I Found a Door to the Elven Realm

Chapter 199: Crying Over the Past

The Totem had solved this problem the same way a prisoner with a life sentence and too much free time would. It stopped doing things with its own body and started making other things do them instead.

At first the proxies were simple. Bacteria-level organisms that the Totem could grow from its own root network and send to the surface to collect data. But over millions of years the proxies got more complex. Insects, then larger creatures, then things that could breed and evolve on their own while the Totem steered them from below like a kid playing a real-time strategy game except the game board was an entire continent and each round lasted a hundred thousand years.

It built its own ecosystem from scratch while stuck underground.

Eren was starting to understand why no other life had developed independently on Aradne for so long. Nothing could compete with a brain that had been designing organisms since before multicellular life was even a concept anywhere else on the planet.

The cute little tree that he’d known in the elf village, the one the elders prayed to every morning, the one that generated the protective barrier and made the experience system work in that region? That was a finger puppet. One single root pushed up through the soil and grown into a harmless-looking tree so the Evon system would classify it as a regional Totem anchor instead of recognizing the real thing hiding kilometers underground.

The entire village had been living around a decoy. Two hundred years of prayers and festivals and offerings to a stick that the actual creature had grown the same way a person might tape a cardboard sign to their front door.

His stomach dropped and he pulled his hand off the root. Eight seconds this time. His nose dripped blood onto his collar and his head felt like someone had shoved a hot needle through the back of his skull.

Fury pressed his side against Eren’s knee without saying anything. The wolf had figured out that post-vision Eren needed about two minutes of silence before he could walk straight.

"..it’s been running the whole region from underground for millions of years," Eren muttered while pinching his nose shut with two fingers. "The tree we all prayed to was a puppet. Like a scarecrow. Except the scarecrow was connected to something the size of a city buried under the soil."

He went back three days later. And the day after that. And again two days after that because the visions were pulling at him now, each one picking up exactly where the last one left off like episodes of a show he couldn’t stop watching even though the content was making him feel sick.

The tenth visit was the one that broke open.

Fifteen seconds of contact. Both nostrils bleeding at the same time. A pressure behind his left eye that scared him enough to almost let go but whatever was in the root was pulling him forward, demanding he see the next part and he held on for three more seconds that felt like three hours.

Aradne had elves once. Not a village worth. An entire civilization with cities and roads and a kingdom that stretched across the continent. Hundreds of thousands of them living and building and growing for generations while the Totem watched from underneath every step they took.

Then the visions got ugly.

Groups of elves disappearing underground. Whole settlements going quiet overnight. Eren watched the elf kingdom hollow out over centuries like a termite colony eating a house from the inside. The population vanished from the edges inward and nobody on the surface seemed to understand why until it was too late. Some of them died in the root network. Some of them were changed into things Eren didn’t want to think about, half-elf and half-bark hybrids grown in underground chambers for purposes his brain refused to process even through the compressed blur of a million-year-old memory.

It had eaten an entire civilization over centuries and nobody ever figured it out because the thing doing the eating was literally the ground they walked on.

How do you fight a floor?

No elves remained on Aradne. Not because they’d left. Because the thing under the ground had used every last one of them up.

And then the vision jumped forward and showed him the part about skills.

The Totem hadn’t just learned abilities from the Evon system the way Eren and Emily and every other living creature on this planet did. It had studied the system’s architecture for millions of years through its proxy experiments until it understood the framework well enough to build new skills from scratch and inject them into the system like a hacker adding lines to someone else’s source code.

Door Master was one of them. The skill that opened portals between universes, the one his grandfather had gotten decades ago and passed down through the bloodline, the one that had dropped Eren into an elf village bathroom six months ago and changed his entire life. That wasn’t a natural system reward. The Totem had designed it and planted it in a specific family line as part of a project that went back longer than Eren’s entire family tree.

The Clone skill too. The Legendary ability that had created a copy of himself who lived and fought and died alone in this forest for thirty-eight days. That was engineered by the same root network buried under this ground.

The village barrier. The safe starting zones. The experience distribution system that made growth possible in this region. All of it was the Totem’s architecture, designed and installed and refined over ages through methods the system itself couldn’t detect because the Totem had spent longer learning the system’s vulnerabilities than most species had spent existing.

Eren ripped his hand off the root and fell backward onto the ash.

His ears were ringing and both nostrils were streaming blood and something warm was leaking from his left ear too. The headache was so bad the edges of his vision had gone white. But the pain wasn’t the worst part.

The Totem had made his skills. It had designed his class. It had built the door that brought him here. Everything he’d thought was luck or destiny or the system rewarding him for being brave or smart or whatever story he’d been telling himself for six months was just a creature in the ground assembling a product.

