Chapter 3: The White Night Cataclysm

Since Treehouse began to manage the forest finder industry, one thing that has gradually attracted the attention of the treehouse hosts is that there are many commissions that have been received and have not been rewarded until the specified period of time, and the forest finders who have received the commissions have not appeared from other treehouses since, so it can be said that these people have disappeared in the jungle with the commission.

In the past, for those who did not return, everyone initially thought that they just did not want to live alone and chose to reunite with their deceased relatives, and then there were rumors of colleagues attacking each other for profit, and the missing forest seekers were often alone, so no one really took it seriously. But sixteen years have passed since the war, and as more and more people have volunteered to join the foresters, the treehouse has been recorded, and when the receptionists of each branch report all the information about the missing to headquarters, the managers find that the number of missing people since the beginning of the record is far greater than expected, and even one out of every five people who enter the jungle never returns.

The management of the treehouse, perhaps the first to feel the dangers of the jungle, held a special meeting in Omartin, the birthplace of the treehouse, to discuss whether the continued issuance of forest hunter status to the general public should be banned, but the proposal was opposed by representatives of several of the treehouse's major funders. Just when the discussion on this issue reached an impasse, the emergency contact of Treehouse's branch in Dubian Village ended it all.

Unlike the cautious Queen of Atra, the similarly ruined Milai have always had a positive attitude towards exploring the jungle. Although Yago, the capital of Milley, was still a highly mechanized city in its pre-war appearance, most of the people who mastered these manufacturing skills disappeared into the depths of the jungle with the war. Unlike the Atra, the Milai did not have the ability to manipulate magic, so the Milai made a variety of handy tools and weapons for construction and self-defense, which were in some ways comparable to magic, but with the disappearance of many technologies, they now had to revert to more primitive methods. After getting used to the convenience brought by technology, this made the Millai people very uncomfortable, so in the treehouse, the Milley Academy of Sciences issued a variety of high bounty commissions for entering the jungle to find lost technology, and soon occupied most of the country, as long as a bounty is completed, it is enough for an ordinary family to eat and dress for half a year, although there are many people who accept the task, but there are very few results that really satisfy the Academy of Sciences.

On this day, a forest seeker who just wants to eat three meals accidentally causes a disaster. As usual, he accepted the commission from the Academy of Sciences for a week, and then walked deep into the dense forest, where there was no sign on the map of the treehouse, only the area he was familiar with, and many veteran forest seekers had this kind of "private" area. But perhaps because he had drunk a little more than usual at the Treehouse Tavern before leaving, he deviated slightly from his route and was already dark by the time he reached his destination. Just when he was about to set up camp, he suddenly noticed a white light in the woodland not far away, and his curiosity drove him to follow the light, only to see a small piece of land emitting a faint white light, one of which was like a tentacle slowly stretched down the ground to the nearest tree, when the light touched the root of the tree, the whole tree became tall and straight with a speed visible to the naked eye, the trunk gradually turned white in the moonlight, the crown became almost transparent, and even the stars in the sky could be faintly seen. Yes, this lucky forester may have been the first to see first-hand the transformation of an ordinary tree into a moonlight tree.

A veteran forester, he quickly recovered from his astonishment, and what attracted him even more was the ground that was still glowing white, and he walked over to dig through the shallow soil, and in a few moments he came across a metal corner, and a faint light was radiating from the gap in the corner. Continuing to clear the surrounding soil along this corner, a rectangular black box inserted diagonally into the ground appeared in front of him, which seemed to be made of metal throughout, and there was a pipe at the bottom of the upturned end that seemed to be connected to something downward, and he dug down again, and the pipe was very long and could not dig the other end. Undoubtedly, this artifact that can transform ordinary trees into moonlight trees will definitely bring boundless wealth to the discoverer, but there is no basis for such a reward, and perhaps it is a good choice to bring this metal box back directly. So he drew his dagger and prepared to cut through the pipe and drag the box out completely.

