The intact and orderly World that Bella knew was only the reflection. What lay beneath was something far harsher.
"No wonder so many things felt wrong. My telescope cannot directly observe objects light-years away, and my ships cannot just fly to other planets. At first, I thought something strange was blocking me."
"Now that I think about it, those things were probably just textures, except for Sun."
Bella complained while recalling her failed interstellar exploration plans. Every step had been correct, yet the result was always wrong, and that feeling was maddening. In the end, she could only stay on The Continent and struggle there.
Realizing you might still be inside the atmosphere after flying for ages was absurd. If she could step into Space, she would have already taken out her weapon and slapped some sense into anyone causing trouble on the surface. The map was simply too small, and this shelter built by a few gods and one God of Light could only maintain a basic form.
"Ham, when you say you manage the System itself, do you mean Bahamut? Fate?"
Bella asked again, since the Fate described by Ham sounded more like a necessary conclusion based on total information and massive calculation. If that counted as Fate, then with enough Computational Power and data, Bella felt she could imitate it herself. On the scale of a shelter like World, however, it made more sense.
"Yes, that is right. Even if we restored the basic appearance of the old World, management was still necessary. Order is not something you can easily create, and doing it by hand would have exhausted us long ago."
"So we needed an operating mechanism that could oversee everything, grasp all basic information within World, and adjust things at any time. That mechanism is me."
"So you are basically a giant version of me. When I first heard your title, I thought you could do things like billion-fold nuclear explosions or final annihilation."
Bella delivered her blunt comment without mercy. Ham instinctively opened her mouth to argue, then realized that it was actually accurate. If she really could do those things, she would not be in this state.
Instead, she was the one carrying the mountain of rubies, with a cow beneath an angel, and a giant fish supporting the land below that. She was an original Dragon, but only in name. Beneath her was nothing but endless darkness.
"Then what about the Elves? And that legendary World Tree from ancient stories? The materials I translated there made it sound like another shelter, with many different races."
Bella raised another question. If World was built by gods who survived the ancient war, then what were those places meant to be? And why did humans have so many branches?
Some races barely looked human, yet they had no reproductive barrier with humans at all. It was absurd.
"Oh, that is easy to explain. World Tree was essentially an ecological modification System we built so that the newly created World would at least be livable."
"Elven Homeland was basically a giant culture dish and seed bank, meant to preserve rare life samples. Once World was mostly stabilized, we threw World Tree back in."
"When World was first built, its environment was no different from the Abyssal Void outside. Just cleaning it up took many years, and World Tree itself was a creation of the Crimson God, so using it carried risks."
"Then why did you create the Dragonkin?"
Bella continued, because if other plants were just part of a normal ecological System, then creating a race like the Dragonkin was strange. They lived extremely long lives, were individually powerful, yet had very low fertility.
Many of them were also confined to Dragon Valley. On The Continent, Great Dragon were incredibly rare, and even that was only because Edward had half-destroyed Dragon Valley thousands of years ago. Otherwise, most Dragon might never have left that place.
"Because only Dragon, created using me as a genetic template, had the ability to survive at the very beginning of creation. You understand, right? There was no Sun, no water, no soil, and no other plants or animals. Everything that existed was just Dragon."
"That is why the authority of Fate is dangerous even to our own people. Fundamentally, all life on The Continent, including humans, evolved from Dragon over countless generations."
"So now you know why I have always tried so hard to smash that damned Shard of Fate. I myself am a massive hazard."
"Oh, I see."
World-shaking secrets that would shatter most people's understanding were casually spilled out like village gossip after a meal. Ham was willing to speak so freely because hiding it served no purpose, and knowing it would not really change anything. Besides, Bella already thought very differently from ordinary people.
Of course, many complications were skipped, such as indirect influences and information hazards that could take advantage of a weak moment. Under normal circumstances, these things would need to stay hidden. But with the Crimson God almost completely wiped out by Belial, it no longer seemed dangerous.
So Ham spoke without restraint, feeling relieved after holding it in for so many years. Bella simply sighed and acknowledged it, since hearing about it did not give her any real sense of reality. She had not lived through that era, or had long since forgotten it.
From the moment she woke up, she had been dragged along nonstop, never touching solid ground. To her, it was just a story, and knowing it would not change what she did. Worrying about it was pointless compared to going to the dock for some fries.
"So does that mean we can ignore the Dark Power consciousness for now? If it shows up again, we just chase it off, right?"
Bella began using Proficient to leave the observation cabin and head toward the battlefield to collect scraps and recover the latest data on Belial. Ham lowered her head, supporting her chin, then slowly shook it.
"Not necessarily. Its control over Dark Power is beyond what you or I imagine. Even with so much light inside World, darkness still exists."
"This thing is essentially part of the soul. It cannot be removed, and since it exists, it can interfere. The only difference is how much force it can apply."
"…Especially that damned Elfido, who still has not fully appeared. I really want to deal with him."
"Ah!"
"Ah!"
The scream coming through the communicator made Ham scream as well. She rushed over at once, only to see the floor ripple like water as Bella resurfaced from it, her face full of confusion.
She was gasping for air, and even though she did not understand what had happened at the White Tier level, she had almost thought she was about to be gone. It felt as if she had nearly ceased to exist.
"What happened? Are you okay?"
"I just now… it felt like I touched something? Then it was gone. All the Nanometal that make up my body were gone."
As she spoke, terror still lingered in Bella's eyes. The fear of complete erasure, worse than death itself, struck her in an instant. The intensity of that fear was overwhelming.
Just now, outside, Bella had sent out a Clone. The task assigned by the Lord was simple, cleaning up the battlefield and collecting energy data. But only moments ago, the instant it touched the scattered Spiral Heat Ray Energy Stream, the Clone and all related detectors abruptly lost contact, leaving behind nothing at all as they were completely erased.
Was it blown apart by lingering aftershocks? No, that did not make sense. Even though Belial's current breath temperature easily climbed into the millions of degrees, Bella's specially modified coating and protective fields were designed to withstand that level while collecting samples. Compared to the rule pollution caused by Crimson God's Authority, extreme heat alone was already a much simpler problem, yet this had still been erased in an instant, which should not have happened.
Belial often ignored common sense, but from another angle, he was strangely consistent. As long as you were tougher than his output, even without strange rule-based defenses, you could hold on. It was the idea of fighting a numbers monster with raw numbers. You might still get blown apart, but it was better than being a fragile mechanics type, and in theory, Bella's setup should have been enough to swim across the surface of Sun and circle around a few times without trouble.
"And you are saying it vanished the moment you touched it. What exactly does that mean? Was it destroyed, or…" "Using a metaphor I am more used to, it was like clearing both the folder and the recycle bin in one go, completely gone. It made me feel like even my main body, the files in that same folder, were about to be deleted as well."
"It was not destruction. It was just gone, vanished, deleted, all right. As if all intermediate steps were ignored and the result of deletion was reached in one jump, completely unreasonable." "…"