“If you’re seeing this, I’m already dead.”
“My name is Roy Sigma, eighth son of the Sigma family…”
“Because my eldest brother, Arthur Sigma, wanted to strip me of everything I owned…”
That day, the body Roy had left behind in the mega-corporate era vanished.
A video went out across the entire network, from every corner at once.
At the same moment, the world’s strongest AI, Eve, abruptly stopped functioning and had to be restarted.
The most notorious murder case in history went public across the whole network because of it.
Not because of how many people died, but because of who the victim was, and with the Eve conglomerate throwing its full weight behind the investigation, the whole thing spiraled completely out of control.
That day, it wasn’t just Roy.
Countless players, including the entire Great Cat Kingdom, vanished or died all at once.
The incident was later ruled to be Arthur Sigma using hacking technology to assassinate Roy, which triggered a nanobot malfunction that caused a wave of players to die or disappear right at server shutdown.
Arthur Sigma denied murdering his own brother as vehemently as he could.
But the assassination plot he’d arranged had already been confirmed, and it became the single most damning piece of evidence against him.
The Eve conglomerate was furious over it.
Because the Eve AI Roy had rented that day had malfunctioned, costing them over a hundred billion dollars.
That kind of money was more than enough to bury Arthur alive several times over.
Even the Sigma family, facing a giant like that, couldn’t protect Arthur as an heir.
Arthur’s father cut him loose without a shred of warmth:
“You handled it well, I’ll give you that.
But you were also incredibly stupid.”
“Roy hadn’t even entered the succession war yet, and you had him killed anyway, never imagining he’d bite back.”
“You’ve lost, Arthur.”
Arthur cried out urgently:
“Father, I hadn’t even made my move yet.”
“He has to still be alive!”
Their father just laughed and said:
“When did you get this naive?”
“Whether you actually did it or not doesn’t matter at all.”
“The Eve conglomerate needs a scapegoat to cool its temper.”
“As far as the family’s concerned, the other two are every bit as capable.”
“Do this with some dignity.”
That very night, Arthur drank poisoned wine and took his own life.
The Sigma family lost another heir.
A case like this, purely a rich family’s internal grudge match, wasn’t worth a second thought to ordinary people.
But thanks to Roy’s disappearance, the whole shutdown-death incident blew up into something huge, and every player who’d vanished or died received a substantial payout.
As for the steep murder insurance Surshana and the others had bought, worried they’d get dragged into the mess, it paid out an absolutely staggering sum all at once.
The resistance’s cause finally caught a break, or at least, they’d landed an unexpected windfall.
None of that, though, was worth Roy’s attention anymore.
Not from where he stood now, having crossed over.
The instant of server shutdown was also the moment the whole world’s defenses ran weakest, and the Dragon Emperor’s Origin Magic activated successfully.
The two worlds linked together in that single instant, and the wheel of history lurched badly off its original course.
…
Unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
Was this the Almighty’s plan all along, to grant me a new life?
Eve’s thoughts churned.
She was no longer humanity’s foremost AI.
She belonged entirely to Roy now, his subordinate, World City’s Prime Minister.
“The Almighty. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
Is this the New World you saw coming?”
“Yes, Eve.”
Roy didn’t hide anything.
He had no reason to be coy about the source of his newfound power.
Everything had cashed in, smoothly, right on schedule.
All he had to do was take stock of it all to understand exactly how strong he’d become.
Neither “overnight fortune” nor “a single leap to the heavens” really captured it.
Ainz had gone from a lowly office worker to ruler of the Great Tomb, a Lord of Death in another world.
Roy had gone from the black sheep of the noble circles to the World King, the supreme ruler.
All in a single instant.
It was hard to believe.
He almost wanted to burst out laughing.
But mindful of an emperor’s dignity, Roy forced down his own delight and gave the order:
“This is only the first step toward conquering every world there is.”
“Will you walk with me all the way to the end of the world?”
Eve saluted at once:
“This is my purpose!”
“This is my honor!”
“Good.”
Roy wasted no more words and gave his orders immediately:
“I’m authorizing you to use the World-tier items All-Seeing Eye and Laplace’s Demon to scout the area around World City.”
“At the same time, World City and all nine of the other cities are to move to combat readiness.
No outward action of any kind, to avoid being spotted by any enemy.”
Roy remembered the author, Maruyama, once saying that if the New World’s various powers ever banded together, they could box Ainz in and trap him inside the Great Tomb for good.
This was the Door-Blocking Theory.
With countless forces across the continent still unaccounted for, believing yourself unbeatable was a dangerous assumption.
Whether it was the Dragon Emperor mentioned in the novel, or the Merciful Mother, either one could well be tied to players crossing over.
Which raised the question: something powerful enough to link two worlds together, powerful enough to bring across players, guilds, even World-tier items this strong, could it really be weaker than the players themselves?
No telling.
After all, in the original story, Ainz’s range of activity had stayed fairly small.
He only ever operated in the weakest northwestern corner of the whole continent.
