The final seven days before the world’s total collapse.
Roy held humanity’s hope for the new world in his own two hands.
It had originally been a romantic flourish the lead designer built in for the players.
Any player who found the World Tree Sapling would trigger a server-wide announcement, along with an invitation to the new world.
That was exactly why Qin Shi Huang had tried so hard to reach the new world himself.
Too bad Roy had ordered that particular feature stripped out entirely.
The last thing he wanted was the entire server lighting up and flooding back online all at once.
All he wanted was the World Tree Sapling itself.
If the Eternal Serpent Ring was billed as the strongest World-tier item in the whole game, then the World Tree Sapling had a legitimate claim to that title too.
Because its effect was genuinely terrifying.
[World-tier Item: World Tree Sapling]
[Effect 1: The World Tree Sapling can be planted on guild grounds.
Once every ten years, it can unleash its ultimate power: a full rollback.]
[Effect 2: If the sapling hasn’t accumulated enough time and its power is forced early, it will wither and die, then resprout somewhere else in the world.]
That’s right.
The ultimate failsafe for the game’s own operators: if a bug or an operational error ever occurred, the entire world could be rolled back.
Basically a save point for the whole game.
The World Tree Sapling held power of the very highest tier, capable of recording an entire world.
Too bad the company had been sneaky about it.
They were willing to hand out that kind of power, sure, but only during the final seven days.
Find it, and players could go wild with it.
Miss it, and that was just that.
For a normal player to actually use the World Tree Sapling, they’d need to cultivate it for a full ten years, building up enough power before it could unleash a full rollback.
The World Tree Sapling’s tier was rare in the extreme.
Other single-use World-tier items vanished the moment they were used.
But the World Tree left you with hope intact.
Use its ability once every ten years, and it would simply keep going.
The lead designer had set it up this way specifically because he didn’t want players triggering this power carelessly.
Best if nobody ever used it at all, just let it sit there, present but untouched.
As it happened, Roy had no intention of using it either.
The World Tree Sapling could be cultivated.
Its tier was extraordinarily high, and given enough time, it could grow into a true World Tree in its own right.
At that point, would he ever be short on World-tier items again?
No matter which universe he found himself in, this counted as a top-tier treasure.
Looking at it through the lens of Eastern fantasy cosmology, Yggdrasil’s world resembled something like a Small Chiliocosm.
The original author, Maruyama, had once mentioned that Yggdrasil was split into nine worlds, with a single one of them being roughly two to three times the size of real-world Tokyo.
From a game design standpoint, a map that size was genuinely massive.
And the Small Chiliocosm concept happened to explain it perfectly.
Since a Small Chiliocosm’s underlying laws were less fully formed, it was far easier to obtain power tied to fundamental law there than it would be in a Great Trichiliocosm.
Resurrection, spatial teleportation, rewriting the world’s own laws, stopping time, all of it.
Powers like that were staggering in any world, and yet here, characters with comparatively low stats could still get their hands on them.
So if Yggdrasil counted as a Small Chiliocosm, it had to be one of the most precious ones out there.
It had given birth to far too many fundamental laws, more than enough to make even powerhouses from a Great Trichiliocosm fight over it.
Look at the Dragon Emperor, practically drooling over the laws here, trying to use them to transcend his own origin, and running straight into trouble because of it.
Roy, having claimed these particular items, felt completely satisfied.
He even had a growing certainty that, as long as his guild had this tree planted on its grounds, his crossing was guaranteed to succeed.
The Dragon Emperor, even at the cost of damaging his own origin, was absolutely going to drag World City into the New World with him.
Because if you could roll back an entire world, that meant you held its very foundation on record, total command over everything in it.
Compared to a wish-granting item like the Eternal Serpent Ring, this was the real strongest World-tier item in the game.
As for something like One Punch Man’s world-will characters with purely absurd stats, Roy honestly felt nothing toward those at all.
He had no plans to go to war with the world anyway.
With the treasures secured, Roy opened a portal on the spot and carried it all straight back to World City.
The moment the World Tree Sapling was properly planted, Roy could feel World City itself radiating a captivating sense of life.
Whether that was just a game effect, he couldn’t say.
Either way, he was thoroughly pleased with it.
With six and a half days left before shutdown, he’d already secured six World-tier items in just half a day, and counting the World Crown he already had, that made seven total.
Ninety-three still remained unclaimed.
He had to pick up the pace.
The items still ahead were difficult too, sure, but nowhere near as brutal as the first few had been.
Roy had been working through them from hardest to easiest, deliberately.
Because the hardest quests were flatly impossible for anyone else to complete without cheating, even if they tried right now.
So he’d tackled them in that exact order.
