An hour later, the rotten, vile-smelling, whispering madness of a forest had calmed down a bit. Some still tracked him from time to time, cackling as he passed by, but most laid dormant and lethargic.

  Most likely, they realized it wasn’t worth it to chase him around. Crackheads they might be, but they still held some level of consciousness and will to survive. Either that or they didn’t fancy being treated with his 'scarlet punishment'.

  Or perhaps… they believed they had him cornered.

  That they only had to wait until nightfall to get his ass?

  “Fuck, they’re right." Zayn put on a casual face while panicking inside.

  Reality was just that. If he couldn’t find the supposed ‘way out’ before the moon reclaimed the skies, he might as well start calling for God.

  He’d never been much of a believer.

  Still, a nightmare-inducing forest had a way of turning even the most unhinged atheist into a god-fearing man. If only for a day.

  And so he pretended. Pretended to be fine, that he wasn’t shitting himself on the inside. Pretended he was tough enough to take them all as he trudged through the forest with solid, heavy steps.

  That’s what the Helldiver taught him: pretend you’re okay until you’re strong enough to handle it. That single line had fueled him through most of his difficult years. Once again, it seemed to work.

  The truth of the matter was, the treants were just as scared of him, if not more.

  Something about that cheeky red mana he wielded made their vines stand in fear. And over time, as he moved through the jungle, their cackles grew increasingly strained, reserved, and much lower in frequency.

  Was he somehow on the right path? God, he fucking hoped so.

  Soon, he came across another depression on the ground, where the trees went missing for about a hundred feet. Deciding his legs deserved rest, he slid down the slope. As the heat struck his skin, he nodded.

  This should be enough to keep the treants away.

  With his current constitution, he could move for a few more hours without exhausting his engine, but he couldn’t just keep moving without direction. The situation was uncertain, and his life could be in grave danger at any moment.

  He needed rest and recovery.

  Out of his storage ring, he scoured out a few of the stone slabs. It wasn't safe to sit on the ground, not with it looking like shattered, thin glass. Ichor running underneath.

  Stacking the slabs atop each other, he stacked them into a crude seat and sat cross-legged.

  If the dungeon boss were ever to learn that his precious books were being used as a seat, he’d probably hate Zayn more than the Fae.

  Good thing the Treants were unlikely to tell him.

  Once got the opportunity, he fed himself, and then he fished out the memory crystals from his pockets.

  Seventeen. That’s how many he’d gathered.

  He figured out the bigger and brighter crystals held more memories than the smaller ones, so he handpicked the good ones and left the rest to be.

  Anyways… now the biggest problem was figuring out how these crystals were supposed to be used. Like, was he supposed to infuse them with mana? Break them? Devour—nope. Nah-uh.

  Then, he had an idea.

  Making bloodmetal worm out, he poked at the crystal. Surprisingly solid. He gritted his teeth and pushed harder, and it took his entire strength to put a crack in it.

  Mana stormed in and enveloped him.

  ***

  The scene in front of him changed.

  He could feel himself sitting atop the stone slab. Still smell the ash and burn of the forest. What he heard and saw, however, changed completely.

  The greenery returned, revealing the trees once more. Compared to the white-barked forest, it looked normal and incredibly diverse. He even saw snakes the size of an anaconda squirming on the tree.

  The noise of people bickering rang out. Soft footsteps stepped on the grass, and armor clinked against itself.

  “This is tiresome! Why was I drafted into the war of all people? I do not have enough constitution to walk through this forest all day!” A pointy-eared young man in white vented aloud, sweating, frustration apparent on his pretty face.

  He frowned as soon as he saw the group of people.

  They were…almost human. Disgustingly pretty humans in oversized armour. They did have a leaf growing above their pointy ears, but it didn’t look weird or unnatural. It kind of looked...elegant, if anything.

  Nature had decided it wasn’t enough, so there was a gleaming crystal in the middle of their forehead.

  The same size as the memory crystals.

  Too pretty! Enough to make him puke. Illegal, or something.

  They looked like the puppy versions of elves…if that made any sense.

  “Why do we even need a thirty-three-thousand-strong army to face one guy?” The young man wearing a comically large white armour spoke out again. While others had their armors scratched and dented all over, his was…untouched. “Sure, it’s the Stone Sage, but that’s still just one guy! The Fate Alchemists have gone mad! Mad, I tell you!”

  The “handsome enough to puke” men laughed at him. But their armour was black, the same as Faeria's. An insignia of a black raven was etched upon each of their chests, above which glowing stars were carved. Most only had a couple, while a pale-eyed guy in the group had three stars. Probably the leader of this group.

  He chuckled and sent a side glance at the white-armoured guy. “Thorin, aren’t you just worried your wife is going to be lonely if you die?”

  The group broke out in loud jeers and laughter. Another woman chimed in, “Don’t worry, God Monarch Sylvar has promised that whoever dies in this war will be granted the highest positions on the World Tree! Next life we’re going to be royalty!”

  “Yeah, you are right. Its the others who should be scared.” Thorin muttered, making exaggerated motions with his hands. “We’re going to run the monarchy to the ground.”

