Chapter 22: The World of the Sacred Tree and Bad Ending No. 144
"As for the so-called Saint of the Beginning..."
The frozen flow of time started moving again when the crescent moon hanging in the sky passed over Raul’s head.
As pale moonlight pierced the dense trees and draped silver over the crimson glow of the campfire, Raul answered,
"It means exactly what it sounds like. I’m not sure how the elves passed it down in their own society, but sixteen hundred years ago, I was the one who made the first divinity bloom in this land. The Saint of the Beginning."
"...You mean that was you?"
Needless to say, the face he made was one of pure disbelief.
Still, there was nothing he could do about that. It was the truth.
So Raul decided to be a little more honest this time.
"Well, unless my memories were manipulated by someone."
"...Pardon?"
"To be blunt, I don’t really know either. That I’m the Saint of the Beginning, or that I have to find the Western Great Forest like this. I only had a vague sense of it. I don’t know why I have to do it, either."
It probably sounded like the sort of thing a man pulled from the clouds, but that was Raul’s honest impression.
If he stripped away everything he couldn’t say out loud, like the game or the setting book, this was the best way he could put it.
"You’ve endured sixteen hundred years. Your memory must have become overloaded."
Fortunately, the elf didn’t look at Raul as if he were simply insane. He was trying to make sense of it in his own way.
"Overloaded memory?"
"Yes. It happens among us elves too. Elders who live a hundred or two hundred years beyond the average lifespan sometimes show symptoms like that."
"I see."
Raul nodded with a very grave expression.
Not because of anything else, but because it was oddly fascinating that elves could get dementia too.
"Then allow me to introduce myself properly. Saint. My name is Edwin. I’m the Fourth Squad Leader of the Golden Branch Ranger Corps."
As he spoke, he moved his right shoulder and then stiffened.
His right arm ended in empty space below the shoulder.
Even so, Edwin gave an awkward smile and extended his left hand as if nothing were wrong.
Raul inwardly admired that composure and took his hand.
The first knot in his dealings with the elves seemed to have tied far better than he had expected.
***
The journey to the “forest” ended up being a little long.
The reason was obvious.
There were enslaved elves loaded onto the wagon and a ranger with his leg blown off among the party.
They should have simply cut straight through Tetra Mountain to the northwest, but instead they had to make a wide detour.
For Raul, though, that was an opportunity rather than a problem.
"I’ll help."
"Thank you, Saint."
He had already thought it would be better if they could become more familiar before reaching the forest, and the long journey naturally gave them room to do exactly that.
"Ah, I’ll take that too."
"W-when we get back to the forest, I’ll definitely treat you to something, Saint!"
Before long, even the rangers who had first found him awkward were saying things like that to him.
Among them, the one he had grown closest to was undeniably the leader of the ranger squad, Edwin.
"Saint! Look what I brought back!"
Somehow, with nothing but one arm, he would shoot arrows and bring back Tetra Mountain rabbits and boars.
Even now, rabbits were strung in a line from the vine he held.
Every time Raul saw Edwin’s proud face, he would give an embarrassed smile in return.
"What is it?"
"No, it’s just strange. I heard elves don’t enjoy eating meat, but you don’t seem to be like that at all."
"Saint, you make us sound old-fashioned. We accepted meat in our diet more than a thousand years ago."
"Did you?"
When Raul asked in surprise, Edwin, who was butchering the rabbit one-handed and skewering it with practiced ease, answered with a playful smile.
"Of course. The only ones still clinging to those old food customs are probably the elders in the Senate. Right, Alicia?"
"Huh?"
Called out so suddenly, the woman with hair like the Milky Way, Alicia, let out a startled sound.
"I mean the old dietary customs."
"Ah, that... Yes. In my family too, it’s mostly just my grandmother..."
She answered awkwardly, then flinched when her eyes met Raul’s.
For reasons he couldn’t understand, Alicia seemed to fear him.
That introduced a small snag in Raul’s plan to get close to the Sererial family, but...
Whatever. I saved them. That doesn’t change.
Whether they became friendly or not, the fact remained that Raul had thrown himself into danger to save the Sererials. He wasn’t especially impatient about it.
Besides, every evening when he went to gather firewood, she always ended up following him. She probably didn’t hate him, at least.
Time will do the work.
Raul lost interest in Alicia for now.
Right then, the rabbit meat dripping with juices over the fire mattered more.
Then one day, near the end of the journey to the forest, after everyone had collapsed into sleep from exhaustion, a strange sensation brushed Raul’s senses.
He opened his eyes and walked across a field thick with dawn mist.
Cold wind swept down from the base of the towering mountain range.
When he finally arrived, he saw it.
Birds sparkling in a variety of colors, as though someone had taken the glittering night sky and laid it across the earth, and at the center of them all, an elf with hair shining like the Milky Way.
"...Spirit?"
The words slipped out before he could stop himself.
At Raul’s mutter, Alicia, who had looked like a rabbit startled out of its burrow, snapped her head around.
