Not according to plan…

ㅤ Yggdrasill watched as the world he'd tried to protect crumbled before his eyes. It was his fault… He'd committed the greatest folly by canceling the plan with the exspheres, abandoning it halfway, believing it a failure. But the new plan turned out to be even worse… Walking through the empty corridors of Derris-Kharlan, Yggdrasill was heading to the mana seed. To Martel… He had no intention of confessing. He wanted only one thing—to forget. But even in his most sacred place, he couldn't do it! Images of what he'd done to people flashed before his eyes. No, not only to them. To all life on Aselia! And, as ridiculous as it may seem, now everyone truly was equal. Before impersonal death. When the exspheres failed to live up to expectations, Yggdrasill decided to resort to a mind-controlling parasite and a virus that weakened the mind's resistance. Together, they produced too powerful an effect, setting off a chain reaction… While Yggdrasill and his scientists were trying to find a balance between mind and instinct, to find the point where everyone would be equal, where emotions and prejudices would no longer rule, they overlooked how the virus had escaped the laboratory and begun to spread uncontrollably at a monstrous rate. There was only one way out… Burn the world to the ground. At least most of it. Rats and birds had carried the virus an unimaginable distance. It was hard to say if there were any safe zones left. A single small rodent was capable of causing a full-scale epidemic. Yggdrasill alone was physically unable to single out only a few relatively healthy individuals, nor could he create a quarantine zone for everyone without risking to infect them all by one mistake. 'At least a few pairs of each species?' he thought. But even so… Yggdrasill could only preserve a small fraction of life on the planet. 'Better than nothing.' Yggdrasill stood up, steeling himself. He couldn't undo the biggest mistake of his life, but sitting idly by was also the wrong thing to do. Something had to be done. Otherwise, there truly would be nothing left. Nothing would remain of the world Martel loved so much. '…Perhaps it's for the best?' a dark thought suddenly occurred to him. 'The world will be renewed, the old prejudices will disappear. I will be able to raise a new humanity… But first, I must save as many living beings as possible and destroy the virus—otherwise, there's no point in thinking about the future!' Having set a goal, action became easier. Even though his plan had failed, Yggdrasill was filled with the desire to save the world at all costs! And he had no room for error: one bite—and even he would fall and leave his noble mission unfulfilled. If only there was someone to save… ㅤ