Literature / Tree of Aeons

TREETREE!

Trees are not that bad, actually.
- Mozart

Indie game developer Matt is killed in a bus crash, along with a crowd of cheerful and optimistic teenagers whom the gods summon into another world as heroes, to defeat the demon king.

The teenagers are heroes, that is. Matt didn't qualify. Instead, he rolls fate's dice and gets reborn as a tree.

As his psychopomp promised, though, being a tree is not so bad. In fact, as the years roll by, Matt/TreeTree/Aeon begins to find that being ageless, highly resilient, and capable of harvesting power from the cycle of life and death, may be just what he needs to truly fix the world...

Tree of Aeons is an isekai story posted on Royal Road by Spaizzzer.

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This story contains examples of:

A-F

• Affectionate Nickname: Matt starts calling himself TreeTree after 3-year-old Lausanne uses it. Many years later, he's a little saddened that she's grown out of it.
• The Ageless:
  • Very early in his new life, the system informs Matt that "Trees are eternal if they do not get killed." The years just slip by him, with friends and acquaintances coming and going. At one point, he's reflecting on his diplomatic options, and considers a 10-year alliance with another nation to be so short as to be a total waste of effort.
  • Kei inadvertently becomes unageing after being narrowly rescued from death by Aeon and turned into living crystal.
• A God Am I: As his power and influence steadily grows, Aeon sets himself up as a divine ruler. He doesn't really hide the fact that he's only a demigod thus far, rather than fully ascended, but he creates his own religion nonetheless. Ken, a hero who refused to fight, is stunned to realise that the resulting religious-military state isn't being run by the priests, but actually has a divine figure at its heart.
• Alpha Strike: The fastest demon king fight to date is against Demon King Tigash, who arrives in the world in Aeon's territory, and promptly encounters a prepared ambush: massive synchronised bombs, artillery, elite empowered soldiers, and a sympathetic hero. It's still a costly battle, but the demon king goes down on its first day, and "bomb it to pieces" becomes the new gold standard for demon king strategy.
  It was beautiful. It resembled Total Annihilation when I let loose multiple long range cannons, or those old videos of battleships going all out. The valley was filled with the sound of all the cannons and artifacts unleashing fury on the demons and the demon king. The 50 or so demon champions were destroyed quickly.
  After the volley, came the traps. The entire ground beneath the demon king glowed. Overcharged mana potatoes embedded in the ground, configured into a literal mana bomb, and the multiple explosive formations around them. Together, they would explode as one single massive bomb. The single explosion for the mana was so large it could be heard 100 miles away, the fortress braced for the shockwave of energy.
• And I Must Scream: For his first several decades, Matt has no ability to sense the world, he's just in a black void, punctuated by system messages every few years about heroes fighting the demon king. Good thing he has the [Hibernate] skill...
• Anti-Magic: One of the demonic worlds that Aeon encounters has a mana-disrupting particle included in its sunlight. The surface is baked and largely dead, and the demons have to live underground during the day to survive, but conversely, they have absorbed the anti-magic properties through their extensive exposure, so they have to be fought with mundane skills.
• Apocalypse How: Aeon witnesses a Class X, when the "Cometworld" breaks apart as its star dies, and he receives a title, "Witness of a World’s Death".
• An Arm and a Leg: Jura survives the burning of Freeka and the few escapees travelling to the elven kingdom, but he loses his left arm. Even crippled, though, he's still a more effective warrior than Laufen and the children. Much later, Aeon manages to repair his soul and restore the limb.
• Artificial Intelligence: Aeon can make assistant minds from the pieces that he harvests from souls preparing for reincarnation. They are efficient and loyal, but limited to the jobs he gives them, not capable of true creativity. With the number of trees he can eventually connect to, however, and the population he's managing, their help is indispensable.
• The Assimilator: Several characters can convert another type of material or mana into their own.
  • One of the demon kings sends out rods that can be embedded in powerful natural mana sources, converting them into demon factories.
  • Aeon can flood his own mana into an object using the [Natural Mana Overwhelming] skill. Depending on the target, this may either convert it, or just kill it with mana poisoning. He even manages to convert a demon rod, turning it into a Forest Rod that lets him conquer a mana source for his own purposes.
• Aura Vision: Lacking eyes, Matt instead perceives the world through [Lesser Spirit Vision], which he received from a druid. He can see people, at least, though he can't read.
• Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Aeon would really prefer to leave the rest of the world to sort itself out. He has bigger problems to deal with, like responding to demonic invasions. Even if the rest of the world is at war, that's okay; conflict means gaining levels, which means more people who might be useful in a fight against a demon king. But after enough peacetime, the nations around him start trying to steal his resources and distribute propaganda suggesting that he's really out to brainwash the world's leaders and take over, escalating to the point where a crusade against him is imminent and he decides he'll have to intervene. And since he controls the vast majority of the world's level 100+ individuals, including several domain holders, it would not be anything like an even fight.
  Matreearch Hoyia: Aeon wants to know whether, if he were to order the capture of all the kings, rulers, merchant kings, priests, lords and generals, and essentially force everyone to sit down and talk, would it stop the nonsense and prevent it from escalating to a total war?
• Bargain with Heaven: Aeon makes a deal with Hawa. In return for Aeon taking on the job of protecting some of Hawa's worlds, which will free up some of Hawa's power, Hawa will forge a weapon capable of breaking through the demons' defences. Of course, Aeon is close to a peer...
• Beast of Battle: Some of Aeon's elite Valthorns take to riding on his rhino-sized warbeetles, allowing them to move much faster, hunting individual demons or small packs around the countryside. It doesn't hurt that the beetles themselves are highly capable, able to take on even elite humans if they have a numbers advantage — which they generally will, since they don't limit themselves to one beetle per rider. Lausanne, for example, leads 4 other girls and 100 beetles.
• Benevolent Dictator: As TreeTree grows in power, he eventually sets himself up as a God-Emperor (or rather, demigod). With the combined perspective of a former human turned into The Ageless, he's generally a fair and forward-thinking ruler, who promotes peace and prosperity while also building up a military force to combat existential threats. He listens to others' counsel and generally values individual freedoms — but ultimately, his word is law, with artificial minds giving him total surveillance of his domain, and rebels being executed through destructive medical research and experimentation. With all of that, his territory is probably the best place to live on the planet, and he's the best hope of repelling the demonic invasions, too. Just don't offend him.
