Katze, in German, means “cat.”
Which meant the Katze Plains could just as easily be called Cat Plains, likely a nod to a cat’s nine lives as a stand-in for the undead.
So this was, fittingly, sacred ground for the undead.
Going by the logic of crossing over, a player’s racial affinity influenced where they landed.
Roy was human, and even with countless races under his guild’s banner, he’d still ended up in the continent’s northwest corner.
By that same logic, if Ainz’s crossing had succeeded, he’d almost certainly have landed somewhere near the Katze Plains, regardless of any butterfly effects.
As for keeping tabs on Ainz, it wasn’t that Roy wanted to cozy up to him.
He needed to confirm how much the world had changed, and Ainz made a convenient scout in the meantime.
A useful, free set of muscle wasn’t something that came along every day.
Eve responded at once:
“Laplace’s Demon did detect an unidentified power near the Katze Plains, but it couldn’t keep observing beyond that.”
“Hela used the All-Seeing Eye and confirmed the terrain nearby has been reshaped by someone, but she can’t see what’s inside.”
So it had actually happened.
Roy let out a breath of relief.
However much of a butterfly effect he’d caused, the broad strokes still held.
“Tell Governor Hela of Eternal Night City I’ll be granting her the World-tier item Veil of the Hidden Kami.”
“I want her to keep the forces at the Katze Plains under surveillance.
The moment she locates the Great Tomb, report back immediately, but no further action beyond that.”
“I’ll also grant her the World-tier item the Yata Mirror, to guard against the enemy using a World-tier item of their own.”
“Our concern isn’t just the Great Tomb.
There’s still that unknown dragon out there too.
The Great Tomb might just end up as our own pawn, helping us track down where the dragon actually is.”
Eternal Night City was Roy’s own undead stronghold, and its Governor Hela went by the nickname “Death-Beyond-the-Dark-Night,” also called the “Queen of the Undead.”
Honestly, setting World-tier items aside entirely, Eternal Night City alone could have flattened the Great Tomb without much trouble.
But Roy’s priority was intelligence, so he only ordered Hela to keep a quiet watch.
The mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the oriole behind it.
There was a real chance someone else out there was watching the Great Tomb in secret too.
Which would give Roy the perfect opening to catch them in the act.
With a dragon that powerful lying right there on the moon, Roy couldn’t help but consider one particular possibility.
Maybe the dragons really were watching Ainz, waiting until they’d gathered enough intelligence before landing a decisive blow.
Which meant that by watching Ainz himself, Roy might get the chance to catch something useful too.
Eve answered:
“As you command, Almighty!”
Of course, a strategy this cautious did feel a little too conservative.
Roy added:
“Beyond that, we can’t just let the Great Tomb run wild unchecked either.
So next, gather intelligence on the Kingdom’s Warrior Captain, and on whatever the Slane Theocracy’s Sunlight Scripture is up to.”
“Eve, you handle the Kingdom’s intelligence.
Stay alert for any sign of the dragon.”
“As for the Theocracy, hand that to Lucifer.
Same rule: don’t expose yourselves.”
“I’ll grant her the World-tier item Gate of Heaven.”
After all, there were only so many World-tier items suited to concealment and covert observation.
The All-Seeing Eye, Laplace’s Demon, and the Veil of the Hidden Kami.
Artifact-tier stealth items, on the other hand, there were plenty of.
Lucifer could simply take one along, though an artifact-tier item wouldn’t shield her from tracking by another World-tier item.
Which was exactly why Roy went ahead and granted her the Gate of Heaven as well.
If the Space Dragon showed up in person, Lucifer might not win, but she could unleash the Gate of Heaven to gauge the enemy’s strength, then make her escape.
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
Eve headed off to carry out her orders, while Roy, freshly out of the bath, decided it was time to enjoy some good food.
The thought had barely crossed his mind before Veronica spoke up:
“Master, dinner is ready.”
“You once mentioned wanting to taste the food from your old anime and manga.
Mao has the dishes ready for you now.”
World City had tens of thousands of NPCs, and a fair share of them worked life-skill classes.
An Immortal absolutely had to know how to enjoy life.
Otherwise, how was he supposed to get through all these endless years?
Ten years, a hundred, a thousand: time could stretch out into something genuinely terrifying.
Once Roy had the Immortal class, a short life was no longer something he had to worry about.
