Chapter 218: The Prophet and the Collapse
In the pure white Chamber of Remembrance, time seemed to have lost all meaning.
Serandil’s account of the origin of the Philosopher’s Stone and the elegy of elven civilization kept echoing through Ryan’s mind.
The glory of Avalon. The absolute despair brought by the Dragon Race. The dangerous branch of Magic and technology they had kindled in their struggle to survive. And the contamination that followed, spreading through the world like rot.
It was all too vast, too heavy. So heavy that, for a moment, Ryan forgot to question his own circumstances. All that remained was shock, and a complex, inexpressible sympathy for the lonely elf who had stood watch here for ten thousand years.
The final gravekeeper of a civilization.
The keeper of knowledge meant to resist the void and the contamination.
A tragic hero who had struggled for survival in the depths of despair.
All of those titles layered themselves over Serandil, turning that image of silver hair, golden eyes, and weary compassion into something both tragic and sublime.
And beyond that, there were the Dragon Race, the Philosopher’s Stone, and the contamination.
Each term was like a stone monument crashing into the foundation of understanding Ryan had built as a player. That foundation groaned. It cracked.
No. None of this was right.
The Dragon Race he knew had wings that blotted out the sky, breath that burned cities and split mountains, bodies vast as mountain ranges, and scales with immense magical resistance, though never complete immunity.
They were the tyrants of the heavens, the embodiment of raw might, legendary creatures that could only be hunted down by armies gathered at terrible cost, armed with dragon-slaying weapons.
They were powerful. They were terrifying. But they still existed within the rules of the world.
They were not these silent, drifting things in Serandil’s visions, devouring Mana and life itself like walking voids.
As for the decline of the Elf Race, the clues Ryan knew had always been buried in the dust of history and the shadow of the Demon Race.
In the fragments of Iruya’s storyline, the Elven Legacy had been stolen and hidden away by the Demon Race. The surviving elves had retreated into the last forest, and only by cooperating with the protagonist’s party had they managed to reclaim a fraction of their inheritance and secure even a sliver of standing in the human world.
Their hatred had always pointed toward the Demon Race, not the Dragon Race.
It had never been this—a civilization erased by what amounted to a passing natural disaster, a helpless extinction on a scale beyond resistance.
Two sets of memories, two sets of lore, slammed against each other in Ryan’s mind.
One came from the game he had completed multiple times.
The other came from the sorrowful and authoritative remnant soul of the elf standing before him.
They denied each other. They could not coexist.
An illusion?
That was Ryan’s first thought.
Had he already fallen under its influence while passing through the spider’s lair? Was he now trapped inside some carefully woven nightmare?
But the moment the thought appeared, he crushed it.
A person could not dream of colors utterly unknown to them. They could not imagine details wholly outside the limits of their own understanding.
The impossible beauty and harmony of the elven civilization in those visions, the Dragon Race’s power to negate Magic in defiance of all common sense, even the sorrow and regret in every syllable Serandil spoke—so profound that it made the soul itself tremble—none of it belonged within Ryan’s existing frame of reference.
If this was an illusion, then the one who had woven it possessed insight and power that bordered on the divine.
More importantly—
Ryan tilted his half-transparent body slightly and looked at the little green light resting on his shoulder.
Syl, the remnant soul of Azure Tempest, the contracted Sacred Beast bound directly to his own soul.
From the moment they entered this place, Syl’s reactions had been utterly genuine.
His initial wariness.
His confused search through memory when he heard Serandil’s name.
The sorrow and homesickness born of bloodline memory when he saw the vision of elven civilization.
The fear that had surfaced from the depths of ancient instinct when he heard the story of the Dragon Race.
And finally, the sense of closeness and recognition he had shown toward the ancient, pure elven aura around Serandil.
The fluctuations passing through their soul contract could not be false. Syl’s reactions were the most reliable point of reference Ryan had in this moment.
If Serandil were false—if he were a malicious disguise, or part of the illusion itself—Syl could not possibly have responded this way.
A Sacred Beast’s perception of its own kind, especially its instinctive sense for distortion and malice, was sharper than any human’s by countless orders of magnitude.
Syl’s recognition might have been incomplete. It might have been vague.
But its direction was unmistakable.
He believed Serandil was real. He believed he was an ancient and noble Great Sage of the Elf Race.
Then perhaps... the game had been wrong.
Or perhaps what the game had shown was only the fragmented truth that remained after ten thousand years of war, collapse, and the severing of civilizations—after the real horror had been twisted, buried, and worn down until only a pitiful, broken remnant survived.
Ten thousand years were enough to turn mountains into plains, oceans into deserts, brilliant civilizations into myths. Enough to erase true horrors from history, simplify them, distort them, until at last they became little more than warped monsters in children’s stories.
The name Dragon Race might have survived, but perhaps what later generations called dragons were only some weak subspecies with a trace of dragon blood left in them—or perhaps entirely different creatures that had simply been mistaken for them.
And the true enemy that had brought extinction may have been deliberately erased from history altogether, leaving behind the Demon Race as a scapegoat more convenient for later generations to understand.
The truth of the Elf Race’s destruction may have been buried beneath something more complex—politics, war, compromise, and the exchange of interests.
The surviving elves themselves might no longer have known what kind of despair their ancestors had truly faced.
The thought sent a chill down Ryan’s spine.
And yet, in the cracks of logic, it carried a terrible, unnatural plausibility.
Ryan felt cold.
Not the cold of bodily exhaustion, but the cold that came when the prophet he had always relied on—his knowledge of the story ahead—began to waver beneath the flood of actual truth.
The advantage he had always possessed, his familiarity with the plot’s direction, now seemed thin and fragile before this history.
Worse, it might have been built on error from the very beginning, a palace founded on a dune of sand.
He lifted a hand and looked at the outline of his own translucent consciousness.
The identity of a transmigrator, the memory of a player—at this moment, instead of helping him, they had become barriers to understanding, things he would have to reexamine, perhaps even strip away entirely.
Bathed in the pure white glow, Serandil’s silver-haired, golden-eyed figure seemed at once more aloof and more transparent.
The wall of Ryan’s suspicion had been riddled with holes by the shock of what he had seen and the reasoning that followed.
When the game’s lore and the reality before him stood in irreconcilable conflict, and when Syl—the only true companion he could completely trust—had confirmed the other man’s identity through their soul contract, Ryan’s choice had, in truth, already tilted.
He needed to recalibrate his understanding of this world.
And the fading watcher before him might well be the only key to the truth buried beneath it all.
Even if that key itself remained wrapped in fog.
Ryan lifted his eyes and met Serandil’s deep golden gaze once more.
Serandil was silent for a moment. Even the light of the Chamber of Remembrance seemed to dim with him.
“The Philosopher’s Stone project brought hope,” he said at last, “but it also brought division, suspicion, and... losses that could never be undone. I was one of those who pushed the project forward. Many of the decisions I made... perhaps there might have been better choices. I remain here as a watcher not only to monitor the contamination outside, to keep it from losing control and spreading into the world of later ages, but also as a form of... self-exile and reflection.”
That admission did not weaken his image in the slightest.
On the contrary, it made him feel even more real, more human in the deepest sense—a sage who had made terrible choices at the brink of civilizational extinction, and who had borne the crushing burden of those choices ever since.
That was far easier to trust than a flawless saint.
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