Eugeo pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe his face, which bore a dubious expression. Eventually he answered, “Well, I guess you could say it like that. But in the seven years since I got this Calling, I haven’t actually cut down a single tree.”
“What?”
“This enormous tree is called the Gigas Cedar in the sacred tongue. But most of the villagers just call it the devil tree.”
…Sacred tongue? Giga…Seeder?
A smile of a certain kind of understanding appeared on Eugeo’s face in response to my confusion. He pointed up at the branches far, far above.
“The reason they call it that is because the tree sucks up all of Terraria’s blessings from the land around it. That’s why only moss grows beneath the reach of its branches, and all the trees where its shadow falls do not grow very tall.”
I didn’t know what Terraria was, but the first impression I got when I saw the giant tree and its clearing was largely correct. I nodded, prompting him to continue.
“The villagers want to clear the forest and plant new fields. But as long as this tree stands, no good barley will grow. So we want to cut it down, but, as the name suggests, the demon tree’s trunk is wickedly tough. A single swing from a normal iron ax will chip the blade and ruin it. So they saved up a bunch of money to get this Dragonbone Ax carved from ancient dragon bone shipped from the center capital, and they designated a dedicated ‘carver’ to strike at the tree every day. That’s me,” he said without fanfare.
I looked back and forth between him and the cut, which was about a quarter of the way through the giant tree.
“So…you’ve been chopping away at this tree for seven whole years? And that’s all you’ve managed in that time?”
Now it was Eugeo’s turn to be stunned. He shook his head in disbelief. “Oh, hardly. If you could get this far in just seven years, I might feel a little better about it. I’m the seventh-generation carver. The carvers have come here to work every day for three hundred years, since the founding of Rulid. By the time I’m an old man and I have to hand the ax to the eighth carver, I might have gotten…”
He held his hands less than a foot apart. “This far.”
All I could do was let out a long, whistling breath.
In fantasy-themed MMOs, it was a given that production classes like craftsmen or miners were doomed to a whole lot of tedious repetition, but spending an entire lifetime to not even cut down a single tree was taking it to a new extreme. Human hands created this world, so someone must have placed this tree here for a reason, but I couldn’t begin to guess what it would be.
It still left a crawling sensation down my back.
Eugeo’s three-minute break ended, and he stood up again and reached for the ax. On impulse, I asked, “Hey, Eugeo…mind if I try that?”
“What?”
“I mean, you gave me half your lunch. Doesn’t it make sense for me to do half the work?”
Eugeo was stunned, as if no one had ever offered to help him at his work before in his life—which could very well be the case. Eventually, he offered a hesitant, “Well…there’s no rule that you can’t get someone’s help with your Calling…but you’d be surprised how hard it is. When I was just starting out, I could barely land a hit.”
“Never know until you try, right?”
I grinned, then thrust out my hand. Eugeo offered the handle of the Dragonbone Ax, looking reluctant. I grabbed it.
Despite being made of bone, the ax was tremendously heavy. I added a second hand to the grip and shook a bit as I tested my balance.
I’d never used an ax as my main weapon in either SAO or ALO, but I figured I would at least be good enough with it to hit a stationary target. I stood at the left end of the cut and tried to mimic Eugeo’s form, spreading my feet and lowering my hips.
Eugeo stood at a safe distance, watching me with equal parts consternation and entertainment. I lifted the ax up to my shoulder, gritted my teeth, summoned all the strength I had, and swung for the cut in the trunk of the “Giga Seeder.”
The ax head cracked on a spot about two inches away from the center of the slice. Orange sparks flew, and a terrific shock ran through my hands. I dropped the ax and cradled my numb wrists between my knees, groaning.
“Owww…”
Eugeo laughed heartily at the embarrassing spectacle I’d put on. I glared at him, and he waved in apology but continued laughing.
