Chapter 2

A tall man stood at the entrance of my shop, holding the crumpled commission letter I had thrown away—now smoothed out again—and reading it with careful attention, as though he had never seen it before.

His silver hair fell over his shoulders like moonlight. Like all members of the Vanir race, he possessed pale hair, snow-white skin, and a pair of emerald-green eyes.

Just as I remembered from years ago, when I had looked up at him beneath the altar, Freyr still resembled a god descended into the mortal world. Every movement he made carried an air of sacred grace. Yet his purity was entirely different from the radiant brilliance of Baldur, the God of Light.

At this very moment, however, his sharply arched brows were tightly drawn together, his displeasure written plainly across his face.

I had a strong feeling I would be dead within twenty seconds.

After a long silence, he lifted his head and looked at me with gemlike eyes.

“So it seems the contents of the commission were too dull for Miss Ina to tolerate.”

The corner of my mouth twitched involuntarily.

Suddenly, I recalled what Xia had said about him two years ago, her expression utterly numb:

“‘Bathed in holy light’? That’s only his appearance. He may be the Sun God, but everything about him feels cold. Try spending time with him—you’ll understand.”

I had always assumed she meant his personality was simply icy.

“Of course not,” I said quickly. “It’s just that the deadline is too short. I’m afraid I won’t be able to finish it.”

“Or is it that the client himself causes Miss Ina discomfort?”

“No, no—this has nothing to do with Lord Freyr,” I waved my hands hurriedly. “It really is just a matter of time.”

“Even if the payment is twenty million Vida, you would still refuse?”

“…Actually,” I said immediately, “I was joking just now. I have plenty of time.”

“Just you wait, Xia. Big Sister Ina will soon be riding five silver-winged dragons, ruling Idun Street and crushing Xia’s alchemy shop beneath my glory.”

I strode forward quickly and took the commission letter back from his hand. He smiled as he returned it to me, but when he lifted his eyes to look at me, surprise flickered across his gaze.

“It’s already finished?”

“Huh?”

“You’re Ina?”

“Yes.”

“What exactly is that guy trying to pull… was he lying to me?” His eyes narrowed slightly. Then he handed me a silver voucher. “This is the deposit. Use it to purchase the materials. I’ll come tomorrow to collect the finished item.”

I stood there in confusion, watching as he stepped into the air, mounted a golden-winged dragon, and departed.

For the first time, life felt utterly surreal.

I had actually received a commission from Freyr, one of the Twelve Principal Gods.

The Twelve Gods were a subject of intense attention across the six races and nine worlds. Their origins traced back to the time before creation itself.

In the beginning, the giants created the world and ruled over it. Later, under the leadership of Odin, King of the Gods, the Twelve Gods replaced the giants as rulers. The conflict between gods and giants escalated until it erupted into the legendary war known as Ragnarok—the Twilight of the Gods.

The gods were not destined to lose. But at the decisive moment, Odin’s younger brother, Loki, the God of Fire, betrayed them and killed Odin.

Odin’s life was bound to the souls of all gods. His death marked the end of the divine spirits, and with it, the end of that era—and that world.

The gods vanished.

Including the Fire God himself.

Yet before his death, Odin created a new world and allowed the gods, whose bodies had perished, to sleep for three thousand years.

During these three millennia, war between our people and the Aesir tribe never ceased. And now, three thousand years later, the Twelve Gods were gradually awakening once more.

Some said the future of the world depended entirely on which god revived first. The rebirth of Odin would bring unprecedented prosperity and peace, while the return of the Fire God would herald only devastation and ruin.

As time passed, the Twelve Gods began revealing themselves across the world. So far, only two had appeared within our tribe: Baldur, the God of Light, and Freyr, the Sun God.

The Aesir, however, already possessed five awakened gods.

The disparity in power between the two divine races was impossible to ignore. In the ongoing wars, we were undeniably at a disadvantage.

