Solo Leveling: Ragnarok

Chapter 261

Sillad altered Frostbloom Illusion, and Fores’ tragic memories faded. In their place, an ancient memory of his own began to play for Suho.

An image of an infant appeared.

“That’s me,” Sillad said.

The memory showed the tiny elf peacefully asleep in the arms of an adult elf.

“And my mother.”

Behind them loomed the ominous figure of an Elvenwood tree, its sinister branches twisting.

Sillad glared quietly at the monster wearing its peaceful disguise. In a low voice, he muttered, “Even before I was born, we elves were already being raised like livestock by the Elvenwoods.”

This memory was an unbearably painful one—a scar that the Monarch had carried with him even into death.

For the elves, the four seasons did not always align with the length of a single year. Sometimes the seasons passed quickly, and other times they lasted decades.

But no matter their length, they always ended eventually. Even the peace which seemed to last forever was punctuated by winter. The fertile lands would dry up, and icy blizzards would sweep through forests now stripped bare of their leaves.

“The year of the harvest, as it is called, came without warning... as it always does.”

Suddenly, there was screaming. The elves shouted frantically at one another to run.

“Winter always comes when one least expects it.”

The year of the harvest had arrived for Sillad, and the Elvenwood began to reap the elves that it had nurtured.

“I... was still young.”

Suho, who was silently watching the vision, turned to look at Sillad’s face. He wore an expression of pain and bitterness as he relived the memory.

A freezing wind blew across the snowy landscape, carrying with it the desperate figure of Sillad’s mother fleeing for her life.

The Monarch could still clearly remember it when he closed his eyes.

She held Sillad, still just a newborn, tightly to her chest. Her face was tense with urgency as she ran. In the warm embrace of his mother, the baby Sillad stared up at her.

The deceased Monarch watched this tragic vision unfold.

Then with a sickening sound, a thorny root pierced through his mother’s back.

Even as a grunt of pain sputtered from her lips, she did not falter. Her trembling hands passed her child to another elf.

“You cannot die like me,” she whispered, her voice fading as the Fallen Specters dragged her back toward the Elvenwood. She smiled faintly and sadly as she watched her child be carried away in the arms of another.

As her vision dimmed, she mouthed her final words, her voice barely audible.

“You must live...”

“You must live, my son,” Sillad repeated.

All of it remained vivid in his memory, even as he rested in death’s eternal embrace.

“That was the last I saw of my mother.”

Time in the illusion sped forward. Sillad was left an orphan. He had barely survived after being placed into the arms of another elf during his mother’s sacrifice.

That young elf, who had seen the tragedy unfold with his own eyes, kept the despair of the moment inside him as he settled into a new village with other elves. This was a new home within the bounds of a newly sprouted Elvenwood.

Sillad eventually grew into a boy, then a young man. He made friends, one of whom was Fores.

Sillad learned how to control spirits and hunt with his companions. He competed with them for the position of guardian of the village.

In hindsight, he recognized that these had been peaceful times. Clear skies, the pleasant scent of grass—every moment of it had been tranquil.

Yet through it all, none of Sillad’s friends ever saw him smile. It was as though he didn’t know how.

It was no surprise. His mother had told him to live, but she had not provided him with instructions on how.

“Are you aware of something?” the Monarch murmured beside Suho. “Sometimes a bloody battlefield is preferable to a miserable peace.”

His gaze hardened as he watched his own memory unfold.

Screams erupted again. Winter had returned. The peace was shattered, and elves were dying.

The survivors fled in panic.

“Why?!”

Among them, Fores was crying out in anguish.

“Why must we suffer like this every time?”

“Fores was the same as me,” Sillad said.

Like him, Fores was just a baby when he barely escaped death in the previous village. He, too, had lived through the tragedy of a repeated winter.

“We always felt wronged. Why did we elves always have to suffer such a fate? Why could we never escape that vicious cycle?”

Sillad’s eyes smoldered with quiet rage as he watched Fores’ tearful cries amid the blizzard.

“And so I stayed.”

