The World of the Sacred Tree and Bad Ending No. 144 (2)
The trail of blue leaves sliced cleanly across the violet sky.
As Raul lowered his gaze along the World Tree’s immense branches, and then farther still, he found a wall.
It was a barrier so high and so solid that it could not be compared to any wall they had seen so far.
Unlike the three walls that the elves had personally built for the protection of the World Tree, this was a legendary fortress said to have existed there from the moment the World Tree created this world.
Raul took a few steps toward the fortress before him.
At once, the distance to the holy ground shrank in real time.
So that’s how it was.
The first holy ground the Saint was meant to reach, the Church of the Beginning, was not somewhere else at all.
It was beyond that towering barrier, inside the Land of the World Tree.
"Saint-nim?"
"Saint-nim. Going any farther would be dangerous."
But then the elves came hurrying up to Raul with startled voices and stopped him.
"Dangerous?"
At his question, Edwin answered with a look that said he had just remembered something important.
"Look over there."
In the direction he pointed stood a long row of knight-shaped stone statues in front of the barrier.
The feeling they gave off was so peculiar that Raul frowned and asked, "Don't tell me that's..."
"Yes. Guardians. They're docile under normal circumstances. But if someone tries to step into the Guardians' domain like this..."
As Edwin took two more steps and extended his left arm forward, a heavy dry grinding sound rose, like stone twisting against stone.
Rrrrrumble!
They turned their heads.
All more than twenty statues Raul could see at once turned in unison.
"This happens."
Oh...
Raul rounded his lips in what looked like admiration at Teacher Edwin's kind explanation, while in his head he was thinking something entirely different.
Shit.
He was screwed.
Just as he had learned that his destination lay inside the Land of the World Tree, he now found out he could not enter it.
And what had they said?
He had to gather the insignias of all five houses?
Raul, who had some experience with the elves through another class, knew all too well what that meant.
Elves and humans did not even share the same basic sense of time.
Getting recognized by the five houses and receiving their insignias before visiting the holy ground?
Fine.
Suppose he followed the proper procedure.
Then the first holy ground, sitting barely two hundred meters away, would not be reachable for at least another three years.
Elves were rigid, and above all, they were the living definition of stubborn resistance to anything new.
Raul had already come all this way over the course of a year and three months, and now he was supposed to spend the next three years making himself the elves' best friend?
Talk sense.
If he did that, by the time he finished, the servants of the Abyssal Duke, whom he had already encountered twice, would have resurrected the bastard and still had time left over to tap-dance.
The instant Raul imagined that absurd possibility, he made a decision.
We'll break in somehow.
Nowhere in this world was so vast and so immense that it had no seam.
Raul quickly swept his bangs back and arranged his expression.
Since he had decided to use the back way, it would be better to establish a solid alibi first.
Then Alicia, who had been silently watching him the whole time, stepped closer.
"Saint-nim, do you perhaps have business in the Land of the World Tree?"
Her expression was clearly worried.
Given that Raul was already a problem in himself, his sudden fixation on the most taboo place of all had apparently left her mind in knots.
So Raul chose an odd answer instead of a clumsy denial or affirmation.
"I just asked because I was curious."
"Then could it be that your memories from sixteen hundred years ago are starting to surface?"
To an outsider, that might have sounded like an abrupt non sequitur, but Alicia's question was sharp.
Raul did, in fact, remember seeing this distance, this barrier.
Not a graphic from the game, but the real thing.
At first glance, that seemed obvious enough.
The Church of the Beginning was inside there; surely the Saint would not be visiting this place for the first time.
Raul let out a hollow laugh as he sifted through someone else's memories as if they were his own.
"...Maybe something like that."
His eyes and mouth were smiling, but Raul's feelings were tangled.
As expected, having another person's memories lodged in his head was not a particularly pleasant sensation.
***
"This is the room."
Raul was escorted by a servant of the Celerial family, and even so, he could feel with perfect clarity that he was not at all welcome.
But by now, that kind of treatment was nothing special, so Raul followed the servant in silence.
The room he was shown to was fairly old-fashioned and spacious. A window cut into the wall looked out on the night streets of this world, and a spread of snacks with steaming tea had been prepared for him.
As Raul looked around, the servant said without meeting his eyes, "If you need anything, ring the bell. I will take care of everything. However, you are not to leave the room until the elder gives permission. Rest well."
Speaking in a tone as businesslike as paperwork, the servant finished and left without a sound, closing the door behind him.
Raul immediately scattered divine power through the room and inspected every corner, but there was nothing unusual. He even tried the cookies and tea on the table. There was, as expected, nothing out of the ordinary there either.
No signs of surveillance or wiretaps. No poison in the food, either.
So did they trust Raul at least a little?
Or was this merely the minimum treatment afforded to someone who had, after all, been a lifesaver?
