Immortal Druid

Forest air pressed against my lungs as I leaned back against the rough bark of a towering tree. I left the two cultivators to their sects for interrogation, trusting their methods would be far more thorough than anything I could manage alone.

“This seriously sucks… and here I thought I was imagining things.”

I tried to recall my parents’ faces, to anchor myself to something real, but all I found was a hollow blur, a smudge where warmth should have been. The absence didn’t even hurt the way it should have, and that frightened me more than anything else.

“Consequences, huh?”

It seemed my resurrection had not been perfect.

I thought about Nevle Drol Diurdhcra as I sifted through the thousand years of inherited memories that weren’t mine, yet somehow were. Forests I had never walked felt familiar. Creatures I had never seen felt like old companions. I should have been drowning in it, crushed beneath the weight of so many lives layered over my own fragile sense of self. Yet I wasn’t. I was intact. Functional. Calm, even. That calmness felt wrong, like a still lake hiding something vast and hungry beneath its surface.

“Nevle, come out. Let’s talk,” I called into the empty woods.

Silence answered me, thick and suffocating.

I pushed myself upright, jaw tightening as frustration clawed its way up from somewhere deep inside me. “I know you’re there. Stop hiding and listen to me. Let’s talk.”

The forest remained indifferent, leaves rustling softly as if mocking me. Something inside me snapped then, a fracture spreading through whatever composure I had left.

“Do you think this is funny?” I shouted, the words tearing out of my throat, raw and unfiltered. “I should be dead! I was run over by a truck, for gods’ sake. I felt it. I remember it. I was ready to go… I accepted it. And then I died again. This time more heroically than I’d ever hoped for. I even thought it was a decent ending. So why did you save me? Why?”

The echo of my outburst faded into nothing.

I staggered back a step, suddenly aware of how unhinged I must have sounded, yelling at something that refused to even acknowledge me. Yet the logic held. There was no scenario where I should have survived that Heavenly Tribulation.

But I did.

I had lived, I had found what little peace I could, and I had been content with that being enough. That acceptance hadn’t vanished; it lingered now as a quiet, unsettling truth. I didn’t resent being alive, but I couldn’t understand why I had been brought back against my will.

“That was the responsible thing to do,” I muttered, my voice dropping into something colder, sharper. “That was the Natural Order you’re supposed to uphold, isn’t it? Life, death, balance. You’re the druid part of me, the ancient wisdom, and the guardian of that order. So why interfere? Why break the very cycle you’re meant to protect?” The words sounded absurd even as I spoke them, and I let out a dry, humorless breath. “Right. Of course. Talking to myself. That’s where we are now.”

Again, there was only silence.

“Fine,” I said, bitterness creeping into my tone. “We’ll do this the hard way.”

I was about to literally kill myself just to prove the point, when the sun suddenly blackened like a dead star. The world seemed to hold its breath beneath it, the forest falling into an unnatural stillness. A chill crept down my spine, sharper than any pain I had just endured.

“You wanted to meet me, didn’t you?” a voice murmured, so close it felt like it brushed against my ear. “So, here I am.”

I turned and the world behind me had rotted into something unrecognizable. The ground was no longer soil but a writhing mass of thorn-covered vines, twisting and pulsing like veins beneath diseased flesh. Bones littered the expanse in grotesque abundance: cracked skulls, split ribs, entire skeletons of beasts and birds tangled together with unfamiliar remains.

At the center of it all stood a throne fashioned from decay, a monument of death woven with deliberate care. Seated upon it was a figure that did not quite belong, a silhouette sculpted from living vines into the shape of a man, as if nature itself had tried and failed to imitate humanity.

The thing wore a black-and-white suit, sharp and formal, painfully familiar in a way that made my chest tighten. “Nevle?” I called, the name leaving my mouth uncertainly.

“You seem to be misunderstanding something,” the figure replied, its voice calm, almost amused. “Oh, this is just getting better and better.”

It rose from the throne, and as it did, the vines forming its body withered and peeled away, collapsing into lifeless strands. What remained should have been a man, yet it lacked the most fundamental feature, a face.

I reached up, touching my ears, tracing the unnatural points at their tips. A quiet dread began to coil in my chest.