Tormented and invaded repeatedly by the Aesir, all our people could do was pray—that one day Odin would descend upon our lands and finally end the thousand-year conflict.

We never received Odin’s return.

Instead, we welcomed someone who could hardly be described as anything less than a savior—the Grand Archmage, Lan.

I glanced again at the commission letter. If the gloves were meant for Lan, it would have made sense. But Freyr—a High Priest—why would he need a mage’s gloves? And the materials listed were absurdly extravagant.

One item alone was a Niflheim Sapphire.

This mineral existed only in Niflheim, and less than two thousand kilograms were imported into the royal capital each year. Purchases were never made in fragments—the minimum was a whole gemstone, typically no lighter than five hundred grams. Because it originated from the world of ice elements, it possessed exceptional amplification properties for frost magic, and water mages usually mounted an entire gem atop their staffs.

Yet the commission explicitly required: twenty grams of Niflheim Sapphire, twenty grams of Muspelheim Ruby, and thirty grams of Helheim Diamond, all to be embedded at the base of the glove’s thumb.

In other words, I would have to spend over five hundred thousand just to purchase three five-hundred-gram stones—only to carve off tiny fragments for decoration.

And that was merely a fraction of the crafting cost. The alchemical materials weren’t even included yet. I knew next to nothing about alchemy, but even I recognized the words “Ginnungagap Fairy Soul Essence.”

No wonder Freyr had offered twenty million Vida as payment. The production cost alone would probably exceed ten million.

Even so, the profit would still be enormous.

And more importantly—completing a commission for a Principal God would send my ranking among the Divine Smiths soaring.

What I needed to do now was simple: scour the entirety of Idun Street at top speed, gather every required material, then coerce—through generous wages and shameless bribery—my workers into staying overnight. We would finish forging the so-called “Heretical God Gloves” before dawn, then reserve four or five hours for an alchemist to complete the refinement.

As for the alchemist… that would be Xia.

Her personality was unbearable, but her skills were undeniably first-rate.

Following this plan, I dispatched everyone in the workshop to collect the listed materials while I stayed behind drafting designs, carefully refining every structural detail of the gloves.

Four hours later—three in the afternoon—seven people returned carrying bags upon bags of supplies. I checked them one by one.

For once, my luck was astonishingly good.

Out of thirty-three required materials—including those needed for alchemical processing—they had obtained thirty-two.

“All right,” I said, standing up and wiping the sweat from my forehead. “What’s missing? I’ll go buy it myself.”

“Mo-Goldfish Oil.”

The moment I heard the name, I froze.

“There’s no Mo-Goldfish Oil on Idun Street?”

“None. Every shop says it’s sold out.”

It felt as though I had fallen straight into an abyss.

“Look over this draft first,” I said, handing them the design sheets. “Sort and refine the materials we already have. I’ll make a trip to Hena Village and be back soon.”

Grabbing my satchel, the commission letter, and the blueprints, I rushed out the door at full speed.

While sprinting through the air at full speed, I couldn’t help lamenting that nothing in this world ever came free. Never in my life had I imagined that in a place where almost anything could be bought, I would fail to find something as commonplace as Mokin fish oil — a product practically sold everywhere else.

Haina Village lay slightly east of Vanaheim. Many raw materials could be purchased there at much lower prices. However, because of its remote location — and because the citizens of the royal capital tended to be rather lazy — most people preferred shopping along the bustling Idunn Street instead.

Beyond Haina Village stretched the Haina Forest, a place that became particularly frightening after nightfall. By the time I reached the forest’s outer edge, dusk had already settled in, so I quickened my pace.

In truth, I wasn’t originally from Vanaheim. I had only moved here at the age of twenty-nine. Anyone who has never lived in the royal capital would understand the fear I felt at that moment — because any corner of the Vanir territory could be attacked by the Aesir at any time.

They could teleport.