• Blood Knight: Horns, the artificial mind in charge of the beetles, develops quite a taste for combat.
  Horns: It's totally awesome. All I do all day is fight all these demons! I can't level up anymore, but still, it's awesome! I love fighting!
• Bring It: Demon King Sabnoc blows up a new crater, but given the pulse of magic that it sent out to do it, Aeon is fairly sure its real intent was to let the heroes know its location, challenging them to come to it.
  I can almost feel the words that it meant, through that wave. Come, heroes.
  Time to settle this fight.
• Bring My Brown Pants: Aeon's level 200+ presence causes most of the leaders of the nations, whom he has kidnapped, to lose bladder control. He's actually slightly impressed with the exceptions.
• Cap Raiser: Souls generally have a limit on how far they can grow, varying from person to person, but typically around level 80. There are exceptions, though, such as the heroes, and Matt himself (presumably because he's both The Ageless and a reincarnator). He's eventually able to create soul-strengthening seeds that let others break through the cap and keep growing, which is crucial to his plan to defeat the demon kings with home-grown heroes instead of summoned ones. Too bad that the ingredients are fragments of the shredded souls of executed criminals...
• Captured on Purpose: The magical shackles placed on Lumoof when he's arrested immediately crumble away, but he just smiles and goes along with his captors anyway, in order to get access to their crystal mountain.
• Charged Attack: Meela asks TreeTree to help fight a demon horde, then disappears under an opaque magical barrier. Several minutes of vine grappling later, the barrier glows brighter, before a [Starlight Nova] shockwave incinerates the mooks and severely damages the demonic champions (who are quickly finished off).
• Child Soldiers: For best results, Aeon starts training his "Valthorn" elite soldiers from a young age, with auras that boost learning, class and skill seeds, and custom educational dreams. Yvon isn't pleased by what he's doing, especially the dreams that let them watch helplessly as their friends are slaughtered around them (to inure them to the horrors of war), but he figures that it's a nasty, violent world, and the kids need to be prepared — especially the orphans whom he typically selects. He doesn't try to throw them into battles that will get them killed, though; that would be a waste of his investment.
• Colossus Climb: The first demon champion whom Matt sees is an earth golem "the size of a large building". One of the nearby soldiers attempts to climb its back, but gets swatted off.
• Conscription: The elven village of Freeka receives a demand from the king to send a number of soldiers to enlist in his army, but their tree spirit has warned them that the demon king has just arrived, leaving them torn about whether they can afford to leave their village underdefended. They eventually decide not to respond — and after the demon king is defeated, the king sends an army to slaughter them all in punishment.
• Cooldown: TreeTree unlocks the option to grow carnivorous plants after consuming Alexis' body, but finds that they're of limited usefulness. They function like traps, able to snatch up and consume a creature up to the size of a wolf, but then they take a long time to digest, so they can't handle large groups.
• Crying Wolf:
  • Some of the crusaders have skills that warn them they're being Lured into a Trap, but when those skills keep pinging for months at a time without anything happening, eventually they just shrug and ignore them. Too bad that the skills were perfectly correct, it's just a very slow trap.
    It's funny that one of the ways to beat such 'alarm' skills, is to keep scaring them until they stop treating it seriously. Kinda like training one's body to ignore their daily morning alarm.
  • Demon King Multipus can't find Aeon despite the Core's continual warnings of an intruder, because Aeon is masking himself with demonic mana. It eventually becomes desensitised to the warnings — though not until after dealing heavy damage to its surroundings, making Aeon's job easier.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Jura goes to face two elite demon knights, expecting a tough fight, but since he's a level 80 [Warlord] by now, while they're the rough equivalent of level 40, he rapidly turns them both to mincemeat.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique:
  • The princess of Baroosh attempts to access "void mana", the most powerful but also most dangerous form of mana, which is capable of creating portals to other worlds, in hopes of summoning extra heroes. The result is massive soul damage that nearly kills her, until TreeTree manages to heal her, but leaving her with lingering nightmares.
  • It eventually turns out that the way to safely access it is by repeatedly suffering the corruptive effects of exposure, and getting healed, until one's entire mana pool has been converted to void mana. Not something to be undertaken lightly, nor something that most people have the resources (nor inclination) to try.
• Dead Man Writing: The heroes from the generation of Emperor Harris, knowing that they won't survive the next demon king, create a diary containing their thoughts and discoveries, only usable with star mana, so that future heroes will be able to learn about the gods using them as mercenaries and then discarding them afterward. Aeon can't read it, since he doesn't have normal vision, but he can see how new heroes react, and it's always a confronting experience for them. Several of them add their own recordings to the diary afterward.
• Deadly Euphemism: The highest punishment in Aeon's territory is "Aeon's Mercy". Which is to say, the criminal is handed over to Aeon to do whatever he pleases, which in practice means death via destructive medical experimentation in his soul forge. Even hardened criminals are known to descend into terrified pleading when faced with the sentence (but it doesn't help).
• Death Seeker: After defeating multiple demon kings in a row and bringing an era of peace to the world, Harris, Gerrard and Mirei are tired of the struggle, and increasingly long to return to Earth — which they know will happen when they die. So, they decide to make the next demon king their last fight.
• Deity of Human Origin: At level 250, Aeon meets again with Mozart, and Mozart's supervisor Bach. They offer him a one-time chance to join the [World Faith System], where he would become a god, and he would stop levelling but gain different abilities based on people's faith and belief in him. He turns it down, because he has already gained several of the most important benefits, such as agelessness and the ability to travel to other worlds, and he doesn't like the fact that dropping under the required number of followers would kill him.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Growing ginseng is hard, even when you're overflowing with plant magic. It's fragile, takes years to grow, and its mere presence attracts unusually powerful monsters, for whom it is Supernaturally Delicious and Nutritious. TreeTree persists, though, because not only is ginseng a Rare Candy-style power-up, it's also a vital ingredient in his soul-strengthening items to let people break the level cap.
  [Ginseng tree has been killed]
• Due to the Dead:
  • TreeTree is surprised, but not really bothered, to learn that the treefolk cut up their dead and serve them to the family as soup, on the premise that "our loved ones live forever in us, and as a part of us."