“Do you understand it now?” the silhouette asked, tilting its head. “You’ve never been Wally, Wo Li, or whatever you chose to call yourself. Fool. I can’t believe it took you this long to realize. You were so deeply entangled in my memories that you mistook them for your own.”

“I… I don’t understand,” I stammered, my voice faltering. “That’s… that’s impossible.” My knees gave out, and I collapsed onto the writhing ground. A sharp pain erupted behind my eyes, as if something inside my skull were being forcibly rearranged.

“Of course you don’t,” the figure said dismissively. “The memories you received were incomplete.”

The world shattered without warning. One moment, I was kneeling among vines and bones; the next, I stood before a convenience store bathed in harsh fluorescent light. The scene felt distant, like watching through a fogged screen, every detail slightly blurred and disconnected.

I saw “Wally” walking out of the store, a plastic bag in hand, completely unaware of what was about to happen. The low rumble of an approaching engine filled the air, growing louder, closer. A ten-wheeler truck barreled down the road. Then, just before it reached him, Wally moved. He stepped forward—no, he threw himself into its path.

The impact came and went in an instant. I flinched violently, breath hitching in my throat. When I blinked, the perspective shifted, and suddenly I was the one lying there, sprawled across the asphalt in a spreading pool of blood. The world felt heavy, suffocating, pressing down from all sides. I felt the fading warmth, the slowing heartbeat, the creeping edge of death I remembered all too well.

A sharp snap cut through everything. The illusion shattered.

I found myself back in that grotesque domain of vines and bones, the blackened sun looming overhead like a silent witness. The faceless figure stood before me once more, unchanged, unmoved. My breath came unevenly as I struggled to reconcile what I had just seen.

“What… was that?” I managed, my voice hoarse. “How did you do that? Who are you?”

The figure paused. For the first time, its form shifted into something complete. Features emerged where there had been none. A face took shape with unsettling clarity, with dark hair falling neatly into place, glasses resting on a composed, intelligent expression. Vines still coiled subtly along his body, but there was no mistaking it now. He looked exactly like the man from the memory.

Wally.

He adjusted his tie and looked down at me with quiet condescension. “It’s a long story. To make it short, there was a War for Supremacy a very long time ago. I lost.” He turned away, walking back toward the throne as though the matter were trivial. “You are my punishment. My prison.”

I forced myself to stand, my legs unsteady but functional, my thoughts racing faster than I could grasp. “Then what am I?” I demanded, the question tearing out of me with raw urgency. “If I’m not Wally, if I’m not Wo Li… then who am I? Am I even real?”

He settled onto the throne, resting his chin lightly against his hand, his posture thoughtful, almost bored. “I don’t know,” he replied. “That’s for you to decide.”

“I don’t get it,” I shot back, frustration boiling over as I stepped forward. “What about you? How are we connected? Why me? Why did I end up in this world? What do you even want from me? And what about Legacy World Online? Why does it exist as a game? None of this makes sense. What are you? Who’s behind all of this?”

“I don’t know,” he said again, his tone unchanged.

Something inside me snapped.

“You don’t know?” I barked, disbelief and anger colliding into something volatile. “Or you just won’t tell me? Because that’s not an answer. It’s a cop-out. None of this makes any sense, and you’re just sitting there acting like it doesn’t matter.”

“You are more foolish than I thought,” he said, his voice dripping with disdain. “You’ll have to find the answers yourself.”

The memories I had clung to and the life I thought I had lived slipped through my fingers the harder I tried to grasp them. Something refused to align, refused to settle into truth.

Then it clicked.

“You’re lying to me,” I said, lifting my head to meet his gaze, certainty anchoring my voice despite the chaos in my mind.

“And why would I?” he replied smoothly. “I speak only the truth.”

“No. You have to be lying,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “I know who I am, and I stand by it.”

Silence.

“What? Talk.” I demanded.

“You are my prison. That much is true,” he said at last. “You are the shadow cast upon the ground, the thing I cannot exist without. A vessel once meant to house my greatness, now reduced to… this.” His gaze dragged over me with open contempt. “A fiddling bacterium. A lesser life form. Pathetic.” He exhaled quietly, something almost nostalgic slipping into his tone. “I miss the days I awoke in perfection, when existence itself bent to my will. Now look at me—reduced, constrained, forced to coexist with something like you.”

My jaw tightened, but I didn’t interrupt.

