Chapter 32 – The Echoes of Power
Two years had passed in silence, but the world of Yggdrasil had never truly rested.
Even when I had turned my attention to other games — Dead Zone, Arena X — the digital cosmos of the World Tree continued to shift, evolve, and fracture in ways no developer could have completely foreseen.
It was still alive — in code, in chaos, and in the ambitions of the players who refused to fade.
And as I would soon learn, those two years had rewritten more history than any official update ever could.
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The news broke across every channel, forum, and black market data hub almost at once.
> [BREAKING EVENT: The Siege of Nazarick – Over 1,000 Players Launch Assault on Ainz Ooal Gown!]
Even the tone of the system announcement had felt disbelieving, as if Yggdrasil itself didn't quite know how to process it.
The legendary heteromorphic guild — Ainz Ooal Gown — had become a myth in its own right.
Formed by Touch Me and his allies, their fortress Great Tomb of Nazarick was known among elite players as one of the most impregnable structures in all of Yggdrasil.
Dozens of guilds had whispered about it, and just as many had speculated that it was a ghost story — a place too fortified to be real.
But curiosity was as dangerous as pride.
When the first raid group entered Nazarick, it began as a challenge — a playful rumor, a quest for glory.
By the time the last wave fell, it had turned into a massacre.
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The reports were dizzying.
Of the thousand attackers, barely a hundred escaped.
The rest were annihilated before they could even reach the core levels.
Every hallway had been a trap.
Every statue, a monster.
Every sound, a death sentence.
And at the center of it all, untouched and unbothered, the guild flag of Ainz Ooal Gown still fluttered — a silent mockery of everyone who thought they could claim it.
I wasn't part of the raid, of course.
But the irony was, I had played a quiet role in the storm that created it.
---
Weeks before the assault, I had leaked "partial" data about Nazarick's internal defenses — supposedly from old archives of Three Burning Eye.
It wasn't fake, but it wasn't complete either.
Just enough truth to make it believable.
Just enough error to doom anyone who took it at face value.
I had my reasons.
Touch Me and I hadn't spoken much since he formed Ainz Ooal Gown, but I hadn't forgotten what kind of man he was — fair, selfless, and reckless enough to fight an entire server to protect weaker players.
In a world where heteromorphic races were still treated like parasites, his guild had become the heart of their pride.
So I did what I always did best — manipulated information.
Not to destroy, but to protect.
By letting other guilds taste the edge of Nazarick's wrath, I gave them something they couldn't ignore:
fear.
And fear was a perfect deterrent.
After the Siege of Nazarick, attacks against heteromorphic players plummeted.
Even the most arrogant guilds stopped their "cleansing" raids.
For the first time in years, balance — or something resembling it — returned to Yggdrasil.
---
But peace never lasted long in this world.
Only a few months later, a new calamity appeared in the server logs — one that wasn't supposed to exist.
> [SYSTEM ALERT: World Enemy Manifested – Code Designation: E-404 "The Envious One"]
The name sent ripples through the community.
A player had become a World Enemy.
That was supposed to be impossible.
World Enemies were meant to be system events — boss entities controlled by developers or AI routines, not users.
And yet, the logs confirmed it: the one responsible was the former World Champion of Helheim.
He was famous for his ruthless precision — a player who specialized in necromantic curses and possession-type abilities.
But after his championship, he had vanished for months.
Rumor said he'd been experimenting with forbidden scripts — data mutations that mimicked divine mechanics.
When he reappeared, it wasn't as a player.
It was as Envy.
---
The chaos was immediate.
Every world, from Vanaheim to Muspelheim, trembled as the event began.
Even non-combat zones flickered, mana systems fluctuated, and data anomalies spread like plagues.
He wasn't killing players — he was consuming them.
Their avatars turned gray and shattered, fragments of their data feeding into his code, expanding him into a living corruption that the system could barely contain.
I watched it unfold through dozens of data feeds, unable to look away.
It was both horrifying and fascinating.
How had he done it?
What had triggered the transformation from player to world entity?
I wasn't the only one asking, but I was one of the few who could actually parse the logs.
---
The event lasted three days.
Three real-world days — the longest uncontrolled phenomenon in Yggdrasil's history.
Every major guild joined the counterstrike.
Even the administrators intervened directly, deploying system enforcers and emergency world modifiers to contain him.
By the end, the "Envious One" was defeated — not destroyed, but erased.
His account was locked permanently.
His name struck from the global leaderboard.
His character — a corrupted relic — sealed in the deepest code of Helheim's archives.
But even in deletion, he left behind something more dangerous than power.
He left behind a trail of data.
---
Months later, a new event was announced:
> [WORLD CHAMPION REPLACEMENT EVENT – REGION: HELHEIM]
It was the developers' way of restoring equilibrium — replacing the fallen champion with someone new.
But the twist came when the new victor appeared.
Her name was Elara_Zero — a figure draped in silver and shadow.
Her form was unmistakably feminine, her style elegant but cruelly efficient.
She was the first female-presenting World Champion in Yggdrasil's history.
And her final match?
A perfect, clinical victory that ended in less than two minutes.
Most saw her as just another prodigy.
But I saw the data behind her movements — the same patterns, the same residual energy compression that once belonged to Envy.
History, it seemed, had a habit of repeating itself.
Or maybe the system just loved irony.
---
When I began digging into the raw combat logs of the old "Envy Event," I finally understood how it was done.
The transformation wasn't random.
It wasn't even a bug.
It was a mechanism — hidden deep within Yggdrasil's world design.
A player could become a World Enemy.
But only under a specific sequence of conditions:
1. The player had to possess one of the Seven Sin-type World-Class Items.
2. They had to fulfill the "Sin Threshold" — a balance of system corruption, emotional resonance, and code instability tied to their gameplay behavior.
3. Finally, they had to willingly fuse their account's soul signature with the WCI's data core, effectively surrendering player status.
In return, the system recognized them not as a user, but as a phenomenon.
They ceased being players and became entities — avatars of the Seven Sins.
And the WCI that triggered it?
The Mirror of Envy.
It didn't just reflect the image of others.
It copied their essence — and in doing so, consumed the original.
A fitting end for the man who once sought to control death itself.
---
I archived the data, cataloging every byte of it inside Aeternum Sanctum's deepest vaults.
Not because I wanted to become something like him — but because knowledge was power.
And in Yggdrasil, information was the sharpest weapon of all.
> "Ren-sama," HIME said as I watched the flickering playback of the Envy Event. "Do you wish to simulate the process?"
I shook my head. "No. Not yet. But keep the sequence stored. It might be useful one day."
> "Understood," she said softly, her tone curious. "Do you intend to ascend, Ren-sama?"
"Ascend?" I smiled faintly. "No, HIME. I just intend to be ready."
Outside, the digital winds of Vanaheim whispered across the trees of our portable sanctum.
Somewhere far above, in the unseen layers of code, history was still being written — by players, by dreams, by envy and ambition alike.
And I couldn't help but wonder…
When the next sin awakens, whose reflection will the mirror show?
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End of Chapter 32 – The Echoes of Power