  • He later introduces his own set of ceremonies for births and deaths and marriages. It gains acceptance easily enough, since he's already being recognised as a minor deity, but his true motivation is the fact that the "burial" involves the body being placed in one of his biopods, so that he has the best chance of harvesting skill seeds and class seeds.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first ever system notification about a demon king says that it was "defeated and sealed back to the demonic realm." However, the fact that demon kings are not typically sealed away, but killed, is later an important plot point.
• Easy Evangelism: Sort of. The triumvirs of the church of Aiva perform a ritual to let their god manifest in the world and talk with Aeon — during which conversation, they are stunned to hear Aiva declare that he will soon be too far away to properly look after the people of the world, and that Aeon, as a native god, should take all his followers. They personally accept the commandment, but they're aware that the majority of believers, if told this news, would assume that the triumvirs had been suborned or mind-controlled, and would thus reject it, so Aeon opts for a more gradual improvement of relations.
• Easy Logistics:
  • To an extent, this occurs with skills that army generals can possess, like [Create Food Supply] and [Army Skill: Reduce Hunger]. However, Aeon knows that the capacity of those skills is limited, so if he can cut off supply lines entirely, large armies will eventually fold.
  • For Aeon's people, it's quite justified, since any with familiars will be able to create fruits and weapons from mana, and he doesn't tend to project force very far from his root network.
• The Easy Way or the Hard Way: Rolling the wheel of fate to determine how you'll be reincarnated is entirely optional! The alternative is to start out at the very bottom, as a mosquito or skink, with a life expectancy measured in hours to days.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: TreeTree's many hero soul fragments make him extraordinarily good at killing demons. However, he struggles, naturally enough, against magma golems.
• Emotion Eater: As requested by his people, TreeTree plants a [Tree of Prayer] in a public space, for people to come and let out their grievances. He does actually hear their pleas, although he rarely chooses to do anything about it. It turns out, though, that the mere act of offering those prayers allows the tree to absorb some of their anger/frustration/despair/hope, both calming the worshippers and producing corresponding essences that TreeTree can use as a resource.
• Enchanted Forest: After a mage senses TreeTree's presence spanning the valley and panics, ordering the army to retreat, TreeTree's [Haunted tree] skill is upgraded to [Haunted forests], assisting him in intimidating and frightening intruders. Since the valley is full of thousands of trees under his control, all acting as his eyes and ears, and extending the range of his deadly [Root strike] and related skills, there's good reason for unwelcome visitors to be afraid.
• Endless Winter: Just as a regular winter is beginning, TreeTree faces a continent-wide blizzard spell created through the Human Sacrifice of 25,000 people. The resulting cold weather lasts for several years, and gets much more hostile than a natural winter, before it finally dies down. Even before it's over, though, he invests in research and skills that allow his trees and warbeetles to adapt to the cold and keep functioning (after about a year of work).
• Everything Sensor: Lampshaded by TreeTree when his biolabs, which give him comprehensive information about the bodies and souls of those placed inside, are nonetheless unable to tell him much about inorganic materials.
  It's a bio-lab. Not a everything-lab, so dungeon cores don't register. So, oh well.
• The Exile:
  • After TreeTree heals the princess of Baroosh, the wizard who brought her there returns with the promised payment — and requests to stay, because he has been exiled from the kingdom as punishment for allowing her to come to harm in the first place. TreeTree doubts that it was really his fault, but "such are feudal societies".
  • Aeon offers the option of exile to a number of leaders who have attempted to resist his rule. Exile to a world of demons and lava, that is.
• Experience Booster: Several.
  • The [Hero] class grants explosively fast levelling, allowing heroes to reach level 100 within a year or two so that they can fight the demon king. Lausanne, who has worked much longer and seen more modest gains (though still impressive by regular standards) is disheartened to see the heroes surpass her efforts in mere weeks.
  • The hero fragments that Matt accumulates turn out to boost his experience gain, among other benefits; each one provides an additional 50% of the normal experience (so, when he first learns about it, and has 56 fragments, he has a 2800% boost to experience gain).
  • His [Learning Aura] skill gives a more modest 20% boost to experience gain for those of lower levels, but over a whole area.
  • He later finds that it's possible to create familiars that will double the host's rate of experience gain, but they lose most of their other abilities, such as creating [Healing fruit].
• Failure-to-Save Murder: Alvin blames Aeon for not preventing Kei's death — apparently not considering how his own inaction and absence contributed to stacking the odds against her, while Aeon was fighting alongside her to the best of his ability.
• Familiar: The first thing Matt ever manages to do, besides turning on the [Autopilot] skill, is to grant a familiar to a druid who contacts him. It grants the recipient additional abilities, such as [Ironbark skin] and [Minor Regeneration], in exchange for harvesting a portion of the host's skills and experience for Matt when the druid dies — which is how Matt gains [Lesser Spirit Vision] and [Limited Telepathic Communication], so he can communicate with the outside world. Matt later uses familiars extensively to empower his favoured followers, such as Lausanne, and develops several stronger or specialised forms, such as one that grants very few skills but boosts experience gain. The intelligence level of the familiars is uncertain, but they are smart enough to follow instructions, while being unfailingly loyal.
• Fantastic Nuke:
  • When various kingdoms start attacking demonic champions with immense artillery spells fuelled by mass Human Sacrifice, several reincarnated characters immediately start drawing parallels to nuclear weapons. Especially since the detonations leave areas covered in a type of toxic waste...but the spells are actually effective, so unscrupulous kingdoms continue to use them.
  • After Demon King Raja-Naga kills all the heroes, Aeon contemplates building a bomb of his own, but ultimately decides that the deaths of 5 million citizens must be a last resort.
• Fantastic Racism: Elves are not popular within many human kingdoms. Eventually, the prejudice against all non-humans becomes so strong that many of them leave and seek refuge with Aeon.
• Fire Keeps It Dead: After fighting a swarm of demons, Lord Rajjiv gives orders to gather the bodies of the fallen and burn them, so they don't transform into zombies.
• First Town: Heroes typically don't get a nice gentle start, they're just tossed in the deep end. Meela sets up a hotel in Aeon's territory in hopes of changing that and helping new heroes to find their feet. It works once, but she has to leave before she gets a chance to help the next batch.
• Fling a Light into the Future: The elves of Landas have magically sealed vaults that they hope will preserve the records of their history even if their world falls to the demons.

