Unavoidable in game, Chinese “stuff” incoming, it won’t effect the reading experience.
obviously a game big as yggsdrasil would have Eastern mythology/historical content in it.
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Chapter 9: The End of the World and the Ambitions of Qin Shi Huang
In Yggdrasil, World-tier items held the highest value of anything in the game.
And out of all of them, two in particular interested Roy the most.
One was the Seeds of the World Tree.
The other was the World Tree Sapling.
The Seeds of the World Tree could change any race, even letting the undead shift their race entirely.
Which meant the Seeds of the World Tree held the secrets of every race in existence.
Its tier had to be extraordinarily high.
Then there was the World Tree Sapling.
According to the game’s own lore, the World Tree itself was slowly withering away, all the way toward its eventual death.
Even if players stopped the final boss, the Nine Radiant World Devourer, none of that would change.
Every death carried a new life within it.
One major reason Roy had decided to start actually playing in the final seven days was that the World Tree Sapling could only be obtained during that exact window.
It could only be born at the very moment the World Tree died.
With a setup that twisted, how many players were ever going to dig it up?
And to actually grow the World Tree Sapling, it theoretically needed water from the Well of Wisdom.
That was the real reason the Well of Wisdom served as the reward for the Norse mythology quest chain’s final chapter.
It didn’t look particularly powerful on the surface, and yet it genuinely counted among the top twenty items in the game.
Triggering the quest, though, required a whole mix of specific classes.
Immortal Sage, Sorcerer, Talisman Master, Shrine Maiden, Onmyoji, Monk, Daoist Priest.
All seven of those classes had to be present in the party before the quest would even trigger.
Any ordinary player looking at that list of classes would immediately realize this quest was set somewhere in the East.
Because unlocking the World Tree Sapling quest meant meeting a specific, critical NPC.
That NPC was Qin Shi Huang.
Qin Shi Huang would only grant an audience to powerful players of Eastern classes, and nobody else.
If a player chose the Spirit-type Spellcaster class and tried to advance into Immortal Sage, they needed a class-change item: the Elixir of Immortality.
At that point you had two options: complete a quest through Qin Shi Huang himself, or just buy an Elixir of Immortality off another player.
In the game’s early days, players overwhelmingly chose to go through Qin Shi Huang.
Qin Shi Huang would then hand down a quest.
“Xu Fu betrayed me.
He took the boys and girls I sent with him and sailed for the land of Fusang, never to return.”
“Go to Fusang in my place, and reclaim the elixir that is rightfully mine!”
From there, players would normally board a ship for Fusang, hunting for Xu Fu.
On the way to Fusang, the ship would wreck, and after being rescued by local villagers, you’d discover the village was under threat from bandits…
All told, players had to work through what felt like an endless string of trials before they ever actually found Xu Fu.
Only for Xu Fu to completely ignore them and just send out his warriors instead.
Beat the warriors, and Xu Fu would suddenly turn courteous, offering two options.
Either he’d teach you how to brew the elixir yourself, or he’d just hand one over outright.
Whether you actually reported back to Qin Shi Huang after that was entirely up to you.
Take the elixir yourself, and you’d successfully advance into the Immortal Sage class.
Except doing that meant you could never return to the state of Qin again.
You’d be a wanted man. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
So some players chose the second route instead, handing the elixir over to Qin Shi Huang, only for him to say:
“This is the elixir Xu Fu brewed?”
“Worthless.
This doesn’t grant true eternal life at all.
It’s nothing but a fake.”
“I have no use for something like this.”
“Very well.
In recognition of your effort, I’ll reward you with some gold.”
And that was it.
Players walked away with a handful of gold coins, completely useless, and still had to go brew another elixir from scratch.
Eventually, players did the math and realized this whole ordeal was more trouble than it was worth, all it really did was clutter up your class build and net you the Alchemist life-skill class.
Nothing else.
Whether you handed the elixir over or drank it yourself, the payoff was minimal either way.
Easier to just buy one outright.
By the late game, nobody bothered visiting Qin Shi Huang anymore.
The market was flooded with surplus elixirs anyway.
Immortal Sage was a niche class to begin with.
What none of them knew was that Qin Shi Huang was hiding one final, ultimate quest.
Once the world had only seven days left, assembling all seven of those classes into a single party and going to see Qin Shi Huang would reveal a very different expression on his face.
“Players from another world, surely you know the world is about to end.”
“In less than seven days, the World Tree will wither completely.”
“When that happens, every living thing will perish, except for you.”
