Eterna was not a kingdom known for its warm embrace of outsiders, but neither did it cast them out entirely, instead it operated in that curious middle ground of tolerance without acceptance, where other races were not openly persecuted but also never quite welcomed into the inner sanctums of its society.

Because of this ambiguous stance, while non-humans were barred from inhabiting many of Eterna's core cities and institutions, they had been allowed, some might say permitted under cautious watch, to build settlements of their own within the kingdom's broader territory.

Over time, entire races had migrated into Eterna's boundaries, carving out spaces to call their own, each crafting cities that reflected their distinct cultures, customs, and identities.

The primary reason for this influx wasn't opportunity, or even diplomacy, but rather the absence of religious tyranny. Eterna was one of the few kingdoms where doctrine and faith did not rule with an iron grip.

Elsewhere, even where religion wasn't explicitly enforced, those who refused to adopt the dominant faiths often found themselves living at the edges of society, denied resources, protection, and dignity.

Worse still, faithless individuals were known to draw the attention of demons, entities that prowled the spiritual margins, always seeking to seize those without divine allegiance, dragging them into forms of torment so unspeakable that even the faithful whispered their names with dread.

In contrast, Eterna with its secular leanings and relative stability had become a strange sort of sanctuary, and thus, alongside its human population, it now housed numerous cities built by and for other races. Elves, dwarves, beastkin, halflings, and others had staked their claims here, and among these enclaves, none were more secretive or insular than the one Jacob now stood within.

Elvheim, the city of the elves was not merely a settlement, but an ecosystem carefully cultivated and guarded by a race that had never forgotten the traumas of the past, nor forgiven those responsible.

Though the elves of Elvheim did not raise arms or voices against humans, their hatred lingered in more subtle forms: in the tightness of their smiles, the formality of their words, the precision with which they avoided human contact while appearing to offer it.

The resentment ran deep, older than recorded history, and justified by one of the darkest events in known lore, the Great Elven Genocide. Tens of thousands of years ago, armies of men had launched a brutal campaign to claim the World Tree, a force of nature both mystical and eternal, sacred to the elves and to the balance of the world itself. The slaughter that followed had seared itself into the racial memory of the elves, and though the centuries had dulled the swords, they had not dulled the bitterness.

All of this made Henry's decision, or more likely his ability to bring Jacob here not only shocking, but borderline impossible to comprehend. This was no minor border town nor quiet grove of exiled druids; Henry had brought Jacob to the very heart of Elvheim, to its most sacred and protected site, the Imitation World Tree.

It stood before Jacob now like something out of myth, immense in scale and impossible to fully grasp in a single glance. Grown from a seed of the original World Tree, it was said to possess a fraction of its progenitor's power, and even that fraction was enough to make it one of the most potent natural artefacts in the kingdom.

Its trunk was thick and gnarled, its bark a rich, dark brown streaked with veins of gold and moss. The canopy above was wide and deep, its massive branches bending low under their own weight, draped in countless leaves of subtly varying green, some bright as spring, others dark as emerald, all shimmering faintly with life force and latent mana.

It exuded a quiet majesty that made Jacob instinctively lower his voice and slow his breath, as though loud movements alone might offend the tree's ageless slumber.

He stood still for a long moment, his thoughts receding into quiet awe, his earlier nausea forgotten.

This wasn't just a good place to find ambient mana.

This was perhaps the purest source of it available to anyone in the kingdom, and somehow, Henry had brought him here as if it were the most casual thing in the world.

But even the towering imitation of the World Tree wasn't what left Jacob momentarily speechless, it was what had been built around it that truly seized his attention, freezing him mid-step and forcing him to tilt his head slowly upward in disbelief.

Surrounding the ancient trunk and winding high into its vast branches was a sprawling network of structures, compartments of varying sizes and shapes, some stark white and others muted grey, all carefully affixed to the tree's immense girth and limbs as though they had grown from the wood itself rather than been nailed or forged into place.

Each of these chambers, roughly the size of modest rooms or studios, had walls constructed almost entirely of glass, impossibly clean panes that caught the filtered sunlight and scattered it like crystal, reflecting fragments of green and gold into the air.

