WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 598

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A Wildfire Also Starts from a Small Spark - 1

For the past two thousand years, Nevida had tried everything to wake the King of Humanity. And she was still trying now. She gazed at the lotus leaf where the King of Humanity slept, hoping this time would be the last.

Too many failures across too long a span of years. Her heart had hardened by now, stiff as the bark of an ancient tree, until even a sharp blade could cut her and she would feel nothing. She simply stretched new branches without feeling, let them wither, then stretched them again.

But. Right before the new buds broke open. In those moments when hope flickered up, faint and restless, whispering what if this time works, only then could Nevida feel with terrible clarity why she was alive and what she was living for.

She had been born to serve her lord.

The traitors who had stabbed her lord on that cursed mountain, Yulrim, and fled. El, who had the shameless gall to stand and wait after daring to betray that lord.

The Warriors of the King who had stepped forward to bury a lord still holding the last flicker of life, claiming they wanted to inter the lord in their domain. Those who had plotted assassination, insisting the lord had to die completely before the next could appear. The ones who used her lord's absence to expand their territories and shamelessly usurped the title of king to deceive the people.

Those who had chased and hunted and tried to kill Nevida when she took her dying lord and fled. Those who wanted to seize the lord and use that to cement their own standing. Those who spread El's teachings, proclaiming that someday a savior would come to the world.

The lord was the king of all humanity, yet humanity had been the lord's enemy. Not one of them had revered or served the lord as a lord. Nevida had run, had hidden by turning herself into a tree, had slept alongside her lord and wandered through long stretches of time. She had reached into every form of knowledge she could find to revive the lord, had endured the vast span of years, and at last had even brought the Tree of Corruption to bloom.

And now she was attempting the method with the highest chance of success.

Her palms were sweating from nerves. Her body had long stepped outside the boundaries of the human through countless transformations into wood and through deep synchronization with the Tree of Corruption itself. Yet at the thought of being reunited with her lord, she trembled like a tree that had survived winter, like a new bud on the very edge of spring.

"..."

She could not simply wait for the fruit to ripen, though.

Insects were swarming toward the scent of those blossoms.

"We have come to see the King of Humanity! Open the gate!"

The Tree of Corruption was enjoying an unusual rush of visitors.

The Anub tribe, made up entirely of dog-kin. Loyal hounds of Agarta, and a distinguished lineage from the old kingdom that still carried a high reputation in this jungle.

Unlike the beastkin who were born from fruit, these were descended from some ancient Warrior's transgression and from the children of Agarta and the King of Dogs. They were the real thing, carrying the royal blood in full strength.

"Woof. Looks like the word got out. Other dogs caught the scent and came running."

Blanca Baskerville stood at the base of the Tree of Corruption, where millions of roots spread out and carved a gullied slope into the earth, and let out a soft bark as she looked toward the approach.

"Is that not your own fault for making such a scene?"

A small butterfly apparition shimmered at her back. Walpurgisnacht. The witch of the night. A legendary witch who had kept this jungle steeped in cold, quiet darkness before she was recruited by the great witch and by Nevida. Unlike the great witch, who carried the Progenitor's blood, she had dominated this jungle for over two hundred years on pure black magic alone.

She had given much, taken much, killed and saved countless lives. She was the very concept of "witch" made flesh. She had grown comparatively gentler since receiving the great witch's blood, but today there was an edge to her.

"Fighting the King of Humanity. What a reckless thing to do when you are only here as a guest."

"Please. How was I supposed to know that was the King of Humanity? No one passed me any information."

"Do you not think the fight itself was the problem?"

"No. Not at all."

Blanca Baskerville smoothed her pricked-up ears and answered.

"I was born to fight, after all. I only did what I was made to do. Just like them."

At the end of Blanca's gaze stood some hundred members of the Anub tribe.

"Come to think of it, you two do look rather alike! Is there some connection between you?"

The figure with the monocle over one eye asked the question with that creaking, grinding sound. It was a sound no living body should produce, an interlocking rhythm that was somehow both harmonious and deeply unsettling.

One of the military state's Six Generals, an alchemist and mage who had nearly become lord even in the Lesser States. The military state's designer, Gwapyeong Maximilien. A mage, and yet in raw force he was an anomaly comparable to an energy practitioner whose art touched on principle.

