They appeared within a dark tunnel as soon as they entered the white swirling vortex of light. At the end of the tunnel was a bright light.
It looked like they were moving really fast because there were white lights in the tunnel that blurred into a line. But it didn't look like they were moving fast because Yggdrasil was still huge behind them.
If they were moving so fast, Yggdrasil should have become smaller than it was, right? After all, they were moving away from it.
But that wasn't so, and Kelvin realized that soon after. He realized that they had left the hemisphere they were in before. Behind them was the true size of Yggdrasil, and it was larger than stars. In fact, it looked as large as a galaxy.
The tree was so large that its roots had penetrated stars and were siphoning energy from them. The stars in the sky had literally become grains of sand for it to be nourished.
He decided to use his Extraordinary Perception ability to make sense of what he was seeing and see better. But what he saw made him more confused.
According to Extraordinary Perception, what he was seeing was many small trees overlapped and constantly glitching. Their glitching was causing his head to pound as his mind tried to make sense of it.
Fortunately, Wrath came to his rescue. She said, "The Yggdrasil you're seeing right now isn't one tree. It is many trees in different spaces connected to each other in a way that made them superimpose on one another and appear as this size."
He nodded and looked away.
What she said made sense, but he couldn't begin to figure out how it was done. But he didn't bother with that too much. After all, he doesn't know how to become a god yet. When he becomes a god, he will bother with how Yggdrasil works.
His focus returned to the tunnel they were in and the light at its end. In less than a minute, they reached this light.
The whole world brightened instantly. The intensity was so bad that he had to close his eyes.
When he opened them, he was in another world.
Above him was a blue sky with white clouds. Beneath him was an ocean of trees. There was no mountain or lake or desert. The whole world was just trees.
He knew where they were immediately he saw this scene. He had seen it many times in the expedition briefing. There was just one significant difference between what he saw in the bubbles of information and what had appeared in front of him.
Aganju confirmed his suspicions when he smiled at the world below then and said, "Welcome to the Lignum world, my fingers. This is where we will crash for the next couple of years."
"And look, it seems the hosts have sent people to welcome us."
The sky was full of flying creatures flying straight for them. This was what was different from the images of Lignum he had seen before.
Their numbers had to be up to a hundred million. Maybe he was exaggerating. But it felt like that when the sky was full of creatures that it looked like a dark sea was trying to submerge the spacecraft.
Aganju said to them, "Prepare for battle."
Then the side of the spacecraft began to open to dislodge the invaders it was carrying into the poor world as if it was a disease carrier. If it was a disease carrier, then that disease is the Yggdrasil civilization.
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7 months ago, a green star had appeared in the Lignum world.
It had appeared suddenly. One moment, there was nothing in the sky; the next, there was a bright round object casting a green glow all over the world.
Unlike any normal star, the light it was producing was too bright. It was so bright that it was contending with the moon.
Another oddity about this star was that it was within the Lignum world, not above it in space like normal celestial bodies. This was definitely odd.
What finally clinched the oddness was the fact that this star was also present in the day. Day and night, it produced its light. It couldn't be touched or interrupted. It didn't go away, and it didn't take a break.
With these three features, no one could pretend that the star was natural and everything was alright. For once in the long history of the Lignum world, the sun and moon elves were of one mind.
They could agree that the star was odd. In fact, they were in agreement that the green star bore a world-ending calamity. Unfortunately, they couldn't agree on what to do about it and how to deal with it.
This division in opinion couldn't be resolved in a short time because the Great Mother of Life wasn't responding. The sun and moon elves spent months arguing and negotiating.
It was clear that an army had to be mobilized, but the problem of feeding and the problem of permission to cross the territory of nobles had to be ironed out first.
This tedious process is something that has become a part of their long life. It and their pride were difficult to set aside in a short amount of time even though the world could end tomorrow.
Fortunately, they had a period of months to make a decision and come to some sort of agreement. The Elven Kings ordered the whole world to be mobilized against the enemy. Their words were law, so the world was mobilized.
However, the whole world is very large. The world was united, and everyone was willing to heed the call of the kings. But not everyone was strong enough to reach the position of the green star in time for it to dislodge the calamity it was carrying.
Even so, there were about a hundred million that managed to reach the green star in time. Half of them were flying creatures, and the other half were land creatures.