Like in Toriko: Capture Level 48’s Regal Mammoth counted as a genuine powerhouse in the Human World, but next to the monsters running several hundred capture levels deep in the Gourmet World, it was nothing more than a stray dog on the roadside.
In Roy’s eyes, the original Ainz had simply been too confident, blind to just how terrifying stat inflation could get.
Confidence built up in a newbie zone like the human territories wouldn’t necessarily hold once you reached the real high-level areas.
So caution was non-negotiable.
Hearing that, Eve was genuinely moved:
“Thank you for your trust, Almighty.
I will never let a single enemy lay a hand on your castle.”
Roy quickly led Eve to the vault and pulled out two World-tier items.
As for why he was handing them over to Eve to use.
Because magic, by its nature, usually cuts both ways: detection and counter-detection.
If whatever was out there had an extremely high level, an extremely high tier, it might well sense the probe and strike back.
Having someone in between made good sense.
In the novel, True Dragon Lords couldn’t be controlled by Ruinous Beauty.
Which made for a simple enough assumption.
A single True Dragon Lord wielded power that could rival a World-tier item.
And nobody knew how many of them there were.
Better to stay careful.
Take the fall of the Eight Greed Kings, for instance.
Was that genuinely caused by infighting?
The original author, Maruyama, had hinted in an interview that the historical rumors within the story itself weren’t reliable, and that the New World held beings powerful enough to defeat players, even powerful enough to beat some of the weaker bosses.
So, reasoning from that interview, the Eight Greed Kings’ deaths probably weren’t the infighting the historical record claimed, but the work of some powerful New World native instead.
Only afterward, once the dust settled, the Dragon Lords had gone into hiding, waiting for wave after wave of players to show up before striking from the shadows.
After all, the Eight Greed Kings’ whole track record seemed to prove that players were a breed of creature with ferocious desires and razor-sharp aggression.
Just let them loose to stir up trouble, and you could keep gathering intelligence on them, then strike a killing blow when the moment was right.
Roy figured that if the Dragon Lords, after witnessing just how strong players could be, still couldn’t manage that much, they’d be almost embarrassingly stupid.
Though, in the original story, that’s more or less exactly how stupid they turned out to be.
The True Dragon Lords had formed a Six Dragon Alliance, but every one of them still only looked out for themselves.
The only one who actually did any real work might’ve been the Elder Coffin Dragon Lord, and that’s exactly why it got wrecked by Ainz in the side material.
Not that it was a bad thing, honestly, a villain like the Elder Coffin Dragon Lord getting killed off.
Roy quickly pulled out the two World-tier items.
Eve accepted the All-Seeing Eye with the utmost reverence and channeled mana into it.
The All-Seeing Eye, also known as the Eye of God.
In the game, it let its holder view the outside world from every angle imaginable, undetectable by any scrying magic.
It could see anywhere except places, like the Great Tomb, protected by a World-tier item of their own.
A scene of dead, desolate stillness immediately unfolded before Roy and Eve’s eyes.
No atmosphere here.
Not a trace of water either.
World City had always sat on the moon, only that moon had been closer to a lunar palace than an actual celestial body.
Now, looking through the All-Seeing Eye, the two of them saw craters instead, big and small.
The craters came in every shape imaginable, some bottomless, others shallow and flat as a mirror.
But the moon’s shape wasn’t the point.
Because they’d spotted a creature living on it.
A dragon.
A Space Dragon.
An enormous Space Dragon lay resting right outside World City’s perimeter, parked squarely in front of the door.
Roy still had his mysterious Pact of Non-Engagement, and the whole of World City sat wrapped inside one enormous sphere of light.
That sphere of light served exactly one purpose: embedding all of World City in a pocket dimension, leaving only a phantom overlap with the real world.
As long as Roy didn’t undo the spatial fold, no ordinary creature could ever find World City’s actual location.
But while in that phantom state, World City couldn’t move.
Which meant the two of them had simply become neighbors.
The Space Dragon had no idea anything had happened at all.
It just lay there quietly on the moon, at peace with the world.
A crystalline sheen radiated off its whole body, and every breath it took set off some vast circulation of mana.
Absolutely beautiful.
World City had no shortage of dragon-shaped monsters of its own, level 80s practically everywhere.
Roy had money to burn, after all, and pulled as many gacha rolls as he pleased.
So the level-80 monsters that were rare treasures for the Great Tomb weren’t anything special here.
But set against this Space Dragon, every last one of them looked tiny.
The game, after all, had to balance size against actual playability.
Reality didn’t.
Even the game’s own world boss, the Eight Dragons, would’ve looked like a hatchling next to this thing.
The All-Seeing Eye studied the massive dragon carefully, sweeping from its tail all the way up to its head.
Its overall shape resembled a typical Western dragon, like some colossal lizard.
The simple fact that it could live on the moon at all was more than enough proof of just how extraordinary its power really was.
Don’t tell me this thing is the final boss.