Chapter 102: Entering the Origin Tomb, Tension-fille Encounter
Twenty-four hours passed in a blur of last meals and last checks, and the spacecraft lifted off exactly on schedule, carrying Epic-rank Hunters and Legendary-rank Hunters and Divine-rank powerhouses alike toward a destination none of them had seen with their own eyes yet.
The Origin Tomb resolved out of the dark hours later, and Aidan understood immediately why people started wars over the right to enter it.
It hung suspended in open space with nothing around it for light years in any direction, a door. Not a building, not a ruin, just a single vast archway of dark, ancient stone standing alone against the void.
Its surface was carved with faces and skylines and battle scenes worn smooth by an age nobody living could measure. Layered light pulsed behind the archway’s empty center, dimensional pressure rolling off it in slow, visible waves.
The gathered crowd fell quiet as the ships settled into formation before it, humans and beastfolk shoulder to shoulder with the sharp-eared elves of a dozen clans and the broad, stone-set dwarves who’d traveled in from their own deep-world holds. Majority human, but far from only human.
The Throne Bearer’s voice carried across every ship at once.
"No flight beyond thirty meters inside the Tomb. The space in there doesn’t tolerate it well, and neither will you if you push it." He let that settle. "Form groups. Split up once you’re through. Camp near any exit node you find, they’re the only safe way out, and the only way home."
He paused.
"One more thing. Origin Tombs open into multiple small realms at once. You may encounter people who don’t answer to this Alliance at all. Be careful who you trust in there."
Then, quieter, layered into a channel only a handful of minds in the fleet could hear at all, a different voice arrived.
[Player Aidan, Origin Tombs are not ruins. They are constructs, shaped by the will of the Nine Realms Tree itself from the people and empires lost to this war.]
[They exist between the small realms and the great ones, foolproof against Terror invasion by design, built for exactly one purpose. To give the strong a place to become stronger.]
Aidan let that settle somewhere quiet in his chest.
’Built from the dead, to arm the living.’ He watched the archway grow larger through the viewport. ’The Tree doesn’t waste anything, does it.’
[We can’t afford.]
’I guess you also give information to other players and aid them like you do to me, right?’
[Yes. But we don’t aid the players to hunt each other. However...]
’Huh? However what?’
’Tsk, gone mute, huh.’
...
The passage through the archway felt like walking through a held breath, pressure and silence and then, all at once, ground under his boots again.
Aidan’s group had already found each other by the time the disorientation cleared, Ordun and Kyrsa and Veshan and Sella falling in without needing to be asked, Beatrix and Solenne flanking him on either side, Isolde a step behind with one hand still resting on her new gold plate like she wasn’t quite convinced it would hold.
A new presence approached before they’d taken three steps, tall and quiet, silver hair bound back from a face carved in the particular ageless calm of a very old elf.
"Elowen Vashti." She inclined her head, Divine-rank power settling around her like something worn rather than worked for. "Warden of the Verdant Clans. Mind if I walk with your group? I’d rather not enter alone, and yours looks capable."
"The more the merrier." Aidan grinned. "Welcome aboard."
Elowen smiled and fell into step beside Isolde without further ceremony.
...
The Tomb unfolded around them in every direction at once, a landscape that had clearly once been something and had since become something else entirely.
Broken towers leaned against each other in the middle distance, their upper floors overgrown with vines that pulsed faint gold along every leaf.
Fallen statues the size of buildings lay half-buried in drifting silver sand, faces worn past recognition. Far overhead, fragments of what might once have been a sky hung frozen mid-collapse, held there by something patient and old.
"Whatever civilization this was," Solenne said quietly, "it went out enormous."
"They all do," Elowen murmured. "That’s rather the point."
The group moved through the ruins in loose formation, Ordun and Veshan scouting the flanks while Kyrsa and Sella watched the rear. For a long while nothing broke the quiet except the crunch of silver sand and the distant, directionless hum that seemed to come from the Tomb itself.
Then Tom went very still on Aidan’s shoulder.
[Tom: Hold on. There’s a thread.]
"A thread," Aidan repeated.
[Tom: A fortunate one. Faint, but real. It’s coming from... that direction. That cupboard, specifically.]
Aidan followed the line of Tom’s attention to a half-collapsed room off the main ruin. Inside it, improbably intact amid centuries of collapse, stood a single wooden cupboard, plain and unassuming and entirely out of place.
"That cupboard," Aidan said. "Let’s go there."
[Tom: I don’t make the rules of fortune. I just see the threads.]
The group crossed to it without much debate, and Aidan pulled the door open.
It wasn’t a cupboard at all. Light spilled out where shelves should have been, warm and golden, and beyond the frame lay somewhere that had nothing to do with the ruined ground they stood on.
"Well." Aidan glanced back at the others. "Guess I’ll go first."
He stepped through, and the world changed entirely.
...
They stood in a garden that shouldn’t have existed anywhere, let alone inside a ruin, rows upon rows of plants glowing softly under a sky that held no sun at all, light coming instead from the blossoms themselves.
Flowers the size of shields turned slowly to track the group’s movement, petals shifting through colors that had no names. A tree at the garden’s center bore fruit that pulsed with visible Legendary-rank density. Past it, half-hidden in silver mist, a single flower burned with something heavier and older, unmistakably Divine.
"I don’t even want to know what half of this does," Isolde breathed, "and I want to eat all of it anyway."
"Legendary and Divine-rank flora," Elowen said. She crouched beside a cluster of glowing roots and touched one leaf with two fingers, careful as if it might bruise. "I’ve read about places like this. Never seen one."
Aidan crouched beside the nearest bloom, already cataloguing which of it he wanted to bring home for Jiran, when the air on the far side of the garden split open with a sound like tearing silk.
A second door lit into existence, gold-edged and unfamiliar, and figures began stepping through it before the light had finished settling.
Six Divine-rank powerhouses emerged first, unfamiliar crests, unfamiliar armor, none of it matching anything Aidan had seen across the entire Cloud Whirl Alliance. Five Legendary-rank Hunters followed behind them, a mixed handful of species Aidan didn’t immediately recognize either, weapons already loosening in their grips.
The garden’s soft, golden quiet went taut in an instant.
Ordun’s hand drifted to his spear without seeming to move at all. Elowen straightened fully, Divine-rank pressure gathering low and ready around her. Across the garden, the newcomers’ front line had gone equally still, sizing up the strangers who’d just wandered into what they’d clearly expected to find empty.
Nobody spoke.
Nobody moved.