Hive City and the Star God's Gift

The World Tree Capital had clearly not been designed for humans, yet humanity had remade it into a form fit for their own lives.

The farther Ian followed Anfa and her knightly retinue toward the fourth level of the World Tree Capital, taking in the sights along the way, the more certain he became of this.

If Ian's guess was correct, the World Tree Capital was essentially a gigantic airship tens of thousands of meters long—perhaps far more than that. Its interior was naturally spacious for a warship, but it could not be called large for a city. Especially its urban districts: like the Imperial Capital, their cross-sectional area was really only that of an ordinary small town.

But its urban districts were extraordinarily tall—each one was nearly three thousand meters high.

That alone showed that this super-colossal airship had never been designed for humans. It had been built for some kind of lifeform with an extremely slender structure, perhaps like vines or fungi, perhaps even capable of flight... Of course, it might also have been some kind of moss or algae, or even aquatic life. The original World Tree Capital might well have been filled with vast amounts of water...

In any case, it had not been meant for people to live in.

But humans had always been capable of unleashing their creativity.

After thousands of years of alterations, the vast three-thousand-meter-high space was no longer empty. Through the repairs and construction of generations of Elves, numerous suspended platforms and wall buildings hung from the four walls of the urban districts. They interwove, braced one another against the city's immense metal framework, and formed an incomparably complex three-dimensional city.

If one had to make a vivid comparison, it was like a beehive.

Every urban district within the World Tree