If somebody genuinely managed to finish one of the easier quests within these seven days and claim a World-tier item, well, they’d have earned it fair and square.
With map coordinates and a full walkthrough in hand, Roy made quick work of tracking down item after item.
The eighth item: the Book of Final Judgment.
[Effect: Upon killing a player, applies a varying death penalty based on that player’s recorded moral standing.]
The name sounded imposing enough, but the actual effect was pretty mediocre.
It didn’t work off some predefined alignment stat, but off a player’s actual recorded behavior in-game.
If you PKed constantly and earned the hatred of the wider playerbase, the AI would actually track your criminal flag.
In that case, Roy killing a flagged player would trigger the item’s effect.
They might lose ten levels on death, or drop two pieces of gear.
The one real upside was that, once you held this item, any death-penalty-reducing item the target carried simply stopped working.
Bluntly put, it was a tool for punishing habitual PKers.
If Roy ever used this item against Ainz, especially after one of his infamous massacres, he could shatter his levels in a single kill, revival or not.
The ninth item: Gate of Heaven. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
[Effect: When facing evil forces, opens the Gate of Heaven, summoning a great host of angels until the evil is purified, or 72 hours pass, whichever comes first.]
It resembled another item, already discovered by other players, that could summon demons and drown an entire world in them.
Just much, much weaker.
It was a one-time consumable, opening the Gate of Heaven once to summon countless angels against a designated guild.
So it was single-use, and it didn’t even guarantee a clean wipe.
If the target guild held out for 72 hours, the angels simply vanished.
Compared to the demon version, it was pretty half-hearted.
The tenth item: Wings of the Fallen Angel.
[Effect 1: When used by a top-tier Seraph, transforms them into a Fallen Angel, unlocking the special class “Satan.”]
[Effect 2: When used by a non-angel, grants a Fallen Form instead.]
Now that was something.
The Satan class, on par with a God-tier class.
This was a class only obtainable through a World-tier item.
Only the highest-ranking angels could fall into becoming Satan, ruler over all of Hell.
Was it strong?
Genuinely, yes.
A truly rare class.
But spending a whole World-tier item just for a class change felt like a bit of a waste.
Not that Roy minded much.
Not every World-tier item could be game-breaking, after all.
Besides, none of his NPCs actually had the Satan class to begin with.
Plenty of classes came with special restrictions, the same way he didn’t have anyone in the World Champion class either.
Some things just couldn’t be forced.
The eleventh item: Hades’ Imprisonment.
[Effect 1: Upon killing a player, enslave them, gaining a weakened soul servant.]
[Effect 2: If the soul servant is killed, the enslavement is broken.]
[Effect 3: If the item-holder is killed, the item is destroyed.]
Well, this was practically a friendship-ending artifact.
It wasn’t actually that powerful.
Killing an enemy just conjured a weak servant copy of them.
But that servant could grovel.
Imagine the target player logging in to find their own doppelganger shouting:
“Oh, great master, I offer you my utmost respect.”
“I am So-and-so’s loyal dog.”
That player would burn through their entire fortune just to get revenge.
But in the New World, this might actually work to permanently enslave an enemy and keep them from ever coming back.
Not a bad item at all!
The twelfth item: Core of the Tower of Babel.
[Effect: Corrupts a spellcaster’s incantations, doubling cast time and making spells far easier to interrupt.]
It didn’t look like much on paper, but in the New World, it could keep spellcasters from ever chanting cleanly, a genuine mage-killer.
Push it a little further, and it could basically function as an anti-magic field.
How else was he supposed to fight mages without shutting magic down entirely?
The thirteenth item: Yata Mirror.
[Effect 1: Once per day, reflects any attack of Super-tier magic or below.]
[Effect 2: Reflects a single World-tier item’s attack once, then is consumed.]
Roy picked up the treasure straight out of Japanese mythology.
Solid, if unremarkable.
Reflecting a World-tier item attack once was genuinely useful, perfect for dealing with something as account-deleting as the Saint-Slaying Spear.
The fourteenth item: Kusanagi Sword.
[Effect 1: Severs any binding contract.
Consumed on use.]
Genuinely useless.
Normally, players could use it to break free of Hades’ Imprisonment, or the mind control from Ruinous Beauty.
But among World-tier items, an effect that narrow just wasn’t going to compete for the spotlight.
The fifteenth item: Yasakani Jewel.
[Effect: Breaks one World-tier seal.
Consumed on use.]
A middling effect, purpose-built against various imprisonment and sealing abilities.
Some use, sure, but still strictly a backup piece.
Not every World-tier item could be a showstopper.
These three tied to Japanese mythology, for instance, weren’t exactly hard-hitters, useful at best.
The sixteenth item: Veil of the Hidden Kami.
