The room we arrived at was dark and filled with many pipes. A large ventilation fan was spinning on the wall.

“This is the ventilation room. As you can see from that propeller, it’s one of the rooms closest to the building’s outer wall. There’s no one guarding it either.”

Seeing the outside air and light finally moved me deeply. I thought I’d die trapped in that room forever! The wings, larger than my body, spun menacingly, and if I got caught in them, my body would be cut in half. Looking outside from a bit of a distance, I could feel hot air rising.

Pointing at the menacingly spinning propeller, I asked Mesquite.

“Mesquite, can you break that? I need to see outside.”

At first, I planned to ask Mesquite to break the wall. Her strength had shattered all the glass walls with a single thrust of her lance. I thought that would be enough to make a big hole in the wall.

“If that ventilation propeller weren’t there… were you seriously planning to just break the wall? You asked to be guided to a place near the outer wall…”

Papyrus spoke in a dumbfounded voice, looking at the finger pointing at the propeller.

Regardless, Mesquite gripped her lance in response to my request.

“My master, Jae. If it is your wish, I will do anything.”

Golden sand wrapped around her black lance. Sand-like petals spiraled around her as well, and it was clear that immense power was gathering, even at a glance.

Everyone quietly stepped back at Mesquite’s momentum. Elder grabbed my shoulder, pulling me away, distracted by the spectacle. His scolding tone hit my ears, asking if I wanted to get hurt by being caught in it.

A moment later, with a tremendous noise, the thrust lance struck the exact center of the propeller. The fiercely spinning blades trembled and vibrated like a tree caught in a storm before stopping, and then the massive propeller itself fell out of place and dropped downward.

It was truly an incredible force. I had only thought about breaking it, but it completely tore it away.

A moment later, a heavy thud struck the ground as a fierce gust of air surged upward. The earth, viewed through the open wall, felt impossibly far away. We really were up high. The loud commotion stirred murmurs from the crowd. It was only a matter of time before we were discovered.

“Elder, are you ready?”

Taking a deep breath, I looked at my white flower. As if refusing to be outdone by Mesquite’s showmanship, she nodded with a tight-lipped expression.

To the guild members, I sent a letter requesting black branches and a connection to the water vein, while to Siedling, I delivered a separate letter detailing another request.

“I need your Belladonna to bring down black rain. Last time, I saw you and Belladonna using graft to create those black buds. When the time comes, I’ll use graft with Elder to summon a great rain. I want Belladonna’s black poison to mix with the rain, making it look like black rain. You’ve seen the rain Elder can bring, so you know its power. You’ll need to exert a lot of strength to keep Belladonna’s graft from being purified instantly. I’ll be making it rain in the terrarium for a very, very long time.”

“There’s no fire around, and I don’t feel any foul energy to wash away, so what’s the point of wasting rain like this?”

Knowing the source of the rain he created, Elder seemed reluctant even as he reluctantly complied.

“At the same time we use graft, Siedling will use graft with Belladonna. Black rain will fall. If your power is weak, the strong poison will be scattered all over the terrarium. You know that can’t happen, right?”

Elder bristled with frustration, as if to say there was no way he’d fail. It was literally that—the balance between our side and theirs was critical.

If our side’s power was too weak, Belladonna’s poison, strong enough to contaminate everything around it just by existing, would engulf the entire terrarium. But if their side was too weak, instead of black rain, only Elder’s refreshing rain would pour down abundantly.

My beautiful white flower, the first of my dryads to awaken graft. Without a flower capable of such a wide-ranging skill like you, this plan would never have even been conceivable.

Focusing fully on Elder, a pleasant flutter rose from deep in my chest. My vision slowly narrowed until only Elder shone brightly and clearly in focus. My heart pounded roughly, heightening the tension throughout my body.

Whenever I was about to perform graft with Elder like this, I was filled with a wonderfully thrilling excitement. It felt like solid proof that he was truly a dryad meant only for me.

A white light flickered, and around Elder, the image of a tree covered in beautiful white blossoms was projected. When Elder grasped his extended staff, a massive force pressed down on my entire body.

A sweet fragrance warmly enveloped me, and a refreshing energy swirled as if the blood flowing through my veins was being purified cleanly.