G-Q

• Glass Weapon: Aeon's experiments with Anti-Magic sand result in several glass weapons that shatter after a few uses, but are quite effective against magical creatures.
• God-Emperor: TreeTree initially requests for Jura and Laufen to be made more traditional royalty over his valley, but the people are very reluctant to accept an absolute monarch. So, on the basis that the treefolk worship him, the council decides to instead grant Jura and Laufen recognition and authority as senior members of the church. This eventually leads to TreeTree establishing his own priesthood, and establishing his rule as a local deity — a much more absolute rule than any mere mortal king, though generally fair and civic-minded. At level 150 and above, he actually starts to gain a divine domain and associated powers, too.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: The gods are on a different system, gaining power from the faith and belief of their followers instead of from experience. As long as they have enough followers, they can't be entirely killed, but if they lose all their followers, they die regardless of other considerations, and if they drop too low, they will wither away. Aeon is offered the chance to move to the [World Faith System] once he reaches level 250, but he already has most of its greatest benefits, like agelessness and the ability to reach other worlds, so he turns it down as an unnecessary liability.
• Good Is Not Nice: Aeon is fair-minded, wants to make the world better, and has people he cares about. However, he's quite self-interested, and his justice is tempered with very little mercy. If you want his help, you'd better be prepared to pay, and if you cross him, he will have no qualms about executing you out of hand.
• Happily Ever After: Discussed between Alexis and Meela; the heroes would like to think that they'll all survive killing the demon king and then happily live out the rest of their lives. The reality is a bit different. The gods need them to defeat the regular demon invasions, but don't want the heroes to become dangerous in their own right, so the [hero] class includes hardwired mental influences that push the heroes to single-mindedly focus on the demon king and then, if it doesn't kill them all, infight and destroy each other and themselves. Or, if they manage to get past all that, the next demon king will finish them off. Defeating three demon kings in a row is the longest winning streak in recorded history. But each new batch of heroes arrives with the same cheerfully naive expectations...
• Hard Work Hardly Works: When Lausanne first wants to train in combat and become a hero, Jura talks to TreeTree about how it only makes sense for people to train things they're naturally talented at, and Lausanne isn't gifted at combat; he wants her to try something else. TreeTree doesn't have the heart to just crush her dreams, though, so he offers her what help he can. Results are mixed; with his many boosts to learning, and the opportunities he gives her, she becomes a prodigy by most people's standards, and yet is left in the dust when she encounters the divinely blessed heroes, who can surpass her hard-won progress in days or weeks.
• Head Desk: When Alexis hears that Meela wants to be incarnated as a tree hotel, she attempts to beat her head against the wall of her lab, but it doesn't really work because she's incorporeal.
• Heroic Sacrifice: With so many heroes and demon kings around, it's not surprising that there are plenty of these.
  • Jura lands a finishing blow on Demon King Tigash, but can't escape its final self-destruct.
  • Gerard, Harris and Mirei pour their souls into kamikaze attacks that successfully take out a demon king.
• Hero of Another Story: Each generation of heroes is an epic saga unto itself, but Matt is at a distance from them, just focused on growing his valley and looking after his trees.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Aeon's rise to prominence alarms the four gods, who spread misinformation and turn a great deal of the world against him, calling his home the Cursed Continent.
• History Repeats:
  • Matt gets to watch the heroes fighting the demon king over and over. The demon king arrives, a batch of heroes is summoned, they kill the demon king with high casualties, they infight and kill each other, and then another demon king arrives ten years later. Repeat. There are minor variations; sometimes it's a complete mutual kill, sometimes the heroes all die first and a second batch gets summoned, and occasionally they'll even survive to fight a second demon king. But one way or another, the cycle continues. Due to the destruction that it wreaks on the world, Matt really wants to break the cycle and end the demon threat for good.
  • He eventually learns that the whole cycle has repeated itself on many other worlds, each of which is regularly invaded by demons and has heroes summoned by the gods to stop them. Until the gods are too far away to reach a world anymore, and it falls to the demons.
• Hive Mind: The lilies of Giant Lilypod City form a collective mind, which Aeon likens to a choir that sometimes has a dominant voice. They have a tendency to give vague answers, and even contradict themselves at times, but are more or less friendly to him as a kindred spirit.
  Lilies: < We are many. And we have many ways. We are aggressive. We are passive. We are quiet. We are loud. We are everything, and we are nothing. >
• I Did What I Had to Do: Aeon remembers morality and does try, by and large, to respect life, but when he hasn't been human for centuries, it's easy for him to be very pragmatic. Killing a few to save many? Routine. Keeping someone alive against their will for political reasons? That can be arranged. His inner circle are aware that he tends to take a very long, very big-picture view of things.
  What was done, was done.
  Now, I deal with the consequences.
• Immune to Mind Control: There's no perfect immunity, but Aeon builds several defences.
  • His "Great Mind Tree", as well as massively expanding his ability to multitask, provides the mental equivalent of a firewall.
  • Even unintentionally, tea made from his branches reduces external mental influences. Several heroes use this to counteract the side effects of their class, which is designed to make them angry and push them to go fight the demon king.
• Immunity Disability: The [Hero] class grants immunity to poisons and various other status conditions. However, if the demons manage to get around it or through it and inflict some kind of curse, then painkillers and sedatives don't work, as Mirei painfully discovers. For additional cruelty, although it may be possible to temporarily switch off the effect of the class, it's too dangerous to try, since that might mean that the curse is immediately fatal.
• Impeded Communication: This is the immediate effect noticed when Demon King Sabnoc arrives. The [message] spell that enables near-realtime communication across the world stops working, enabling the demons to more efficiently divide and conquer the nations — especially since, if people gather together to make low-tech communication easier, they also become easier targets for siege-level artillery. The heroes are granted divine abilities to let them work around it, placing communication towers to punch through the interference.
• Kill One, Others Get Stronger: The gods built this into the hero class, with each hero death leaving a "fragment" to the others, empowering them further. As it turns out, however, any reincarnator will receive a fragment, even those who aren't heroes themselves. And since Matt is The Ageless, he collects quite a lot of them...
• Know When to Fold 'Em:
