[Vol. 8] Chapter 343: I Am the World
“These guys… why does each one sound more mysterious and dramatic than the last…”
With a helpless shake of her head, Violet didn’t give any reaction to Leonis’s final actions or his disappearance. Even though she had clashed with this emperor of the empire both openly and secretly several times, she didn’t exactly hate him, but she didn’t like him either. His very existence was one of the main reasons the world was so unstable now. Naturally, the priestess wasn’t about to waste effort on unnecessary things.
Finishing one matter, she quickly turned her head and walked toward the wooden doll that had always drawn her attention, but she had never really gotten the chance to study closely. She raised a hand and waved at it cautiously.
“......”
Still no reaction. Even when she moved close enough that she could attack at any moment, the simple-looking puppet just stood there quietly, head lowered like a machine with no power, motionless.
Because it had no real face, Violet couldn’t read its expression or guess its thoughts. But the terrifying strength and power it had shown earlier were still fresh in her mind. That was why she was very careful now, every movement guarded against the chance that it might suddenly attack her.
This thing was no joke. If Violet was right, its overall ability was already at the level of a level 100 warrior in Illusory World, and most likely it even had some very special abilities. Something like this could really hurt her. So it was better to stay cautious.
After all, she was “just a harmless priest,” wasn’t she?
But soon, Violet realized her caution might have been unnecessary. The puppet didn’t react at all to her approach. Even more surprising, the faint golden glow that had been weakened by the [Ironblood Arena] spread apart on its own when she touched it, revealing the puppet’s true inside form.
Violet blinked in surprise. Thinking back to the strange moment when it had suddenly attacked Leonis, who was no longer even its target, she couldn’t help but feel something odd.
“Strange… what exactly is this thing?”
Muttering her doubt, the priestess carefully looked it over again from head to toe.
Just as it seemed from the outside, it was indeed made of some kind of unknown wood. The craftsmanship was rough and simple, but on closer inspection she could notice hints of something unusual.
First of all, she had never seen this kind of wood before. But its toughness was far beyond any metal she knew. In fact, it was so unnaturally strong that it didn’t seem like a normal material at all. If she had to compare, it was somewhat similar to the “Eternal” trait of the [Eternal Scepter of the World's Heart], a property that went beyond the material itself, almost reaching a conceptual level of “indestructible.”
No wonder it had survived such intense battles without the slightest damage. In a sense, this puppet could already be considered a divine artifact.
And since it was still an object, that meant she could try to investigate it. Violet didn’t expect much, but after a moment of thought, she decided to use [Information Detection] on it.
If the world was like a big online game such as Illusory World, then the diviner in the Ancient Spirit Realm or the skill [Information Detection] were basically the same. They were unofficial ways of trying to steal information from the system’s hidden storage.
That was why fortune-tellers risked divine punishment, and why [Information Detection] usually failed against high-level beings. The higher something’s rank, the more complex its “passwords” and “security systems” would be. You couldn’t just hack your way in and look around.
So for something of this level, possibly a creation of the Primordial Light, the skill should logically return almost nothing. Violet only hoped for a little result, even just a hint.
But unexpectedly, the moment she started her scan, her long-unused system panel suddenly lit up, flashing with strange, broken symbols that looked like scrambled code!
“Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…!”
Violet flinched in shock and instinctively pulled her hand back to stop the skill. Her “game system,” which she had brought with her when she crossed over, usually didn’t do much. It didn’t give quests, didn’t hand out rewards, and had nothing to do with so-called cheats. But at the very least, it was connected to her life. And now, seeing it look like it had been hacked by a virus definitely didn’t feel like a good sign.
Could it be that this puppet’s level is too shocking, to the point that it automatically caused a backlash against skills like [Information Detection]?!
But before the sudden flash of surprise in her heart could even grow, and before she could react at all, the screen full of messy garbled text, flickering on and off like broken fragments, shook again. Strangely, some of the garbled parts slowly changed shape, turning into words that Violet could actually understand.
Was this… the result of [Information Detection]?
Even though this weird situation left her in an awkward position, an opportunity like this couldn’t be wasted. After just a short hesitation, the priestess instinctively started scanning through the information.
[Origin-type Machine 03]
[... supervision... breakthrough... command one... warning... error... error... request correction... detecting authority...]
But the lines were a mix of garbled text and real words, far too confusing. Even after forcing herself to read for a long while, Violet could only barely piece together a little bit of meaning.
She still didn’t understand what it really represented. Just as she was silently worrying about this “mystery text” in front of her, the strange puppet suddenly moved without any warning!
“ZZzz~!”
Its rough body suddenly burst out with dazzling light. Before Violet could even react, the wooden arm, so crude it didn’t even have fingers, had already stretched out and pressed itself against her palm!
“!?”
Violet’s heart jumped, and her first instinct was to pull away. But her divine calmness quickly suppressed the impulse. She faintly sensed that the puppet didn’t mean her harm. This action was probably triggered because she had accidentally activated some kind of special mechanism, and it might even be connected to that strange garbled information just now!
Sure enough, the moment the wooden arm touched her, a mysterious stream of information started flowing rapidly into her!
It wasn’t harmful at all. On the contrary, it felt like a special channel had been opened for her. In an instant, Violet felt her mind boiling over, as if it was being refined and transformed into something even more indescribable. Her vision spread endlessly, as though it was soaring high into the heavens!
