The Great Forest War
A dark mage clad in a grey robe stood beneath the night sky strewn with a glittering galaxy and began his solitary monologue. "I am the leader of the black mages and the Magic God of Dimensions, wielder of Dimensional Authority."
The star he called home was the Main God Star forged by the Creator God of the 499th Main Universe. A Main God Star was a colossal planet, its surface expanded more than ten thousand times beyond ordinary worlds inhabited by sentient beings through the sheer force of divine power.
At the heart of this giant lay a jungle so vast its breadth defied measurement, known as the Great Forest. In the center of that boundless woodland—where trees several kilometers tall and even subspecies of the World Tree grew in profusion—sat the Great Cavity, a place where magical energy gathered with unnatural intensity. Here stood the modest Survival Magic Tower he had inherited from his master.
Haah… Is this two-story brick hut really a magic tower? It was already cramped for two people. How utterly shabby.
As if to prove he was indeed a black mage, the two-story tower built from black stone was so dilapidated it practically begged for a sigh. Of course, the fact that this rundown tower floats in the exact center of the enormous Great Cavity might make it look slightly more impressive.
The Great Cavity was also called the navel of the Main God Star or the bottomless abyss. The black magic tower levitating at its core—kept aloft by floating magic—was, naturally, his own creation.
In the past I attached it to the cavity wall, but I switched it to aerial positioning for better defense.
As the leader of the black mages—archenemies of the Middle World—he naturally had countless foes. His defensive systems were so thorough that he sometimes wondered if he was being paranoid. The natural magical currents and dimensional barriers only made the fortifications more absolute.
The Great Cavity fundamentally overlaps with dimensional passages connected to the Demon Realm. The spatial coordinates are unstable, so any teleportation or long-range attack gets flung straight into the Demon Realm.
Within the Great Forest, the collision between the jungle’s boundless life force and the demonic energy generated by the Demon Realm made manifesting magic exceptionally difficult. To the question of how the tower could remain afloat under levitation magic, the only answer was endless, back-breaking labor.
I used Dimensional Authority to hurl thirty thousand magic stones into the air and stacked them one by one without the slightest gap. Thanks to that insane endeavor I ascended to become the Magic God of Dimensions while raising my circles, but honestly, it was pure madness.
He had not been born a member of the god race, nor as the Magic God of Dimensions. He had entered this world as a noble prince of the Magic Empire.
In the past, my master—the previous leader of the black mages—kidnapped me as a newborn prince of the Magic Empire and fled here to raise me as his successor. He nearly died carrying infant me across the Great Forest.
A black mage could not avoid conflict with the High Elves and High Orcs who ruled the Great Forest and despised black magic.
The High Elves grow stronger in proportion to the forest’s life force. Inside the Great Forest they stand above most transcendents. Moreover, the High Elves here have built an empire numbering in the hundreds of millions.
Trees hundreds of meters tall were treated as mere shrubs, and countless monstrous specimens several kilometers across—presumed to be subspecies of the World Tree—filled the woods. Thanks to living atop such titanic trees, the population of the High Elf Empire in the Great Forest was beyond counting.
When I ran the numbers, the High Elf population exceeded a billion. Disgustingly numerous, especially when I was alone.
These High Elves had evolved over eons of warfare against the monsters that poured from the Great Cavity, a dimensional passage to the Demon Realm.
Demonic energy is poison to ordinary life forms—except black mages. Yet when it collides with the life force of the Great Forest, it transforms into vitality. And vitality is an unmatched nutrient for the land.
The five World Trees surrounding the Great Cavity, nourished by that tremendous vitality, had grown large enough to serve as the foundation for an empire of over a billion High Elves.
To protect those World Trees, the High Elf Empire has sacrificed countless lives fighting the monsters and demons that spill from the Great Cavity.
They could never tolerate a black mage approaching the cavity in search of its concentrated power.
While breaking through their encirclement, Master clashed with the High Elves countless times. As a result, he earned the undying grudge of the Ancient High Elf Queens—beings without fixed lifespans or the mercy of forgetting. When I first emerged from the cavity I was still a newborn, so I asked why they held a grudge against me. That was the moment I learned, bone-deep, that elves do not listen to reason.
The answer to his legitimate protest came in the form of millions of aura-infused arrows and a total assault by hundreds of thousands of elite High Elf soldiers who had summoned every kind of top-grade elemental imaginable.
Even the High Elf Queens charged alongside Elemental Kings. I genuinely thought I was going to die. We only survived by fleeing into the cavity, where the air was thick with demonic energy the forest clans could not approach. The problem was that my enemies did not end with the High Elves.
If the canopy of the Great Forest belonged to the elves, the ground below belonged to the orcs.