That night, all the people in the towns on the edge of the dense forest saw that there was a sudden white light rising into the sky in the forest, and the original night was as bright as day, but this spectacular scene could not hear a sound, and the white light that erupted into the air scattered like raindrops, and then all the places bathed in light and rain, the shape of ordinary trees quickly changed into moonlight trees, and where there were no trees, the moonlight trees would also break out of the ground, this strange scene was recorded by the treehouse branch of Dubian Village, and quickly spread all over the world with the communication network of the treehouse。 When the morning sun came again, the people here did not see a ray of sunlight again, and the dense moonlight forest flooded all the surrounding areas like a flood that burst the embankment, and continued to stretch in all directions. The panicked Milai people used all known methods to destroy the crazy trees, but all failed, the Moonlight Tree grew and transformed ordinary trees far faster than it was destroyed, and in less than a month the dense forest had flooded several cities approaching the border of the capital Yago, and the Milai people, who had just gained some respite from the end of the war, were inexplicably in a desperate situation again. Just when the people of Milai were at a loss in the face of the sudden growth of the dense forest, Queen Atra conveyed a message to the emperor of Milai through the treehouse: immediately cutting down all the moonlight trees in the territory that were used for commodity circulation was the only way to stop the forest from spreading.

In the early days, the Moonlight Tree also entered the Atlas as a best-selling item, and the people of Atlas, who could use magic, felt the strange energy of the Moonlight Tree and brought it to the capital to present it to the queen. As a wise sage with profound mana, Sharon Althea felt the strange sensation of the sapling in the hand of the messenger standing below just sitting on a high throne, but he didn't know why. There was no record of this tree in the town, and at the suggestion of the elders of the Law Society, she sent the sapling to the Spiritual Church in the Sacred Grove to the west of the capital. There were many people in the church who had gone to the battlefield to look for the king, and they all felt unspeakably uncomfortable with this sapling—they were alive but alive, just like the king who walked out of the jungle that day.

"There must be hidden dangers in the circulation of such things as commodities" Queen Aisya expressed her concern to the Emperor of Milley, and hoped that the tree would not be circulated as a commodity, but unfortunately the councillors of Milley who had supported her views were later bought by Omartin's merchants with money. The Moonlight Tree was so popular that it was planted in towns bordering Alterah and Millai, but the Queen's insistence prevented the tree from making its way into Atlas. When the white light of the night passed, the people of Atra felt the mutual attraction between the rapidly growing Moonlight Tree and the Commodity Moonlight Tree, and they quickly destroyed all the commodity trees in the territory by magic, and the Moonlight Tree that had spread in the territory of Atra stopped growing. At the same time, the trees that grew wildly in Milai destroyed all the communication lines laid, but fortunately, the treehouse was used as a neutral agency to communicate with a part of Atlas's magic, and through them, the queen also conveyed to Milai in time how to stop the jungle from growing wildly, although it also successfully stopped the spread of the forest, but most of Milai's territory has been covered.

Historically known as the "White Night Cataclysm", the original dense forest became known today as the "White Night Forest", but in fact, the White Night Forest is still spreading, but together with Millai, Atra has found a way to temporarily control it. Two years later, most of the towns that had been flooded by the sea of trees had regained contact with each other, the familiar world of the woodlands that had lost their daylight forever had disappeared, and strange plants, ferocious beasts that had never been seen before, and many people who had gone astray began to lurk among the woodlands to attack travelers and caravans. The keen Omartin businessmen still did not miss this opportunity, they were once infamous as the initiators of the catastrophe for their large-scale development of the jungle exploration industry, and turned the treehouse into a union organization that provides paid escort services for employers, "Night Owl", and the former forest hunters also had a new name - White Night Guard, although these people also continue to bear the infamy along with the organization, but those who can survive in the dense forest until now are powerful, whether it is for atonement or livelihood, they are still inseparable from this forest.