnea tree fruits and then spread the seeds with their excrement.
Malevolence found this level of perseverance incredibly motivating.
"It’s strange to take a TREE as an example, but every bee should strive to be this way! Achieve her goals even after being swallowed whole!" she told her soldiers in some of her speeches.
A task complicated for bees, but for the trees, it worked.
Within the next day, Malevolence’s scouts reported to her that many dragons had eaten the usnea fruits and flown away from the river, spreading their poop and usnea seeds that immediately sprouted on freshly fertilised soil. The most update n0vels are published on NoveI(F)ire.net
Even more, many dragons tried to gather not only enough fruits to feed themselves for a moment, but also save some for later. Land beasts tried to do the same—grab as much as they could, put in stashes what they couldn’t eat immediately.
The seeds in these fruits were also destined to sprout into trees eventually.
From the first batch of fruits, none of them even reached Ferwall’s surroundings, but there were five more batches after the first one—and that was only on the first day.
For three days, the bees tirelessly grew usnea fruits, and humans dressed in several layers of warm clothing and beast hides poured the fruits into the river in entire baskets.
By this point, beasts from the entire region gathered in the area downriver, eager for more fruits. Some of them noticed the usnea tree fields and Hive Aboveall, but very few could actually travel past the tall usnea trees exuding a cold aura for dozens of meters in each direction.
Those who could were mercilessly killed by bees, teaching others to stay where they were allowed to.
Thanks to all the beasts spreading the seeds around, the usnea trees were sprouting all over the region. With each passing day, the area taken by them became larger and larger.
A single seed turned into a tree, a tree turned into several, several trees became groves, and groves slowly grew and merged until they became forests.
In some places, the trees’ progress was slowed down by cold-resistant beasts or by other plants. The beasts were usually deterred by usnea trees’ sharp spikes; with other plants, things were complicated.
Plants usually fought more subtly. Without the scouts’ sharp sense of smell, they would never be able to tell that some of them spread poisons through the soil, killing all plants nearby through their roots.
Usnea trees weren’t immune to venoms and acids, but their cold aura protected them from things like these partially. They froze the soil around them, stopping the spread of poisons. Only usnea trees themselves could easily break through the ice with their powerful roots.
How they gathered moisture from it, nobody in Malevolence’s army knew, but perhaps they didn’t need moisture at all, only soil.
Countless beasts were killed by usnea trees’ cold aura, especially when they tried to reach for their tasty fruits. Malevolence sent humans with bees’ protection to gather their corpses so they could be eaten.
A week after the first fruit was put into the water, the number of beasts gathering to fish them out decreased massively. The fruits were finally allowed to travel farther downriver, and some of them naturally ended up washed out on the riverbanks.
But most travelled farther, to where the humans lived and gathered water. Some humans even picked the fruits up, but none of them hurried to eat them. At least until they saw that the beasts and insects didn’t die from eating them.
And through these beasts, the first sprouts of usnea trees appeared amid the few crops reared by humans. Something that they have quickly noticed and tried to fix...