"…"
Damien was speechless. The events he had witnessed were simply too shocking.
The war was already enough information to overload his brain, especially after spending 10 years in the body of a person who was fighting in it.
'But to think that the Primordial Undying Tree was actually an elf at one point.'
It was a riveting story that ended in a noble sacrifice. It was a war from 100,000 years ago that was left out of history.
'I thought the threat that the Nox pose now was already immense, but who would've thought that it was so much worse in the past…?'
He couldn't even imagine it. If the forces that the Nox possessed 100,000 years ago descended on the current universe…
It was guaranteed annihilation.
After the scene in which the elf senior sealed the Nox Demigod, the playback didn't end. Damien was shown what the elf senior saw through his awareness afterwards.
With the awareness of a Demigod, it wasn't hard to see the results of the battle that had been taking place when he died. In the end, the alliance's Demigod never appeared, but it wasn't their loss either.
Because the Nox race's Demigod never returned to the battlefield, their morale began to drop, which allowed the alliance to pull ahead.
The battle ended in their victory even though they had sustained many losses. It served as a turning point in the war, one which brought hope to the despairing alliance.
Unfortunately, when the alliance heads tried to find traces of the elf warrior, they were unable to find anything. His body had been absorbed into the great tree, and the traces of battle between him and the Nox Demigod were only present hundreds of kilometers away.
'How…how did that war end?' Damien wondered. Although the result was obvious since the universe was still not within the Nox's control, he wanted to know it in more detail.
More specifically, he wanted to know why records of that war had been lost to time.
100,000 years was a vast amount of time that he couldn't understand at all, but with the methods of people at the power levels of the alliance heads, and even the Demigods on the alliance side, storing records that could withstand the tests of time was extremely plausible.
But in the end, there was nobody who could answer his question. Even the elf senior had been stuck on the Cloud Plane, unable to see what happened outside of its vicinity.
'Senior…your name. What's your name?'
Damien couldn't help but ask. From the very depths of his being, he could feel a bubbling respect for the man.
The man who had sacrificed himself for his noble cause, and had even kept fighting after his death.
[The Primordial Undying Tree sighs. It says that after so many years, its name has been long forgotten.]
'Whether or not it is forgotten doesn't matter. As long as I'm alive, I will carry your legacy with me. I will make sure you are not forgotten by history as you are now. This much I can promise you.'
[…]
[Alaric. Alaric Alfheim was my name.]
Damien's eyes widened. It wasn't a message delivered by a system window that he saw. It was the voice of the man whose story he had just witnessed.
The Primordial Undying Tree, no, Alaric Alfheim had just spoken to him for the first time.
'Senior, rest assured I will remember it well.'
[…]
Alaric didn't respond. Even as they spoke the memories he was showing Damien didn't end.
When Alaric merged with the great tree, it wasn't the Primordial Undying Tree yet. Hell, it wasn't even a World Tree.
It was simply a great tree of immense size and enormous vitality that had managed to reach the Demigod realm over time.
But that enormous vitality obviously wasn't normal. It was the characteristic that allowed the great tree to become something even greater. And with Alaric's consciousness guiding its evolution, the process was greatly sped up.
10,000 years after he became the great tree, it had spread its wings even further and become a World Tree.
The enormous vitality leaking from it brought prosperity to the land, reviving the desolate atmosphere left by the battle that had taken place there many millennia ago.
Within another 5,000 years, mountains rose and rovers split. The groundwork of the 3000 Beast Mountain Range was formed.
And due to the heavenly conditions of the area, many beasts gravitated towards it.
Finally, an entire 20,000 years after the battle with the Nox Demigod, the World Tree evolved further and became the Primordial Undying Tree that was known today.
He created a subtree within the secret realm he had formed to seal the Nox Demigod, and he used this subtree as a hope to nurture future generations.
It was how the first Primordial Undying Realm opened.
Alaric used his vast consciousness to open the entrance on a different world every time. As long as the world was relatively close by, such a feat was within his means.
But it wasn't easy. Due to the effort he had to put in, the secret realm could only be opened every 10,000 years.
The problem was, he wasn't the only one inhabiting the secret realm. Every time the realm opened, the Nox Demigod would use the geniuses who entered as chess pieces to fight him.
In the end, many races were forcefully or willingly corrupted by him, becoming the ones that were known today.
Damien watched it all happen. Although the memories were played speedily and with gaps so that his mind could handle the stress of such a vast time period, he could still feel the essence of 90,000 years that had passed.
It was only 90,000 because not long before the 8th opening of the Primordial Undying Realm, something interesting happened.
The war with the Nox began anew. Worlds were ravaged and countless corpses littered the universe. In this hectic atmosphere, a certain group of elves fled from their world.
'This is…the memory I saw last time when I absorbed the lotus in my spiritual world.' Damien realized.
Of course the faces of those people would be blurred. He realized now that the reason wasn't that something was being hidden from him, it was just that because it was being watched from such a vast distance, those faces weren't clear to Alaric in the first place.
But he knew that they were elves. And he could clearly feel the connection he had with them even though his body had been discarded for a new one.
The scene of those elves being chased into the starry sky played out in front of Damien again, but this time, he was able to see how it ended.
In that moment, right before their inevitable deaths before they could reach the Cloud Plane, a massive portal appeared and sucked them in.
When they reappeared, they were already in the 3000 Beast Mountain Range.
Those elves, seeing that a World Tree had saved them, began worshipping Alaric and decided to set up their home at the base of his trunk.
And they named it Taesi, so that they would never forget their origins.
Taesi, meaning defector in the language of the elves.