Any Aesir god could ignore the immense resistance above the Ginnungagap Rift and appear directly within our lands. Vanaheim was home to the strongest of the Vanir gods, which was why no one had dared invade it so far. If the entire Vanir tribe were as strong as Vanaheim itself, I doubt the Aesir would still act with such arrogance.

Unfortunately, that was not the case.

I was born in an ordinary village of the Vanir tribe. I once had an older sister, an older brother, and a younger sister.

Since childhood, I had dreamed of becoming a mage. But given the environment I grew up in, that ambition was painfully unrealistic. My sister spent her days hunting and gathering materials in the mountains and forests, selling them cheaply to merchants who periodically arrived from other cities. Most of those merchants would then travel to the royal capital, where the materials were processed and categorized before being sold at exorbitant prices to extravagant alchemists and divine smiths.

The medicines, weapons, and metals forged or refined from those materials would eventually be purchased by the wealthiest individuals at prices tens of millions of times higher than their original cost — becoming tools for war or stepping stones toward royal favor and promotion.

And nine out of ten of those wealthy people were mages.

I had no real objection to this way of life. After all, those with ability had the right to live more comfortably and prosperously than others — provided they truly fulfilled their duty to protect the nation, or that we lived in an age of peace.

From childhood to adulthood, I had felt disappointment in this empire’s cruelty more times than I could count. Living far from the royal capital, I would gaze at that floating city — the highest suspended metropolis in the entire tribe. Above it flew long-tailed golden wyverns, giant whales, celestial deer… along with pavilions and castles drifting through the sky.

That world looked so distant, so dreamlike, that I often wondered whether the people living there could ever understand our suffering.

Shia had complained countless times that my personality was too gloomy, that I spoke too little — that I resembled the Aesir gods we both despised.

Being called gloomy and quiet, I could accept. That was simply the truth.

But being compared to those most vile and cruel beings in the world — that I could not forgive.

Even so, I reacted exactly the way she hated most.

I said nothing at all.

When I reached Heina Village, I bought the Mojin fish oil as quickly as possible and tossed the small dark-brown jar into my satchel. Sweat was already pouring down my body from the heat. I tied my hair up with a band, pulled my hat over it, and hurried toward Vanaheim on the opposite side of the Heina Forest.

But night fell much faster than I had expected.

Once darkness came, Heina Forest looked eerily similar to the backwoods near my hometown at night. When I was little, I had countless dreams of pairs of glowing dark-green eyes staring at me from the darkness, waiting for us to step beyond the village’s protective halo—Odin’s Blessing.

Just thinking about those memories sent a chill through my entire body.

I glanced again at the pitch-black forest. Dark silhouettes of trees swayed in the night wind, fallen leaves rolling and scraping against my calves. I shook my head, forcing myself to suppress the rising fear, and walked forward without looking back.

After a while, however, I faintly heard a rustling sound behind me.

I paused. My whole body tensed, stiff with dread, before I quickened my pace.

An illusion. It had to be an illusion.

I had barely taken two steps when a sharp rushing sound tore through the air behind me. I knew my chances were slim, but I still prepared to leap into the air and escape. Before my foot could even lift, a thunderbolt struck down directly in front of me. Startled, I stumbled backward—only for my heel to step onto something ice-cold.

At once, an extreme chill crept upward from my heel. Wherever it passed, sensation and movement vanished completely. The items in my hands fell to the ground, and my entire body seemed to turn into an ice sculpture, frozen in place.

The scene I least wanted to witness appeared once again.

Two flashes of silver light streaked through the air.

Two Aesir stood before me.

Those who lived in the royal capital might not realize what such lightning-swift silver flashes truly signified. But after seeing their appearance, anyone who still failed to understand their situation would have to be a fool.

The scene before my eyes overlapped with one from more than twenty years ago.

The same dark forest. The same night.