  • After twenty years trapped underground in the aftermath of Demon King Sabnoc, Lausanne has lost a lot of her idealism, and resigned herself to being "special, but not that special." She's still a force for good in the world, but she no longer aspires to match the heroes, and turns down offers for special opportunities to advance further.
  • Of all characters, the god/goddess Aiva is giving up on the world, since the gods' reach is limited as worlds move farther apart, and Aiva would lose contact within a century or two anyway. So, s/he declares that Aeon, as a native god (though weaker), should take over. The triumvirs of Aiva are deeply shocked that their god would abandon them, but for Aiva it seems like the sensible option.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: The default enforcement setting on a soul contract causes any rebellious soul to forget the thing that made them want to rebel. When Alexis triggers the enforcement while having a Skill that helps her record and remember things, she gets stuck in a constant — and painful — loop, until Aeon agrees to send her away with Meela.
• Leave No Survivors: The existence of experience points and levelling means that any enemy who survives a fight will likely return even stronger, possibly even with specific skills tailored to the battle. So, Aeon's strategy for such conflicts is, "It's really a case of just killing everyone."
• Leeroy Jenkins: Aeon deliberately prompts this in an enemy commander by pricking him with a poisoned thorn, which boosts his hormone production, especially testosterone. The angry, frustrated, and ambitious young man promptly orders his forces into a frontal charge, taking heavy losses without achieving anything.
• Let's You and Him Fight: When his subordinate nations fight, Aeon decides not to always intervene, but rather to let his priests offer aid in recovery, so he entrenches his influence more deeply and wins over more hearts.
  Cultural victory in my opinion involved watching others make mistakes and then resist the urge to interrupt them.
• Ley Line: Natural sources of magic, including leylines, are important resources. Before he can claim one, TreeTree has to conquer a dungeon that spontaneously formed around it, but once he does, the injection of energy upgrades his soul forge and his ability to harvest souls at long range.
• LitRPG:
  • The System is woven into everyone's lives, granting XP for killing enemies and giving skills as people level up. At level 250, Aeon learns that there are other systems, and is given the option to switch to the World Faith System used by most of the gods, but he prefers the standard one.
  • It's taken a step further on one of the demonic worlds, where divine power has divided the world up into hexagonal territories and imposed game-like limits on movement and attack rates and stamina. There's even a clock in the sky. Conveniently, level 150+ domain holders can resist the divine influence and ignore the rules.
• Look Both Ways: When he starts researching dedicated truck-beetles and trailer-beetles, Aeon internally notes, "I just hope they don't accidentally bang into someone and reverse-isekai them to another world."
• Magically-Binding Contract: When someone contracts their soul to Aeon, the system will enforce it, even going so far as to inflict pain and amnesia if they think of trying to break it. Normally this sort of soul bargain might qualify as a Deal with the Devil, but since the term of service is temporary (a thousand years), and the work is not necessarily cruel or onerous, it's actually worked out fairly well for most of those who have taken it.
• Magikarp Power: Stella arrives in Treeworld with no particular skills, and without much mental resilience either. She gets a class, but mostly just drifts around trying different things and feeling rather sorry for herself. However, when she was reincarnated, she was given a [Late Bloomer] blessing. She eventually latches on to the one thing that really interests her, void magic, and goes through the harrowing and dangerous process of attuning herself to it, becoming Aeon's first void magic user — a [Void Archmage], in fact. Her skills become a crucial part of his expansion, allowing her to open portals to other worlds and even make use of the demonic rift gates.
• Marked to Die: Killing a hero is ordinarily quite lucrative in terms of experience, but when there is an active demon king, the gods discourage it by marking the killer as a target for other heroes.
• Mayfly–December Romance: Pure-blooded elves can live for 500 years, so when they marry humans, it's not uncommon for them to outlive their great-grandchildren. Laufen sits Lausanne down for a talk after Lausanne's husband passes away; he lived to 100, not a bad run, but Lausanne is still not even middle-aged.
  Laufen: It is a very sad thing to witness our children's children and their children leave before we do.
• Might Makes Right: When Yvon gets upset about Aeon's training of orphans into Child Soldiers, and argues that they should be able to appreciate the peace, Aeon is unimpressed, and points out that the reason for that peace is because of his own military prowess.
  Aeon: This is no true peace, Lady Yvon. It is a peace built on fear. A fear of our power. And if you know better, this peace is maintained by power.
• Mini-Boss: Demon King Sabnoc visits the sites of past demon kings' deaths and uses the residual energy to create extra-powerful minions, beyond the usual demonic champions. Aeon considers this a stupid move, since it gives the heroes more opportunities for experience and level gain before they confront the king itself.
• Moral Myopia: Alvin is angry with Aeon for not doing enough to save Kei's life. He apparently isn't thinking about the fact that he himself completely ignored her requests to come and help out, believing that he had plenty of time to wander over later and assist, and only discovering after her death how urgent her requests actually were. Aeon, meanwhile, was fighting right beside her.
• Mum Looks Like a Sister: By the time Lausanne is more than a century old, she and her mother Laufen look quite similar as they discuss her recent widowhood. Elves can live to around 500, so neither is especially old yet.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Edna, when she obtains her own Domain, receives the [Duty Beyond Life and Death] skill, which makes her unkillable for 24 hours, even tanking hits from a demon king (but absolutely exhausted afterward).
• No Immortal Inertia: Classes can greatly slow down the rate of aging, but if the class is forcibly removed, the person's body might make up for lost time. Chung is stripped of his hero class and rapidly changes from a young man to having only about five years left.
• No-Sell:
  • For years, Matt survives wandering demon attacks by simply being so resistant (thanks to his hero fragments) that they eventually get bored of hitting him, and move on. Even a demon lord wielding a fiery axe just bounces off.
  • Falklay the ranger has a number of potent stealth skills, such as [hidden amongst trees]. However, that skill does nothing to protect him against observation by the trees themselves, allowing Matt to reliably observe him.
• Not So Harmless Punishment: The punishment for multiple murders in the Freshlands is "Aeon's mercy". The thing about it is, he's not merciful.
  No one subjected to Aeon's Mercy had ever returned. How could they, with their souls ripped out of their bodies and turned into living experiments.
• Order Versus Chaos: The winged beings discovered on "Angelworld" are firmly on the side of order. Left to their own devices, this has resulted in a peaceful world full of lawyers quibbling with each other. Raph, however, upon visiting Aeon and seeing what the demons have wrought on other worlds, determines to turn their quest for Order outward and start imposing it on the vast number of purely chaotic worlds around them, which Aeon finds concerning.
