I Was Reborn in Another World, But I Awoke Inside a Corpse

Chapter 139: Notes of Herodotus

Isaac stepped into the Royal Root Archives, buried deep beneath the lowest reaches of Yggdrasil's massive roots.

The air was dense with age and silence—the scent of cedar bark, old ink, and polished memorywood curling through the chamber like an invisible mist. The floor beneath his boots was smooth, formed not from stone or tile, but grown into shape—living wood shaped by centuries of patient elven craftsmanship.

Shelves lined the walls like ribs in a great beast—towering stacks of bark-bound scrolls, vine-etched slabs, and ancient leaf-paged tomes. No system messages greeted him. No magical lights flickered into place. This wasn't a place of spells or enchantments.

It was something older.

Scholarly. Sacred. Still.

The elven attendants had already withdrawn at Aelira's command, leaving Isaac alone in this forgotten cathedral of knowledge.

He wandered in silence, his fingers trailing across carved spines and moss-covered shelves. These weren't spellbooks. Not manuals or training records. He passed memoirs of dead kings, battle logs from ancient wars, philosophical transcripts, and diplomatic correspondence recorded by high scribes long turned to dust.

But none of it was what he came for.

And so, he narrowed his focus.

"[Soulpiercer Sight – Rank A] – Activate."

His vision shifted instantly.

What had once been a quiet archive shimmered beneath a different layer of truth—magic woven into the very grain of the wood, residual enchantments half-forgotten, hidden sigils glowing faintly beneath dust.

There—near the back, almost swallowed by the shadows at the farthest end of the shelves—a faint pulse of hidden magic.

He followed it.

It led him to a worn and misshelved volume, coated in a thin layer of bark-dust, its title completely eroded to the naked eye. But with his sight, the true script revealed itself beneath a false illusion:

"Notes of Herodotus."

His brow furrowed.

The magic on the book was clever—not to destroy, not to trap, but to mislead. It projected false information to anyone who opened it, rewriting its contents in real time with sanitized legends and harmless fairy tales.

It was a historical decoy.

But Soulpiercer Sight sliced through the illusion, revealing the true ink beneath the mask.

He opened the first page.

And began to read.

What he found inside wasn't poetry or myth.

It was history.

Real. Brutal. Unfiltered.

"This world is called Terra. It is but one of many."

"The World Tree—Yggdrasil—connects countless realms. Its roots span the void between worlds. Through these roots, the strong reach the weak. Through these roots, colonization begins."

Isaac's hands tightened slightly on the edges of the tome.

"Each world has gods. But not all gods are equal."

He turned the page.

"The gods of Terra are weak. So weak, in fact, that by the standards of higher realms, they barely qualify as deities at all. Their domains are shallow. Their influence, thin. Their bodies, fragile."

Another page.

"But Terra is vast. Rich. Alive. A world brimming with essence, resources, and most importantly—faith."

Isaac's eyes narrowed.

"Gods—no matter how powerful—can still grow stronger. The faith of mortals fuels them. Empires rise around belief. The more believers, the greater their reach."

"And so, the gods of stronger worlds look upon Terra not with scorn, but with hunger."

"They send messengers, not avatars. Rarely can a god cross over directly—the stronger they are, the more bound they are to their origin world. They can only reach Terra in fragmented forms: avatars, heralds, relics."

Isaac felt a chill in his spine as he turned another page, the ink growing darker, the script sharper.

"This is not a war of swords."

"It is a war of worship."

"Some gods who cross into Terra come in peace. They teach. They guide. They share. But others—selfish, ruthless, insatiable—take what they can and twist mortal faith into weaponry."

He flipped through records of divine incursions. Wars fought in the name of gods that didn't even bleed. Cities built on borrowed miracles. Entire nations rising under the banners of Olympians, Asgardians, Celestials… and more.

But one idea repeated—again and again, through many scribes' hands:

"This world does not belong to them."

"But they are trying to take it."

Isaac closed the book slowly, the last page still trembling faintly under his hand.

There were no system logs here.

No rewards.

No quests.

Only the weight of truth.

He leaned back, eyes scanning the quiet archive, and thought:

"The gods I knew… were never stories."

"They were always real. Just out of reach."