Chapter 865: Beneath the Roots of Yggdrasil
Nidhoggr’s rebellion and defeat temporarily weakened the dragon race and created the chance for another of the Four Great Sinners to rise.
The one who bore the sin of ’Greed’, the Kinslayer, Fafnir.
Fafnir’s ambition was simple but boundless.
She wanted to become the ALL Dragon, the single being that embodied the Power and Authority of every Ancient-Breed Dragon in existence.
To achieve this, she set out to kill and devour every one of them, consuming their strength and absorbing their abilities one after another.
She began with the Ancients who had been imprisoned following Nidhoggr’s rebellion, and by the time Aleksas realised something was amiss, she had already grown too powerful.
She became so strong that it took him and the six Levites together to defeat her and strip her of all her power.
The long and devastating battle weakened Fafnir, and she fled to the First Multiverse, heading toward the Cosmic Nexus where Nidhoggr was sealed, intending to devour the weakened Blighted Dragon to recover her strength.
Unfortunately, Aleksas caught her before she could do that and decided that simply killing or imprisoning her wasn’t enough to repay the damage she had inflicted on the dragons.
He proceeded to extract the majority of her dragon factors and imbue them into a sword, one crafted solely to kill Fafnir over and over again using her own power.
That sword was the Phantasmal Great Sword that felled the ’Sky Demon’ of Asgard, Balmung.
As long as Balmung existed, Fafnir could never regain her full strength, and to punish her further, Aleksas manipulated events behind the scenes so that Fafnir, who had fallen to become the weakest breed of Demi-Dragon, would be slain by a member of one of the races she despised most—a human.
Aleksas placed Balmung in the hands of a human and had him kill Fafnir, only for her to reincarnate because of the runes inscribed on the sword.
The cursed runes forced her to begin as a Demi-Dragon again, compelled her to hunger for power, and once she regained her full draconic nature, she was slain again by Balmung, which absorbed her strength before she reincarnated once more, repeating the cycle endlessly.
"...damn...Aleksas is harsh," Arthur muttered, a trace of shock in his tone.
[Master, someone once tried to kill you, and you used Race Conversion to torture them. You should NOT be criticising Aleksas,] Lostvayne immediately retorted, their projected voice catching the attention of Wyndella and Barda.
"How do you torture someone with Race Conversion?" Wyndella asked, genuinely curious how that was possible.
"Well...you switch off the pain nullification setting?"
""...""
Both Ancient Dragons went silent after Arthur’s response, and Barda’s eyes slowly widened as realisation dawned.
The process of converting one race to another involved the transformation of one’s existence down to the most fundamental level. The Race Factors within their bodies, energy cores, and souls, all the way down to their Existential Graph, were altered, and that process was naturally not without pain.
However, Race Conversion by default consumed extra cosmic energy to temporarily deactivate the target’s pain receptors, so the process would be seamless.
Arthur, however, had chosen to disable that feature the first time he used it on someone.
Still surprised, Barda muttered, "Dude...how did you even think of that?"
"I was pissed, okay? Don’t look at me like you haven’t done worse to other people."
"Fair enough," Barda replied with a shrug, not even bothering to argue with Arthur’s point.
"Ten points for viciousness," Wyndella added, briefly holding up ten fingers before returning them to the pyramid on the desk.
Once again, the pyramid drew Arthur’s attention, but he decided to put off asking about it for now, choosing instead to take advantage of the current topic of conversation.
"Anyway, since you’re going to the Nine Realms, mind giving me a lift?"
When he asked this, Wyndella raised an eyebrow, her gaze questioning why he wanted to go there, and Arthur proceeded to give a brief explanation of his intentions.
"I want to speak with one of the Beasts of the END there. A god killer werewolf born between two Jotunheim giants."
"Oh? Why?"
"Well, I’m the Progenitor godslayer. Wanted to have a renowned god killer under me," Arthur answered candidly, and at this, Wyndella nodded.
"Is that so? That’s not a problem."
Her positive response nearly made Arthur fist pump, but he held himself back and continued his request.
"There’s just a little problem, though..."
"What?"
Seeing the dragon’s eyes slowly narrow, Arthur began to feel like he was pushing his luck, but without this, there was no point in going to the Nine Realms anyway.
"There’s this Asgardian god called Heimdall. He’s a Main Entity, and he has special extrasensory capabilities that apparently allow him to see across the Nine Realms, and hear so acutely that he can hear the grass growing and the wool on a sheep’s back."
Barda turned a curious gaze toward Arthur when he heard this, and the godslayer continued explaining.
"He likely knows what I look like thanks to Asgardian spies who’ve come to Hell, and the place I want to go is surely somewhere he’d be watching over or patrolling with his all-seeing eyes. If he were to see me, it wouldn’t be pretty in more ways than one..."
