Chapter 3 – The Mirror of All Things
There's something addictive about not being yourself.
Ever since I picked Doppelgänger as my race, I've been living inside a paradox — a shapeless being pretending to be everyone but me. In Yggdrasil, identity is a tool, and I'm starting to realize I might be the sharpest blade in the box.
I didn't upload this part to my vlog, of course. What I record for the internet is a polished performance — third-person camera angles, commentary, flashy fights. What I actually do when the stream's off? That's the real experiment. The secret one.
The first thing I learned: the Doppelgänger isn't meant for beginners. At level 4, I could barely mimic anything higher than level 4 targets, and even then I only got about ninety percent of their actual strength. No save slots. No archives. Just one active template at a time — overwritten whenever I copy something new.
It's like running a single-line buffer for the universe. Efficient, dangerous, and absolutely thrilling.
I started small.
A wolf-type monster from Vanaheim — simple body, fast reflexes, no magic. Once I copied it, my entire form restructured: fur, claws, muscle memory. The mimicry was perfect — I could even smell better. I sprinted through the forest, tearing through mobs, laughing at the sheer absurdity of having functioning legs again.
Then I lost it.
I touched a slime by accident, and poof, overwrite. Suddenly I was goo.
Lesson learned: never copy something dumb unless you want to be dumb.
After that, I became obsessed with data optimization. Every monster, every player, every entity — I saw them not as threats, but as equations. If I could copy them, I could understand them.
At level 8, I started testing humanoids. Elves, dwarves, even angels. The angelic form from Asgard was especially interesting: immense magic power, natural resistance to dark energy. Perfect counter to demonic races.
So I went to Muspelheim.
You know, the flaming hellscape where demons spawn like corrupted data packets.
The moment I entered, my holy aura started to decay. Fire damage per tick, environmental debuffs — my stats nosedived. But I was ready.
I'd spent all my gold on environment resistance accessories — heat dampeners, elemental charms, even a "Blessed Ash Cloak" from some rich fool who didn't know its true worth.
Every step I took burned, but my numbers stayed stable.
The demons came in waves, and for once, I was the monster in their story.
I didn't fight fair.
Illusions layered over illusions — projections of holy fire, mirror doubles, and false damage indicators. The moment they tried to read my stats, my class Illusionist kicked in. What they saw wasn't me.
They thought they were fighting an Archangel. In reality, they were fighting a crippled kid behind a monitor, giggling like an idiot while his MP bar screamed for mercy.
There's a thrill in deception. Not the kind that lies — the kind that rewrites reality.
The Illusionist class turned out to be the perfect complement to my race. The more I focused on it, the more I realized Yggdrasil wasn't testing power; it was testing belief.
If they believed the illusion was real, then it was real — at least long enough for me to win.
And when I won, I copied again.
By level 15, I had a pattern — my own rhythm of evolution.
First, find a target race that's powerful in its home realm.
Second, copy it.
Third, take that form somewhere it shouldn't survive — and make it work.
Angel to fight demons. Demon to fight paladins. Slime to infiltrate vents in mechanical dungeons.
Every disadvantage became a puzzle. And puzzles are meant to be solved.
One time, I even impersonated a lich — undead, brittle, dripping with negative energy — just to test whether holy magic would kill me instantly. It didn't. The system logged me as "unstable" instead. My HP dropped fast, but I lasted long enough to cast illusions of holy light that confused the system itself.
Imagine tricking the server into not knowing what you are.
That's the kind of chaos I live for.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of these forms as disguises. They became languages — each one teaching me how the world thought.
An angel's pride.
A demon's hunger.
A human's fear.
And in between all that noise, there was me — the observer. The mimic. The kid who played god from a wheelchair.
I could have shown it all to the world — the perfect gameplay footage, the brilliant commentary, the numbers that would've broken every forum thread. But I didn't.
Because the truth is, the moment people know how a magic trick works, it stops being magic.
So instead, I uploaded my videos in third-person, all cinematic and detached. No trace of my real race. Just "The Wanderer." A nameless adventurer exploring the realms.
The viewers thought I had a full camera crew.
I let them believe it.
But every illusion takes something from the caster. The more I hid, the more blurred my sense of self became.
When you can be anyone, who are you when you log out?
Sometimes, after a long session, I'd look at my reflection in the dome's glass and half expect it to flicker — to shift. My mind still running the mimicry subroutines even when I was back in my real body.
Still, I kept diving back.
Because every time I copied something new, I learned something real — about strength, about weakness, about the way systems bend under creative pressure.
And every time I fooled a player into fighting a phantom instead of me, I felt… invincible.
I think that's when I started to understand the real meaning of Yggdrasil.
It wasn't about winning.
It was about becoming.
Not the strongest.
Not the smartest.
But the one who could adapt to anything — the mirror that reflects the entire world and yet belongs to none of it.
I ended my private log that night with one line:
"In a world where everything can be copied, the only thing that matters is what you choose to hide."
And as I disconnected from the server, my avatar dissolved into mist — faceless, nameless, forgotten.
Just another ghost in a god's machine.
End of Chapter 3 – "The Mirror of All Things."