Chapter 864: Yggdrasil’s Secret
When Wyndella declared that he’d be having his whip trials in Valmone, Arthur stayed silent for a while before shrugging.
"Okay, no problem," he eventually said.
He thought about it and found no reason to object since he was already planning to go to Valmone. It was simply a matter of spending thirty days preoccupied somewhere before beginning what he actually intended to do there.
Right after he spoke, Wyndella added, "I’ll talk to Gervod and see if we can arrange your Axe Trials to be held there as well, so you’ll be done with our curriculum."
"That’s fine too," Arthur agreed, once again having no objections since that was his destination anyway.
"So, when are we leaving?" he asked right after.
As soon as he spoke, movement in the corner of his vision caught his attention, and he quickly reached out, grabbing Elaine’s hand before she touched something in Mofil’s workshop that seemed dangerous, his eyes still fixed on Wyndella as she rubbed her chin thoughtfully.
"I was gonna say tomorrow, but then I remembered I have to go somewhere else first before we can head to Valmone. It’s kind of the last official business I have to handle for the Old Man."
She unintentionally revealed that Aleksas was the reason behind her hectic schedule over the past few months, something Arthur had already suspected.
Still, Arthur wondered where she had to go next, a passing curiosity that prompted him to ask her a question.
"Where to?"
"It’s this little universe group in the First Multiverse called the Nine Realms."
Hearing the familiar name, Arthur’s eyebrows lifted, and he began naming a few places.
"Asgard, Jotunheim, Niflheim?"
The names he mentioned made Wyndella’s eyes light up as she tapped the table and spoke. "Yeah, yeah. That one. You know it?"
"I do," Arthur answered, a distant look in his eyes. "I distinctly remember finding out that Asgard’s Master sent some of his Valkyries to assassinate the seven-year-old me."
Barda chuckled at his casual revelation and muttered, "Tough life."
"I know, right?" Arthur replied in the same laid-back tone.
The two of them brushed off the matter while Elaine, who had just learned that Arthur had nearly been assassinated when he was seven, was frozen in shock.
Acting as if he didn’t notice her shock, Arthur continued speaking.
"So, what do you want from Asgard anyway?"
He also had his own Asgard-related goals and wanted to see if he could have Wyndella take him along.
"Well, actually, I don’t have business with any of the universes in that group," Wyndella replied, and before Arthur could say anything else, she revealed her true destination.
"My business is with what’s at the bottom of the Cosmic Nexus in between them."
The mention of a ’Cosmic Nexus’ confused Arthur momentarily, but then he remembered something Lucifer had told him years ago, and it immediately clicked.
"Oh, you mean Yggdrasil?"
"Right, that’s what they were calling it. A Universal Tree or something. What a big insult to a Cosmic Nexus..."
Wyndella’s mutter made Arthur blink in confusion since he didn’t understand why that would be considered an insult.
To begin with, while he had heard Lucifer refer to Yggdrasil as a Cosmic Nexus, Arthur didn’t really understand what that meant.
"Can you give me a brief rundown on what a Cosmic Nexus is?"
"Basically, the galactic web upgraded to the scale of a multiverse," Wyndella explained.
"That’s soo NOT what a Cosmic Nexus is! You’re oversimplifying it to a ridiculous degree!" Barda interjected with a raised voice, and at that, Wyndella rolled her eyes and replied.
"Then you explain it to him. You’re better at space stuff anyway."
Barda sighed at her reaction, shaking his head before turning to Arthur.
"I’ll put it simply. A Cosmic Nexus is essentially a focal point in a Multiverse. Universes may look scattered when viewed from a distance, but they’re actually arranged perfectly.
Imagine if the universes were like clothes hanging on clotheslines, then a Cosmic Nexus would be the pole those clotheslines extend from.
There are many across each Multiverse, and they’re crucial components of the Cosmic Web that make up Multiversal Structures."
It was a simple explanation, but enough for Arthur to grasp what Cosmic Nexuses were and how vital they were.
"So, Yggdrasil is that important to that region, huh?" Arthur muttered
"Yeah, it is, but not in the way you’re probably thinking," Barda replied, a 3D hologram of the Multiverse appearing around the workshop as he spoke.
"Left on its own, a Cosmic Nexus can grow to have entire superclusters of universes attached. And I’m not talking hundreds or thousands, but billions and tens of billions. But that Yggdrasil one only has Nine."
Arthur figured there had to be a reason why Yggdrasil had only nine universes connected despite its potential, and that reason was likely why Wyndella needed to go there.
"So, what’s the reason?"
For a moment, Wyndella had a pensive look, as if debating whether to tell him or not, but she eventually shrugged and decided to.
"It’s not really that big of a secret anyway. It’s where we stuffed one of the idiots who tried to mess up our race’s order a couple trillion years ago."
"One of? There were others?" Arthur’s attention lingered briefly on the implication that there had been more than one, but he quickly switched focus.
After thinking about it for a moment, he arrived at a conclusion and asked, "So you guys imprisoned someone in Yggdrasil, and the reason it can’t fully function as a Cosmic Nexus is because most of its energy is being redirected to keeping that person imprisoned?"
