Chapter 34 – The Endless Roots of the World Tree
There was a strange kind of silence that came when the world began to die.
Not the silence of endings — but of echoes, like the soft hum of a song that refused to fade.
Yggdrasil was still vast, still beautiful, still incomprehensibly alive in its own way. Yet most of its explorers, its warriors, its dreamers had long left.
That left me — Traveler_R, the last ghost wandering a fading paradise.
It was almost poetic.
For the first time in years, there was no competition. No raids, no markets, no tournaments.
Just the world — and me.
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The Return to Exploration
I began where it had all started: Helheim, the realm of death and cold rebirth.
The underground caverns still glimmered with frost-fire veins, rivers of pale blue light winding through skeletal spires.
Here, I discovered a kind of fungal flora that thrived on raw mana decay — Necrolume Mushrooms, each glowing with faint cyan light.
Perfect for the guild base's lower levels.
I stored the samples inside data crystals, their structure compacted and categorized by HIME in real time.
> "Sample integrity at ninety-eight percent," HIME reported. "Conversion complete. Suggest classification: Helheim-native flora."
"Mark it," I said. "Let's bring the dead forest home."
---
From Helheim, I moved to Niflheim, where the world itself seemed frozen in time.
Glaciers sang in low tones when the wind moved across them — harmonic data vibrations, more music than weather.
Buried deep within one of the frost spires, I found something almost alive — Cryosprites, digital organisms with adaptive data patterns that mimicked ice elementals but had no aggression subroutine.
I smiled. "Perfect. Defense-type pop monsters for layer two."
> "Processing Cryosprite data… complete," HIME responded. "Shall I synchronize their spawn pattern with Niflheim-tier defenses?"
"Yeah. Let's make them part of the sanctum's heartbeat."
---
Then came Muspelheim — the burning heart of the lower worlds.
Even here, the flames felt lonely.
I wandered for hours through magma fields where once legendary guilds had built their fortresses, now nothing but molten glass.
I collected Volcrystals — self-sustaining fire elementals — and rare flora that grew along the obsidian ridges, their petals burning like torches.
One particular ruin still radiated faint traces of magic — the remains of an ancient summoning circle, perhaps a dungeon forgotten by the devs themselves.
There, embedded in the center, was something glowing faintly: a shard of red crystal inscribed with golden sigils.
> "Unidentified artifact detected," HIME murmured. "Residual World-Class resonance… very faint."
I picked it up. "Not another WCI, right?"
> "Negative. A fragment, perhaps, of something once tied to one."
I chuckled. "Good. I've got enough headaches with the real ones."
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The Collector's Calm
Over the months, my inventory became a museum.
Every corner of Yggdrasil offered some hidden wonder — glowing beasts, singing minerals, strange biomes untouched by war.
Each time I returned to Aeternum Sanctum, I'd hand the data to HIME.
She'd integrate them into the sanctum's layered ecology:
new trees sprouted in Vanaheim, bioluminescent coral grew in Alfheim, and spectral birds flew freely through Asgard's skies.
The once-silent guild base began to live again — not with players, but with life.
Artificial, coded, yet still… beautiful.
> "Population balance is stable," HIME reported one evening as we watched glowing butterflies drift through the garden deck. "Aeternum Sanctum now simulates full biomes from six worlds."
"That's good," I said quietly. "Let's make sure the world doesn't forget what it was."
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Of Relics and Restraint
I had stopped counting the treasures I'd found long ago.
But one thing remained constant — the whisper of World-Class Items.
Even when I didn't chase them, they found me.
When Three Burning Eyes still had hundreds of members, we'd catalogued eight of them — a feat almost unthinkable for a single guild.
Now, as I reviewed them alone, they felt more like stories than tools.
1. The Piercing Truth – A WCI that manifests pure energy in linear form. A weapon of absolute focus; it ignores all armor and resistances, striking directly at a target's data core. The perfect assassin's relic.
2. Chrono Nullifier – The anti-space and time WCI, capable of erasing teleportation, rewinds, or temporal skills for several minutes within a massive radius. It froze even the laws of reality in place.
3. The Grand Atlas – A living map of Yggdrasil. It marked every lifeform — friend, foe, or neutral — across worlds in real time. In the wrong hands, it was the death of secrecy itself.
4. Throne of Radiant Choir – A summoning-type WCI, capable of calling forth thousands of angels from heaven-tier ranks 50–80. Each one weaker than a divine-class summon, but in scale… an army.
5. Genesis Engine – A terraforming relic, altering the world around it — turning paradise into wasteland, jungle into ice, oceans into magma. Creation and destruction, intertwined.
6. Aegis of Reversal – A shield that didn't block, but reflected. Every strike returned with equal force — physical, magical, or divine. It had no offense, but it made defense into a weapon.
7. The Voodoo Sovereign – One of the Twenty. A small black doll with no face. It allowed its user to mark up to three entities — player, NPC, or monster — and transfer all incoming damage to them.
A horrifying item when used tactically, and nearly godlike when combined with illusions.
8. Infernal Crown – The most recent addition. Restriction-type. The cursed counterpart to divine authority — granting immense control at the cost of the user's freedom.
Eight relics. Eight legacies of divine-level chaos.
And all of them now slumbered in the deepest vault of Aeternum Sanctum, guarded by systems only HIME and I could access.
Sometimes I'd visit the chamber — stand among the quiet artifacts glowing faintly in their crystalline containment fields.
They looked like sleeping gods, waiting for the world to need them again.
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"Are you not tempted to collect the rest, Ren-sama?" HIME asked one day as we drifted over the floating plains of Midgard.
I smiled. "Tempted, sure. But what's the fun in ending the game before it's over?"
> "Statistically, completion of the World-Class Item set would make you the most powerful entity in Yggdrasil."
"Yeah," I said, gazing at the horizon. "And the most bored."
> "You find greater joy in the process, not the result."
"Exactly. Power's only interesting when it has a purpose. And this world's given me everything already — discovery, mystery, beauty."
> "Then what do you seek now?"
I thought for a long moment.
"…Something new to be curious about."
---
As we traveled through the empty worlds — Jotunheim's storm peaks, Alfheim's twilight forests, the broken ruins of Midgard's last cities — I realized something simple but profound.
I wasn't exploring for treasure anymore.
I was exploring to remember.
To remember why this game mattered.
Why it felt like home.
Why even now, with no players left to witness it, I couldn't bear to let it fade quietly.
---
We returned to Aeternum Sanctum one evening as the twin moons of Alfheim crossed the sky.
The air was calm. The sanctum's lights glowed like embers in the dark — no longer the fortress of spies and information, but a living archive of everything Yggdrasil had ever been.
HIME stood beside me as I placed another crystal — this one containing data from an extinct desert beast — into the sanctum's archive.
> "Another world preserved," she said softly. "You've brought the world back to itself."
I chuckled. "No, HIME. I just didn't want it to be forgotten."
She tilted her head.
> "Then this is remembrance?"
"Yeah," I said, watching the lights ripple across the hall. "This is remembrance."
---
For the first time in eleven years, there were no objectives, no raids, no tournaments.
Just the sound of the sanctum breathing — the quiet rhythm of data alive, waiting, listening.
And for a player who once chased power, control, and secrets, I had finally found something far rarer.
Peace.
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End of Chapter 34 – The Endless Roots of the World Tree