“Yet you are also my path to redemption.” His voice shifted, losing its mockery, gaining something darker. “I have done terrible things far beyond what you can comprehend. I embraced the cruelty of this reality, indulged in it, shaped it. And now…” His eyes flicked upward, toward the blackened sun. “Now I am given a second chance. I cannot let you die. I will not allow it. More than that, Heaven will not allow it.”

A chill crawled down my spine.

“What do you mean Heaven won’t allow it?” I asked, my voice quieter now.

He raised a hand and pointed upward. “Do you see that?”

I followed his gesture. The dark sun loomed overhead, vast and oppressive, swallowing the sky whole.

“That,” he said, “is your misfortune.”

My breath hitched.

“When you first arrived in this world, it was no larger than a fist,” he continued calmly. “Insignificant. Manageable. But every time you tug at destiny, every time you resurrect someone who should have stayed dead, every time you assert your existence upon the natural order… it grows.” His gaze sharpened. “Every Heavenly Tribulation you survive feeds it. Every imbalance you correct shifts the burden onto you. You bring balance by taking misfortune upon yourself, allowing providence to flourish elsewhere.”

The weight of his words pressed down on me, suffocating.

“I imagine you felt it instinctively,” he added. “That urge to remove yourself from the equation. Admirable, in its own way, but futile.”

Before I could respond, he moved.

One moment, he stood at a distance; the next, he was right in front of me, his hand shooting forward with terrifying speed. I barely registered it before the vines beneath him surged upward, wrapping around his arm and halting him inches from my face. His fingers trembled there, so close I could feel the intent behind them. If they had reached me, they would have taken my eyes without hesitation.

He exhaled slowly, frustration bleeding into his expression. “It would have been so much easier… if it were just me.”

His face began to wither, skin unraveling into brittle leaves that drifted into nothingness. Beneath it, another form emerged. It was a silver-haired elf, eerily familiar yet undeniably different. I stared, my mind racing, trying to reconcile the shifting identities layered before me.

“Nevle,” I said, my voice tight. “What are you?”

The answer didn’t come.

Instead, I felt something else.

My body.

I looked down just in time to see my hand begin to unravel, flesh thinning into fragile leaves that crumbled at the edges. Panic surged as I flexed my fingers, watching them lose form, lose substance. My suit clung to a body that was no longer stable, reflecting the moment of my death with cruel precision.

“I was you,” Nevle said quietly. “An Earthling.” His gaze locked onto mine. “And you are going to become me.”

Darkness swallowed the world in an instant.

Night fell as if existence itself had been snuffed out. The black sun remained, looming larger than ever, its presence suffocating.

“The God of Creation has a sense of humor,” Nevle continued, his voice echoing through the void. “To place me in this body, to be toyed with by the likes of you. To force me into a life shaped by your choices.” His expression twisted, something feral creeping in. “I am no toy. I am no character bound by the rules of a video game. I have lived, just as you have.”

He stepped closer, the air warping around him.

“You wanted to know who I am,” he said softly. “Then listen carefully.” His eyes gleamed with something unhinged, ancient, wrong. “Never forget what is sealed within you. Never forget the monster that lurks in every heart. Never forget the chaos sleeping in your blood.” His lips curled into something grotesque. “Remember my name, you naive fool. Because one day, when everything collapses, when you have nothing left…”

He leaned in, his face inches from mine, his presence overwhelming.

“You will call for me.”

His skin warped, twisting into something monstrous, barely contained.

“And I will answer.”

A pause. A whisper.

“I am the Supreme Monster.”

I opened my eyes.

The world snapped back into place with brutal clarity. I lay sprawled across a tree branch, rough bark digging into my back, the forest stretching endlessly around me as if nothing had happened. My body was whole again, solid, real, but the memory lingered, sharp and undeniable.

I stared up at the sky, breathing slowly, forcing myself to anchor to reality.

“Yeah,” I muttered under my breath, bitterness creeping into my voice. “That settles it.”

I pushed myself upright, gripping the branch as I steadied myself, my mind no longer clouded by confusion but sharpened by something far more dangerous.

“Whoever sent me here…” I said quietly, my gaze hardening as I looked out over the forest.

“They’ve got a lot to answer for.”

Because whatever this was?

It fucking sucked.