“…You don’t have to laugh that hard…”
“Ha-ha-ha…No, no, I’m sorry. You put way too much tension into your shoulders and hips, Kirito. You’ve got to relax your whole body…Hmm, how to explain it…”
He awkwardly pantomimed swinging an ax, and I belatedly recognized my mistake. It was unlikely that this world was simulating muscle tension based on strict physical laws. It was a realistic dream the STL created, so the most important factor had to be the strength of the imagination.
The feeling was coming back to my hands, so I picked up the ax lying at my feet.
“Just wait, I’ll hit it right on the mark this time…”
I held up the ax again, this time using as little muscle tension as possible. I envisioned all the movement of my body and slowly pulled back the tool. Imagining the motion of the Horizontal slashing sword skill I used so often in SAO, I shifted my weight forward, adding the energy to the rotation of my hips and shoulders down to the wrists and ax head, slamming it into the tree…
This time it missed the cut in the tree entirely and twanged off the tough bark. I didn’t get the same numbing jolt in my wrists, but I’d been so focused on my own movement that I neglected to aim properly. I figured that Eugeo would laugh again, but this time he offered honest feedback.
“Whoa…that was pretty good, Kirito. But your problem was that you were looking at the ax. You’ve got to keep your eyes focused right on the center of the cut. Try it again, while you’ve got the hang of it!”
“O-okay.”
My next attempt was also weak. But I kept trying, following Eugeo’s advice, and somewhere a few dozen swings later, the ax finally struck true, producing that clear ring and sending a tiny little shard of black flying.
At that point, I switched with Eugeo and watched him execute fifty perfect strikes. Then he handed it off, and I attempted another fifty wheezing swings.
After a number of turns back and forth, I realized the sun was going down, and there was an orange tint to the light trickling into the forest clearing. I took the last swig of water from the large waterskin, and Eugeo set down the ax.
“There…that makes a thousand.”
“We’ve already done that many?”
“Yep. I did five hundred; you did five hundred. My Calling is to strike the Gigas Cedar two thousand times a day, over the morning and afternoon.”
“Two thousand…”
I stared at the large crevice cut into the massive black tree. It didn’t look like any damage had been done to it at all since we’d started. What a thankless job.
Meanwhile, Eugeo said happily, “You’ve got talent for this, Kirito. There were two or three good hits in that last set of fifty. And it made my job a whole lot easier today.”
“I dunno…if you were doing it all yourself, you’d have been done sooner. I feel bad; I was hoping to help out, but I only held you back,” I apologized, but Eugeo just laughed it off.
“I told you, I can’t cut down this tree for as long as I live. And after all, it will regrow half of the depth that we carve out over the course of the night…Oh hey, I’ve got something to show you. You’re not really supposed to look at it, though.”
He approached the tree and held up his left hand, making the usual sign with his two fingers, then tapped the black bark.
I raced over to get a closer look, realizing that the tree itself must have a durability rating. The status—pardon me, Stacia Window—appeared with a chime, and we peered in at it.
“Ugh,” I groaned. The number on the window was vast: over 232,00
0.
“Hmm. That’s only about fifty lower than what it said when I checked last month,” Eugeo noted, similarly disappointed. “So you see, Kirito…I could swing this ax for an entire year, and it would only reduce the life of the Gigas Cedar by about six hundred. I’ll be lucky if the total is under 200,000 by the time I retire. Do you get it now? A little bit less progress over half a day doesn’t make the least bit of difference. This isn’t any ordinary tree; it’s the giant god of cedars.”
Suddenly, something clicked, and I understood the source of the name. It was a mix of Latin and English. The split wasn’t after Giga, it was Gigas—there were two S sounds in a row. Gigas Cedar, the giant cedar.
Meaning that this boy spoke Japanese as his mother language, while English and other languages were treated as the “sacred tongue,” like spells. If that was the case, he probably didn’t even recognize that he was speaking Japanese. It was Underworldian. Or…Norlangarthian? But wait, when he talked about the bread, he had used the word pan, the Japanese word for it. But pan didn’t originate from English…Wasn’t it from Portuguese? Spanish?