  His kind, if spread throughout the stars, would help many worlds from the fury of the demons, but I could also see the great destruction and the dictatorial order that they would inflict on worlds.
  The perfectly manicured version of their homeworld, copy pasted across many others.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Souls have multiple layers, with the innermost being indestructible and immortal and used to reincarnate them, while the outer is more malleable and can be harvested for resources to make things like class seeds and subservient artificial minds. Part of Aeon's role as a soul tree is to gather up the souls of the departed, until they are ready to move on, which normally takes a few months. While they're hanging around, they're fully conscious and can communicate with him such as Jura taking the chance to say goodbye, and he's even able to make bodies for them to inhabit if he wants to (typically for those who have a soul contract binding them to his service).
• Pest Controller: TreeTree eventually gains the ability to grow and control swarms of war-beetles and spiders, allowing him to project force despite being immobile himself. Especially since the beetles are not palm-sized little bugs, but large enough to fight a grown man. And the more subordinate trees he plants, the larger the swarm he can support...
• Plant Person: Among the refugees driven out by humanists are a number of treefolk, which appear to Matt as some kind of tree/human/insect hybrid. They need contact with the ground in order to sleep, can become mildly sick from too much moving around, can reproduce externally from their bodies similarly to flower pollination, can hibernate in cold weather, and are longer-lived than humans. Matt feels a degree of kinship when he first meets them, and they're pleased to have him around.
• Play-Along Prisoner: Lausanne allows herself to be placed under house arrest, since she's not actually being harmed and she's in no rush. But since she's level 80 and has a powerful Aeonic familiar, she's pretty confident that she could break out any time she wanted.
• Playing with Fire: Alexis the hero has a powerful affinity with fire magic, including the [Body of fire] skill that essentially turns her into a fire elemental (thus ignoring most attempts to hurt her). When she's infected with demonic energies, she's quite difficult for TreeTree to subdue.
• Playing with Syringes:
  • Upon capturing Falklay the ranger, TreeTree proceeds to test the effects of the [Natural mana overwhelming] skill on someone who isn't an ally. However, since his mana isn't very compatible with the body, this results in mana poisoning. Which he attempts to heal, while still pouring in more mana just to see what will happen, resulting in the victim being gradually tortured to death over the course of two days, very much alive and conscious (and thrashing around) the whole time, after which TreeTree watches the moment of death closely to see exactly what happens to the soul.
    I'm actually curious, does the body actually gain compatibility over time? Or does the body continue to naturally reject my mana?
  • When Aeon is trying to devise a cure for a missing hand, lost so long ago that its template has faded from the soul, he runs a series of experiments on guinea pigs and similar critters. The results are messy, such as the time he recreated a tail, but as a simple lump of skin without the necessary blood vessels, and it rapidly swelled with blood until it popped.
  • The highest penalty for crime in his realm is for the prisoner to be handed over to him, "subject to Aeon's mercy." The usual outcome is that he experiments on them to death, testing out the capabilities of his soul forge and related abilities.
    I mean, if the justice system says who and who is to die, might as well contribute to science while dying. It's not as if the manner of death makes a difference.
• Police State: A relatively mild example, but an example nonetheless. Aeon is fair, generally honest, civic-minded, and chooses not to stop people from privately disagreeing or disliking him. However, he always knows that they are doing it, with his network of trees giving him the ability to observe everywhere in his realm at once. And capital punishment is euphemistically referred to as being "subject to Aeon's mercy" — which in practice means death via becoming an experimental test subject. Crime is, unsurprisingly, quite low, and rebellion is not permitted.
• Poor Communication Kills: Hawa sent his followers in a crusade against Aeon, with many casualties, because he's a long way away and couldn't spare the energy to scry on Aeon's world in detail and properly understand the situation. He merely became aware of an interloping power, assumed it was a demonic assault, and gave the order. He apologises to Aeon once he learns the truth. Aeon is slightly perturbed that an apology is all he gets, but realises that he's callous enough by now to probably have done the same.
• Power Perversion Potential: When a Salah official gained levels in the [Authoritarian] class, he received a related skill called [Submission] — which apparently "worked so wonderfully with the commoner ladies!"
• Psychopomp: As Matt gains levels, he evolves into a [Soul Tree], with the function of gathering the souls of the dead and preparing them for reincarnation (by stripping off the outer layers of the soul, containing their classes and skills, which he gets to harvest for his own use). It's mostly an automatic process, and he usually doesn't actually interact with the dead, but he's capable of speaking to the recently departed as they pass through, if he wants to, such as his longstanding friend Jura.
• Pummeling the Corpse: Just a few days after the slaughter of Freeka, Laufen vents her grief and frustration on a demon hound that menaces the village, hitting it long past the point where it's dead. Emile persuades her to calm down, then kicks the hound's body herself.
• Punny Name: Matt amuses himself by using tree puns whenever he names things, from his artificial minds (Ivy, Dimitree, Stratreegy, etc), to his followers (the Valtrian Order, with its Valthorn military arm), to his institutions (such as the school of Treeology).
• Puppeteer Parasite: One of the more troublesome demon kings unleashes large numbers of parasitic larvae, which bite into their victims, injecting a numbing agent so they're not noticed, then take over the body and turn it into a demonic hatchery, while preserving the brain for last so they can pretend to go about life as normal. They're not extraordinarily powerful in combat, but the impact on morale is profound, and in the absence of specialist detection equipment, the only reliable countermeasure for a suspected outbreak is to scorch the earth, racking up large numbers of potentially innocent casualties.
  Edna: The temples are just burning entire villages to the ground. I'm afraid I see merit in their approach.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Demon King Sabnoc dies, but is first able to draw power from the souls of two heroes it killed in the fight, to help it corrupt a huge portion of the central continent into demonic territory, and the demons then proceed to attack the two souls over the next several years and gradually gain access to their memories.
• Quantity vs. Quality: At level 200, Lumoof has a choice between extending Avatar mode to a group of up to twenty other people, or enhancing the Avatar to be a full copy of all Aeon's abilities.
  Lumoof: I think the choice is whether to go wide or to go tall.