He had made a different choice. As Fores and the others scattered and ran from the village, Sillad alone had stayed behind within that biting, frigid blizzard, his weapon in hand.

“It wasn’t fair. So I told myself I would not repeat the experience.”

In the vision, Sillad glared defiantly at the Elvenwood as its massive roots lunged toward him, piercing the frozen ground and cutting through the blizzard.

“If my end was predetermined, then I would at least choose where I would die.”

The Fallen Specters attacked. The evil beings wore the faces of those who had lived in the village alongside him. Ravenous spirits who had not yet managed to find a vessel joined the assault.

Sillad faced an onslaught. Every enemy in the world seemed against him.

“And I did not run.”

Amid the raging snowstorm, Sillad stood his ground and fought. While everyone else fled, he alone remained.

“I fought night and day. I forgot hunger. Time had no meaning in the storm. And beyond a certain point...”

He paused.

“I realized no one was attacking me anymore.”

All of his enemies were gone. In the cold and desolate winter, within the endless blizzard, the figure of Sillad stood alone in the barren expanse of snow.

Moments later, something caught the figure’s eye, and an incredulous laugh escaped him.

Suho, who had been watching the illusion from beside the Monarch, was just as incredulous when he noticed it.

“The Elvenwood... It froze to death.”

“Yes. Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

Sillad chuckled at Suho’s surprise.

“The great Elvenwood was killed by the cold. It froze much faster than me, and I had merely been struggling. The cold killed it. The cold... Nothing but the cold...”

As Sillad muttered, his expression was a blend of emptiness, bitterness, and mockery. It almost seemed as though he was holding back tears.

Barely clinging to life, the image of Sillad dragged his battered body toward the frozen tree and began hacking at it like a madman. There was no purpose behind it—only an overwhelming need to vent his rage.

Wham! Wham!

He continued for days on end until the massive tree lay in pieces.

“Even then, it was not enough to appease my anger. So I dug up the frozen ground and tore out every remaining root. Then I ate them.”

The vision displayed Sillad’s twisted, half-mad expression as he forced himself to chew and swallow the Elvenwood’s remains.

How could he possibly be sane after everything he had endured? His body, ravaged by the extended battle, was in complete disarray. The blood from his wounds had frozen over, forming an icy crust in the relentless cold winds. His skin was cracked and split.

Sillad looked worse than the Fallen Specters themselves. Death could have claimed him at any moment.

Still, he had survived. Even the bitter cold that seeped into his bones meant nothing to him now. He could not let himself die—not when he had vowed to continue laughing at the Elvenwood that had succumbed to the mere cold. That meant he would have to laugh at it for the rest of his life.

“And so I decided to stay on in that village. Any reason to leave was gone.”

He felt that if he ever fled the cold, he would lose the right to mock the Elvenwood.

“I simply stayed put. It was cold, all right, but I learned that there were advantages.”

Those advantages were few, and the cold was fierce. However, elves were adaptable creatures.

“I became the first ice elf.”

This was how Sillad had endured the cold.

His rise as a Monarch came later—much later, after the previous elven Monarch died in the war between the Rulers and the Monarchs. Sillad then assumed the title of Monarch himself.

But in the vision, he was still young. In truth, he had not truly avenged the elves or exacted justice on the Elvenwoods—all he had done was brave the cold until the tree in his village had died.

He had made a promise to himself then.

“I decided that one day, I would become the elven Monarch and find and uproot every Elvenwood. And I did just that. The first thing I did after becoming a Monarch was to destroy every Elvenwood in sight.”

Of course, not all elves agreed with his actions, but Sillad’s word as a Monarch was absolute. The others adapted to life in the freezing cold left behind by the absence of the Elvenwoods, transforming into ice elves themselves.

The starting point of it all was the first frozen wasteland where Sillad had survived. That was the first village rebuilt on the cold land where an Elvenwood had died.

Ironically, without an Elvenwood, the elves became terribly weak. The spirits, having lost their anchor, stopped listening to the elves entirely.