Everything was planned.

He lay in the ash for a full minute before he could sit up.

"..this whole time," he said out loud to the burned forest around him. His voice was shaking and he hated that it was shaking. "The whole time I thought the system was giving me things. Rewarding me for grinding and fighting and nearly dying every other day. And it was all that thing in the ground just.. building me. Like I was a character in its game."

Fury was at his side instantly. The wolf pressed his entire body against Eren’s leg and whimpered low in his throat. [Your ears are bleeding. We leave now.]

"One more minute."

[Now.] The wolf grabbed the hem of Eren’s pants with his teeth and pulled.

Eren didn’t argue. He let Fury lead him away from the ruins while the dragon kept breathing its slow ancient breaths forty meters from the blackened trunk.

He went back three days later because he had to know how it ended. Or how it was ending right now.

The vision showed him the rest and the rest was worse than everything that came before.

The Totem wanted a body. Not a tree body because its own root structure was permanently rejected by the Evon Universe no matter how many disguises it wore. It could hide behind the Totem classification and it could build skills and barriers and entire regional systems but it could never level up. It could never gain stats through combat or evolve through the Evon framework the way a biological creature could. The system treated it as an illegal object, something that shouldn’t exist here and every time it tried to grow beyond its anchor role the universe pushed it back down.

So it needed a vessel made of real flesh and blood and bone that the system would accept. And the vessel it had spent decades engineering through careful bloodline manipulation via Door Master, through generations of patient waiting for the right genetic combination, through filling that vessel with the most powerful custom-built skills it could design and pushing it toward a level threshold where the body would be strong enough to contain a mind that had been growing for millions of years..

That vessel was Eren.

I was being fattened up. Like a chicken on a farm.

One moment he would have been himself and the next he’d be gone and something that predated human civilization would be walking around wearing his face. That was the plan. That had always been the plan.

But it had failed. Eren had never reached Level 50. The experience lockout had stalled everything and the Totem had either run out of patience or something had forced its hand because the dragon had come.

And the dragon wasn’t an accident either.

The village burning, the attack, the destruction that had driven two hundred elves across a portal to a Turkish farm. Eren could see the threads of that plan stretching back at least a hundred years in the compressed vision. Territorial manipulation, prey species redirected, conflicts engineered between the dragon’s mountain and the lowland creatures until the dragon had no choice but to fly south. The village burning wasn’t a disaster the Totem had failed to prevent. It was a controlled demolition to bring the backup vessel within root range.

Because the dragon’s body was bigger, more durable and already at a level so high the Evon system would accept it as a peak organism. If the Totem couldn’t have Eren it would take the dragon instead.

And it was doing it right now.

The Totem wasn’t dead. It wasn’t sleeping. It wasn’t waiting to regrow the way Emily had hoped and Eren had wanted to believe. It was slowly and methodically pushing itself into the unconscious dragon’s body through the soil, root by root, cell by cell. The dragon wasn’t resting near the World Tree ruins. It was being eaten by them from below.

The vision gave him one last thing before the pain became unbearable. Not a name the Totem had chosen for itself but more like a signature woven into everything it had ever built. Every skill, every barrier, every manipulation across millions of years carried the same pattern and when Eren’s brain tried to translate that pattern into something he could understand it came back as two syllables. Nisann.

He pulled his hand away and everything came out of him at once.

Blood from his nose and ears and the sound that left his throat was somewhere between a scream and a sob. He fell sideways into the ash and his body convulsed once before he got himself onto his hands and knees.

The last seconds of the vision were still burning behind his eyes.

Emily’s mother Ember. Level 150. The strongest elf the village had produced in maybe a thousand years. She’d gone north and nobody ever saw her again. Emily had carried that shame and loss her entire life, had built her whole personality around being the daughter of a woman who abandoned her family.

The vision showed him where Ember actually went. Underground, pulled into the root network and taken down to chambers that Eren’s brain didn’t want to picture.

And Henner too. The old hunter who’d raised Emily alone after her mother disappeared. He hadn’t wandered off into the forest the way everyone assumed. He’d been pulled back underground but not by choice.

And the elf villagers who had vanished over the centuries. The hunters who went deep into the forest and never returned. The elders who used to tell stories about how the village once had four or five times as many people and nobody could explain where they all went. The missing and the dead and the mourned for generations.

All of them were in the ground. Every single one of them had been taken or used or changed by the thing that the village had been praying to and dancing around and offering gifts to every morning and evening for as long as anyone could remember.

Eren’s face was in the ash of the memories and he started crying.