In this forest where species sensitive to the land’s life force grow stronger, the orcs had flourished tremendously.
The Great Forest was so fertile and overflowing with life that it provided the orc clans with limitless food. With such abundance, the orcs had once risen as the largest tribe in history, their numbers exceeding ten billion.
The High Orcs were thriving until the High Elf clans invaded. They suffered a crushing defeat and were driven from the central forest to the outer regions.
In terms of raw military power the orcs held the advantage, but High Orcs could not climb the trees of the Great Forest.
With their short limbs, they simply could not scale the trunks.
The trees themselves were so resilient that even transcendents struggled to damage them. The High Orcs were helpless against the rain of arrows and elemental assaults unleashed from above. They fled to the outer forests where tall trees were scarce.
Even now, the High Orcs exiled to the outskirts waged near-constant war against the High Elf clans in hopes of reclaiming the rich central forest.
This is a battlefield where strength is valued above all else. Into that chaos suddenly appeared a special delicacy—a superhuman radiating powerful vitality. The High Orcs’ eyes rolled back like goblins spotting a Taoist wizard, and they fought my master in a battle to the death. The outcome needs no detailed explanation. My master was simply that strong.
It was said that the carnage left behind after facing a powerful black mage was something even the dim-witted orcs could never forget.
Other unusual races exist, but they are minor tribes struggling to survive between the two dominant powers, so I will omit them. Even so, each possesses over ten million members and qualifies as a kingdom-level force. They cannot be ignored.
In terms of power distribution, the High Elves were the greatest force, while the orcs, nagas, and dwarves had formed an alliance to fight for territorial expansion.
A billion-strong High Elf Empire clashing with a High Orc alliance exceeding ten billion—this brutal battlefield is the Great Forest. Thanks to the grudges my master earned with these mighty races, I had no choice but to float my tower in the center of the Great Cavity. What even Master did not know was that the gate to the Demon Realm opens here roughly once every century.
When the gate opened, monsters and demons poured forth, and every race in the Great Forest waged war against them. The local races were monstrously strong compared to ordinary elves or orcs, so they prevailed—but the casualties were always horrific.
The real problem begins about a month after the gate closes, once the demonic energy stabilizes. The protective magic power in the safe zone of the Great Cavity partially dissipates.
Then the forest clans, previously unable to approach even the outskirts, begin their assault on the tower.
Twenty years after Master settled here with me as a baby, the Demon Realm gate opened. At the time, Master was a 7th-circle master and I was a 7th-circle user. With the support of infinite demonic energy we fought desperately for a month and somehow survived. Afterward, we had to raise the tower in the air where the demonic energy remained thick and stable.
This was the Great Forest where he lived, and the Survival Magic Tower was his home. That was his situation.
When Master was still alive we could take turns holding the line. But this time I must endure alone.
Reflecting on his circumstances, a lament escaped him naturally.
He was a Main God-level deity who had attained the 10th circle through Dimensional Authority. The Great Cavity, saturated with condensed demonic energy from the Demon Realm, was the ideal battlefield for a black mage.
Yet he would have to endure an entire month against five High Elf Queens who were 7th-circle masters, countless elementals, and an endless tide of High Elf transcendents.
Must I fight an army of over a billion High Elves alone for a full month? The thought alone is dizzying.
Moreover, to protect the Great Forest that maintained purified vitality, he could not resort to large-scale area-destruction magic.
Fortunately the zone where demonic energy dissipates is narrow. I only need to defend the Survival Magic Tower itself. Thank goodness for small mercies. People ask why I don’t simply leave if I don’t want to fight the High Elf Empire.
What mattered for raising one’s circles was not the quantity of magic power but its quality.
I searched other regions for possible migration, but every location had less than one-hundredth the magic density. At that level I could not even accumulate power in the Survival Magic Tower.
The Great Cavity of the Great Forest was the absolute best location a black mage could ask for.
"This is my home. My hometown. I may be a pitiful wandering mercenary god unaffiliated with the Divine Realm, but I am still a god. Do you think the Magic God of Dimensions—renowned for being undefeated in his rise—would allow himself to be forcibly evicted by mere sentient beings? If word spread that I was driven out of my own house by mortals, I couldn’t even continue working as a mercenary god."
For the sake of his dignity as the Magic God of Dimensions and for the sake of his future career as a mercenary god, he had to settle this with the High Elf Empire once and for all.
At the surge of the Magic God of Dimensions’ powerful magic, the cavity—which held light yet consisted only of darkness—began to tremble violently.
Uwoooooong!
Cracks formed in space and the demonic energy thickened until it was visible to the naked eye.
An army of hundreds of millions of High Elves had already surrounded the Great Cavity. They held arrows imbued with elemental power nocked on their bows, all aimed at the center of the abyss. The sky was packed with countless elementals, every one of them poised to attack the black stone magic tower floating in the air at the cavity’s heart.
