I Found a Door to the Elven Realm

Chapter 186: Ugly Voices and Horrific Intel

Every bird in the tree went quiet.

Not gradually. All of them at once. Fifty fire birds cutting their screaming mid-screech and the sudden silence was so wrong that Eren’s Predatory Reflex sent a cold spike through his shoulders before his brain even processed what happened.

He’d just spoken to them. In Beastin. And they all shut up at the exact same second.

Not one by one. Not a ripple spreading outward from the closest bird. Every single bird in the canopy stopped screaming at the same instant and turned to face him.

That’s not how individual animals react.

The bird on the lowest branch tilted its head and its beak opened and closed twice before producing a sound that was lower than the usual screeching and more deliberate.

[You speak the voice. The dead one never spoke the voice.]

"I learned it from wolves." His Beastin came out rough and slow but the skill smoothed most of the pronunciation. "The language works on everything that can think."

The nearest bird ruffled its feathers and the orange glow in its beak pulsed brighter. Then the bird two branches above did the same pulse at the exact same brightness. Then a third one across the canopy.

[Wolves are dirt creatures. They roll in their own sick. You learned the voice from dirt creatures.]

Eren almost responded with something defensive about Rury but stopped because his brain was stuck on something else. That synchronized beak-pulse. Three different birds on three different branches had done the exact same light pattern at the exact same moment.

Animals didn’t do that. Even pack animals with good coordination had a leader-follower dynamic where one moved first and others followed with tiny delays. That’s how wolf packs worked and how the elf hunting parties moved through the forest. Leader reacts, followers adjust.

These birds had no delay. Zero.

That’s not coordination. That’s.. synchronization.

He tried to keep his face neutral while his brain worked through it. The Clone had noticed the birds watching him in perfect sync before. Six birds tracking the same hand movement at the same angle.

But the Clone didn’t have Beastin at a high enough level to hear the structure in their screaming. He definitely didn’t catch the beak-light patterns.

"How many of you are there?" Eren asked it casually while pretending to examine the Clone’s old vine rope that hung from a lower branch.

[We are here. We are in the eastern trees. We are in the southern burned area watching the big red one. We are in the mountain watching the dark one. We are everywhere in the forest that has trees.]

We. Not "there are others." Just "we."

Every hair on Eren’s arms went stiff.

[You are looking at us strangely. The dead one looked at us that way sometimes. He was confused by us too but he could not hear the voice so his confusion was smaller.]

Eren’s Observe skill fired at the bird on the lowest branch.

[Observe: Target Identified: Jade Cinder Rook (Worker) - Level 19] -Colony Role: Scout/Observer -Linked Colony Size: Approximately 4,000+ units -Hive Status: Active - Central Node Located Outside Scan Range

Worker.

Colony role.

He read the system text three times because the first two times his brain rejected it.

These weren’t birds. They looked like birds and they screamed like birds and they flew and had feathers and built nests. But they weren’t individual creatures. Every single one of these ugly black fire-spitting things was a unit. A worker.

Part of a colony connected to a central node that his Observe couldn’t even reach from here. Four thousand of them spread across the entire forest.

The Clone had lived in their tree for five weeks and never ate one. Not because he chose not to. Something told him not to. Some instinct or maybe some influence from the colony itself kept him from treating them as food.

And the whole time they were watching everything he did and reporting it back to.. what? A queen? A brain?

The "rainbow one" they keep mentioning?

He backed away from the tree slowly. Not running because running from a hive of four thousand fire-throwing units would be the last stupid decision he ever made. Just casual stepping backward while keeping his hands visible and his posture non-threatening.

"I’m not here to cause problems." His Beastin whistled through his teeth. "I just wanted to see the tree."

[The tree is ours. The dead one was allowed because the rainbow mother allowed it. You smell like the dead one so you are also allowed. For now.]

For now. Great.

He kept moving and his eyes caught something at the base of the tree that made him stop.

The Clone’s saplings.

Two small plants growing from the disturbed soil near the roots. The Clone had planted them during his last week alive.

One was a thin woody stem about thirty centimeters tall with three tiny leaves that shimmered faintly gold in the light. That was the cutting from the centaur luck-fruit tree, the branch he’d snapped off during one of his stealing runs.

His Observe told him the bark still had living tissue inside and now it had actually rooted.

The other was the vine from the wyvern mountain. The orange-olive vine that had saved the Clone from starvation during his mountain escape. It had climbed about half a meter up the big tree’s trunk and produced four small green buds.

He planted these knowing he might not live to see them grow. And here they were, alive and rooting while he was gone. These saplings were the closest thing to a grave marker the Clone had.