My mind tumbled through a cavalcade of distractions, while Eugeo tidied up the things he’d brought.
“Thanks for waiting, Kirito. Let’s go to the village.”
As we walked to his village, Dragonbone Ax slung over his shoulder and empty waterskin hanging from his hand, Eugeo cheerfully told me about a variety of topics. His predecessor was an old man named Garitta, who was apparently quite a master woodcutter. The other children his age thought Eugeo’s Calling was an easy one, an opinion he resented. I muttered and grunted to show that I was listening throughout his stories, but my mind was racing as it considered just one topic.
For what purpose was this world envisioned and put into practical use?
They didn’t need to test the pneumonic visual system the STL used. It was already perfectly functional. I’d already experienced—to an unpleasant degree—just how indistinguishable from real life this world was.
And yet, the world had been internally simulated for at least three hundred years, and terrifyingly enough, extrapolating from the Gigas Cedar’s durability and Eugeo’s workflow, it was slated to continue running for at least a thousand more.
I didn’t know what the upper limit of the fluctlight acceleration factor was, but a person who dove into this place with their memories blocked was at risk of spending an entire lifetime in the machine. True, there was no danger to the physical body, and if the memories were all blocked at the end of the dive, it would all be nothing but a “very long dream” to the user—but what happened to the soul, the fluctlight that experienced that dream? Was there a lifespan to the photon field that made up the human consciousness?
Clearly, what they were doing with this world was impractical, implausible, impossible.
Did that mean there was a goal worth so much risk? Like Sinon had said at Dicey Café, it couldn’t be something the AmuSphere could already do, like making a realistic virtual world. Something created through a nearly infinite passage of time in a virtual world that was indistinguishable from reality…
I looked up and took stock of my surroundings. The forest was trailing off just ahead, replaced by a larger amount of orange sunlight. At the side of the trail close to the exit was a single building that looked like a storage shed. Eugeo walked over to it and pulled open the door. Over his back, I could see a number of normal metal axes, a smaller hatchet, various tools like ropes and buckets, and narrow leather packages with unknown contents, crammed messily into the shed.
Eugeo stood the Dragonbone Ax against the wall among them and shut the door. He immediately started back for the trail, so I hastily asked him, “Uh, shouldn’t you lock it or something? That’s a really important ax, right?”
He looked surprised. “Lock? Why?”
“Er, because…it might get stolen…”
Once I said my fear aloud, I realized where I went wrong. There were no thieves. No doubt in that Taboo Index there was an entry that said, “Thou shalt not steal,” or something along those lines.
Sure enough, Eugeo gave me the exact answer I had just been anticipating.
“That would never happen. I’m the only one who’s allowed to open this shed.”
I figured as much. Then another question occurred to me. “But…didn’t you say there were guards in the village, Eugeo? Why would that be a profession if there are no thieves or bandits?”
“Isn’t that obvious? To protect the village from the forces of darkness.”
“Forces of…darkness…”
“Look, you can see up there.”
He held up his hand to point just as we crossed the last line of trees.
There was a full field of barley wheat ahead. The heads, still young and green and not yet expanding, swayed in the breeze. They caught the full light of the waning sun like a sea of grass. The path continued on through the field, winding toward a hill in the far distance. Atop the tree-dotted hill, as small as specks of sand to the eye, was a number of buildings and one taller tower among them. That had to be the village of Rulid, Eugeo’s home.
But what Eugeo pointed at was far beyond the village—a range of pure-white mountains faded with distance. The line of peaks continued as far as the eye could see to the left and right, like the sharp teeth of a saw.
“Those are the End Mountains. On the other side is the land of darkness, beyond Solus’s light. Black clouds cover the sky, even in the daytime, and the light of the heavens was red like blood. The ground and trees were all as black as coal…”
Eugeo’s voice trembled as he recalled his experiences from the distant past.