R-Z

• Rare Candy: Aeon has seeds that could give people many levels instantly, even up to level 60. However, they don't work at higher levels, and at lower levels you can never be sure that someone is mentally ready for power since they have no experience of it. So Aeon generally doesn't use the seeds, just stockpiles them. Lausanne also notes that using them doesn't quite result in the same level of power that would come from earning levels yourself.
• Refusal of the Call: Ken really isn't happy about being a summoned hero, finds the whole thing deeply suspicious, and walks away instead of helping to fight the demon king. His peers eventually learn that he's on the right track; they're basically cosmic mercenaries whom the gods will use and then throw away.
• Reincarnate in Another World: This is the beginning of Matt's story, and also the origin of the summoned heroes. The heroes apparently get to return home once they die, but Matt hasn't been promised that.
• Reincarnated as a Non-Humanoid: Matt reincarnating into a tree with a few surprising upsides is the main premise of the plot, Aeon's contracted souls can become other things as well such as sapient buildings.
• Revenge: Discussed at length with the various wronged parties once Aeon is able to locate those responsible for the massacre of Freeka. The victims have various reactions, some wanting to execute them, or publicly shame and hurt them to make them feel a portion of what they inflicted, some wanting to just move on.
  Jura: I think I will only know what I will do when I hold the executioner's blade, and the culprit's head on the chopping block.
• Rip Van Winkle:
  • When the situation calls for it, Matt can hibernate for years at a time, waking up to find the world changed.
    • When he's first reborn, he has no way to interact with the world, and spends over fifty years hibernating, interspersed with occasional system messages.
    • He spends another twenty years mostly asleep after being critically injured by Demon King Sabnoc's final Taking You with Me corruption wave. People he knew have grown up and/or died, politics have shifted, and things he built have disappeared.
  • Sawabesarulars returns to his homeworld after what turns out to be approximately three centuries, finding that everyone he knew is gone and almost entirely forgotten, and his plans and hopes need to be adjusted for an entirely different situation from what he expected.
• Rock Monster: Upon the heroes defeating a mixture of demonic golems and hell hounds, the fragments are pulled together into a giant spiky centipede. Since its magic is designed to pull pieces back into itself, it's quite hard to deal any meaningful damage to it, and the heroes have to stall it until it runs out of magic.
• Royal Harem:
  • It's reasonably common for heroes who survive the demon king to become monarchs and gather a collection of wives, due to their immense personal power. Harris nearly loses track of how many children he has, after two dozen — but they're all ambitious and impatient, causing his empire to fragment into civil war between his various wives and heirs once he's no longer holding it together.
  • Subverted for Matt, who upon being told of reincarnation, is initially excited at the prospect of building a harem — until he ends up as a tree.
• RPG Mechanics 'Verse: It's handled fairly loosely, but the world works on classes and levels and Skills, and the populace are aware of it. Matt starts off as just a Tree, but his class changes over time based on his levels and achievements, eg becoming a Soul Tree.
• Sapient House: Several of Aeon's contracted souls are incarnated into buildings, including a hotel, a combat training facility, and a research lab, resulting in mutable and partially mobile structures. Whether they can leave the building depends on the exact terms of their service; Meela has a separate wooden body and can wander around at will, but Yvon can only go about ten paces outside the tree.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Gerrard speculates about ending the cycle of demon kings by sealing one away instead of killing it. A later group of heroes attempts it, succeeding at the cost of their own lives, but the gods summon a fresh group of heroes and pressure them into finishing it off. Kei, among the second group, is furious when she realises what she was made to do.
• Self-Duplication: The "Tree of Life" domain allows Aeon to grow extra copies of his main body. He can't be fully killed without destroying all of them, and they can also pass objects between them, no matter how far apart they are. Unfortunately, he's initially limited to five of them.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Snek volunteered to leave his planet, which was besieged by demons, and throw himself into the void, seeking a Hero. After centuries of drifting and waiting, he manages to latch onto one, who agrees to let Snek use blood magic to extract his [hero] class. Snek is then discovered by Aeon, to his horror, but is accepted as a guest, and after a great deal of effort and exploration, Aeon tracks down Snek's world in the void sea and is able to deliver him back, carrying the precious [hero] class so they can make a champion to drive the demons out. Unfortunately, since it's been centuries, Snek's mission has been entirely forgotten, everyone involved in sending him is dead, and the survivors have become accustomed to the new status quo and don't want to disrupt it.
• Shout-Out: Matt internally makes quite a lot of references to media from his first life.
  • When he learns that subsidiary trees must be placed within range of his root network, but that they also extend that network, he thinks, "I should have pylons." Later, Dimitree sees him looking at the steep upgrade costs for his subordinate minds, especially the gems required, and tells him, "You require more minerals."
  • When Alexis is unable to regain control of her own body, TreeTree internally decides that the "friendship-no-jutsu route" has failed.
  • The walking demonic castle that attacks him has glowing red spires that "reminded me of the Obelisk of Light." When it reaches the walls, Alexis literally shouts out, "You shall not pass!"
  • During his work to restore a missing hand, Aeon contemplates creating a library of organ templates for future use, "Kind of like playing Spores, the game."
  • Meela spends so much time and effort on expanding her hotel's repertoire of recipes that Aeon thinks to himself that she's playing hotel tycoon or Overcooked!
  • He compares Demon King Sabnoc's wave of corruption destroying his tree network to an extradimensional disaster consuming the stars in Stellaris.
  • When he reaches level 150 and has to select a Domain, he wonders if it's like choosing a deity to worship in Age of Mythology.
  • Upon deciding to do his best to win over the citizens of captured cities, instead of executing them, Aeon privately thinks, Wololo.
  • When it turns out that neighbouring countries didn't realise Aeon could create dungeons for Level Grinding, artificial mind Patreeck privately informs him that, "I find their lack of faith in your abilities, disturbing."
  • After Stella remarks that her experimental telepathic suit makes her feel like Iron Man, but it can't support the mental load she needs to tap into a demon king core, Aeon settles on instead making combat versions for the higher-level Valthorns.
    I decided the first version would be named the Timberman Mark I.
  • A group of high-level knights who primarily use spears and pikes jokingly call themselves the Order of the Pointy Stick.
• Sleep Learning: At its most basic, Matt's [Dream tutor] ability just lets him give pleasant dreams to the recipients, but he can also imbue collected essences into dreams to bestow Skills. Or, he can put Child Soldiers through horrific scenarios designed to inure them to the traumatic experiences of war.
• Soul Eating:
  • The role of a soul tree is to gather the souls of the dead in preparation for them to be reincarnated. As part of that process, the trees harvest "class seeds" and "skill seeds" from the outer layers of the souls, giving Aeon a stockpile to empower his favoured servants, as well as granting him experience for himself. He doesn't see anything inherently wrong with this.
    Aeon: It's not as if you actually lost anything. You died. Your attachment to your body and whatever fragments stop there. It's like your corpse, after it's buried in the ground, some worms come and eat your dead body. It's just nature, naturally consuming and assimilating the deceased! Do you curse the worms for eating the bodies buried in the ground? I am a [soul tree]. My job is to recycle the souls and spirits of the world, and reality is, you, as a person who died, are part of that cycle.
  • As a reincarnator, Matt also receives a soul fragment each time a hero is killed, granting him offensive and defensive bonuses against demons, and faster experience gain. Of course, as The Ageless, he's able to watch cycle after cycle of heroes come and go, meaning that he accumulates quite a lot of these fragments...
• Soul Power: Once he gathers enough mana to bring his "soul forge" online, TreeTree is able to manipulate the souls he harvests from the dead. Or others he captures, or who enter his biopods. He uses it primarily for healing and research — although the research would never be approved by an ethics board.
  [The power to repair, mend souls. To strip souls apart, and put them back together. The ability to add souls to your abilities, familiars, items, trees. The ability to push souls to their limits, and beyond. The ability to rank up a soul. The ability to fuse soul fragments whole, and create artificial sub-souls from ordinary soul fragments]
• Status Buff:
  • Upon discovering that Matt's [Root strike] can deal minor damage to a demonic champion with Super-Toughness, Lord Rajjiv commands his troops to cast all their support spells on Matt, with the idea that the power-ups will be enough to let him deal serious damage instead of the Scratch Damage that everyone else has managed. After becoming the recipient of [Holy Power X], [Blessed strike V], [Demon slayer III], [Energy burst V], [Fatal strike], [Heaven’s Punishment], [Holy Blessing], [Imbue Holy Power], [Energy boost], [Piercing strike], [Magic damage III], and [Attack boost III], Matt feels light-headed, but is able to One-Hit Kill the champion.