But this was not a problem. Sillad had never seen the spirits as friends to the elves. The relationship between them needed to be redefined.

“Obey me, you lowly, cowardly spirits.”

In the vision, Sillad—now the Monarch of Frost—uprooted every Elvenwood and began earnestly hunting the spirits who scattered in order to escape him.

“Spirits cannot die, but no matter. I could capture them and freeze them,” the deceased Sillad explained.

In the illusion, he poured every ounce of his bitterness and fury into the curses he hurled at the spirits he captured.

“Freeze, spirits. Be trapped in the unforgiving cold and endure its pain for all eternity.”

This was the spirit manipulation of the first ice elf, Sillad, born of a relentless will to survive the cold.

“Just as you have done to my people, you shall experience what it is to be neither alive nor dead, existing through the ages.”

The same way the spirits had mocked the dead elves by turning them into Fallen Specters, he imprisoned them in eternal ice. They were enslaved, frozen in a state that was neither life nor death.

From them, the massive ice giants were born, trembling before Sillad as they pledged their loyalty. Their roaring was filled with the cowardly cries of the spirits trapped within.

[Ice Golem]

Suho observed the name tag that appeared above these frozen prisons.

In that moment, he recalled a philosopher’s words: “We all fight our own wars.”

He also remembered the vision of a forgotten time that he was shown when he first met Sillad in this world of white. In that vision, the Monarch of Frost had whispered cruelly as he drove an icy blade into Jinwoo’s heart.

“Is this as far as you go, human? You will not be around to see my army arrive on your soil. When it does, the bodies of you humans will form mountains, and your blood shall make new rivers flow.”

That had been the worst curse that Sillad, the King of the Snow Folk and the Monarch of Frost, had been capable of.

“But this nation where you were born and raised—it will suffer a different fate. I will freeze its people myself and subject them to eternal agony.”

It was a living hell, a torment that he understood more intimately than any other being.

“They will be neither dead nor alive, never able to find repose in true death.”

Such was the fate of the Fallen Specters, trapped eternally in their undead state. That had also been the fate of the elves, raised like livestock by the Elvenwoods, only to have everything stripped from them in the end.

“And so, hate me as you will, eternally, from the depths of the grave.”

As Sillad died, this was the worst curse he could manage toward the Monarch of Shadows as he remembered the hell that he had lived through.

“For that also shall please me.”

It had been the only form of consolation he could offer his mother, who had smiled as she sacrificed herself to save him. It was also all he could offer to the countless elves who had perished miserably beside him.

The vision shifted, showing Fores again as he ran and cried out in anguish.

“Why?! Why must we suffer like this every time?”

Sillad’s expression turned sorrowful as he murmured, “Yes. I felt wronged, just like him. I wanted others to experience the same hell that had been our lives as elves. It was the only way I could honor my companions who had already died. But I now realize...”

His eyes flashed as he gazed at Fores’ next memory.

“Fores seems to have found another path.”

While Sillad endured and overcame the frost through sheer resolve, his fellow high elf had repeatedly fled in the endless cycle of winters.

The two met vastly different fates. Sillad had become a Monarch in the end, fighting his enemies proudly and dying on the battlefield. Though he ultimately fell, he had achieved the feat of driving a blade into the heart of the Monarch of Shadows.

Fores, however, was different.

“A pitiful creature with a pitiful fate,” came a voice within the vision.

Someone had appeared before the despairing Fores. Outside the vision, Sillad and Suho’s eyes both widened.

Holy wounds! Suho thought.

Mysterious beings with golden wounds on their heads had appeared before Fores. From each wound, golden light radiated like a halo.

Unfortunately, their faces were shrouded in the radiant light and hidden from view. This was, after all, what Fores had witnessed.

He had been too overwhelmed by the divine light to dare look directly at the beings, but even so, he had seen something.

“Shall we offer you a bit of help?”

The beings had worn smiles—smiles as cruel as they were beautiful.

Fores watched their hands as they gently reached out toward him. Without waiting for an answer, they plucked out his eyes.