Blanca folded her ears back slightly at the unpleasant sound.

"They call themselves loyal hounds of the Warrior. Not a figure of speech, either, they actually have ears and tails. And they have a dog's loyalty to match. Wouldn't even the emperor of the Empire, sitting atop all the wealth and glory in the world, want to keep one or two around?"

"So you share a common ancestor! Interesting! And in only a few generations the ears and tail grew shorter, did they, because..."

"...Hey. Are you picking a fight?"

The Baskervilles' ears and tails had been cut by people called "groomers" when they were young. The shortened ears and tail were a symbol of human arrogance.

Blanca dropped her voice and growled. But Maximilien, with his gear-wheel heart, was entirely unmoved and asked back at his steady pace.

"Hm? Was there something offensive in what I said?"

"You..."

Then. Nevida surfaced from her contemplation and spoke, her tone heavy.

"That is not so. The Root Tree does not branch in a mere few generations. This was done by human hands."

"To the ears and tail? How curious. What did they do?"

"They cut the ears and tails when the children were young. The traits remain by nature, but someone wished to erase their outward sign. A thoroughly pointless thing to do."

She was less interested in stopping the quarrel than in correcting a false claim. The Root Tree was Nevida's domain, after all.

Nevida rose and continued.

"Nenyaph is the wanton woman's spy. She will come to interfere, that is certain. We cannot let outsiders in at this moment. Walpurgisnacht, pass the word."

"...With all due respect, the great witch has already gone out to meet them."

In the apparition Walpurgisnacht had conjured, the great witch could be seen descending on a large hawk. Nevida studied the image for a moment and murmured.

"Hexia?"

"Yes. The great witch finds beastkin... charming, and also pitiable. What shall we do?"

Nevida shook her head.

"Let Hexia do as she wishes. I will not interfere."

Her tone had been cold, but her attitude toward the great witch was altogether soft. Maximilien asked with obvious curiosity.

"Strange. I thought you and I were much the same kind of fruit."

"Naturally. You and I are fruit from the same branch."

"No, I did not mean your tree. I was speaking of disposition. I prefer things that click into place like gears, and I had assumed you were the same, as pitiless as a tree. Yet you are unusually soft toward the great witch."

"Trees have blood and tears too. The form is simply different."

Nevida gave the short answer, then added.

"She is my teacher."

"Your teacher? Even a supreme being who has spent an eternity dispensing wisdom had a teacher?"

"Many of them. As many as the years I have lived."

Nevida recalled her teachers one by one.

The first had been a foul-tempered druid. He drank and caused trouble and put her to work running petty errands. She learned nothing from him, but he was the first she ever saw, and so Nevida became a druid.

The second had been the King of Humanity. The lord had taught her everything yet never once given Nevida an order or a command. Nevida had decided she would spend every ability she had in that lord's service.

...Regrettably, the next teacher had been El. El had not taught Nevida directly, but the world El showed her had widened Nevida's horizons. The four taboos El revealed in particular had become the soil in which the Root Tree was planted.

Had El truly known Nevida would become a Demon God? Probably not. The Sanctum could not prophesy Demon Gods. A Demon God was something beyond the frame.

But the rising irritation remained as sharp as ever. Nevida chose to set El aside. There was nothing to gain from dwelling on it.

"Hexia's ideas led me to become a Demon God. Before her, I was nothing more than a very old druid. Now I have become a Demon God spread through the world."

"Was the great witch really that extraordinary? What did she do?"

"The idea that meat could grow from a tree."

"But it was the great witch who did that. How did it make you a Demon God?"

A tree from which beasts hang at the branch tips, growing outward from the origin of species. That idea was an intuition that pierced through the world entire.

But Nevida could not explain it. What she could point to instead was why Maximilien was showing such interest.

"If you become a Demon God, you will understand."

"Hahaha. Cowardly! Are you saying that without the qualification, one cannot even understand it?"

Maximilien laughed it off, then let a somewhat self-deprecating smile settle on his face.

"Back in the military state, the King of Humanity told me something. That my innate arcane was not a piece of the world, but merely a way of interpreting the world according to my own convenience. That I could never become a Demon God."

"The lord said that to you."

"What do you think? I want to ask a Demon God. Do you agree with the King of Humanity?"