[Effect: The holder cannot be detected by any living being and leaks no information, provided they use no skills and are never struck.]
Decent enough.
Roy could hand it off to a ninja NPC for scouting, guaranteed undetectable.
Just a bit underwhelming, sitting at the same table as the Kusanagi Sword.
The seventeenth item: The Fair Arena.
[Effect: Pulls a selected player into a dedicated arena, fully equalizing both sides’ stats and attributes.]
Now this one was genuinely strange.
Using it against low-tier mobs would just be shooting himself in the foot.
But use it against someone like Saitama, and would it actually even out the numbers?
If it worked, this was a genuine artifact!
It didn’t touch equipment stats at all.
In other words, the Fair Arena wasn’t actually all that fair.
The eighteenth item: Raziel’s Mysterious Key.
[Effect: Opens any chest in the world without triggering traps, and improves the quality of loot obtained.]
No combat value at all, but genuinely valuable.
Roy actually liked items like this, interesting on their own merits.
He just kept it as a collectible.
The nineteenth item: The Buddha’s Bodhi Tree.
[Effect 1: The highest-ranking Monk can advance into the special class, Buddha.]
[Effect 2: Other classes may use it to advance into High Monk instead.]
Its effect ran parallel to the Wings of the Fallen Angel, another one of the game’s rarest, most special classes.
Roy genuinely liked items like this.
Same as World’s Richest Man or World Champion, they unlocked classes that were vanishingly rare.
Down the line, he could pass it on to one of his own NPCs, or even try mastering that power himself.
An honestly perfect day.
Not once since the game launched had Roy actually played this seriously.
Because it turned out the game’s most brilliant, most genuinely thought-provoking content had almost entirely been packed into its World-tier items.
Which was frankly ridiculous.
A perfectly ordinary online game, and its absolute best material was hidden away somewhere only a single player could ever actually experience.
These designers were genuinely unhinged.
Take it or leave it.
Ordinary players got none of it.
Even without Roy cutting off his spending, this game had clearly been due to die anyway.
Grumbling to himself, Roy packed the items away into his vault.
After that, he headed for the game’s famous cafe, planning to grab a bitter coffee to clear his head before moving on to the next item.
Instead, he ran into someone he actually knew.
“Lord Joshua!”
“I finally found you.”
The one calling out to him was a man dressed in a long robe, a hood pulled over his head, iron boots on his feet, and a great scythe in hand, looking every bit like the Grim Reaper himself.
He was also one of the few people Roy actually knew in-game, a player named Surshana, who would later cross over into the New World himself.
Surshana was set to cross over the moment the game shut down.
Except six hundred years before the original story’s protagonist, Ainz, ever would.
By the time he’d passed into history, into legend, Surshana had become the God of Death, one of the Six Great Gods worshipped by the Slane Theocracy.
All because he’d protected enslaved humans, freed them, and helped establish a nation of their own.
From humanity’s point of view, Surshana was, without question, a good man.
That was exactly why Roy had bothered talking to him in the first place, and along the way, he’d picked up a rather interesting piece of information.
Surshana was actually a member of the real-world resistance.
Which made perfect sense.
If he fought against the mega-corporations in the real world, then fighting to protect humanity in the New World, right up to a martyr’s death, was simply the natural next step.
The cafe was quiet, this deep into the game’s final days, with just the two of them there.
Roy offered a mild smile:
“Shana.
What’s going on?”
Surshana looked a little sheepish:
“Lord Joshua, I just knew you’d come here for the bitter coffee.”
Under computer regulations, Yggdrasil technically blocked out taste entirely.
But there was always an exception somewhere, and one cafe had exploited a system loophole to actually simulate bitterness.
Since it was just bitterness, the developers had never bothered patching it out.
Roy would drop by every now and then just to taste it.
His own life, after all, wasn’t bitter in the slightest.
Surshana, having gotten to know him over time, naturally picked up on little habits like that.
Roy nodded:
“Get to the point.”
Surshana said, a little embarrassed:
“The private message I sent you, Lord Joshua, I wasn’t sure if you’d seen it.”
Roy shook his head:
“Never saw it.”
That was a lie, of course, meant to keep the other man from thinking he was being brushed off.
Surshana hurried on:
“Right, so, our Great Cat Kingdom has a World-tier item called Ruinous Beauty.”
“It can control any monster below World-tier.”
“The game’s about to shut down, sure, but you’d still get the full World-tier experience out of it.”
“Only 100,000 yen.”
“Would Lord Joshua happen to be interested?”
Roy let out a sigh at that:
“Shana.
Let’s go talk it over back at your guild.”
Surshana lit up, thrilled:
“Our guild is always happy to have you, Lord Joshua.”
“Right, but just so we’re clear, I’m not buying it.”
“…Huh?”