Chapter 476
Chapter 476
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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 476
Chapter Title: Last Parade (7)
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Kwaaaa—
“....”
Kwaaaaaa—
“....”
Kwaaaaaaa—!!
“Wow.”
Sometimes, no matter how sharp your eyesight, there are things you just have to get up close to confirm. For example—
“It really looks just like the real thing.”
The kind of things you can’t quite believe even after seeing them with your own eyes.
What’s right in front of me right now is a waterfall. The roaring rush of water, the mist-like spray billowing out, the wind unique to a valley, and so on....
Kwaaaa!
Parararak!
The only difference is that everything crashing down fiercely in front of me is made entirely of paper.
Letters pouring down with a majesty that would put Niagara Falls to shame, the ethereal mist rising up is paper dust kicked up by countless worn-out envelopes rubbing together, and the wind.... well, it’s the inevitable gusts created when objects covering that much surface area surge in one direction.
-Tak!
Lost in awe at this grand world composed of letters, I snatched a single envelope flying right at my face.
=========
To the esteemed Yinma in the capital
Yinma, Jeini is sick.
It hurts so much. Hurts and I’m hungry.
Dad hasn’t come home for three nights.
Please come. I want to see you.
=========
A crude scrawl that anyone could tell was written by a child. The contents are, well, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all—a typical tragedy from some rural farmhouse.
Heartbreaking in its own right, but what really caught my attention wasn’t the story inside the tattered envelope.
“No recipient’s name.”
The spelling’s all wrong throughout, and it’s just addressed to “Yinma” without so much as a single proper name. No doubt about it: an undelivered letter.
Flutter! Flutter flutter!
“Let’s see here. This one too, this one too, hmm. This one looks intact.... An assassination order? Oh, a pseudonym, huh?”
Beyond that, there were ones where tears had smeared the ink on the recipient’s name, or traces of the middle name being scratched out and rewritten over and over—problems that had botched the letter magic entirely.
“Then this really is that subspace of ‘undelivered letters’ I saw back at Felix Home.”
Meaning I’ve come to exactly the right place. This grand—
“Cough, cough! Ugh, what’s with all this dust....”
Er, this somewhat lung-searing spot is the exact same subspace that ancient Felix Home created to house the ‘undelivered letters’.
“Hmm. And it’s not just bigger.”
Even a quick glance around shows it’s a far cry from the grim child-labor hellhole where that kid Astraad had been holed up way back when.
For starters, it’s massive. Even with my eyesight boosted to raptor levels after turning mutant, I can’t make out the far walls.
Kwaaaaaa—
Flutter flutter flutter flutter!
And that enormous space is packed floor-to-ceiling with letters, not a single gap anywhere. Walls and ceiling alike are cascading torrents of envelopes, while waterfalls of paper link sky to ground like pillars—dozens of them standing tall—and the spilled letters flow on endlessly like quicksand, heading toward a horizon made of paper.
This setup feels like.... an aquarium? A fountain?
“Let’s see, these are letters that got sent out but never delivered, so they still carry that lingering.... desire? Intent? To reach their owner, keeping them locked in this loop? A cycle means stability, stability symbolizes preservation.... Argh!”
Damn it. Even trying to puzzle it out, I can’t make heads or tails of it.
Professor had a decent grasp on magic, but not me. Magic’s all about intuition, and peeking into the guy’s memories only gets me so far—I can’t even hazard a guess at how this high-tier spell ticks.
At best, I can spot the obvious external flow: letters crash down from the waterfalls, stream across the floor, climb the walls, then pour back down from ceiling-linked cascades?
No clue why they’re routed that way, but one thing’s clear.
“Undelivered letters—the minor magics clinging to each and every one had to gather in numbers like this to shatter a grand mage’s Last Spell.”
I’d known the Last Spell was something else.
On Storm Hill, a dying Gaufman had juiced a third-circle scrub kid up to a full seventh-circle grand mage, if only briefly. Felix Home sparked a communications revolution in this medieval fantasy world, ballooning a mere kingdom—Valtin—into a terrifying empire. And Master Ottoman’s little grand magic had even revived mages as near-elemental spirits.
Jaw-dropping feats, every one, the sort that make even us non-mages go, “Now that’s a straight-up miracle.”
Kwaaaaaaa!
Pashuk! Pashushushushu!
“Heh....”
But now, with the magic broken down into tiny spells and laid bare before my eyes, I could truly grasp just how much sway the Last Spell—which I’d always dismissed as “some massive miracle”—holds over the world.
“Well, when you think about it, it’s one mage’s entire world made manifest. Calling it a ‘small world’ wouldn’t be off-base.”
Sarak—
“If you’ve grasped that much, no need for a basic rundown.”
In an instant, as I stared blankly at the paper waterfall, someone picked up right where my thoughts left off, from behind me.
I figured someone would show. Astraad’s basically the owner who built this place, and he designed it to let in only specific people. Naturally, I expected the white-haired grand mage Astraad to pop up with a “Well spotted—welcome aboard~”
“You...!”
No way I’d have guessed someone other than Astraad would be the one to greet me.
I know her. But she....
“You know me...?”
“This makes the second time we’ve met in person. Once now, and once before—in the forest, when the mages’ contraption came crashing down.”
“....Ah!”
Right. The airship we’d taken after leaving Storm Hill, struck by the empire-wide deluge of letters and plummeting from the sky.
