The Tree of Beginning, the primordial tree at the origin of this world, seemed to possess a will of its own. The moment the virus attempted to breach its inner sanctum, a wave of flowing red energy surged through its colossal form.
This energy acted like a barrier, halting the virus in its tracks, preventing it from reaching the core systems that sustained the Tree's existence.
It was the Tree's rule force, the fundamental laws governing its world—that rejected the virus's intrusion.
But Lucius had foreseen this. Having read the original work, he knew one critical truth: the Tree's consciousness was deeply intertwined with Mew. In fact, Mew was the very embodiment of the Tree's will.
Outside the Tree, Mewtwo's eyes flared with a blinding blue light. A wave of psychic pressure erupted from him, expanding across several kilometers.
Every Pokémon dwelling within the Tree, including Mew, was engulfed by the sheer force of that pressure. Even the legendary titans Regirock, Regice, and Registeel were forced to the ground, barely able to resist.
This wasn't the virus at work. This was pure, unadulterated psychic power.
"Mii~!" Mew cried out in visible panic. It immediately responded with its own psychic force, rising to counter Mewtwo's will.
But the difference in power was stark. Even before being enhanced by the virus, Mewtwo had surpassed Mew. Now, with the virus augmenting him, the gap was insurmountable.
Boom—
An ancient Armaldo collapsed under the weight of Mewtwo's pressure.
Crash—
A Heracross fell from the trunk wall, its brain clearly shattered by the overwhelming force.
One by one, the Pokémon fell. Under Mewtwo's terrifying psychic field, only Mew and the three titans could barely hold on.
"Mii~!" Mew's frustration boiled over. A surge of red energy, drawn from the same origin as the Tree, burst forth from its body and launched toward Mewtwo.
Mewtwo dodged, fluid as vapor, and pushed his psychic pressure even further, widening its reach.
"Mii…" Mew watched as Mewtwo's psychic energy became almost tangible, like a translucent ocean sweeping outward. It realized that if it didn't stop this next attack, every ordinary Pokémon nearby would perish.
Acting swiftly, Mew tapped deeper into the Tree's power. Vast reserves of red energy unfurled around it, and for a moment, it summoned enough force to suppress Mewtwo.
The red energy collided with Mewtwo's blue psychic aura, spreading like a membrane around the expanding wave, trying to compress and contain it.
But Mewtwo's psychic onslaught wasn't meant to break through. It was meant to wear Mew down.
Even as the forces clashed, Mewtwo escalated the pressure.
To hold him back, Mew had to continuously draw on the Tree's power, and the more it did, the thinner the Tree's internal defenses became.
It was time.
Black mist seeped into the Tree, infiltrating crystalline clusters within.
These clusters were energy nodes, the Tree's equivalent of acupuncture points, guiding and channeling its purified energy throughout its vast body.
The Old One Virus had evolved beyond merely infecting the living. It could now invade matter itself, conceptual in nature.
Through these weakened nodes, Lucius pinpointed several areas where the red energy barrier was thinnest, slipped through, and broke into the Tree's inner systems.
The Tree of Beginning was worthy of its title. As the world's first divine tree, its internal structure was impossibly complex, its networks and energy flows dizzying even for Lucius, whose powers were now amplified by billions of infected hosts.
If this were a labyrinth, it might take an eternity to escape.
But Lucius wasn't trying to escape, he was trying to conquer. And he wasn't alone. He could multiply endlessly.
He didn't need to find paths. He would consume them all.
The Old One Virus flowed along the Tree's conduits, infecting everything it touched. Whether it was old, impure energy the Tree had absorbed, or newly purified energy ready for release; whether it was nutrient-carrying roots or life-giving pipes, anything Lucius passed became tainted.
"Mii~!" Just as Mew was beginning to suppress Mewtwo's psychic field, its attention snapped toward the Tree.
Something was wrong.
And it was spreading.
In a blink, Mew vanished from the battlefield.
A second later, it reappeared inside the Tree's core.
What it saw left it horrified, entire patches of crystalline nodes had turned black. Even the mighty Regi trio, the Tree's ancient protectors, had succumbed to a state of mental breakdown.
For Lucius, disrupting them was as simple as a stray thought.
Shocked and furious, Mew rushed to inject red energy into the crystals, trying to "detoxify" them, disregarding everything else.
Compared to the importance of the Tree, the fate of the Pokémon outside no longer mattered.
Mew grieved for the fallen, but if the Tree of Beginning was lost, the entire world would face annihilation.
It understood that cost all too well, as a being who had existed for millennia.
Mew returned the borrowed red energy to the Tree, reinvigorating its internal barriers. But it was too late, like donning a mask after catching a cold.
Still, the red energy surged back through the Tree like an immune system responding to infection, pushing back against the virus.
"Mii~" Mew channeled more red energy into the corrupted crystals. As they slowly turned from black back to crimson, Mew exhaled in relief, only for a sharp, sudden pain to lance through its mind.
It was like being stabbed with an invisible needle.
Before it could react, a thousand voices erupted in its head, each babbling in incomprehensible tongues, an insane chorus of madness as though a choir of lunatics had taken residence in its brain.
Lucius had poisoned the energy flow between Mew and the Tree's nodes, introducing the chaos of microbial thought directly into Mew's consciousness.
Only thanks to its nature as a Psychic-type Mythical Pokémon did Mew survive. Any other being would've gone mad instantly.
With Mew incapacitated, Lucius engaged in a full-scale tug-of-war with the Tree's revitalized red energy.
While the red energy held rule-based power and couldn't be corrupted outright, it wasn't part of the Tree's core. It functioned more like an immune system.
As the virus danced and darted through the Tree's networks, it continued to infect every system not directly protected by the red force.
The Tree's crown stretched beyond the clouds, but its roots were just as vast, spreading deep beneath the Kanto region, tapping the earth's nutrients and absorbing the planet's impurities.
The virus now spread in both directions.
Not only had it infested the Tree's visible trunk and branches, it now spread through every subterranean root.
And as the virus continued merging with the Tree's tissues, it began to change.
It started mimicking the Tree itself.
Soon, even the red energy, designed to detect and repel invaders, could no longer be sure whether it was facing an enemy… or something born of the Tree itself.
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