It felt like the entire world, everything within the Origin Realm, was laid out completely before her eyes. The world itself became a massive, crystal-clear panoramic map. Violet stood above it all, able to see almost every detail in every corner. Each tree, each blade of grass, every small change.
The [World] seemed to have become her divine realm.
Everything was within her grasp!
All-knowing, all-seeing, almost [Omniscient].
But Violet was someone who had already seen great things, and she didn’t let herself sink too deep into this strange feeling of control. Almost immediately, she noticed something unusual on this “world map.”
The east, south, west, and north edges of the Origin Realm were all bordered by endless environments that couldn’t be explored further. The Endless Sea to the east, the abyss beyond the hundred thousand floating islands to the south, the infinite desert to the west, and the frozen tundra to the north. But these were simply the natural limits of the world’s borders.
In fact, the size of the Origin Realm wasn’t unmeasurable. The winged people that Sethlin asked had already collected information and drawn a precious world map, proving this clearly. The map the Goddess of Life had once gifted her wasn’t as vivid, but it was still extremely detailed and accurate. Since Violet had studied both maps often, she could instantly tell, what was now displayed before her through this shared information stream was not complete.
There were missing areas, patches covered in fog, or like holes forcibly cut out of the map, scattered all across the world. Most of these hidden areas were in the north, like zones blocked off from the network, completely invisible even to Violet with this new “authority.”
There were at least a dozen of these regions. Judging by their size, even the smallest was about as large as the entire capital city of Frederick. But the most shocking one…
It was at the farthest north.
A vast territory centered around the endless frozen tundra at the border, so massive it could rival more than half the total land of the Human United Kingdom. Even many of the inhabited regions of the northern countries were swallowed within its boundaries, making it stand out like a glaring wound on the map.
The mist here was not only the thickest, but also clearly one of the most important areas. Just by size alone, even if all the other scattered regions were added together, they still could not compare to this one.
What do these places… really mean?
As she felt all this new information appearing before her, the priestess couldn’t help but fall into deep confusion.
“Swoosh!”
Before she could think more, the scene in front of her changed again at incredible speed!
When she came back to her senses, Violet found herself standing in a boundless, silent, empty battlefield that felt like it was floating in the void.
Corpses covered the land, rivers of blood flowed, elements had collapsed. The bodies were of all kinds of races, most of which she had never even heard of. But some, when Violet saw them clearly, made her pupils shrink in shock!
And among the endless corpses, there were still powerful beings standing tall, facing against something in the distance. At the very front stood a girl in a gorgeous mage robe. Though her body was small and youthful, her eyes shone with a solemn power that did not match her delicate appearance. She was standing on the back of a majestic black dragon.
The black gem at the top of her long staff shone with a dazzling light. Violet immediately linked it to a certain artifact she had accidentally obtained in her bag. The terrifying magical power flowing around the girl was like a deep abyss, so strong that even Violet, usually calm, was secretly shocked.
Although she had never seen this extraordinary girl before, the features and the strange sense of familiarity made the answer clear enough.
“Demon God… Olivia?”
The priestess blurted out in surprise, but her voice didn’t seem to reach the girl or affect her at all. Clearly, this was just a memory, or maybe a recorded vision stored inside the puppet, that had been triggered for some unknown reason.
At least… that’s how it looked.
Violet already knew much about Demon God Olivia from her trip to the northern lands of the Human United Kingdom. Like most of the gods back then, Olivia had died in the great disaster of the gods a thousand years ago. True, she once appeared as an echo, possessing the young Wolf Novia during the chaos in the Ten Thousand Demons Mountains, even helping to resolve the crisis, but that did not mean she was still alive.
Since this recording came from a puppet tied closely to Primordial Light, it was definitely not something trivial. The replay was so vivid that Violet could clearly sense Olivia’s breath was unsteady. Blood stained her lips, her staff was broken, and even the black dragon under her dripped dark blood, these silent signs all pointed to the same fact.
She had just gone through a huge battle.
And she was injured.
Demon God Olivia was the highest-ranking deity of the neutral camp. Even in the Era of the Gods, she was a powerful being who had almost no rivals. For her to be pushed this far, the fight must have been something extreme.
Which meant… this must be the very battlefield of the [Divine Catastrophe], the disaster that caused the fall of the gods of the Origin Realm!
If so, then the true source of that god-killing disaster, the thing that was unspeakable, that even forced that sly fox Dawn to flee to the Ancient Spirit Realm, could it also be here?
She instinctively wanted to look around. But, unfortunately, because of the limits of the memory, her point of view could not move freely. She couldn’t even see whose memory this was. Still, from small details, she could guess that the recorder was floating high above, facing Olivia and the other gods directly. Most likely, this recorder was their enemy.
Could it be this puppet?
But as soon as the thought appeared, Violet immediately dismissed it. Impossible. Even if the puppet really took part in that ancient war, it could never have been the one to wipe out all the gods. This [Origin-type Machine] puppet was strong, yes, but only about the level of a Main God without a divine realm. Even with some strange abilities, it was not strong enough to fight against all the gods together.
But just then, the recorder seemed to notice something. The fixed point of view suddenly rose sharply upward, and at the far end of the void, a streak of silver-white light shot down!
That silver light pierced the void, split into three as it burned fiercely, and fell toward some faraway unknown emptiness. The sight clearly shocked the recorder greatly. The vision shook, as if the recorder wanted to act and stop it. But at that very moment, the gods, who had been holding back until now, suddenly attacked again!