“There are accursed humanoids in the land of darkness like goblins and orcs, and even more terrifying monsters…Not to mention knights of darkness who ride black dragons. Naturally, the Integrity Knights protect the mountain range, but every once in a while, some of them sneak in through the caves, from what I understand. I’ve never seen it happen myself. Plus, according to the Axiom Church, every thousand years, when the light of Solus weakens, the knights of darkness cross the mountains with a horde of enemies to attack. When that happens, the Integrity Knights will lead the village men-at-arms, the sentinels from larger towns, and even the imperial army in the fight against the monsters.”
Eugeo paused, looked at me skeptically, and said, “Even the youngest children in the village know this story. Did you even forget that when you lost your memory?”
“Uh…y-yeah. It sounds familiar to me…but some of the details are different,” I said, thinking quickly. Eugeo beamed in a way that made me wonder if he even understood the concept of doubt at all.
“Oh, I see…Maybe you really did come from one of the three other empires, outside of Norlangarth.”
“M-maybe I did,” I agreed, and pointed toward the approaching hill to steer the conversation away from this dangerous topic. “That must be Rulid. Which one’s your house, Eugeo?”
“The thing in front is the south gate, and my house is near the west gate, so you can’t see it from here.”
“Ahh. And the building with the tower? Is that the church with Sister…Azalia?”
“That’s right.”
I squinted and made out a symbol at the tip of the narrow tower, a combination of cross and circle.
“It’s actually…fancier than I expected. Are they really going to let someone like me stay there?”
“Of course. Sister Azalia is a very nice person.”
I wasn’t entirely convinced, but if Azalia was as much a personification of selfless virtue as Eugeo, then I could probably manage safely as long as I kept the conversation on sensible ground. Then again, I was totally in the dark when it came to knowing what passed for “common sense” here.
Ideally, Sister Azalia would be one of Rath’s stationed observers. But I doubted that any staff members charged with monitoring the state of their world would take on a vital role like the village elder or nun. It was more
likely they’d take the role of a simple villager, which meant I had to find them. And that was assuming they had an observer in this tiny village at all.
I followed Eugeo across a mossy stone bridge spanning a narrow waterway and set foot into the village of Rulid.
3
“Here you go, a pillow and blankets. There are more in the wardrobe in the back if you’re cold. Morning prayer is at six, and breakfast is at seven. I’ll come to check on you, but please do wake up on your own. There’s a curfew once lights are out, so be mindful of that.”
I accepted both the onslaught of words and the heavy pile of wool blankets with outstretched arms.
A girl of about twelve years was standing before me as I sat on the bed. She wore a black habit with a white collar, and her light brown hair hung long down her back. Her big, busy eyes held none of the downcast obedience she’d displayed in the presence of the sister.
Her name was Selka, and she was a sister-in-training, studying sacred arts at the church. She was also charged with watching over the other boys and girls living at the church, which was probably why she bossed me around like a big sister or mother, despite being several years my junior. It was hard to keep the grin off my face.
“Umm, is there anything else you need to know?”
“No, I think I’ve got it. Thanks for all the help,” I said. For a brief moment, Selka’s expression softened, and then it was back to fussy business as usual.
“Good night, then. Do you know how to put out the lamp?”
“…Yeah. Good night, Selka.”
She nodded briskly and spun to leave the room, the hem of her slightly-too-large habit swaying. Once her quiet footsteps trailed away, I let out a long sigh.
They had put me in a little-used room on the second floor of the church. The room was about a hundred square feet, with a cast-iron bed, matching desk and chair, a small bookshelf, and a wardrobe next to it. I moved the blankets and pillow off my knees and onto the bed, then put my hands behind my head and rolled back onto the sheets. The flame in the lamp overhead briefly sizzled.
“What the hell…”
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