Eren crouched down and touched the golden-leafed cutting carefully. The stem was thin but firm in the soil.

If this grows and produces luck fruits here..

No more stealing from centaurs. A private supply of +50 Luck per fruit right next to a safe base. But that was years away if it even worked. The centaur trees were old-growth monsters with deep roots. This cutting was barely a twig.

He stood up and looked around the clearing where the Clone had spent his days.

..

The question of why the Clone leveled so fast had been nagging him since he’d inherited the memories. In five weeks the Clone went from Level 25 to Level 49 and picked up eight Evolution League 2 skills. That was absurd.

Eren himself had spent months in the village training with Emily and hunting in the safe zones. His progress was steady but nothing close to what the Clone achieved out here.

The village had been safe. Protected by the Totem’s barrier and kept clear of high-level threats by generations of elf hunters. The forest around the village was a curated environment where the biggest dangers were Level 20 slimes and the occasional troll wandering too close.

But out here in the deep forest the Clone was fighting Level 40 gorillas and outrunning centaur alphas and dodging wyvern fire on mountain ridges. Every single day was life or death and the system rewarded that with massive experience gains.

He thought about the first system message he’d ever received when he entered the village six months ago.

[You have entered Elven Village in the Starting Zone 31!]

Back then he’d assumed "Starting Zone 31" was just the village’s name in the system. A label. Nothing more.

But standing out here in a forest where a Level 19 fire bird was part of a four-thousand-unit colony and a wounded dragon slept on a sacred tree and fruit that gave +50 Luck grew on centaur-guarded trees..

What if "Starting Zone" isn’t a name? What if it’s a difficulty rating?

If the village was a literal starting zone where everything was low level and the rewards matched then this deep forest was something else. A higher zone.

And the further north you went, past the centaurs and past the wyvern mountain, the higher the difficulty and the bigger the experience payouts.

That would explain everything. The Clone wasn’t a genius or a prodigy. He was just thrown into hard content at a low level and the system compensated. Same mechanics, different difficulty slider.

After the Class upgrade at Level 50 I need to come back here.

Not the village. Here. The deep forest and maybe even further north.

He made a mental note and started walking toward the nearest bird cluster but then stopped and changed his approach.

He looked up at the nearest Worker perched about four meters above him and focused. Lovely Eyes activated and his irises shifted to the warm golden hue that the skill produced.

At the same time he layered Charming Voice on top and spoke in Beastin with his smoothest tone.

"Hey there.. I could really use your help with something. Tell me more about the forest? The territories, the dangerous ones, which areas I should avoid?"

The bird stared at him. Its beak pulsed orange once, then twice, then a rapid stuttering pattern.

[Did you just try to charm me?]

Another bird from higher up joined in with the same stuttering beak-pattern.

[It tried to use mating-warmth on a Worker. The tree-human tried to court a Worker.]

[Workers do not mate. Workers do not feel mating-warmth. The tree-human does not understand what we are.]

From the eastern branches a whole cluster of birds started doing the same stuttering pattern and Eren realized with dawning horror that they were laughing at him. All of them. Across the entire canopy. And from the trees further away the same pattern echoed.

Birds he couldn’t even see were joining in. The stuttering beak-pulse was spreading through the forest and with his Beastin he could hear fragments of what they were saying to each other across distances.

[The new tree-human tried to court a Worker!]

[Pass it on!]

[The dead one never tried to court us. This one is stranger than the dead one.]

Eren’s face burned from his jaw to his ears and he was very grateful that nobody from the farm was here to witness this.

I just tried to seduce a hive mind.

But the embarrassment faded fast because something else was happening. His Apex Predator Awareness was painting heat signatures approaching from the east and north. More birds. Dozens of them moving through the trees toward his position.

The Workers’ laughter wasn’t just laughter. It was a signal that had propagated through the colony and now units from across the forest were converging on the source.

He didn’t wait to find out what four thousand synchronized fire-throwing birds did when their whole network focused on one spot.

"I’m going for a walk!" He said it loud and started moving northeast at a pace that was faster than casual but not quite running. "Not courting anything!"

The nearest birds watched him go with their heads tilted at identical angles.

[Interesting creature. Report to the rainbow mother.]

..

Three hours into the deep forest and Eren was starting to understand why the Clone had become a different person out here.

Everything tried to kill you. Not occasionally and not during bad luck encounters. Constantly from every direction with zero warning beyond what your skills could provide.

In the first hour alone he’d dodged a camouflaged snake that dropped from a branch directly at his face. His Predatory Reflex caught the heat signature a quarter second before impact and his body twisted sideways on pure instinct.

The snake hit the ground where his head had been and burrowed straight back into the leaves.