That was the greatest obstacle before Arthur and his Nine Realms-related plans.
After hearing this, Barda and Wyndella understood that Arthur wanted protection against Heimdall’s senses so he wouldn’t notice him while he was there.
"Oh, if it’s that much, then it can be arranged," Wyndella agreed without a second thought, her expression returning to its usual neutral state.
"Thanks."
Arthur calmly thanked her for that, then quickly redirected the topic to the miniature pyramid that she and Barda had been tinkering with all this time.
"What’s the pyramid for?"
"Altrishia. Was planning to toss her into it for her own trials, so we’re demoing the dungeon."
That was the response Barda gave, and looking at the pyramid, Arthur couldn’t help but feel it looked familiar because of the structures that surrounded it.
"Looks like that one we saw in Athion."
"It is that one. I plan to remodel it," Barda replied, confirming that Arthur hadn’t been mistaken.
Arthur didn’t say anything else, silently wishing Rishia luck in her dungeon run. He’d probably still be in Valmone when it happened anyway.
He spent a few more minutes talking with the Levites before taking Elaine and heading off to another planet in another Galaxy to play around until nightfall.
◇ ◇ ◇
The next day, the 25th of Fourth, 9440th Draconic Year, Arthur, Wyndella, and Barda set out for the First Multiverse’s Nine Realms.
The trip, originally meant to be taken by just Arthur and Wyndella, had Barda joining in on what seemed half a whim and half a practical reason.
Wyndella seemed eager to finish Aleksas’ tasks quickly so she could attend to personal matters, and Barda had mentioned that someone needed to handle Nidhoggr while she was busy with those.
Right after saying that, he added that it would be fun to make fun of Nidhoggr, so he was coming along regardless of whether Wyndella needed him or not.
In that way, the trio departed for the Nine Realms, their journey much faster thanks to the Cosmic Gates crafted by Barda, who was far ahead of Wyndella in spatial manipulation.
Elaine was left behind in Draco Sirus with Berlal due to the danger of where Arthur was going, a place she simply couldn’t follow him to.
Arthur couldn’t measure the travel time in 24-hour days, but he could tell it was considerably shorter than the time it had taken him to reach Draco Sirus using the Cosmic Teleporter.
Soon, Arthur found himself gazing at the sight of nine universes, each with a distinctly different colour scheme, orbiting a colossal structure in a perfect circle.
The structure shone a brilliant white, stretching several billion parsecs above and below the flat plane on which the universes revolved.
Its top and bottom were shaped like tree roots, extending into the impenetrable clouds of cosmic dust and gas that blanketed either side, expanding as wide as the diameter of the universes’ orbit.
Barda created a spatial bubble around Arthur and then dashed toward the lower cloud of cosmic dust, shooting through it at incredible speed.
The Multiverse around them disappeared into darkness streaked with faint, multicoloured light, the sensation resembling a plunge through a roaring cosmic ocean.
Rocks, fragments of shattered celestial bodies, and glimmering shards of ice collided against the surface of the spatial bubble, and before long, they were phasing through the core of a star concealed within the dense haze of dust.
The star’s light flashed briefly around them before dimming back into obscurity, and soon after, they phased through several drifting planets, and just as Arthur counted 13, they suddenly crossed an invisible barrier of some kind.
The violent turbulence ceased instantly as they emerged into a dim, vast, and open expanse of space surrounded by clouds of cosmic dust on all sides.
The roots of the Cosmic Nexus stretched down from above, and now that they were much closer, Arthur could see that the roots which had appeared densely packed from afar actually had at least a light year of distance between them.
The fact that he could see those gaps at all spoke volumes about how far off they still were, but before he could dwell on that thought, Barda teleported them across the expanse, bringing them about halfway to the centre of the vast space.
"And we have touchdown," Barda said playfully as his legs descended toward the clouds of dust below, stopping on an invisible platform of severed space just above it.
He started walking forward, with Wyndella matching his pace while Arthur silently followed behind, looking at everything around him.
The surroundings reminded him of the few galactic landfills he had seen back in Hell, where dead, malformed, or failed galaxies were piled up, waiting to be converted into cosmic energy that would later be used for new galactic births.
Barda folded space as they walked, so each step spanned several light-years, and before long, Arthur began to notice a change in the colour of the cosmic dust clouds.
Originally multi-coloured, a visual reflection of the all-encompassing nature of the cosmic energy within them, they gradually began to take on a dull green hue.
It was faint at first, but gradually, it grew denser, and soon, Arthur could see that the clouds ahead were entirely a deep green.
Barda snapped his fingers, and Arthur felt his body enveloped by a layer of cosmic energy, shielding him from the poisonous gas filling the area, a gas that would instantly kill anything within the Nine Realms above, from Asgardian gods to Jotunheim giants.
