City of Sin (Yanyu Jiangnan)

A New Race

As Richard sauntered into the forest, he found it completely different from the one he had first encountered while he was conquering this plane. The symbol of this world was glowing in the distance, now standing nearly a kilometre tall with golden light spilling out from its crown to chase away the cold and damp of the plane itself. The tree brought a fantastical warmth and color to the world, with flowers all over the forest floor and rabbits, hamsters, and reddish-brown deer bounding across everywhere. They were all docile creatures.

A few small shadows suddenly ran into his field of vision, children that were barely a metre tall. These night elves behaved nothing like drones, frolicking around and enjoying the merriment of childhood. They only discovered Richard when they nearly bumped into him, but they immediately squealed and looked at him vigilantly as they started to retreat. Their movements were slow, but at any moment they could erupt with strength and speed that far surpassed even most adult humans.

Richard squatted and smiled, extending a hand towards the children. In it was an orb of faint green light, spinning and jumping around as it pulsed with life and nature energy. This mix was a deadly temptation to any elven race, and the children’s gazes locked onto the orb while their faces wrinkled up, but surprisingly they didn’t just jump at it immediately. As a natural battle race, they showed significant self-control.

A soft breeze blew across the forest as a number of other shadows appeared amongst the trees, arrowtips glimmering with a faint blue radiance being pointed towards him. Richard was a little surprised to find his skin tingling in response; these sharp arrows could actually damage him. It was only to the point of leaving tiny scratches on his skin, but given his current power that was still a huge accomplishment for any saint.

A rather old night elf appeared on a tree about ten metres away and barked, “Who are you? What are you doing here? I’m warning you, don’t move!”

This time, Richard was actually shocked, “You don’t recognise me?”

“Answer me!” the archer pulled his bow harder. Richard frowned and looked for these elves in his soul network, but unlike the army from before he actually couldn’t even find them. This meant he had no control.

He stood up and dissipated the orb of nature, scanning the elves around him with interest, “I’m Richard Archeron, and I should be your… god.”

“Rubbish! Our God is Zealor!”

“Zealor?” he recalled the special unit that had taken levels away from the broodmother’s clone to create. The night elven archer had slowly lost all traces of Nyris as he matured, so it wasn’t even a consideration in his mind any longer. While he was impeccably precise and could blink around with ease, he hadn’t been all that impactful against the big-bodied demons so Richard had almost forgotten about him.

For these night elves to worship that drone… A lot of changes had obviously taken place during his struggles in the Darkness. So the night elves, the broodmother’s clone… Was it even the Golden World Tree that had gotten out of control?

He continued to smile, but his gaze turned cold. Even the main body would be nothing more than a thorn in his side, and this clone who didn’t enhance her personal strength at all was defenceless against him. Moonlight sensed his attention and keened softly, a chilly radiance streaking past its hilt.

The clone’s voice finally rang out in his mind, “Master, no! Everything you see is the work of the Golden World Tree and myself; if you have enough patience, I can explain!”

“Don’t you think you’re getting too slow with the greetings? I’ve been here for a while now,” he scoffed.

“I thought I could discuss the current situation with you once you’d seen it.”

“Seen that you’ve made your drones fully independent of me? You think that would give you the qualifications to discuss things with me?”

“I… did.”

Richard laughed, “And now?”

“Now, you’ve returned from the Darkness, and things naturally aren’t the same.”

“Alright, I’ll come over.”

The clone fell silent for another moment before sending an affirmative.

……

It wasn’t even a minute later when Richard stepped out of a portal and came before the broodmother’s vast body. At over ten kilometres long and a thousand metres tall, she was now effectively a moving hill. Everything within hundreds of kilometres of her had been turned into the larval forest, with countless workers bustling around and nearly a thousand night elves being deep asleep. He could see the crown of the Golden World Tree in the distance, illuminating her body with a faint layer of golden light.

His face softened as he saw her; he had been allowed to come here without any resistance, which meant at least that she had resigned herself to his judgement. Of course, it would have been useless to resist anyway— what was a cloned broodmother to someone who had overcome the reapers themselves— but it did show that she hadn’t become a complete enemy just yet.

“I’m waiting,” he said as he sat down on her carapace.

“Umm… Master, do you remember when we were first designing the night elves? You asked me for a number of things that I couldn’t do, but… as a being whose entire purpose is to create drones for others to use, I started dreaming about something. I wanted to become the creator for an entirely new race…”

Richard was rather surprised by her words, a smile crawling up his face. Just like the one in Faelor who’d dreamed of independence, this one had her own dream as well. Was that not true for all beings with souls? Still, he chuckled at the irony of a seed of destruction wanting to become a creator.

When he had fallen into the Darkness, his connections to everyone in Norland had naturally been cut off. The clone had only been a single overarching order, and she had a great degree of autonomy in how she accomplished it. That order had been to evolve the night elves into his main army, and the specifics of the design were up to him to decide. She had decided to use that autonomy to begin chasing after her dreams, but to become a creator she first needed her own soul.

Fortunately, this huge step was quite simple for one that had already broken free of her main body. Borrowing the help of the Golden World Tree that had grown up alongside her, she easily broke Richard’s control and obtained full autonomy. He would have been able to stop the entire process if he had been anywhere in the domain of order, but unable to feel his existence this was a risk she had been willing to take.

Following that, she had started on her grand path of creation. Still somewhat heeding his commands, she started with the night elves that were already approaching perfection. As a type of drone created with a near-epic Richard who controlled all the laws of the Forest Plane, their design made them even more powerful on average than most high elves.

The biggest obstacle on the way to creation was the difficulty of making souls, but with the evernight elves around as well as the Golden World Tree’s assistance, this wasn’t a difficult task to complete. The Golden World Tree was the mother tree of elvenkind, the origin of their faith and power that had the task of preserving their souls. High elves that reached a certain degree of power would place a portion of their souls within it, allowing a newborn to inherit this memory when they died. Such elves would be prodigies as they grew up, and this style of inheritance allowed them to amass a large number of epic beings during their peak. Even weakened, Lithgalen itself still had four epic beings of its own.

The combat prowess of someone birthed in such a way couldn’t compare to someone who had swam through oceans of blood— to the point that even someone like Greyhawk could match them while Richard shattered their myth entirely— but it did solve the most basic difficulty with creating a new race. The Golden World Tree could produce blank souls without a life imprint and insert them into the newborn night elves, filling the void in the entire project.