What was certain was that Raul was effectively imprisoned in this room, no different from being locked behind the bars of a checkpoint.
They want me to stay here until I get permission...
But when would that permission ever come?
Probably not tomorrow or the day after.
Didn't Edwin already say that it would take "quite some time"?
As mentioned before, elves and humans had very different senses of time.
At least ten days. A month if it drags on.
Of course, he had no intention of waiting quietly.
The moment Raul reached that conclusion on his own, he prepared to put his plan into action.
Alicia had been more or less dragged away by the people of her house, so it was obvious she would not be able to come looking for Raul tonight.
So... if I'm going to move in secret, there's no better day than today.
Leaving the room he had been told not to leave turned out, unexpectedly, to be easy.
The elves had many spirit users, and humans had been born with keen instincts as a rule, but in this peaceful world of the World Tree, they had forgotten how to be suspicious.
What remained was only arrogance: a habit of scorning what they did not know and looking down on what was unfamiliar.
Raul knew that trait well, so he scaled walls without hesitation and slipped into their night streets.
Even in the realm of the fair folk, there were those who lived by night.
Somewhere between taverns and inns.
There were no open brothels or anything so blatant, but there were women dressed like that, and men with that sort of look in their eyes.
To cross the city unnoticed, Raul pulled up the green robe he had been given by the elves in his party and forced himself to walk through that sticky, sordid district.
Soon the barrier, whose nickname fortress was more fitting for, came into view.
"Hah."
Perhaps because it was a no-entry zone personally sanctioned by the World Tree, the place was, ironically, sparsely populated.
After all, the Guardians were protecting the World Tree, and whatever suspicious elements there might have been had probably been stripped away during the three rounds of inspection.
Quiet. Uncomfortably so.
As Raul studied the line of stone Guardians and searched for a gap between them, he could not shake the eerie chill creeping up the back of his neck.
Even though this was the World Tree's world, split off by a barrier between dimensions, the elves here were far too carefree.
At last, unable to ignore the drunken shouting he had been dismissing all along, Raul turned around for a moment.
"...I’m telling you! I smashed that dwarf's nose in! Then he—"
"...Uuugh! Need more money? Then come over here and..."
"...What you're saying doesn't even sound like..."
A drunk elf was sprawled on the ground, vomiting into the street.
Another was heading toward an inn with a woman tucked under his arm.
And another had the hair of an elf woman in his fist as he slapped her face without mercy.
Their limbs showed no sign of muscle.
Their unfocused eyes suggested a life that had never even imagined war.
Their shouting was nothing like the screams of Exeria's residents.
Their hands were so thin and withered that they could scarcely be compared to those of an ordinary farmer in Exeria.
They were hands that had never once held a weapon in their lives.
Raul stared silently at those palms for a long while.
He was looking at the life of a fair folk reflected in those hands, not at the elf himself.
"Ha."
Raul's brow tightened more than before.
"Unbelievable."
It was absurd, unpleasant, and filled his retinas with a disgust he could not even begin to name, yet he did nothing.
He only thought, briefly, that perhaps euthanasia might be the end best suited to this world of the World Tree.
That was the kind of world this was.
***
The opening appeared in the deep hours of the morning, when even those who lived by night had vanished as quietly as mice.
There was a place where the distance between the stone Guardians was wider than elsewhere.
Raul spread divine power in two different directions, and the moment the head of a statue, alerted to some "foreign matter," turned that way, he struck.
Like a pole-vault athlete, he used a long, sturdy branch to launch himself upward.
Raul gathered divine power at his fingertips and drove his nails into the smooth, patternless barrier, hanging there by sheer grip.
For the current Raul, clutching a steel wall was not terribly difficult.
"Hm."
After climbing the fortress for quite some time, Raul stood atop it.
At last he could take in the base of the World Tree and the full panorama of the Land of the World Tree, the place they called paradise.
Unlike the outside, which had taken the shape of a city, the inside was a textbook green plain.
Scattered trees glimmered beneath the starlight, and stones and boulders stood in harmonious arrangement.
Between them flowed a shallow stream that glittered like a jewel...
"So that's why they call it paradise."
It was the sort of scene one might imagine when thinking of the Garden of Eden.
"Hup."
Raul held his breath and slid down the fortress wall.
The grass he landed in with a silent fall was so mysteriously soft it felt almost unreal.
Yellow petals drifted on the tickling wind, laughing with a soft rustle.
No, it was not just the wind.
They were spirits.
And not only that. Spirits of flowing water and blooming flowers, even of the wind itself and the bare earth, played and seeped through everything here.
The wind laughed, and when Raul approached things that shone like fire they were warm rather than hot, while the water, having spotted an outsider, flicked up droplets in mischief and stared at him with fascinated eyes.
