1. The Undying One of Another World.
Momonga opened his eyes, alone.
The howling wind and the sound of waves grinding against stone battered his ears.
He had definitely been waiting for Yggdrasil's servers to shut down.
But when he opened his eyes, he was standing on a cliff.
And on top of that, he had transformed into the character he had played all this time.
Truly... how ironic.
*
Beautiful.
The impression he felt as he stood on the cliff and looked out over the world was simple, yet it carried countless meanings.
Unlike Earth, where greenery had vanished beneath environmental pollution, this world was flawlessly clear.
Was he still inside Yggdrasil?
The thought arose only because this purity was on an entirely different level from the ruined Earth he knew.
Yggdrasil, the virtual reality game that had reached its end, and the game that had allowed him to endure that cruel world.
When he looked at his hand, he saw nothing but bare bone, and he was draped in a jet-black robe accented with gold and purple.
When he scratched his cheek, the eerie sound of bone striking bone rang out. There was no doubt that he was Momonga, the avatar and character he himself had created.
Even so, it was all far too strange.
Yggdrasil had never been a game this vivid.
It was a marvel of technology, yes, but it was also an old game. Sensory synchronization had always remained below a certain threshold, and sound reproduction had its limits as well.
This world shattered all such common sense, overflowing with rich and varied sensations.
Could it be that they were testing Yggdrasil 2?
With that thought, countless possibilities flooded his mind.
If this was a game, could they really do something like this without even obtaining the player's consent? Was he some kind of lab rat for testing new technology? How large was the scope? Just him? Or a group?
No matter how ruthless a corporation might be, surely they would not commit such reckless cyber-kidnapping.
Had he been dragged into this? Or had it all been planned?
"…."
As he thought such things, it suddenly occurred to him that he was no different from his former self.
He had started gaming to avoid thinking about that wretched reality, and yet here he was again, doing the same thing. He reproached himself for it.
He forcibly cut off the runaway fantasies before they could spiral any further.
Lately, he had had many worries.
There was the fact that the guild they had all worked so hard to build had only one member left by the day the servers shut down, and even that person had left because of work, leaving him alone.
There was the fact that he had written into one of the guild's custom NPCs that she was in love with him.
There was the fact that, as a salaryman crushed under excessive work, he could count on one hand the number of times he had slept properly.
Those worries tormented his mind, and he no longer wanted to think about them.
Whether this was Yggdrasil 2 or a brain in a vat, none of it mattered.
He simply wanted to enjoy the beauty of the great natural world spread before his eyes.
Though his body was nothing but bone now, there were things one could feel precisely because there was no skin.
He savored with his very skeleton the leaves brushing against his feet in soft whispers, the lukewarm warmth of a sun that held both day and night's twilight, and the rough waves climbing up the cliff face.
Only now did he understand why Blue Planet, his former guildmate, had praised nature so fervently.
For merely gazing at the fading evening glow was enough to fill his heart this deeply.
He took a step forward.
Enchanted by a kind of nature he had never seen before, he kept moving onward.
One step, then another.
Like a child who had only just learned to walk, his pace gradually began to quicken.
The thick grass swaying like reeds in the wind tickled his bony toes.
He reached out his hand, trying to draw closer to the sunset glittering in the distance like a jewel.
This world was like a treasure chest.
He wanted it.
The thought flashed through his mind for an instant, but there was no companion in this world to help him claim it. His stark white finger bones, stripped of even a scrap of flesh, swept through empty air, and his body, robbed of its destination, fell from the cliff.
That was the long version. Put simply, he had been so captivated by nature that he fell into the sea.
It was the very first thing Momonga did upon arriving in another world.
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