Siedling, you must never succumb to our energy.

Dark clouds gathered in the sky, and the bright morning instantly turned dark. More and wider. A colossal downpour to cover the entire terrarium!

A rumbling sound, like a landslide from a mountain made of small stones, echoed in my ears. At the same time, I heard the sound of raindrops lightly tapping the ground, pit-a-pat.

An enormous amount of rain began to pour down, so intense that it instantly cooled the scorching hot ground. The rain fell so heavily, as if a hole had been torn in the sky, the streaks of water becoming invisible to the naked eye.

It was an amount incomparable to what I used when repelling the fire chariot or purifying the swamp of death. As the raindrops hit the ground and met the heat, steam instantly rose, and the entire terrarium was shrouded in the torrential rain and steam so thick that one couldn’t see even an inch ahead.

Both the people on the streets and the tall buildings disappeared, as if swallowed into the clouds.

Just as I thought the rain couldn’t continue like this, a black curtain starting from the hills rapidly began to encroach upon the clear raindrops. The diamond-like sparkling rain had already deteriorated into a gloomy and dark ink-like substance.

As I had feared, perhaps because our side’s momentum, spewing forth infinite diamonds, was much stronger, the black rain repeatedly paled and then deepened in color, pushed back by the clear energy.

Hey, we can’t be pushed back.

The dwarves, truly excited by the long-awaited extravagance, knew no restraint. Even as I considered showing some leniency from our side, the rumbling sound of the diamond landslide was still echoing nonstop in three-dimensional surround sound.

Even though the rain was made of tree sap that quickly vaporized and flew away, the overwhelming volume of it was enough for water to pool and flow on the ground like shallow streams.

Whether Siedling had finally poured all its strength into it, for a while, the black rain maintained such a distinct color that it became etched into my mind.

I felt this was enough and stopped the graft. A surging force struck deep within my chest, and I let out a heavy breath.

It wasn’t something that could be done simply by pouring out diamonds endlessly. A scale like this seemed to affect even my stamina.

Who could have ever dared to imagine such a thing? Pouring in an unfathomable amount of diamonds just to mimic an omen and create rain.

“Just… what have you done?”

Even though Earning was known for being easygoing, she spoke to me in a trembling voice.

“Was that… something you and the dryad accomplished through your graft? Did you really… bring rain that could cover the entire terrarium?”

“Historically… there has never been a druid who used such a tremendous graft.”

Papyrus also looked at me with eyes that saw something bizarre, blinking repeatedly.

“With that level of power, you should have died. It’s enough force to completely exhaust life force. How can you rain that down and still be alive? A graft covering the entire terrarium… was something Scarecrow barely managed to pull off by staking his own life…”

But is Siedling okay? To replicate this level of power, she must have struggled just as much… Our Elder uses diamonds as materials for grafting, but according to others, life force is consumed as a baseline. I worried that I might have pushed Siedling too far.

“This is the power of the 28th terrarium’s administrative officer. The black rain has also fallen. Now, preparations are complete.”

The people who had been murmuring below the crashed alchemy tower had all taken shelter from the sudden downpour, and were nowhere to be seen.

Apart from the gloomy black downpour, the Elder’s rain of life filled the terrarium with a sacred energy. The sunlight shining through the cleared sky illuminated the terrarium, gleaming brilliantly as if it had just been washed with water.

I took out my phone and called up the status window of the wasp.

“I mimicked the omen of destruction as much as I could. With this, others should believe it, right?”

“You’re truly reckless and bizarre. To carry out something like this and act completely unfazed.”

“To me, you are the most bizarre person I have ever met.”

I touched the parasite of the dark bee and changed its purpose. The parasite’s color glowed red, and its name changed to ‘Distortion Loop Parasite No. 5’.

It distorts all messages transmitted by every bee within the terrarium under my dark bee’s command into a single piece of content. There’s a 14-character limit, so…

Alchemy tower conducting illegal artificial modifications

As I entered the text and activated it, I saw the dark bee’s fullness dropping wildly. It meant that all the bees in the terrarium had started delivering a single message to their master.

It was time to leave the alchemy tower.