Even with the Dimensional Gate able to open the next world the moment he poured enough energy into it, he was in no hurry.
Ainz’s world was dangerous, sure, but not that dangerous.
Fluder Paradyne, for instance, had managed to scrape together a few centuries of life just fine.
Stay in the northwest corner, and you weren’t likely to run into anything too dangerous.
Roy could easily live out his days here in comfort, while helping raise humanity up into something stronger along the way.
Seeing how thoughtful Veronica had been, he couldn’t help but smile.
“Without you, I honestly wouldn’t know what to do with myself.”
“Your Majesty is too kind.
This is simply my duty.”
Veronica’s face lit up with a happy smile as she brought over the appetizers.
Roy took a bite, then let her help him change into fresh clothes before heading to the dining hall for the full meal.
Mao was one of his own level-100 NPCs, and there were a dozen or so chefs of that same caliber scattered across the world.
He intended to make sure he never ate the same dish twice within an entire century, something new to look forward to every single day.
World City had the most absurdly stocked Paradise Lost imaginable, holding the richest variety of ingredients found anywhere in the world.
And when he eventually moved on to other worlds, he could easily gather a few more, just to keep satisfying his appetite.
As Roy worked his way through dish after dish, he couldn’t help but notice just how dramatically his own body had changed.
Golden fried rice.
Magical mapo tofu.
Peerless Noodles…
Every dish that had once made his mouth water on screen, dishes he’d never actually gotten to enjoy, now sat spread out right in front of him.
Countless delicacies, alongside every kind of fruit, pastry, fine wine, and drink imaginable.
Roy cleared through it all in what felt like no time at all.
And that was only enough to leave him thirty percent full.
A genuinely blissful feeling.
Even back in his old life, however much food Roy could pack away, there was no way he could have actually digested it all.
Sure, the ultra-wealthy could use nanobots to help digest food and keep on eating indefinitely, but that always struck him as a genuine waste.
Now, though, his body was practically inhuman.
Even if he couldn’t match a dedicated close-combat unit like Kagura Inori, he could still move at supersonic speed, and his appetite had naturally grown to match.
Which meant that where other people could never manage to enjoy so much good food, he could indulge in it to his heart’s content.
The chefs stayed busy in the kitchen while Veronica directed everything with total composure, and the instant Roy finished one plate, she’d already have the next delicacy waiting, timed perfectly.
By the time Roy finished, the whole table had been completely refreshed.
A flawless dining experience, top to bottom.
Building Veronica in the first place had turned out to be a genuinely brilliant decision.
Roy let out a satisfied burp just as Eve’s message came through.
“Almighty, the preliminary intelligence on the Kingdom is complete.”
“Go ahead.”
“So far, no sign of Imperial troops, or anyone disguised as Imperial troops, harassing the Kingdom’s border villages.”
“Lucifer tracked the Theocracy’s forces and located the Sunlight Scripture.”
“The unit has split into two groups.”
“One is heading toward the Abelion Hills to hunt demi-humans, easing the pressure the Sacred Kingdom is under.”
“The other is headed for the Dragon Kingdom, to deal with incursions from the Beastman Country.”
“They haven’t dispatched any force to the Kingdom’s border to impersonate Imperial troops.”
“As for the Kingdom’s Warrior Captain, that man does exist, a loyal, trusted confidant of King Ramposa III.”
“But the orders he’s actually received are to head to the Great Forest of Tob, near the Azerlisia Mountains, to hunt down monsters.”
The whole plot had come completely unraveled.
Roy’s original plan had been to stop the Theocracy from massacring border villagers, to prevent a domino effect that might interfere with his own plans against the Great Tomb.
Because, frankly, the Theocracy’s behavior in the original story sometimes made very little sense.
Forget for a moment that the Sunlight Scripture’s actual job was clearing out demi-human villages.
A unit like that was a textbook executioner squad, the kind that needed genuinely fanatical conviction behind it, something like human supremacy.
And now, suddenly, the plan was: let’s go slaughter humans instead.
Fine, say you weren’t worried about your own troops’ loyalty cracking under that.
Did the Empire even know about this assassination plot against the Warrior Captain?
The Empire didn’t.
The Theocracy would be committing a massacre in the Kingdom’s villages under the Empire’s name, supposedly for the Empire’s own benefit.
If Emperor Jircniv of the Baharuth Empire ever found out, wouldn’t he have every right to say:
“Are you helping me, or ruining me?”