The placement of these rooms felt oddly chaotic at first glance, but the more Jacob looked, the more he could sense an invisible order, a logic that perhaps only elves understood. He watched, somewhat entranced, as figures moved effortlessly between the compartments, their movements elegant and precise; some leapt from branch to branch with a confidence born of repetition, others dropped down entire levels without hesitation, relying on skill and timing alone to land smoothly on connecting platforms or walkways that looped around the trunk in wide spirals.

And then, a sudden shout broke through the gentle ambience of the place, loud, deep, and resonant, the kind of voice that seemed to crack the very air around it.

"Henry! Good to see you!"

The words had barely landed before a violent gust followed, sweeping through the clearing with such force that Jacob instinctively braced himself.

His clothes were whipped forward with the force of a sudden gale, and for a moment he wasn't just disoriented, he was physically pushed back, his feet dragging half a step across the ground. Bewildered, he blinked rapidly and glanced at Henry, who stood unaffected, then upward to search for the source of the voice.

And there he was.

High above, not merely among the upper branches but near the very top of the tree itself stood a man, his figure distant but unmistakably massive. Jacob could hardly make out his features from this range, but what he could sense was the pressure of mana, thick and commanding, radiating down from the treetop like invisible gravity. Even at this distance it wrapped around Jacob's chest like a weighted blanket, not oppressive exactly, but undeniable, the kind of strength that didn't need to announce itself.

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Then, without warning, the man jumped.

No hesitation, no chant or flash of magic, no aura burning to slow his descent. He simply stepped off the edge and fell, body upright, feet aimed toward the ground, arms loosely at his sides. Jacob's breath caught in his throat as he watched the figure plummet at an alarming speed, cutting through the air like a blade dropped from the heavens. The fall must have lasted a good twenty seconds, yet not once did the man falter or try to arrest his momentum.

And then he landed.

No explosion, no crater, no recoil. Just a soft, almost imperceptible contact with the earth as if the weight of his descent had been dispersed at the very last moment with a control so absolute that even the grass beneath his feet remained untouched.

Jacob stared in silence, stunned not by brute strength but by the sheer, impossible precision of what he had just witnessed. From what he could tell, the man hadn't even used mana or aura, he had simply mastered the mechanics of his own body so completely that even gravity obeyed his will.

"I got your message," the man said as he approached, his voice now calm and measured, "A little sudden to tell the truth."

And as he stepped fully into view, Jacob finally had a chance to see him clearly, not just his build or posture, but the way he moved, the way his presence filled the space. The man didn't walk like someone used to being feared, but like someone who no longer even considered the idea that he could be threatened.

There existed a curious and persistent stereotype that had somehow burrowed itself deep into the minds of those who wrote tales and sang songs about elves, a stereotype repeated so often across stories, children's books, and old legends that it had almost become accepted as truth: that elves were archers and mages by nature, inherently in tune with mana, physically frail, and by default lovers of peace, harmony, and everything gentle in the world.

None of it was true.

Not the slightest bit.

Elves, as Jacob had long since learned through extensive reading, were as varied in their vocations as any other race. Some became mages, yes, and others excelled with bows, but there were just as many who took up blades, spears, or hammers, training their bodies into weapons as formidable as their minds.

They thought as they pleased, lived as they pleased, and chose their own paths with the same autonomy, and occasional recklessness, as humans. There was no singular elven archetype, no defined "nature" that restricted them to grace and magic.

The second misconception, that they were inherently attuned to mana or "loved by it," was also false, or at least, misrepresented. Elves did have a higher capacity to absorb and process mana than humans, but not because mana was especially fond of them. Rather, it was nature that responded to them.

Nature, not mana, was the force that enveloped their kind, the trees, the earth, the wind, and even the smallest living organisms seemed to acknowledge the elves in a way that could only be called reverence. By some ancient account, their bloodline traced back to a being said to be born directly from the will of nature itself, an incarnation of the wild world, unshaped by man or god.

And then there was the third myth, the most dangerous one: that elves were peaceful.

They were not.

If anything, Jacob had come to view elves as one of the most quietly violent races in the world. Their strength wasn't just physical, though it was certainly there, and plentiful, it was cultural, ideological.

The elves had been waging what could only be called a holy war for centuries, an unrelenting crusade against what they called the "corruption of the modern races," a long and bloody effort to reclaim the world from those who poisoned the land, felled sacred groves, and drained the rivers dry.

