The Twenty-First Act: The Warlike Knight

Gold of the River did not mean the gold buried beneath river silt. It referred to the magically rich gold beneath the long river of fate flowing quietly beside Eileen. It was one of the world's most precious treasures. Witches often used it as a medium for sorcery that changed the future, which was why it was also called Witch's Gold. The greedy witches so often mentioned in rural fairy tales, tirelessly gathering gold, were actually gathering this same thing.

It was an extremely, extremely rare magical mineral. A piece no bigger than a fingernail was worth as much as a castle. In the game, Witch's Gold had another important use: breaking the threads of fate. In simple terms, to pass from the highest stage of the Enlightenment Element realm—the Sage Domain—into the realm of the perfected body, one had to use this gold as a medium to cast the transcendent spell.

Before the Tablet War, Brando had never even heard of this legendary mineral. He had only seen vague mentions of it in a few books. The players of Vonder first discovered Witch's Gold after the Holy War ended, in the Year of Starlight, when the first tablet was found on the White Mountain at the border of Saint Osore. Afterward, players began entering the Black Forest in large numbers, and Witch's Gold finally appeared in their field of vision.

Yet even in the Black Forest, this gold was extremely rare. Put simply, it appeared even less often than the Fountain of Youth.

And reviving each Valkyrie required a full pound of Gold of the River—a whole pound! Brando nearly wanted to kill Babu. It would have been more merciful simply to tell him that reviving the Valkyries was impossible. Compared with that, the other materials were much easier