  • Matt himself gains the ability to project various auras, from boosting experience gain, to increasing plant growth, to suppressing demonic power. And he's later able to impart partial auras to his subsidiary trees, allowing him to cover very large areas.
• Stone Wall: As a tree, Matt is immobile unless someone digs him up and replants him (and the bigger he grows, the more unlikely that is), and although he can attack with roots and vines, his powerset is oriented more toward survival and regrowth. As a result, he is extremely hard to kill, and only grows more resilient as he collects more hero soul fragments. He eventually works around his immobility by recruiting minions.
• Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: Invoked by TreeTree when he offers Meela a job as a harvester of souls, and she turns him down.
  Meela: I'm a cute little girl. I ain't becoming your haunted ghost.
  TreeTree: But cute little girls make the best scary ghosts!
• Super Breeding Program: Aeon has very mixed feelings once he learns that skills can sometimes be inherited by children, weighing up the value of breeding super-soldiers vs the moral perils of treating people like cattle. However, once he gains the ability to directly inject inheritable skills into a willing recipient, Patreeck suggests trialling it with the Treefolk and Lizardfolk, who have different customs and norms around reproduction.
• Symbiotic Possession: Lumoof, upon achieving his Domain, can act as an avatar of Aeon, channelling power as if he were Aeon's main body. This gives him access to Aeon's various anti-demon auras and abilities, and allows Aeon to work around being a stationary tree.
• Take Over the World: Aeon actually finds total planetary takeover to be an annoying distraction from his real work. Also, it inevitably involves a lot of preventable deaths. Still, for the sake of putting down threats and stabilising his realm, he can and will do it — on multiple worlds. His beetle armies and domain-holders are beyond what regular nations can fight, and his ability to create prosperity means that a not insignificant number of people are willing to bend the knee peacefully.
• Taking You with Me: Demon kings often self-destruct in various fashions when they die, sometimes exploding and incinerating all the heroes fighting them, sometimes corrupting large swathes of the continent into demonic territory that is hostile to all existing life.
• Taught by Experience: Aeon finds a long-term solution to rebellions on Threeworld, by sending captured rebels to fight against the demons on Lavaworld. A quarter of them die, and the rest are so horrified by what they've seen that they no longer try to oppose Aeon.
• Tech Tree: The [biolab] is able to research various enhancements and adaptations for Matt's creations, from cold-resistant trees, to larger beetles designed to carry cargo. Each advance generally requires months to years, but he doesn't care about such trifling spans of time as that.
• Telepathy: Matt gains the ability to speak telepathically to people nearby, which is his only way of communicating for quite a while.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: Since Aeon gets treated as an evil cult leader, he decides to do it properly and firmly establish his religious organisation, standardise teaching and training, etc.
• There Are No Therapists: The mental influences built into the [hero] class assist the heroes in being numb to the violence and gore and dismemberment and incineration that they wade through, in their quest to slay the demon king. After the fact, however, if they survive, they're pretty much cast adrift, frequently turning to alcoholism, promiscuity, self-destructive infighting, and other ways of failing to cope with the trauma they've experienced.
• Too Much Information: Kei could have lived without knowing that a lot of Alvin's information from the Oracle was gained in bed.
• Trial by Combat: After he downsizes a number of less skilled employees, TreeTree gets a scattering of complaints. His response is to invite anyone who is dissatisfied with his decision, to challenge one of his (rhinoceros-sized) war beetles to a fight.
  TreeTree: If they prove they will be more useful in battle than any of my beetles, I will give them their position back, and a small reward. In fact, please put up a notice. Let this be known.
• Truce Zone: As much as possible, TreeTree prefers to stay out of conflicts between nations; everyone is welcome to come and do business, if they follow his rules, but no one gets special treatment, and he doesn't intend to join in anyone else's war. As his power expands, he eventually forms an alliance and has to mediate disputes between his subordinates, but even then, in his home ground, infighting is not permitted (and he has the Police State infrastructure to back that up).
  Personally, my ideal outcome is for the battles to be fought around me, without affecting me, such that I gain the souls from all this… conflict.
• Trust Password: When TreeTree sees two groups of people approaching, with one group pursuing the other, he knows nothing about their allegiance and idly considers killing them all, until one of them calls out a phrase he doesn't understand, and Jura responds by asking TreeTree to target the other group. Turns out that the person who called out was another elf, with connections in Freeka, who knew a recognition password.
• The Unchosen One:
  • Lausanne is inspired by stories about heroes, and dedicates her life to becoming one — with quite a bit of success, reaching impressively high levels at a young age and doing a lot of good for the world. She's a bit discouraged, however, when she meets the actual gods-chosen heroes, and watches them surpass her years of training in days or weeks. TreeTree, who has taken a liking to her, is inclined to grumble at the unfairness of the heroes' divine blessings.
  • Matt himself, despite being disqualified as a chosen hero during his reincarnation, is on track to bring more lasting change to the world than the heroes do.
• War Is Hell: Some of Aeon's nastier [dream tutor] lessons are meant to teach this, putting the recipient in a dream battlefield where they helplessly watch their friends get slaughtered around them. Some of the young Valthorns also get to learn it from real experience, when they fight seemingly endless waves of demons at the volcano (in a relatively safe and well supported environment, but nonetheless, the grind and slaughter gets to them).
  8-year-old Valthorn: Wars are not nice.
  Captain: Good that you realise that when you’re young.
• Weapon of X-Slaying:
  • His many hero fragments give Matt tremendous bonuses when attacking demons, but do nothing against other enemies (except boosted experience gain).
  • He later helps some of the heroes to manufacture anti-demon weaponry, since their tremendous natural abilities don't always have specific bonuses against demons.
• When Trees Attack: Once he unlocks the [Root Strike] skill, Matt is able to attack out of the ground with no warning, anywhere within his roots' range. It has a limited number of uses per day, but that limit can grow quite high with enough levels, and the element of surprise means that each strike is likely to be a kill against soft targets. Plus, his roots gain the anti-demon effects of his hero fragments. He later picks up additional options, for restraining enemies with vines, or making a whole field erupt in thorns, or hurling poisonous fruits.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: On several occasions, Matt encounters injuries that linger despite his healing abilities.
  • The fires of Demon King Baal are stalemated with his Healing Factor for years, new growth constantly forming and burning away, until a group of cultists collect the fire for their own purposes.
  • Meela suffers a demonic attack that attempts to rot her soul, and healing just stalls it rather than removing it. TreeTree keeps her on life support for several months, until someone arrives who can reduce the rot enough for her to function, and even then, it's not entirely gone and she isn't combat-effective.
  • Harris, Gerrard, and Mirei are affected by a demon king's plague, and have to remain close to Aeon afterward, so they can be regularly healed. Which plays a part in their decision to sacrifice their own lives and return to Earth.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: The heroes' star mana reacts explosively when it comes in contact with the void mana of the demonic rift gates, so they can't counter-invade and stop a demon king before it arrives. However, Aeon's forces don't rely on star mana, and they eventually succeed in killing a demon king before it can launch its assault — which results in the demons pulling back their forces to regroup and escalate.
• You Have Researched Breathing: TreeTree is bemused when he reaches level 123 and receives the [Reinforce defensive structures] skill, which doesn't seem to him like a suitable skill for such a high level.
• You Wouldn't Shoot Me: Most of the world's leaders are sure that Aeon's threat to stop their war by kidnapping them all is a bluff.
  Those older, and have seen the more violent era were wise enough to know I would, and they tried their best to persuade those sitting on the fences.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: Souls collected by a soul tree will ordinarily linger for just a few months, barring special circumstances, then go on to be reincarnated. However, it is also possible to make a contract, which will result in the soul lingering and being subservient for a thousand years.
  • Eriz is sentenced to a soul contract as a punishment for getting TreeTree involved in a fight he didn't want. It's only once the sentence is actually carried out that she discovers it's not going to take her soul immediately, and she's free to live out her life.
  • Yvon makes a contract in exchange for her people receiving more economic assistance.
  • Alexis gets contracted by accident after her failed attempt at soul meddling.
  • There's a lesser effect when someone accepts a familiar from Matt; their soul isn't kept beyond the usual time, but is more thoroughly harvested of seeds and skills and experience when they die. This is how he first gains the ability to sense and communicate with the outside world, by harvesting skills from a druid.

---

I roll the wheel. There's not much of a choice. This guy isn't buying it.
And it stops at some random word that I did not understand… Wait. The word transformed.
"A trope."