Kung! Kung! Kung!
At the center of that vast High Elf host stood a Walking Tree—a colossal moving tree and mobile fortress more than a kilometer tall and wide. Atop it, the Elf Queens clad in silver mithril armor conversed with lethal intensity.
“Is he truly 10th circle? That human black mage.”
“Outside the cavity, only something above 8th circle could block a combined strike from all five of us.”
“To evade fifty thousand High Elven Knights on top of that, we can assume 9th circle or higher.”
“If the ten circles engraved on that grey robe are real, then it is indeed 10th circle.”
They had to face a 10th-circle black mage inside the Great Cavity, where he could draw on infinite magic power. The pressure was on an entirely different level from the time they had tried to eliminate two 7th-circle black mages.
“The boy who was once his disciple has grown into something difficult to handle.”
“We should have killed the old black mage—his master—at any cost back then.”
“The past is the past.”
“This time, we kill him no matter what.”
The High Elves of the Great Forest were nothing like the gentle, nature-loving elves known across the continent. They stood a full head taller than ordinary elves. Their naturally slender frames were packed with powerful muscle, giving them breasts and hips far more generous than those of human women. The combination of an elf’s lithe build with voluptuous curves forged from muscle and limbs hardened by extreme training would have made them look like jungle warrior women were it not for their long ears.
Their leaf-green hair and blue eyes burned with murderous intent. Instead of awe at their beauty, one felt only a chilling frost. These were the rulers and empresses of the High Elves, guardians of the Great Forest as the elves’ holy land since the dawn of time. They had slain countless monsters and demons.
The will of the gathered queens was singular.
“When the Demon Realm gate opens, we launch an all-out assault to annihilate every monster and demon. Then we will erase that filthy black mage from our holy land.”
“We offer our lives to the great Goddess of Light, Lady Granzoa.”
The conversation of the High Elf Queens could not escape the ears of the Magic God of Dimensions. Having reached Main God-level high god status through Dimensional Authority, he listened in secret, and his insides burned with rage.
What exactly did I do wrong? Is struggling just to live a crime? Besides, even though I’m a magic god, I’m still a god of light. What would I gain by offering my neck to Granzoa, another god of light?
It was possible for him to extend his authority domain beyond the mountains outside the Great Forest’s territory. Within that domain he could dictate even life and death for all but the strongest.
Yet he was forced to remain on the defensive. No. That damned goddess would be delighted. She’d see it as an opportunity to earn the karma needed to become a Main God.
The Divine Realm of the Main God Star was currently holding him by the ankle.
That wretched elf goddess Granzoa—! Damn those god-race bastards!
When the Magic God of Dimensions entered the realm of gods after reaching 9th circle, he had chosen to remain in the Middle World. Granzoa had then summoned him to the Divine Realm.
She possessed a beauty that could not possibly be surpassed, fitting for the goddess of elves.
At the moment any man should have been enchanted, the Magic God of Dimensions—having fought High Elves for so long—reflexively unleashed magic at her. It was nothing more than a conditioned reflex to killing intent! Yet I ended up fighting the elf goddess Granzoa to a draw.
In their near-ruined state, she had declared that gods belonged in the Divine Realm. Since he had become a god through black magic, they could not allow him into the sacred realm. Therefore his residence would be restricted to the Middle World.
They also threatened that if my karma turned negative and reached “extremely evil,” the entire Divine Realm would annihilate me. Having just become a god and standing alone, I had no choice but to accept the contract. Master, unaware of any of this, was overjoyed when he saw I had become a magic god. He declared that the age of black mages had finally arrived.
From that point onward the Divine Realm began to watch the Magic God of Dimensions with clear malice. He started wearing the grey robe that concealed everything about him. He had no choice but to become obsessive about managing his karma.
Just wait. I will somehow reach 12th circle and become a Creator God. Then I will repay every ounce of this suffering.
While the Magic God of Dimensions grumbled, the gate to the Demon Realm opened. Unrefined demonic energy surged wildly. Monsters that were grotesque fusions of insects and beasts poured from the sky like hail. Low-ranking demons with black bat wings cheered in delight at their invasion of the Middle World.
At that exact moment the heavens split apart.
Papapapapapapapapapapapa!
Hundreds of millions of arrows rained down upon them. Right behind the arrows came countless elementals that slammed into the demons and monsters, exploding on impact.
The area around his magic tower was the exact center of the cavity; any attack or explosion was instantly shunted off to some corner of the Demon Realm.
I can watch this comfortably, like enjoying a play I saw while traveling.
He made sure to enjoy every detail.
“Ooh! This is excellent!”