Chapter 1: The Dawn of the Jungle
Maybe all the people who live in the sun on this continent are a little afraid of the forest, but this "forest" does not refer to the kind formed by the dense growth of our common trees, the trees that compose it may be nearly 100 meters high from the ground to the top, but the slightly whitish trunk has no side branches or protrusions, as if the stone pillars are artificially polished, and the dense canopy of round leaves supports each other, stacks, and entangles each other, completely obscuring the sky, no matter how much the wind toress it, there is no gap. The most peculiar thing is the change in the leaves deep in the forest: the front is still green but the back is black, and the leaves at this time completely block out the sun, but when night falls, the opposite is completely true – even the stars in the sky can be faintly seen through the leaves. Because of the relationship between the strange leaves, although the sun is shining outside the forest during the day, the forest is shrouded by the canopy, but the five fingers are not visible; at night, especially when the moon is in the sky, the moonlight shines through the hazy canopy of the trees, and the giant trees are like many white arms with open palms to support the canopy under the silver light. "White Night Forest" is the name given to this forest by the merchants, "the forest is separated by the world, the day is like night, and the moon is like the rising sun", so the bard who saw this scene sang. But it seems to be just a strange forest, why are people afraid? It probably has a lot to do with the reason why it appears.
Even children who have never seen the world will know from their parents the story of the jungle, the scar or curse left by a great war between two different civilizations long ago. The cause of the war has been divided to this day, the countries that use magic and the countries that worship science have swords against each other because of their respective ideas, countless lives have disappeared in the whirlpool of war, and both sides have poured all their strength into destroying each other, and the final decisive battle has been launched in this place that is now the White Night Forest, and the outcome of the battle directly determines whether a civilization will disappear forever on this continent. The desire to survive and the great sacrifice have long since made people irrational, and the impermissible magic and forbidden technology have been unreservedly invested, and even the kings of both sides have come to the front to reap the fruits of victory themselves, but everything has come to an abrupt end here.
No one knew exactly what was going on in this battle, and all of a sudden all of a sudden all contact with the battlefield was cut off. How many days passed, and the soldiers waiting for the order to support the front, the children who hoped that their parents would come home, the wives who were looking forward to the return of their husbands, and the old people who had no young people at home, all looked in the direction of the battlefield, hoping that the figure of the king would appear on the horizon and lead the army back in triumph, or that the thousands of troops of the enemy country would cover the whole country with the shadow of death, but nothing. When the impatient people who decided not to wait any longer came to the battlefield to look for themselves, they saw that the battlefield that had been originally a plain had long been covered with endless forests, and no matter how they shouted in response, there was only silence, no smoke, no wreckage, no army, only another group of people from the magical realm with the same purpose to look at them.
Just as everyone was about to enter the forest to continue their search, their king suddenly appeared in front of everyone as they helped each other out of the forest. The two were badly wounded and did not return to their country alive, and when they died, only one thing was confirmed from their mouths - there were no survivors. With the death of the king, this war ended with a mystery, in fact, it ended in time, the methods used by both sides to destroy each other are very efficient, and it is very likely that there will be no living people in this world if they continue to fight. The sorcery of magic, the advanced technology, and the people who wield them have vanished everything that has to do with the war, as the people who have long been exhausted by the brutal war have accepted the end, leaving only a dense forest like a graveyard to tell everyone not to forget what happened here. Soon after, the world ushered in a new dawn, hatred will not disappear easily, after all, everyone has a blood debt directly or indirectly, but more people are willing to put aside hatred and join hands to continue to survive in this world that has become devastated by war, and two different civilizations are reborn in the ashes of war.