Fine, and even supposing the assassination plot succeeded, did the Emperor actually intend to invade and occupy the Kingdom afterward?
No, not that either.
The Theocracy had gone to the trouble of dispatching an elite unit purely to manufacture a possibility the Empire itself didn’t even know existed, while conveniently framing the Empire for it in the process.
The two nations hadn’t coordinated on any of this whatsoever.
Not to mention, the Kingdom’s genuine Hero-class powerhouses all belonged to two of its Adamantite-rank adventuring parties.
One was Blue Rose.
The other was Red Drop.
Red Drop’s Azuth Aindra, in particular, was said to wield a set of powered armor around level 55, and came from genuine noble stock besides.
Even with the adventurers’ unwritten rule of steering well clear of national wars, that rule carried no real binding force.
If Blue Rose’s Lakyus ever decided to defend her own homeland, the combat power she could bring to bear would dwarf the Warrior Captain’s by a wide margin.
Taking out the Warrior Captain, then, would it really accomplish all that much?
However pathetic the Kingdom’s nobility might be otherwise, faced with an Imperial invasion, they genuinely had mustered troops, mobilizing 260,000 men.
For a Kingdom with only 9 million people, mobilizing that many troops was no small feat for the King.
The Kingdom’s nobles weren’t quite as disloyal as all that, either.
They had no intention of surrendering to the Empire, no desire to live under the rule of the Bloody Emperor.
Even with the Warrior Captain removed, the Empire would still have to genuinely annihilate the Kingdom’s 200,000-strong army before it stood any real chance of conquering the nation.
So had the Theocracy actually thought this through at all?
The more Roy considered the plan, the more he doubted the Theocracy’s strategic competence.
With that plan now simply not existing, Roy thought it over for a moment, tapping the table:
“Why is the Warrior Captain out hunting monsters, then?”
Eve, who’d been waiting for Roy to finish digesting all this, went on:
“The Theocracy has made a fortune selling fertilizer and boosting grain yields.”
“That surplus grain has driven population growth in the Kingdom, which has escalated conflicts over farmland, driving up the number of displaced people, badly deteriorating public order, and letting criminal gangs run rampant.”
“King Ramposa III tried to reclaim some of the nobility’s fallow land and redistribute it to the displaced, to ease domestic tensions.”
“The nobles unanimously opposed it, insisting that fiefs were untouchable, a sacred tradition of the Kingdom.”
“If His Majesty felt land was in short supply, they said, they’d be happy to support clearing the vast Great Forest of Tob instead.”
The Kingdom’s nobility, it seemed, had gotten a bit smarter too.
No sooner had Roy thought that than Eve added:
“So the picture’s clear now.
Hunting monsters to clear land addresses the domestic refugee crisis, and from the King’s perspective, that beats turning on his own nobles and risking civil unrest.”
“And from the nobles’ side, if the Warrior Captain’s hunt succeeds, they get a share of the spoils too.
If it fails and the King’s own strength takes a hit, he’s even less able to move against them.”
“Two birds, one stone.”
Roy agreed with Eve’s read on it.
Clearly, the Kingdom’s decision-making here was a good deal more coherent than anything in the original story.
There was still one thing bothering him, though.
“Wait.
If the population’s growing and there are too many displaced people, why aren’t the nobles clearing more fallow land themselves?”
“That would let them absorb the displaced, expand their own influence, and grow their own strength all at once.”
Eve answered:
“There’s something the Almighty may not know.
Thanks to the Theocracy’s fertilizer magic, grain output across human territory has kept climbing, which has driven grain prices steadily downward.”
“The Kingdom’s nobles are deeply unhappy about it, since their income as major landowners has taken a hit.”
“They’ve shifted toward planting cash crops instead, while leaving fallow land and forest untouched.”
“Because the growing population has driven fuel prices steadily upward, and timber from the forests now actually turns a better profit than grain does.”
That cleared things up.
Roy hadn’t expected a simple rise in grain output to ripple out into such a profound butterfly effect on the overall plot.
At this rate, how much of the story’s future events could he actually still count on?
Roy pressed on:
“Alright, I follow.
Though I wonder if the Warrior Captain can actually beat the Wise King of the Forest.
That might be a stretch.”
The Warrior Captain’s strength, in the original story, sat right at the threshold of the Hero tier: level 28.
Eve answered with total confidence:
“Barring any surprises, he certainly can.”