She could answer that one with certainty. Nevida spoke plainly.

"I do not know either. I cannot understand other Demon Gods. Nor do I understand what a Demon God truly is."

"Tsk! Not helpful in the slightest!"

"No one will be helpful to you on this."

That is what it means to be a Demon God.

Had he been put in his place? Maximilien fell silent and turned his gaze away. A strong wind was blowing beyond the large knothole that served as a window. The world's most restless tree, the Root Tree, which brought storms in both the meteorological and figurative sense, was shedding its leaves on that wind.

The sight of those leaves falling from the World Tree was, in a word, breathtaking...

Then, without warning, everyone present felt something was wrong.

"Hey. Were leaves always falling?"

Change in nature is gradual. It never happens all at once in a single moment. Nature has its proper order, its fitting principles, and it shows those signs in advance.

But the leaves dropping from the Tree of Corruption were out of step with all of that.

"Woof. Now that I look, my lips are a little cracked. The humidity is low."

Blanca ran her tongue over her lips and murmured. The slightly cracked lips drew in the moisture as though parched.

"It should not be that season yet."

Nevida murmured and coaxed a single flower into bloom at her fingertips. The petals, which should have opened full and heavy with dew, bloomed only halfway before drying out completely and scattering.

The air was dry. Moisture was lacking. Enough to parch even the leaves of the Root Tree.

Yet that made no sense.

"It is impossible. This land sits at the crossing of dozens of waterways. The World Tree drinks in so much water it breathes out clouds on its own. How could the air be dry?"

Walpurgisnacht raised a reasonable question. Trees draw water from the ground and release it through their leaves, and the World Tree was the king of all such trees. This land, blessed by the World Tree, should always be full of life. And life was inseparable from water.

So how could moisture be lacking?

Everyone found it strange, but Nevida knew the reason.

"The wanton woman."

Nevida spread her roots. It was different from human sensation, far less sensitive, but through the feeling at their tips she sensed the moisture. And she understood.

The waterways.

The air.

Something was waging a scorched-earth campaign against the Root Tree.

The waterways that should be flowing were shrinking. The sky above was cloudless and bare. It was as though the moisture was being stripped from this place, from the very space where the Root Tree stood.

"It is the Celestial God's power. Something is stealing 'water' from the Root Tree."

"Since when?"

"You cannot block a waterway overnight. Judging by the scale, perhaps since..."

Since Nevida had sensed the presence of the patron deity Ankra at the edge of the forest.

The attack had been so unexpected that she was slow to notice. A tree is passive. When moisture runs short, it cannot go looking for water, so it accepts its fate and sheds its leaves. That is how a tree survives.

Under normal circumstances she might have caught it, but her attention had been entirely consumed by drawing out the lotus where the King of Humanity slept.

"Then it started from the very beginning."

"The beginning?"

"It must have begun before I went to the lord. Slowly, squeezing the throat just gradually enough to go unnoticed."

For a tree, water is something close to food, shelter, and breath combined. Even if the Root Tree had been a true World Tree, it would have taken a considerable blow. Probably much like that time long ago, like when the World Tree burned.

Even so.

Maximilien asked with puzzlement.

"What is the problem? This is a Demon God in the form of a tree, is it not?"

A Demon God does not wither. Even if every drop of water dried up, the Root Tree would remain the same. Knowledge is not subject to water or seasons. It stands in that ground regardless.

Those falling leaves were nothing more than decoration. The true essence of the Root Tree was the species growing from its countless branching limbs. The origin of those species, that was the Root Tree.

"Even if a few leaves fall, nothing here is actually affected. At most, the people living below will be a little confused. There is no real problem."

Branches bearing rice, branches bearing wheat, branches bearing beans, and so on. The fruit growing on those branches would fail to ripen and fall. But what did that matter? Anyone beyond the residents living in the World Tree's shade, Nevida herself and the Lords of All Creation, would suffer no blow at all.

"...That cannot be right."

Walpurgisnacht dismissed Maximilien's words.

"In the past, the Warrior of the Kingdom of Ten Thousand was swept away in exactly that kind of chaos and perished. After that, the World Tree burned, and night fell over the Kingdom of Ten Thousand. What they want is the chaos itself. The spark that will set this entire tree ablaze."

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