  “Don’t worry, Thorin. If you die, I’ll take good care of your wife. In your next life…you might even be my son.” The pale-eyed, three-starred man smiled sillily. “Come, call me father, son!”

  “Fuck you!”

  Jubilant, loud laughter reverberated through the jungle once more.

  ***

  Loud screeches full of anger rang in Zayn’s ears as soon as he returned. They stood above the clearing and screeched madly at him, slamming their vines down in anger.

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  Why?

  Because he was watching their memories? Fair enough. He felt a whiplash from the contrast. The sound of that group laughing earlier versus the grotesque things screeching now—it was too different.

  He just closed his eyes. As long as he couldn’t see the problem, it didn’t exist.

  A few questions boomeranged inside him. What did they mean...everyone would be reborn? Was reincarnation real? Fuck, it might as well be here, but how was such a thing promised?

  How could all of them be born royalty?

  What was happening?

  Lies of the authority: that’s what was happening! They were being fed lies…these fae. Just like back on earth. Everyone had to join the rat race, because that apparently was the only way to ever…succeed. Two decades of studies, four decades of slaving in the corporate world to pay rents and have food on the table. That was supposedly the good life.

  All that bullshit!

  Which brought him to the next point—a thirty-three-thousand army was dispatched for a single person!

  The Stone Sage.

  He sneaked a glance at the treants again. They were screeching, jumping, yet not daring to cross a single step inside the clearing. They weren’t capable of standing inside these clearings. So he had nothing to worry about.

  He saw one memory after another.

  Each of them showed different soldiers’ memories right before the war. Some were excited, while others despaired at their fate. But everyone seemed certain of one thing: their next life was going to be better than their current.

  They completely believed in the lies. With mana and magic being real, perhaps it was even easier to sell this kind of lie. Still, an entire race of cultist madmen? A bit too much to digest.

  Some were even determined to earn merits. They want to be reborn as lords, or even kings, or something called ‘Prima’, where they retain the prebious life's memories. In this state, they progressively grow stronger until they become an absolute powerhouse over several reincarnation.

  That single belief pushed everyone into this madness.

  Then came the fifth memory, which was something else altogether.

  ***

  Fire seethed and shattered the land, thick cloud of black smoke swirling upward. Magma spurted out of the ground and burned the trees into coal. And thick clouds swarmed the skies above, raining fire.

  On the ground, corpses were strewn around. Slashed in half and being cut into multiple pieces were the “better” looking ends. Zayn felt everything in his stomach revolt at the scene.

  Between this madness, he found an armored man—well, half a man. Everything below his torso had been cut off, who knew where. But his chest was still moving. He exhaled, painfully, and stared at the skies without hope.

  The cut under his stomach was so smooth that Zayn believed the armor had been sliced with just a single slash.

  Seeing his pale eyes, he recognized the man; it was the same three-star guy that joked around with Thorin earlier.

  Magma flowed into his armor, but he made not a single sound, having seemingly accepted his fate. He watched that for a while. Disappointed, Zayn was ready to come out of the memory—until another movement stirred in the distance.

  Another figure wiggled out from the littered mess of corpses. A figure wearing an oversized white armour. Now, it looked battle-worn like others, with cuts and scratches all over it. Thorin limped over with shaky limbs, kneeling beside his friend.

  The pale-eyed man visibly relaxed at his presence, trying to pull his body upright, but with half his body gone, it was a tough task. Thorin helped him sit upright. With great difficulty, he spoke, “You—you came, Thorin. Though you shouldn’t have… You should’ve ran awa—!”

  “No use running from fate, my friend. The prophecy of the Fate Alchemists has come true.” Thorin laughed in defeat. “There....there will be no next life for us.”

  “How did we lose? We had the entire power of the Fae gathered. How did we—”

  “Because fate abandoned us. Our own abandoned us.” Thorin laughed self-deprecatingly. “We were but sacrifices made for the prophecy.”

  The pale-eyed man stared at Thorin wide-eyedly. Slowly, his pained face morphed into laughter, too.

  A laughter at himself, at the world, at fate itself.

  ***

  Once more, Zayn returned to the ashen forest, annoyed. He felt like he’d seen the first act and the ending of the movie, while the entire middle was missing.

  “Fate abandoned them?” he muttered. It was weird. The Sage had won against a thirty-three-thousand army. Doomed an entire thirty-three thousand army to create the ultimate weapon of prophecy.

  And that thing was now within Zayn, as he stood in the ruins the Sage created, sitting on the books the Sage wrote, drinking wine out of his gourd.

  How ridiculous was that?

  He rolled a yellow crystal in the palm of his hand. The smaller crystals had already given all the information they could, so he decided to speed things up.

  He was still worried about some adverse effect that could arise from using these crystals, but even after so many, he felt no change inside him. And, the treants had grown feisty.

  The rowdy bunch looked down at him from the edge of the circle and shrieked—as though he had violated everything they held dear. As though they couldn’t wait for nightfall to tear him apart.

  Smirking, he grabbed the Sage’s gourd and drank more wine from it. The mix of sweet and bitter quietly turned into mana and burned in his circuit. But there was someone else it burned! The treants!