With the passage of time, civilization has been revived, and the jungle has gradually changed from a sad place to wake up the world, and the original purpose was very simple, some people entered the jungle just to find the relics of their relatives, although they found nothing but discovered the unique form and characteristics of individual towering trees. In the village of Dusk, the village closest to the jungle, a merchant accidentally learned about it and managed to take branches and graft them onto other small trees, and soon the same variety, but much smaller, was cultivated and sold to wealthy people as a rarity. The canopy of the tree can shade the sun during the day and transmit light at night, and the branches that emit a faint silver light in the moonlight make it get the reputation of "moonlight", and many rich people who live in the courtyard of the deep house have a soft spot for it, and the moonlight tree soon became a famous product of Dubian Village, and even the silhouette of the original form of the moonlight tree is used as the symbol of the village. Soon, the towns around the forest and even further away could see the figure of the moonlight tree, and what was originally from the land of sorrow and even called a tombstone was given by the merchants with absurd meanings and titles such as "a gift from the ancestors to the next generation", "the watchfulness of the heavenly relatives in the mortal world", "the guardian of the moon god", etc., so that those who first mastered the resources of these tree species made a lot of money, and they would even hire people to guard the "source" and settle those who raised objections to the "disrespectful behavior" of selling trees.
The Moonlight Tree incident gave birth to a new class, the "Forest Hunter" After all, the pain of war has not completely disappeared, many families have lost the means of making a living, this kind of occupation that seems to be no danger just to try their luck in the jungle is really no threshold, as long as they are brave enough and even women and children can do it, the client will also have full authority to take care of the supplies needed during the period, food and clothing are not worried, this industry really allows many people who are dying of starvation to survive, and some forest seekers who have no way out and have the courage to step into the unknown territory and successfully find spiritual comfort for others even gain respect and social status。 There were also many who never returned, but no one would weep for the end of their friends dying in the war, or for those who were left at home, and it was more desirable to believe that this was the purpose of those who had never returned, than to think about whether there was any potential danger in the woods.
The good remuneration has led more and more people to join the forest finder industry, but the merchants do not have so much time to receive the constant visiting forest seekers, and there are even forest seekers who attack their peers in the dense forest for personal gain. With more and more problems to solve, Omadine, a business empire that saw this, spearheaded the creation of a treehouse dedicated to foresters and employers With the help of the connections of the National Chamber of Commerce, branches have been set up in various towns, all of which are based on their location, using technology or magic to exchange information, as long as the forest finder who has registered information in the treehouse can easily select and receive all the commissions published by the employer in the treehouse, and the completed commissioned content only needs to be confirmed by the receptionist of the local treehouse to receive the corresponding remuneration, which greatly saves time compared to going back and forth to the location of each client. As time passed, more and more people liked this convenience, and the functions of the treehouse became more and more comprehensive; Unified supply, forest hunters can even get a map of some areas of the dense forest issued by the tree house, and according to the quantity and quality of the commissioned completion to improve their status level in the tree house, and later the tree house also formulated corresponding specifications for registered forest seekers and included them in the grade evaluation, it can be said that the emergence of tree houses has made forest seekers, a profession that only refugees can engage in, really come to the foreground, and even forest seekers wearing high-level tree house badges have become the idols of many children
It's not just people who have changed, but towns with treehouse branches have also developed rapidly due to the large number of people moving around, especially those towns that are closer to dense forests, so treehouse's high-level staff have become guests of honor for many local officials. The rapid development of the forest hunter industry group even touched the sensitive nerves of politics, so the prescient head of the Omartin Chamber of Commerce, Yul Leding, together with the other four heads of the other four chambers of commerce in his country, quickly made the treehouse separate from Omartin and became a neutral organization, and each country could share the resources of the treehouse and have the right to tax and law and order all the treehouses in the territory. However, to maintain the operation of the entire treehouse network, it is actually up to who has the money, the most well-connected, and who has the right to say, and Omartin still has the initiative to influence the treehouse as a commercial country, and other countries are aware of it but are helpless.
In this way, the world slowly recovered from the devastation of the Great War, and the pain of the past gradually became memories and words in books, leaving only the jungle here to prove that the history was not false. The Land of Sorrow that appeared out of thin air is still unknown to various people, but rumors and fortune continue to attract countless people to ignore warnings and unknown dangers and enter it, until a sudden change occurs.