Those words alone were enough to stun the whole party.
He was the only NPC in the entire game who knew the truth about the world’s end.
Even knowing it was scripted dialogue cooked up by the designers, it still hit hard.
“Yes, Your Majesty!”
“That’s exactly why we’ve come to ask Your Majesty about the true path to eternal life.”
At that point, Qin Shi Huang’s gaze would fall on the party’s Daoist Priest, and he’d say, almost wistfully:
“Little priest.
I remember you.”
“You were the one who went after Xu Fu on my behalf, and brought back an elixir.”
“Except that elixir couldn’t actually grant true immortality.”
“Do you understand now?”
“We understand, Your Majesty.
Please, guide us.”
“Very well.
Seven of you, matching the secret number seven.
Perhaps there’s a chance yet.”
“After all these years brewing elixirs, Xu Fu must have finally produced a true one by now, one that could let us escape the end of the world.”
Qin Shi Huang looked over the party of seven and handed down an imperial edict.
“Take this edict, go find Xu Fu one more time, and force him to reveal his true self.”
“Once I claim the true elixir, I will take you with me and spare you all from the end of the world.” This story is hosted at g.com.
As an aside, it’s worth asking why this quest needed both a Daoist Priest and an Immortal Sage, when Immortal Sage was technically an advanced upgrade of Daoist Priest.
Because the quest had another brutal hidden requirement: it needed a Daoist Priest who had, at some point, chosen to hand their elixir over.
And that same priest had to have never actually advanced into Immortal Sage themselves, while still bringing along a separate party member who had.
The designers behind this were absolutely unwell.
It’d take a genuinely devious mind to ever figure that combination out.
Roy honestly thought it was completely understandable that players had never found every World-tier item.
What kind of coincidence would it even take to stumble into a quest like this?
Matsuno Hideaki just smiled and said:
“Only fate bringing the right people together makes for the perfect experience.”
“And if nobody ever does, then it just goes unclaimed.
That’s fine too.”
“It’s a World-tier item quest either way.”
Roy had already assembled the party, deliberately picking a Daoist Priest NPC who’d completed the elixir-submission quest long ago, to take the lead.
With the imperial edict in hand, Roy could act on behalf of the state of Qin, launching an expedition to Fusang to hunt down Xu Fu.
And so he entered the Fusang dungeon, where Xu Fu had by now crowned himself king of Fusang.
He commanded an army of Fusang-flavored classes, backed by a special, restrictive form of immortal magic.
Every class outside the six listed above dealt zero damage against him.
That’s right, inside the Fusang dungeon, it didn’t matter if you were a Valkyrie or an Undead Overlord, your damage dropped to zero across the board.
This was exactly where the mechanic-gated boss got its ugliest.
Xu Fu leveraged his own home-field advantage to zero out any attacker’s damage.
Bring along extra teammates beyond the required seven, and they’d be completely useless, just waiting to get wiped out.
Roy, well aware of exactly how the mechanic worked, wasn’t about to fall for it.
He brought a full ninety-nine NPCs along for a righteous group beatdown.
The whole problem with a mechanic-gated boss was that, once the mechanic itself got exposed, it actually became easy to beat.
Once the Fusang dungeon collapsed under the assault, Xu Fu finally showed himself.
“Stop serving the First Emperor.
I can give you far more elixirs than he ever could.”
“Different elixirs carry different effects.”
“You’ll come to understand the true power of immortal magic and the elixirs both.”
“Don’t keep clinging to a lost cause.”
There was no way Roy’s party was going to agree to that, not under these circumstances.
Keep fighting!
Once his first health bar dropped, Xu Fu began to transform.
Immortal Art: Spell-Banning Barrier!
Xu Fu singled them out on the spot: the seven highest-damage classes among them instantly dropped to zero damage.
That’s right, clearing the Fusang dungeon in the first place had required exactly those seven classes.
And then, right at the final confrontation, Xu Fu would flip his own immortal art around and zero out damage from those same seven classes.
Xu Fu’s immortal art was a pure mechanic-gate fight, honestly not far off from the traps Roy himself had designed into World City.
The problem was, this quest had been designed with an ordinary guild’s roster in mind.
Roy already knew exactly how Xu Fu’s mechanic worked, and he’d brought NPCs covering every class under the sun.
The earlier fight had just needed Immortal Sages, Shrine Maidens, Monks, and the rest to clear the field.
Now that the mechanic had flipped, it was everyone else’s turn to step up.