Deep in the woods en route to Haunumman, she’d emerged from Professor’s side—not as some black blob, but in her true form as “Hide.”
Sarak. Sarak.
White bare feet glided effortlessly over the quicksand flow of letters.
“Long time no see, Hide.”
“....Yggdrasil.”
Yggdrasil. The half-elf Yggdrasil.
“How?”
My dazed voice must have tickled her, drawing soft laugh lines around the eyes of the elf verging on old age.
“I pick things up quickly.”
As she answered, she tapped her own pupil with a finger. Meaning she’d reached this place through the exact same deductions as me.
“Puhuhu....”
“Did I do something to entertain you?”
“No, no—not that. It’s just.... funny.”
“?”
She started walking ahead, as if to say we’d talk on the move. I fell in behind her.
“Seeing how you get in here, I figured Astraad had me in mind when he set it up.”
A method only someone privy to his past could nail down properly.
Dead simple, letting even magic-illiterates slip inside.
Even knowing better, the second this magical space unfurled before me, my brain jumped to stuff like, “Wait, did Astraad—that jerk I shot down back then—do this for me...?” or “He came to help! Knew I could count on him!”
“Hm. Hate to disappoint, but somehow I doubt it.”
“Yeah, figured as much? Not like he’s got time to kill—”
“No, not that.”
Fwoosh!
I’d been bantering to play off my embarrassment when the sight unfolding ahead stole my words away.
The wall—the upstream flow of letters surging back toward the ceiling like a school of salmon—parted to either side. Amid the drab hues of yellowed paper and faded ink, a dazzling silver-white glow came spilling out.
An island. A massive island of letters, apparently the waterfalls’ source, hovering in the sky.
And piercing its very center: a silver-white pillar, baring young branches above and faint roots below.
Even the letters circling the island and tree like migratory birds, as if proclaiming this space was built just for them.
“....Lady World Tree?”
“To be precise, the young branch she left behind upon her passing.”
Sarak. Sarak.
“Or, to be even more exact: the key-code to unlock the lock binding the administrator authority of ‘WORLD tree’.”
Boom—
Her words slipped out oh-so-casually, but they hit my heart like a plummeting stone.
An existence from inside the game—an NPC—uttering words they couldn’t possibly know, let alone comprehend.
Yggdrasil planted herself before me, her steps lighter than the paper all around, then turned and bowed politely my way.
“Long time no see, Hide.”
The same greeting as our first meeting, but weighted down with new gravity.
“One of the five elves tasked with guarding the World Tree’s remnant branch. I am High Elf Yggdrasil.”
“Yggdrasil, you’re.... a High Elf? From half-elf?”
“Time has passed. Enough time for the one before me to shift from monster within the hero’s body to human, then back to the red mutant I once knew.”
“Compared to that sort of transformation, a young half-elf growing into an elder high-elf is hardly awkward.”
“No, I mean....”
There was so much I needed to ask, but the questions jammed up in my throat.
Why are you here? High Elf? Lady World Tree? Locking authority? Key-code? Astraad? Everything I don’t know is piling up...?
Yggdrasil caught my desperate stare but simply turned away without a word.
Sarak. Sarak.
“Follow me. Astraad is up above.”
“But—”
“....The answers to all those questions you’re telegraphing so urgently, all together.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
Ugh, tough. Me—Hide, once dubbed the “Wandering Tongue”—getting steamrolled like this! This isn’t the bright-eyed, curiosity-driven elf girl from back in the day!
“Hide.”
“Yes, ma’am! Yggdrasil! On my way!”
Sarak. Sarak.
Splish splash!
“....I meant to say it’s good to see you. Especially like this.”
She called out to me as I thrashed through the letter piles like I was swimming.
Her words sparked a sudden memory about elves.
‘A race that changes slowly, but once they do, it lasts forever.’
Like a wound on a tree turning to a knot that grows with it for life—unyielding to change, but embracing it eternally once it happens.
‘So what kind of life hardened an elf’s emotions to the point she has to spell out her gladness?’
This was my first time crossing paths with Yggdrasil since splitting from Professor.
She hadn’t seen me, but she’d lived through the same stretch of time. Recovery, golden age, war, ruin, and now.
The half-elf who’d ventured into the world to learn about humans had stiffened to the point of needing to voice her feelings outright.
What had she learned? And how much?
“One heads-up: stand too still and let yourself get swept to the bottom, and no one will fish you out until Astraad does it himself.”
“What.... happens then?”
“You ride the magic’s current. Here, that means dissolving into a letter-pile book’s worth under the name ‘Hide.’ Even short of the bottom, linger too long wedged in the envelopes and....”
“Hueek!”
My fleeting thought got buried in her deadpan joke.
She knew exactly what had crossed my mind. I knew she’d lobbed that lighter topic to shut it down.
Splish splash splish splash!
“G-g-going, going!”
“Impressive. Real muscle lets you actually swim through this stuff.”
In the end, we both just laughed it off and kept chatting.
[Yggdrasil—what kind of life has she even lived?]
....No need to ask. The path I’d walked already held most of the answer.
The reason Yggdrasil didn’t pry about my current state was probably the same.
Too much time had passed to unpack it all. Too much had happened.
“Turning into letters wouldn’t be so bad, come to think of it. Mail it off to Professor, and he might pore over it and reclaim his old memories.”
“Not happening! Not to me!”
For now, simple joy at seeing her again was enough.
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