Momonga Pov
When YGGDRASIL was first released, it was thought to be just another VR game. There wasn't much hype for it and even fewer advertisements but once the first players exited the game, the news about it spread up.
What shocked them wasn't just its surreal realism but also its magical ability to give the player their stats and powers from the game in reality. Not even a week after the game was released, millions of new players joined every day.
In the year 2126, humans destroyed the world to the point where we couldn't even leave our specially protected houses and had to wear special equipment to go outside.
Once the game launched, people saw hope in being able to go outside without special suits and enjoy the feeling of wind. The game provided not only skills and stats that allowed you to easily survive the toxicity but also magic that gave hope in restoring and improving our planet.
Two years later, the living environment improved drastically, and whatever was left could be ignored due to our skills and stats. Despite that, chaos increased every day.
People started forming groups and wrestling for control over YGGDRASIL and its recourses and the situation only further escalated recently when the update happened.
The update took everyone by surprise because the game's developers had disappeared the moment the game launched. Many had tried to find them and force them to make them stronger in the game but their search never even found as much as a hair of them.
The update included many new things but what really split our formerly human society was the character takeover. People started to gain some of their avatar traits and those who played the game as the opposite gender turned into that gender, I even heard stories about some unlucky ones that had a race that was androgynous or even hermaphrodites, and not the sexy futanari way.
That day, the chaos in our world multiplied several times and split our society into thousands of ethnicities. Humans being humans, immediately started forming groups and discriminating against everyone that had other features.
Small conflicts grew to wars until basically, everyone was at war with everyone. Since I was a Lich, I was part of the undead clan and an active member of the heteromorph community.
One of the other changes the update brought us was that Karma also influenced us and since I had a −500 Karma, I was very eager to participate in the slaughter.
Although we grew in power, we didn't become completely brainless and fought most of our battles in space the moment our stats and skills allowed us.
Years passed like this and life on Earth gradually became sparser. After years of fighting and grinding, we started building our bases on different planets in and even outside our solar system and Earth had become sort of a holy land since no one wanted to destroy our place of origin any more than it already was.
Over the years, several updates happened but none of them affected us as the first one did. Other than the war, we were still looking for the game developers and other hidden players who didn't want to join any factions.
The stronger we grew, the stronger our desire to find the game developers and force them to give us more power because the more we grew and evolved, the more we understood what immense potential the game had.
As for the hidden players? Well, there were a few overpowered players who never appeared in public and weren't part of any faction. One of them was hundreds of meters tall due to a hidden race he had, had the True class, and although his size gave us a headache, he started to shrink once he evolved from a Mountain Giant to a Titan.
He was one of the most powerful players in the game but there were others, like a player that had somehow evolved into a dragon, a demon who had a contract skill so powerful that it could enslave players in the game and still have them effective IRL, and a spirit that caused anyone in her vicinity to fall asleep and sleep in both the game and real life until the effect wore off.
Those players were both our greatest fear as well as our greatest desire but no matter how we searched, we never found them, they were just as impossible to find as the devs which caused some theories to form, and want people to only have them more.
One day, everyone above Tier 7 felt someone spy on them. This normally wouldn't have been worth much attention but unlike those below Tier 7, those above could feel that this person wasn't even in their Universe which instantly intrigued them.
The theory of alternate universes had long been confirmed and it wasn't even hard to accept considering our own unreasonable game. Many beings had already hit the max level of Tier 10 and were now searching for a way to break through that barrier and the fact that someone much weaker than them was able to travel between universes made everyone feel like this being had a big secret and might hold the opportunity for Tier 11.
The Tier 10s of many factions agreed on a temporary truce and worked together until they captured this being. We were also able to travel between universes but the cost was extremely huge and required thousands of Tier 10 mages to work together to open a breach.
From that, it could be seen that we were very far behind compared to someone who was barely a Tier 3 in terms of Universal travel which only further made us want to capture it.
For the moment, the hidden players of the House of Ur'gazoth and the apparently nonexistent game creators were forgotten.
*****
A/N- This was supposed to be a short 300-400 word extra chapter but it turned into a 900 word chapter.
If I feel like it, I will still consider this as an extra chapter and write another chapter today.