It was a world where all things lived. The Land of the World Tree was such a place.
Raul walked through paradise.
Unlike the strict and heavily guarded exterior, the interior was paradise itself.
Distance remaining to the Church of the Beginning: 0.09 km
He could see the distance, which had grown longer by looping around, shrinking in an instant.
Then, when it reached precisely zero, Raul found a single wooden lectern half-buried in the blue grass.
He looked around.
There were no buildings anywhere, no grand stained glass, no towering spires.
Half in suspicion and half in anticipation, he set his hand on the lectern, and suddenly a voice rang out.
- A church is where two people come together to pray.
It was Raul's voice.
More exactly, it was like a fragment of memory produced by the original owner of this body.
Raul let himself sink into the rising memory and moved his own lips as well.
"A church is where two people come together to pray."
Ding-!
Then, astonishingly, a message truly appeared before his eyes.
『Messiah Scenario: You have completed the First Holy Ground!』
『Messiah Scenario Chapter 1: "Return" has been completed.』
『As a quest completion reward, you have obtained a Stigma.』
An unfamiliar phrase among familiar messages.
Raul muttered with a puzzled expression, "A Stigma?"
That thing the church saintesses had?
The Stigma was a kind of power Raul did not fully understand.
The priest classes he had played had only rescued or protected saintesses; they had never possessed Stigmas themselves.
Still, he knew enough about the church's Three Saintesses to make a few guesses.
It might dramatically elevate divine power at a stroke, or grant the famous future sight skill.
In any case, a Stigma was a blessing of the gods that brought about enormous change in its user.
In short, it was a cheat.
The sort of cheat comparable to combining three copies of the artifact Raul had obtained last time, Al Rad Girdo.
And yet,
"Why isn't anything happening?"
Raul stared at the wooden lectern beneath his hand with a baffled look.
Shouldn't something be coming out here? Just as he was thinking that,
Shhhhhhh!
Light poured out of the lectern so intensely that it whitened Raul's field of vision.
As I thought.
But there was a problem.
The enormous flood of light suddenly curved in a soft arc and gathered on the back of Raul's hand, generating a terrifying heat.
"Ghk?!"
It was hot.
The searing pain of being branded with a red-hot iron shook Raul's brain.
Under ordinary circumstances, it would have been better to just pass out, but the Saint's overwhelming mental strength overcame even this pain.
"Hah, h-huuuu..."
The pain subsided after one minute that felt like an hour.
When he collected himself and looked at the back of his hand, a thin circle had been etched there, emitting a gentle pure-white glow.
Soon after, a message appeared.
『You have obtained Stigma - Logos.』
「Offer an appropriate sacrifice. The Guardian will give its life for you.」
"Logos."
Fortunately, it was a kind of Stigma Raul knew.
...If you subdue a huge beast or a powerful enemy and feed it to the Stigma, it should resurrect that "enemy" as a "Guardian" for me.
Unlike ordinary summoners or beast tamers, Logos had no limitation on the kinds of beings it could command. That was its enormous strength.
In other words, if he could only subdue it, anything at all could be made into a Guardian for him.
The saintess of the Ella Church actually used Logos to make a dragon her Guardian.
The kingdom born from that feat was the Shinryong Kingdom, which even now continued its lineage in eastern Exeria.
In this way, a Stigma was a miraculous wonder with enough influence to rewrite the history of the continent.
Since this is the reward for clearing the chapter, I guess it really is on another level.
A faint smile formed at the corner of Raul's mouth.
That was when it happened.
Just as he dusted himself off and hurried to return to Celerial's mansion, the back of his hand suddenly grew hot again.
"Hm?"
Raul reflexively braced himself for the same searing agony as before.
But the Stigma did not hurt him; instead, it poured out bright divine power.
While he was still trying to make sense of it, a message appeared.
『Stigma - Logos is reacting to the will of the World Tree!』
"The will of the World Tree?"
The Stigma was reacting to the World Tree?
Raul was astonished by the phenomenon, seeing it for the first time in his life, and at the same time that strange smile of his, the one that enjoyed situations he didn't understand, began to bloom again at his lips.
Immediately after, another message filled his vision.
『The World Tree activates the power of future sight.』
「It shows the nearest future to the Stigma bearer who meets the conditions.」
The ground beneath Raul's feet collapsed as the world went black.
The sensation of being sucked somewhere else, the sensation of falling without end.
And then, the future that spread out before his eyes was...
『Bad Ending No. 144: World Tree of Defying Heaven.』
It was a world in which the withered World Tree, stripped of a single green leaf, had sunk roots into Exeria while flashing with violet demonic energy.
A bad ending, huh...
That was a designation Raul knew very well.
At the long-familiar word, glimpsed again after so long, the corners of Raul's mouth began to rise slowly once more.