Then the emerald wind-birds and water-colored birds orbiting her all turned their gaze toward Raul in unison, matching her panic.
Being stared at by more than ten pairs of eyes at once was an unpleasant experience.
Raul studied Alicia’s eyes, now wide as saucers, then slowly raised both hands.
"I’m not a bad person."
"...Pardon?"
"You keep looking at me like that and running away, so."
"Ah..."
At Raul’s words, Alicia made a sound like a deflated balloon.
She looked as if she hadn’t even realized she was doing it.
Raul decided this was as good a chance as any and stepped closer.
"I didn’t know you were a spirit medium. You’re very good with a bow at the auction house."
"I... was?"
"Yes. Most spirit mediums spend their entire lives just trying to commune with spirits, and even then they’re lucky to make a contract once. And from what I know, elves aren’t much different."
In that sense, Alicia before him was extraordinary.
The spirits fluttering around her shoulders, arms, and in the air numbered nearly ten in total.
As far as Raul knew, there was only one explanation for that.
"You were born with it. Spirit affinity."
"You know... a lot about spirit arts?"
Of course he did.
Raul was the kind of man who had cleared all endings as the 2-star class Spirit Medium too.
He didn’t know how deep Alicia’s knowledge of spirit arts went, but at the very least, he was confident he wouldn’t be outmatched by her.
"About as much as anyone else."
"What’s that supposed to mean?"
As if Raul’s reaction were a little outside her expectations, Alicia laughed faintly.
Having found an unexpected common ground, Raul decided to use the opportunity to the fullest.
He took another step closer and spoke in a much friendlier tone.
"Then do the elves have the fairy tale of Etunel, the wind spirit?"
"Huh? Ah, yes. They do. You mean the story about the baby spirit who ran away from the spirit realm the moment she was born, right? The one who later contracted with a benevolent prince and saved a kingdom in decline..."
"Interesting. Could you tell me how it’s passed down among the elves?"
"Ah, um..."
The Wind Spirit Etunel was a kind of textbook fairy tale that explained the basics of spirit arts in story form.
A spirit medium had no way of not knowing it.
Alicia kept glancing at Raul’s face, but fortunately, once she got started, the story flowed naturally.
"...So they drove out the regent, and the rightful heir, the prince, restored the kingdom. That’s how it ends."
"Interesting. It’s almost exactly the same as the version we have."
"R-really?"
"Thank you, Alicia. Your voice was steady, so it was easy to hear."
"Huh? Oh, no. In fact, people usually told me my voice was too quiet... My nanny used to scold me for it."
"Is that so? The standards in elf society are certainly strict."
"Is human society different?"
"Broadly speaking, it’s similar, but we’re a little more accepting of diversity."
"Wow."
By the time they’d talked for a while, Alicia’s eyes were shining brightly.
Fortunately, she had only been shy. She didn’t seem to have disliked Raul after all.
Raul felt secretly relieved and reached for his trump card.
"By the way, did you know there’s a hidden backstory to the tale of the wind spirit Etunel?"
"Huh? A backstory?"
Interesting stories knew no borders.
Alicia’s eyes widened as she focused on Raul’s voice.
"Yes. Actually, the wind spirit Etunel was adapted from a true story in the Northern Kingdom of Bwangka."
Thanks to that incident, Raul sometimes ended up chatting idly with Alicia.
***
"We’ve arrived, Saint."
Edwin, the handsome man with long green hair, smiled brightly at Raul.
"This is our homeland, the Great Forest!"
What he pointed to was a barren stone mountain range lined with strange, jagged rocks.
Contrary to the name Great Forest, where the World Tree was supposed to have rooted itself, the place looked desolate beyond reason.
Anyone seeing it would probably think this elf had lost his mind.
But Raul knew the elves’ secret, so he put on his best innocent face.
"This...? You mean this stone mountain with no trees at all? As far as I know, we should have gone another day west from here..."
Raul asked, deliberately looking confused, and Edwin twitched the corner of his mouth before answering.
"That place is a decoy the elves deliberately leaked. If you actually go there, you’ll be in big trouble. The decoy village is laced with deadly poison that can even paralyze your breathing."
"...So there was a secret like that. That was a close one."
Edwin seemed pleased with Raul’s reaction and straightened his chest as he continued.
"Our homeland, the World of the Mother, cannot be reached, let alone entered, by ordinary means. Only the blood of we children of the Mother and... "
Swish.
As he spoke, he cut his fingertip with a knife.
One drop of blood fell from his finger and ran into the gap between rocks that had seemed like nothing more than ordinary natural stone.
"Only ancient magic, usable when we are in our right minds, is the key that opens the gate."
As he said that, the tip of his finger began to glow green.
Then, with a flick of his finger, a shining rune was left hanging in the air.
ᚠ
The ancient magic he had mentioned.
It was rune magic, like the artifact Raul carried.
So there was a double trap and even a second lock.