That person had not noticed my sister and me hiding behind the trees. Though she was also a woman, her appearance and style were completely different from ours. Her features were sharply defined, and she wore long, deep-red hair—darker than any shade I had ever seen besides my own, and so straight that I could not help staring at it. Her eyes and lips were both a deep blue. Her arms and legs were unusually long, her figure slender and astonishingly beautiful.

Yet there was no smile at the corner of her lips. Not even the slightest trace.

In one hand she held a book filled with strange writing; in the other, a staff that reached the ground. At that time, she was crouching on the earth, gently touching a pile of bones.

Yes—there was no mistake. It was a skeleton, and the skeleton of a phoenix.

Its long, slender tail bones dragged across the ground as though it had been dead for tens of thousands of years. Yet after she chanted another line of incantation, a deep green light began to radiate from the phoenix’s remains. Its skull slowly lifted, the empty sockets where eyes should have been turning hollowly toward us.

Then, like a corpse returning to life, it spread its wings and rose into the air. A chilling aura poured from it, so dense it seemed almost to devour the surrounding air.

I had never witnessed anything so awe-inspiring and terrifying. In that moment, I did not even have the strength to scream—I could only stand there with my mouth wide open.

At the same instant, the Aesir woman spun around and looked straight at us. A flash of green light passed through her deep-blue eyes, identical to the glow surrounding the phoenix skeleton.

My sister grabbed my wrist and turned to run.

A mass of blue light shot past our ears an instant later, slamming into the forest ahead and snapping a stretch of towering trees in half. The freezing sensation carried by that magic was exactly the same as what I felt now.

After we had run barely ten meters, my sister’s body suddenly lurched forward more than three meters. I saw a massive ice sword pierce straight through her back. Blood flowed for only a moment before the blade slowly dissolved into nothingness.

And now, the two Aesir standing before me overlapped perfectly with that woman whose eyes had flashed green.

One was a Grand Sorcerer. The other, a Demon Warden.

The sorcerer raised his staff, murmuring a spell under his breath as a sphere of lightning slowly gathered in his hand. The Demon Warden wore white gloves on one hand and black gloves on the other. With the black-gloved hand he held a box of violet metal filled with dozens of tightly packed test tubes. Using the white-gloved hand, he removed one tube, flicked open the wooden stopper with his thumb, and poured the swirling liquid inside into the lightning sphere.

The liquid did not pass through the sphere. Instead, the sphere itself expanded, its radiance growing ever more intense.

If I had not known what they were doing, perhaps I would have felt less afraid. But I had seen this scene countless times in my studies and in books.

A Grand Sorcerer assisted by a Demon Warden could erase me in an instant, leaving not even a corpse behind. Refined by alchemists, what remained could be turned into the soul-form of a Vanir—just as we extracted biological soul essences above the Ginnungagap Rift.

They were not here to kill for merit.

They were here to harvest materials.

As the sorcerer lifted his casting hand high above his head, my entire body trembled, and I squeezed my eyes shut.

Even through my tightly closed eyelids, I felt a blinding burst of firelight. Then came an overwhelming flood of red. Explosions roared; trees crackled as they burned. The ice encasing my body melted in an instant.

Moments later, the flames faded, and darkness returned once more.

The entire process lasted less than two seconds.

And yet—I was still conscious.

When I opened my eyes, I stared ahead in astonishment.

The two figures lay motionless on the ground, their bodies scorched by flames, showing no sign of breathing. A massive crater marked the earth beside them, scattered embers still flickering faintly within it.

I looked around. No one.

Then I raised my head.

A golden-winged dragon was flying toward Henna Village. Strangely, the dragon had four wings. The rider upon its back wore white robes, the hem of his clothing and his short, tousled hair whipping wildly in the wind. In the darkness of night, the color of his hair was difficult to distinguish, yet under the moonlight it shimmered faintly with a silvery glow.

I stood there, stunned, not yet recovered from the shock.

If he had not been the only person within my field of vision, I would never have believed that those two Aesir had been killed by him.

He was already far away—so far that he did not even descend to confirm the bodies.