  Recognizing the gourd, they went absolutely ballistic, slapping and cracking their whips on the ground in anger. Ribbon-like appendages wormed out of their bodies, another vine attempt at intimidation.

  “Oh yeah? I can do that too!” Summoning a pair of crimson vines, he slapped them down, silencing the rabid trees. Then they broke down in real time, literally breaking into roots in their anger.

  'Skill 'Provocation' has ranked up to Divine!' He snorted to himself.

  Enraged, their roots mixed, wriggled, and wobbled like a nest of snakes, until they grew close to three meters tall, a humanoid tree-like thing. Its overlong arms ended in sinewy claws almost half its size, giving it a rather vicious look.

  Undead Treant Slasher - Lv 35

  Zayn nervously chuckled. “What the hell?”

  Why did everything in this dungeon have to be so weird?

  The Treant Slasher roared, slamming its claws on the ground. The other treants cheered it on, and its next gestures were painfully obvious. It was provoking him to come up and fight, with some colorful language woven in.

  Good thing he didn’t understand any of it.

  “No, no.” Zayn put on a provoking smirk. Since he was in deep shit, he might as well drag them down, too. He pointed it toward himself. “You come here.”

  It was their turn to be frustrated. The entire group turned silent, helplessly staring at him.

  “Guess you’re not coming, then.”

  He crushed the yellow crystal, too.

  ***

  The ground shuddered beneath him. Not like an earthquake, more like a million footsteps all at once. Zayn waited, breath bated, mind racing through possibilities.

  Then they came.

  A stampede of wild beasts tore through the jungle, big and small. Air cracked with the thunder of pounding hooves and claws, the snapping of branches, and the deep, guttural roars of predators.

  Mutated werebears. Wolves larger than elephants. Bulls with metallic, golden hides and pincers jutting out. All of them fled from some unseen predator, their breath steaming the air as they barreled past him.

  The longer he watched, the stranger the beasts became—unfamiliar, alien in shape and color. A few of them eerily matched the stone sculptures he’d seen inside the house.

  And then, once they all passed, there was nothing. Nothing but an eerie, suffocating calm for a while. Then, a loud footstep tore through the calmness. The clinking of armor getting closer, steadily. Then, a sharp snort.

  “Burn the jungle down? Pardon me, but this is the worst idea I’ve ever had the luck of hearing in my twenty-seven lifetimes!” an irritated, smug voice sliced through the quiet woods. “Not surprising, though. The more you allow these ‘lowborns’ to rise to power, the more it gets to their head!”

  Zayn stretched his neck to see the speaker but failed to catch his face. The guy was massive.

  “Prime Noryiah, you lack the vision to see through her General’s concerns,” another mature, reserved voice replied at a deliberate pace. “We face the Sage of Stones himself—someone who rose through ruthless slaughter and incomparable schemes, leaving Eledra shaken. As long as the land remains, he remains.”

  What? What are they doing to the land?

  To his left, bark crunched.

  He turned his neck but only caught a shadow moving past—heavy green armor, pitted with scratches and cuts, bearing the insignia of a black raven.

  “Please!” The first voice—Noryiah—gave a sharp, amused laugh. “You became much too paranoid, Second. I’d say it's because you are always with her.”

  “You weren’t around when the Sage of Stones was running around slaughtering our kind,” the older man replied evenly. “I wish you had seen him in action. He doesn’t move for mere vengeance. He seeks the complete and utter destruction of our race.”

  This time, Zayn got a good look at them.

  The snarky giant—Noryiah— was a beast of a man. Armored in green, he stood taller than three meters. His armour couldn’t hide his biceps, almost as thick as Zayn’s torso. One would certainly think him ferocious—until they saw his baby face.

  It was as though a three-year-old baby got a giant’s body and found a giant axe to hold and pose around. Zayn frowned. That pose…seemed awfully familiar.

  No, there could be coincidences. Axes were common, and so were giants.

  “He could only run amok exactly because I was not around. If I were in my peak, I’d have crushed him beneath my feet alone.” Noryiah said with an unbearable pride written on his face. “Still, the fae burning a jungle down? The jokes just write themselves! I’m terribly curious to see how Faeria explains this to God Monarch Sylvar.”

  Faeria?!

  “That’s General Faeria for you,” said the man, whom Noryiah referred to as Lord Second. He sighed and crouched low to the ground, as if tired of dealing with this man-baby. His heavy, pelted armor didn’t make a single noise as he drew cryptic symbols in the dirt with his spear.

  “Worry about that later. If this battle isn’t won, we might be one with the tree once more.”

  As a final move, he scoured out a bunch of Arax crystals and drove them into different points of the spell circle.

  Zayn felt his eyes strain as he kept them open. He recognized the symbols: the same as the ones he’d found in the clearings.

  The land hummed. Mana crackled through the air. An immense spell unfurled beneath them, covering vast swathes of land with a golden circle. Waves of heat rolled outward from the ground, carrying the smell of scorched leaves and smouldering moss.

  “Aldros!”

  One word later, the world ignited.