Their war, though rarely spoken of in human cities, had no foreseeable end, and though their language for it was polished and wrapped in ancient rhetoric, the truth beneath it was simple, they thrived in war, not despite their bond with nature, but perhaps because of it.

And standing in front of Jacob now was one of them, not just an elf, but a man whose very presence embodied every truth behind the myths he had just mentally dismantled.

He was broad-shouldered, muscular without excess, his frame built like someone who had seen the inside of far too many battlefields. He wore a simple tunic that shifted lightly in the breeze, and his silver hair, thick, shoulder-length, and tied loosely at the nape caught the sunlight in a way that made it gleam like polished metal.

Jacob's heart skipped a beat.

The hair. That colour.

Silver.

It was not common. In fact, within the strict and deeply hierarchical structure of elven society, it was not just rare it was emblematic. The silver hair was a mark of lineage, a sign carried only by those born into the royal bloodline of the elven kingdoms.

Most of the royal family remained within their ancestral homeland, far from the shared territories of Eterna. But a few had been sent abroad, three siblings, if Jacob remembered correctly, diplomats or dignitaries, depending on who you asked. And the man standing before him, radiating control and strength in equal measure, had the hair of a king's child.

A royal delegate, not someone Jacob had ever expected to meet, much less rely on.

Jacob instinctively bowed, the gesture not just one of courtesy but of instinctive recognition, because aside from the overwhelming aura of strength that radiated from the man like heat from sun-warmed stone, there was another, subtler kind of pressure pressing down on him, the sort that came with authority not earned but inherited and wielded with practiced ease.

He kept his gaze low and said, in a voice that barely masked his unease, "I greet the prince."

Given the man's imposing build and bearing, the conclusion wasn't difficult to reach, of the three royal siblings who had been sent as delegates to Eterna, this had to be Prince Evendor.

The title alone would have been intimidating, but what made the prince truly remarkable, or perhaps, in Jacob's eyes, terrifying was the fact that he wasn't just a royal, but a warrior of rare distinction: a knight of rank zero and, simultaneously, a mage of the first rank. To master either path was a lifetime's work; to walk both and survive was something far rarer, the sort of achievement that belonged more to legends than living men.

Evendor, meanwhile, seemed entirely unfazed by the formality. He turned toward Henry with a grin that stretched wide across his face and said, in a voice so thunderously loud that Jacob winced and felt a sharp pain deep in his ears, "Ah, so this must be your little brother!"

Before Jacob could fully recover from the auditory assault, Evendor had stepped forward and delivered two solid pats on his back, affectionate, perhaps, by the prince's standards, but even those casual strikes carried such raw force that Jacob was nearly launched forward, his legs stumbling to keep him grounded.

"Easy now," Henry said with a laugh, casually catching Evendor by the arm and pulling him slightly away, "he's still got all his ribs, and I'd like to keep it that way. What about the favour I asked for?"

Evendor's smile faded just slightly, the lines of amusement smoothing into something more measured as he considered the request. "You should know it's not so simple," he said, his voice quieter now but still carrying that unmistakable edge of command, "Getting a human into the chambers beneath the tree… it won't sit well with the others. And there's a deeper risk, if the tree itself rejects him, it won't just be a matter of politics. He'll die."

The words hit Jacob like a bucket of ice water. He looked up sharply, a flicker of disbelief etched across his features. Dying? From rejection? What did that even mean? How could a tree, even one as powerful as this kill someone?

Henry, for his part, didn't look surprised. He simply turned to Evendor again with a shrug and said, "We'll talk more inside. Even if he can't enter the chambers, we can still use one of the auxiliary rooms, right?"

Evendor nodded after a moment's pause, and without further discussion, he stepped forward, reached for Jacob, and with the ease of someone hoisting a bag of flour grabbed him by the waist and lifted him off the ground.

"Wait….what—?" Jacob started to ask, but his confusion was short-lived.

Evendor jumped.

The world blurred into motion, and Jacob's startled shout followed them both as they soared upward, past twisting branches and drifting leaves, climbing the colossal height of the tree in a single, smooth leap that felt less like travel and more like defying the very laws of nature.

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