Because under her feet was a vast and sprawling web of green and verdant qi spreading throughout the hill and beyond, sinking through the thin gravelly earth to dig into the bedrock, to tap into the heat of the earthveins below.
Every trunk from youngest to oldest was a growth of these roots.
And the roots remembered as far back as Snowblossom herself, their ancient, distant whispers dreams of an age when a vast glacier filled the land, when winter never left, when strange beasts and spirits clashed and roared atop millennial icepack.
They remembered countless fallen, broken trunks, they remembered eons of hibernation stubborn conservation of the last spark of life needed to push up from the snow when at last the wan sun showed his face again. Contraction and growth, a life unending for longer than the Emperors had sat atop the Dragon Throne.