"Bingo," Wyndella said, twirling her finger in the air before pointing at the miniature pyramid, altering its internal structure.
Arthur wondered what she and Barda were trying to accomplish with that thing, but he decided to address his greater curiosity first.
"Who the hell did you imprison down there? And how do you even imprison someone there?
From what I know, it’s shaped like a double-rooted tree with immense clouds of cosmic energy and dust at both ends, obscuring them from all types of perception."
Rubbing his chin, he recalled more details about Yggdrasil.
"I know there’s some eagle-like creature at the top and a dragon at the bot—oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me!"
Realisation dawned on Arthur mid-sentence, and he immediately cursed, eyes widening as he asked, "Are you for real?!"
The two Levites exchanged glances before looking back at him with confusion on their faces as they asked, "Real about what?" "What are you on about?"
Seeing their puzzled expressions, Arthur realised they probably didn’t know the history of the Nine Realms, so he decided to give a brief explanation.
"In the Nine Realms’ history, at the top of Yggdrasil sits an unknown eagle, and at the bottom is a ’Poison Dragon’ that continuously devours the roots of the Universal Tree while cursing everything within the Nine Realms. It’s said to try to drag the entire cluster back into the chaos from which it was formed.
The history says that the dragon came into existence alongside Yggdrasil and the Nine Realms."
Barda and Wyndella exchanged incredulous looks after hearing his explanation.
"What the... bullshit?" Barda finally said.
Arthur chuckled and shook his head at Barda’s reaction, which confirmed that the history he knew was completely wrong.
"Lemme guess, the dragon said to have formed with the Nine Realms is actually the one you imprisoned there, and it gnaws at the roots not because it hates the Nine Realms, but because it’s trying to break out of prison."
"Wait, what’s this about ’gnawing on roots’? Didn’t the old man seal all her Dictums?" Barda asked, turning to Wyndella, who nodded.
"Yeah, he did, but she still has the basic energy absorption we all have, so it makes sense that she can ’eat the roots’ of the thing. It doesn’t really matter since the Nexus regenerates energy faster than she could ever consume."
Arthur quietly updated his knowledge of the Nine Realms’ history with the actual facts before asking one last question, and probably the most important of them all.
"This dragon, does their name happen to be Nidhoggr?"
"Yeah. It’s the arrogant poison idiot," Wyndella replied, earning a sigh from Barda.
"Blighted Dragon, sister," the man said with a tired tone, allowing Arthur to infer that was Nidhoggr’s official title.
The two quickly started bickering about titles, and Arthur silently ignored them, choosing instead to piece together all the details he’d just learned about his home region of the First Multiverse.
’So the Cosmic Nexus is actually the prison where Nidhoggr was sealed by the Levites... But why?
Wyndella said they tried to ’mess up their race’s order’, and she called them an ’arrogant poison idiot’.’
Assuming that wasn’t just Wyndella being herself, then there was likely a clue hidden somewhere in everything that had been said so far. It only took Arthur a few moments to sort through all the dragon-related knowledge he had before arriving at a possible answer.
"Is Nidhoggr part of the Four Great Sinners?"
At that question, Wyndella’s expression scrunched up, and she turned to Arthur.
"You knew about that cringey name but not about Cosmic Horrors? Your knowledge is really skewed."
"True, it is," Arthur replied, then quickly returned to confirming whether his assumption was right.
"Yeah, yeah, you’re right," Wyndella said, waving him off.
As a reminder, the Four Great Sinners bore the following sins:
[Malice — the joy of ruin for its own sake.
Pride — the defiance of the order that birthed her.
Greed — the hunger to become all that exists.
Despair — the will to destroy what cannot be saved.]
’Malice’ had been confirmed to be Azi Dhaka, and from what he’d just heard, Arthur figured Nidhoggr was ’Pride.’
"Exactly what did she do that got her a trillion-year sentence?"
Arthur asked for details, and Barda silently passed him a memory gem, a clear sign that the story was too long to recount verbally.
One memory download later, Arthur now understood the entire mess surrounding Nidhoggr and her imprisonment in the Cosmic Nexus, now known as Yggdrasil.
Once an Ancient-Breed Dragon with Authority only a step below the Levites, Nidhoggr rose in rebellion against Aleksas, believing herself more suited to rule the dragon race.
While others revered the Primordial Progenitor, she viewed obedience as weakness.
The issue was that Nidhoggr wasn’t an ordinary Ancient Dragon, but one who had fought against the Cosmic Horrors during the Reign of Chaos and had earned great reverence among her kind.
Her charisma drew countless dragons to her side, sparking the first great draconic civil war.
Unsurprisingly, Nidhoggr’s rebellion ended in defeat, and she was sealed beneath the Cosmic Nexus.
Aleksas chose not to kill her, wishing to keep her power as a reserve should the need arise, and imprisoned across various regions of the Cosmos were the Ancient-Breeds who had followed her cause, numbering a quarter of the Ancient-Breed Dragon population at the time.
