Chapter Two Hundred Eleven: The Way of Symbiosis

Volume Six: Spirit-Life in Dahuang — Dao Grace Everlasting

Deep within the forest stood a giant tree.

It was neither the tallest tree in Dahuang nor the most ancient. But the stories unfolding upon it were far more remarkable than its height or its age.

Vines coiled around its trunk, their roots driving into the fissures of the bark, drawing sustenance from the tree's sap. Looking only at this, one might think the vines were harming the giant tree. But higher up, the vines' leaves spread over the tree's exposed roots, shielding them from the scorching sun. The vines' tendrils also drew moisture from deep soil that the tree's own roots could not reach, and shared it with the tree through their common mycelial network.

They were in symbiosis.

Ants had built their nest among the tree's roots. These black ants foraged by day, gathering seeds and the bodies of dead insects, carrying them back to the colony. In the process, their excrement accumulated around the tree's roots, becoming natural fertilizer. And the ants' tunnels aerated the soil, allowing the roots to breathe more freely.

A small bird of dull gray plumage lived in the tree. It nested among the vine leaves and fed on the insects that inhabited the tree. Without the bird, the wood-boring beetles that tunneled into the trunk would multiply unchecked and hollow the giant tree from within. The tree gave the bird shelter and a source of food; the bird gave the tree defense against pests.

At the crown, a spider had just finished spinning its web. The web was not large, but it was placed with precision — directly where the vine blossoms clustered thickest. Flying insects, drawn by the fragrance of the flowers, blundered into the threads. The spider crept toward them without haste and wrapped its prey.

In the mornings, the spider's web hung heavy with dewdrops. Sunlight passing through the droplets scattered flecks of fractured light beneath the canopy. Certain flying insects disliked humid conditions; they steered clear of the dew-laden zones, which in turn reduced the damage to the vine's blossoms.

Such relationships filled the forest everywhere. Not competition — a subtle equilibrium, in which every creature unwittingly created the conditions for another's survival. The algae in the water gave fish fry air-breath and cover; the movement of the fry stirred the sediment at the bottom, releasing buried nourishment back into the water to feed the algae. Flowers gave bees nectar; bees spread the flowers' pollen.

Pangu had long since departed, but the world he had left behind was running in its own way.

At the base of this tree, there was a hidden hollow. The opening was small — no wider than a palm — but the cavity within was deep beyond seeing.

A shrew lived there.

The shrew was among the smallest mammals in this forest, its body shorter than a grown man's thumb. Yet it was fierce, fiercely territorial, and fed on insects and worms. It had chosen this tree because the ant colony among the roots provided ample food. And those ants, for all their numbers, could do nothing against a hunter a hundred times their size.

The shrew's waste piled up deep inside the hollow, decomposing naturally and being absorbed by the roots. Each day it patrolled the spaces between the roots, hunting and eating the larvae that gnawed at the tree's base. It asked nothing in return — but it was, undeniably, protecting the tree.

Half a span higher, a dense clump of ferns had taken hold in the fork of the trunk. Their spores had germinated in the cracks of the bark, and their roots crept down along the trunk like a fine-woven net. They were not parasitic — merely epiphytic, drawing moisture from the air and nourishment from the dust that settled upon them.

The ferns' leaves layered over one another, forming a small oasis. Rainwater pooled among the fronds after storms, becoming a breeding ground for mosquitoes. The mosquitoes drew insect-eating tree frogs — small frogs of emerald green, their toe-tips bearing suction pads. They hid beneath the undersides of the fern leaves by day and emerged at night to hunt.

The tree frogs' skin secreted a mucus containing a mild toxin. Seeping through the cracks in the bark into the tree's sap, that toxin helped the giant tree resist certain wood-borers. Between the giant tree, the ferns, and the tree frogs, a marvelous chain of cause and effect had formed.

The middle layer of the canopy was a tangle of crossing branches — the kingdom of moss and lichen.

Gray-green moss blanketed the thick branches, as though clothing the tree in velvet. The moss could absorb vast quantities of rain and release it slowly in dry times — a matter of great importance to the other tenants of the canopy. A white lichen grew among the moss; its acidic secretions broke down the dead outer bark on the branches, providing the moss with mineral nourishment.

An emerald praying mantis lay hidden among the moss, utterly motionless.

Its body was nearly identical in color to the moss — unless one leaned in very close, its presence was impossible to detect. The mantis held its forelimbs folded before its chest, waiting with patience. A butterfly drifted in and settled on a nearby fern leaf. The mantis did not move; it was measuring the distance. The butterfly took flight again and passed directly above the mantis — in that instant, the mantis's forelimbs shot out.

Too fast to follow.

The butterfly was already caught. The mantis began to tear at the butterfly's abdomen; juices dripped, soaking into the moss. The moss absorbed the decaying matter and converted it into nourishment. The mantis ate the butterfly; the moss fed on the mantis's scraps — every tenant of the tree was a participant in its ecological cycle.

At the crown of the tree, a falcon would occasionally stop to rest.

It did not nest in this tree — the canopy was not sturdy enough to bear its weight. Yet it liked to perch here, for this vantage commanded a view of the entire woodland and the distant river. Each time it arrived, every other creature on the tree went deathly still. The shrew retreated to the bottom of its hollow, the tree frogs burrowed deep among the ferns, the mantis vanished into the moss.

But the falcon had no interest in them. Its quarry was the waterfowl along the riverbank. It was merely using this tree as a watchtower.

Even so, the falcon's presence altered the tree's miniature ecology. After killing its prey, it would feed at the crown, and the remains would fall to the ground, enriching the soil. The herbivores that dared not approach the river to drink under the falcon's gaze lingered instead around the tree, browsing on shrubs — their droppings fertilizing the roots.

A predator that hunted elsewhere had become, indirectly, a source of nourishment for this tree.

Upon this tree, stories of the strong preying on the weak played out every day. The mantis caught butterflies; the tree frogs ate mosquitoes; the shrew hunted insects; the spider's web trapped flies. Every act of predation was slaughter; every mouthful of food meant the disappearance of a life. Yet it was precisely this slaughter that maintained the equilibrium of the entire tree. Without the mantis, butterfly larvae would strip the vines of their tender shoots. Without the tree frogs, mosquitoes would swarm in plagues. Without the shrew, root-boring larvae would hollow out the roots.

The tenants of this tree devoured one another, and preserved one another, in the very same act.

In the shade of this tree, death and new life were one and the same.

At the foot of the giant tree, deep in the soil, there was a layer of symbiosis more hidden still.

The mycelial web spread through the earth, fine as weaving, linking the roots of this giant tree with the roots of dozens of trees around it. The web was so fine as to be nearly invisible — yet it carried the exchange of nourishment for the entire forest. When one tree was stricken by pests, the hyphae transmitted its distress signal to its neighbors. When one tree had abundant water, its surplus nourishment was passed through the hyphae to those suffering from scarcity.

The forest was not countless independent trees. It was a single web.

Everything that happened on this tree was quietly affecting distant lands. Birds flew away with seeds in their bellies, and another tree grew from those seeds far away. Ants followed scent-trails and carried off insect eggs, digging new nests beneath new roots. The falcon returned to its eyrie after the hunt, and fern spores caught in its feathers fell upon far-off cliffs and grew into new patches of green.

The story of a single tree was, in the end, the story of the entire forest.