Strongest Among the Heavens
Chapter 265: Horribly Wrong

Chapter 265: Horribly Wrong

Sitting at a table, Kazi skimmed through a book and closed it shut, adding to the pile. Riku jogged up to him and exchanged the closed book for a new one. "Why did you come to the Gates Section?" Kazi asked while skimming the new book.

"Me and my team have decided to take a break from the Heavenly Tower to study at the University of Magic," Riku replied.

"Ah." This book was discussing the gates of the Enlightenment Era: when players from 1782 were summoned. A majority of the gates involved djinns and Arabic folklore. Names, main objectives, special objectives, he memorized everything.

"The semester is beginning very soon and some professors have already put out the syllabus. For Composition of Gates, we need to buy a couple textbooks."

"I bet the House of Wisdom sells them at a high price."

Libraries were stationed at the Old Mage Tower and Tower of University but, if what Kazi heard was correct, the House of Wisdom offered better shares of profit to the average person. Hence why many exclusives were here or there or nowhere.

"Yes." Riku sighed. "Way too expensive. Obviously, the quality is brand new but...yeah. Bare-minimum, you pay three hundred points for one textbook."

"Can’t joining a guild help mitigate the cost?"

"I prefer to be stay with my friends"

Fair enough. Guild contracts could be imposing. It was like choosing between colleges. Kazi closed the book and Riku dutifully took it away.

Riku returned five seconds later. "Oh, here’s a journal of a merchant. If you’re interested."

"Sure." Kazi took it and read it. Halfway through, he slowed down and narrowed his eyes. There were a lot of eras of the Heavenly Games. So many cults, so many guilds, and so much to learn. Up until now, he didn’t check arguably the biggest event to occur: the Second Heavenly War aside from what the gods did during that period.

"165 HE - July 20.

I wandered through the wreckage. Stall after stall, destroyed. Buildings reduced to rubble. Bodies, both human and beast, littering the streets. The screams of the injured and the mourning echo through the streets. Families torn apart, pets and animals and familiars turned rabid and dead, livelihoods destroyed in an instant.

I am a player turned historian and merchant. I know tragedy. But this...is something else.

Nobody expected the Nebulous Bazaar to be attacked by an eight-headed dragon."

Kazi stopped reading, eyes wide. ’The Nebulous Bazaar was...attacked? How!?’

"It escaped."

It.

It.

An eight-headed dragon.

What was it?

"Somehow, through some place, Yamata-no-Orochi escaped Gate 97 and arrived here."

Kazi wasn’t sure what stopped first: his moving thumb or his heart. "Yamata...no-orochi."

The representation of chaos? The primordial beast of Japan?

Yamata-no-orochi.

"I thought I was going to die. EVERYONE did. Because of the war, territories in the White Abyss were already dangerous and being unchallenged. So many of the big guilds were busy in the Heavenly Tower attacking one another and colonizing Gates. No one expected the Nebulous Bazaar to be nearly wiped from existence. Not like this. Not from a monster of that calibre.

Truly, it was a creature from HELL. HELL, I tell you. The eight-headed dragon swallowed magic and humans and gods. Its heads conjured all the elements and lay waste to everything. Its size surpassed that of the Heavenly Tower and the force of its wings ripped away flesh.

I’m trying to be calm. This is a journal and I am a historian. Writing stupidly and angrily is going to disrupt history. Warp the facts. But...still. I can’t write any other way.

I have seen much in my life. But after all the rumours, I can say this. There is something terribly wrong with the Heavenly Tower. Something that wasn’t there before."

Kazi read further and further. Unfortunately, the merchant-historian never expanded on that final remark. The merchant fell into despair.