“Laplace’s Demon has assessed this Warrior Captain, Gazef, at level 35.”
“And the Wise King of the Forest sits at level 31.”
Good grief.
Even the level system he was using as a combat-strength benchmark had shifted.
Roy considered this:
“Is that the Warrior Captain’s level with the Kingdom’s treasured heirloom equipped?”
Eve shot that down immediately:
“No.”
“Gazef isn’t carrying the Kingdom’s treasure, and his odds of victory are still high.”
“Even if something goes wrong for him personally, the Kingdom has sent along other Hero-tier fighters as backup.”
Which butterfly effect had caused this one?
Roy’s brow furrowed.
The treasures he’d given the Great Cat Kingdom shouldn’t have had any way of affecting Gazef’s level.
The New World’s humans had a genuinely pitiful level cap, topping out at 42.
Going by the adventurer-team ranking standard, it broke down roughly like this:
Copper (levels 1-3), Iron (4-6), Silver (7-10), Gold (11-14), Platinum (15-17), Mithril (18-20), Orichalcum (21-23), Adamantite (24-28).
Rank applied to a team as a whole, not necessarily a fixed individual level, but this held roughly true.
Above level 28, the scale stopped applying to adventuring teams and started measuring individuals instead.
Hero-class (29-35), Aberration (36-42).
These tiers gave a rough read on a New World native’s actual strength.
In the original story, the Warrior Captain, used as a benchmark himself, sat one step short of the Hero tier, a textbook level 28.
So how had he ended up at level 35 now?
Roy asked again:
“Is there solid evidence for this?”
“Laplace’s Demon just eavesdrops on information.
Is its assessment capability actually reliable enough for this?”
Eve answered with confidence:
“Rest assured, Your Majesty, Laplace’s Demon has measured this directly.
Unless he’s carrying a World-tier item specifically to falsify it.”
“Adventurers across the Kingdom likewise rate the Warrior Captain as having entered the Hero tier long ago, no worse than the legendary Thirteen Heroes themselves.”
Roy, determined to get to the bottom of it, pressed on:
“How many Adamantite-rank adventuring teams does the Kingdom have now?”
“Four.”
“And the Empire?”
“Also four.”
There it was.
In the original story, there had only been two.
Now that number had simply doubled.
The Kingdom’s population had doubled, so naturally, its pool of talent had grown along with it.
It all clicked for Roy at once.
Beyond the hard cap of level 42, the reason most native humans in this world never reached their own personal limit was simple: they couldn’t level up by grinding monsters the way players could.
Plenty of talented fighters progressed slowly, not because they’d hit the ceiling of their own ability, but because they never found opponents of matching caliber to actually fight.
Brain Unglaus, in the original story, was a genuine once-in-a-generation talent, and after a little “education” from Shalltear, he broke into the Hero tier remarkably fast, which said a lot about how many other talented people out there never got the chance to reach their own ceiling.
As for the ones who never even got that far, cut short partway through, like Ninya in the original story, there were plenty more of those.
With both the Theocracy’s and the Empire’s populations more than double what they’d been in the original story, geniuses were naturally going to be more common too.
Under normal circumstances, the Hero tier produced roughly one person in every million.
Aberration-tier, one in every ten million.
With humanity’s total numbers more than doubled now, and grain production driving prices down as far as it had.
A large population with plentiful food naturally had the resources to train up far more elite fighters.
Humanity still couldn’t break past that level-42 ceiling, sure, but the overall picture was undeniably far better than before.
He genuinely hadn’t expected that a handful of casual gifts on his part could set off changes to the world on this scale.
Roy, struck by it all, added:
“I need the numbers and background on every human nation’s Hero-tier individuals.”
“And keep an eye on how the Warrior Captain’s hunt for the Wise King of the Forest is progressing.”
“If he ends up crossing paths with the Great Tomb, that could get interesting.”
“Yes, Almighty.”
***
The Great Forest of Tob, Carne Village
As humanity’s outpost at the edge of the monster-filled forest, the Kingdom’s army had naturally chosen it as their staging point, setting up camp to rest.
Except the Warrior Captain’s face carried a trace of hesitation.
“Gazef.
What’s on your mind?”
“Don’t tell me you actually think something as small-time as the Wise King of the Forest could stand in your way.”
In the Kingdom’s army, the only person who’d dare address Gazef this casually was his close friend and comrade, Brain Unglaus.