That was certainly the sort of method an elf would devise, meticulous to the point of obsession.
As blood and rune were accepted together, the steeply carved cliff gave off a strange ripple.
"Don’t be afraid and follow me, Saint. I’ll repay this kindness properly once we’re in the forest!"
The handsome man, wearing a refreshing smile, left those words behind and disappeared into the cliff.
"Hah."
Even if he had known it in theory, seeing it with his own eyes was amazing.
It wasn’t merely a suppression of presence. It was complete dimensional relocation.
The authority of the Divine Tree, which cuts and separates space.
Through that power, the Divine Tree had gifted an entirely new world to its descendants, and in return, the elves had sworn eternal loyalty and worship.
That was how the elves came to possess a world of their own, separate from Exeria.
"Saint, if you want... should I, um... take your hand?"
Then a sudden voice drifted up beside him.
Milky blond hair and sparkling green eyes. Alicia Sererial.
"Pardon?"
"Ah, y-you don’t need to be embarrassed. Being afraid of your first dimensional jump is common among us elves too."
Apparently, she had misunderstood Raul’s lingering, sentimental pause.
Raul gave a small laugh and answered the elf he had become close to over the past three days.
"I’m fine."
He stepped forward without hesitation.
Then came the strange exhilaration that wrapped around his entire body.
After that, the sensation of falling endlessly, and at the same time of floating as though submerged in water, crashed over him at once.
Raul thought the feeling was somewhat like the instant he had been sucked into a monitor.
When he opened his eyes, the world had changed.
A sky where dreamlike purple and blue blended together like watercolor.
And above that sky, as though holding it aloft, a single tree so enormous that it could not be described, reaching all the way to the heavens.
The Sacred Tree stood in a magnificent, numinous form that truly called to mind the Tree of Sephirot from Norse mythology.
"Welcome, Saint. This is our homeland. Our paradise."
Edwin was smiling proudly at Raul.
It was certainly strange.
From the texture of the earth to the temperature of the wind, everything had changed.
Exeria stood on the brink of a bitter winter, but the World of the Sacred Tree was an eternal spring.
Overflowing life force and fertile soil.
A world with no fear of hunger and no lack of safety.
Just as Edwin had said, this world really did look like a paradise.
But Raul knew better.
This idyllic realm, seemingly complete and eternal, was the very thing driving the elves of Exeria to extinction.
This was not paradise.
It was only a world of euthanasia, for dying slowly and comfortably.
***
The elves’ so-called paradise, formed around the Sacred Tree, was organized much like a major city in Exeria, divided by layers of walls and governed by five families belonging to the Senate.
Of course, the deeper one went past the first wall, the tighter the inspections became, and in ordinary circumstances, a human should not even have been able to cross the first wall.
In this world, it was fundamentally taboo for a living human to enter the city of the Sacred Tree at all.
"I can prove my identity."
"Please open the way."
But Raul was different.
The elves who had traveled with him over the past ten days all stepped forward one after another to guarantee his identity.
In particular, the influence of Edwin, who held the position of squad leader in the Golden Branch Corps, and Alicia, a member of the Sererial family, was considerable.
"Hah, but..."
"I’m taking him directly to Mother. Is there still a problem?"
"I-if the young lady of the Sererial family says so..."
The gate guards fumbled helplessly the whole time.
It was a scene Raul had never seen in the game, and it felt strangely fresh.
After they safely passed the third wall, Raul offered his sincere thanks.
"Thank you."
To be blunt, he truly hadn’t expected to pass the third gate this easily.
"Oh, it’s nothing!"
"Don’t say that, Saint. Are we ordinary acquaintances?"
"If you ever need anything, just say the word. From here on, we’ll take care of you!"
At Raul’s words, the elves all answered eagerly, their eyes shining.
In truth, his goodwill and help toward them had been the product of calculation, meant to get through the gate...
But Raul saw no reason to shatter their excitement by saying so.
If they wanted to help more because they were grateful, why refuse?
Then Edwin, who had been discussing various matters with the others, came up to Raul.
"For now, would you go with Alicia to the Sererial mansion and wait there for a few days?"
"...Why would I need to wait for several days?"
When Raul asked out of genuine curiosity, Edwin answered with a bright smile.
"Yes. Well, if you want to roam freely through the inner city, Saint, we’ll need the elders’ permission."
"And that permission..."
"Yes. It’ll take quite some time. We’ll need long cross-checks of not only all of us who were involved with you, Saint, but also the elves who were abducted, and of course of you yourself."
Apparently, a living, healthy human being had never set foot here before, so things had become complicated in all sorts of ways.
Raul understood that well enough. He had anticipated it too.
Even so, the reason a rare hint of impatience and disappointment appeared on his face was simple.
It was the familiar message floating before his eyes.
Messiah Scenario - First Holy Site.
Distance remaining to the Church of the Beginning: 0.2 km
The first destination of the Epic Quest was right in front of him.