The Pope’s Secret Origin

A biting wind swept through the pallid canyon, scouring the entire plain at the foot of the Dunnau Mountains. Snowflakes danced and scattered amidst the rustling vegetation, while the foothills lay prostrate beneath the frigid, sunless light of the Empire’s north.

Bertram looked back, gazing upwards. Upon the silver expanse, blanketed in pristine snow, a hazy, pale golden veil seemed to shimmer.

“Your Holiness, the Holy Knights have confirmed there are no traces of beastmen in the nearby forest. You may now enter the ruins.” A voice, delicate and gentle as silk, drew his gaze and attention back to the present.

Kneeling before Bertram was a maiden, no older than sixteen or seventeen.

Her features were exquisitely delicate and soft, her skin as fair as ivory. A magnificent cascade of white-gold hair shimmered brilliantly, adorned with delicate braids and dangling tassels.

She exuded an aura of flawless nobility. Beneath her gently lowered eyelids, a pair of emerald eyes shone with a clarity purer than the post-rain sky.

The silver cruciform crown resting upon the maiden’s head clearly denoted her identity.

The sole Divine Chosen of Vatitaya, Goddess of the Sun; Her Highness, the Saintess of the Blazing Sun Church; Vice-Commander of the Blazing Sun Holy Knights; the Empire’s Platinum Crown—these were but a few of the maiden’s many titles and roles. Her name was Gwynevere.

Behind the maiden, more than a dozen Holy Knights, clad in gleaming armor, knelt with bowed heads. Their retinues of squires, shield guards, and foot archers stretched out, a formidable presence along the snow-covered forest path.

Bertram was indeed the ‘Your Holiness’ the maiden had addressed.

He had personally led his guard from the distant Salentz Religious Domain to the Empire’s ice-bound northernmost frontier. His sole purpose was an ancient ruin, deeply embedded within the foothills.

Those who accompanied the Pope did not fully grasp his intentions, yet they held unwavering faith in his decisions. They firmly believed he received divine revelations from the Goddess of the Sun, for he consistently made sound judgments and, conspiring with the Emperor, had repeatedly saved the Empire from dire straits.

Only Bertram himself knew the truth. Vatitaya could never bestow revelations upon any mortal.

His reason for coming to this particular ruin was that, even before transmigrating into this game world, he had known a powerful and mysterious ‘Developer Item’ lay hidden within.

Bertram was not a native of this world.

Before his transmigration, he was certainly no awe-inspiring Pope, revered by thousands. Instead, he had been a frail university student, nocturnal by habit, whose attendance records often relied on his roommates’ questionable ‘help’.

One late night, consumed by excitement while gaming, he had reached a climax and, in a moment of intense passion, pleaded for a ‘release’ towards the screen. He hadn’t anticipated his keyboard would short-circuit at that precise moment.

When he next opened his eyes, he found himself in another world.

The game was titled ‘Gods’ Chessboard: COG’. It was a massively popular online role-playing game that had once swept the globe, having been running for a decade.

However, due to the impact of a certain AAA mobile game, COG’s popularity and concurrent player count were steadily dwindling. Its revenue had fallen to a point where it could no longer cover its operational costs, leading almost everyone to believe that the MMORPG genre was destined to be swept into the dustbin of history.

It was at this juncture that the development team made a decision that went against their very traditions. They planned to release a ‘Doomsday Version’ to bring an end to the Nocartia Continent, then, six months later, gracefully shut down the servers, pivot to a gacha-style anime mobile game, and aggressively ‘exploit’ otaku wallets.

The so-called ‘Doomsday Version’ was COG’s final expansion pack, ‘Twilight of the End’. In it, the Nocartia Continent ultimately faced destruction, and the Chaos Gods claimed victory in the grand chessboard.

This expansion pack was nothing short of a disaster in gaming history. Players, incensed, flooded the forums with furious condemnations of the development team for months, and the fervor only began to subside after COG officially shut down its servers.

While dwindling revenue, server shutdowns, and pivots to microtransaction-heavy mobile games were all understandable to players, their primary target of attack was the storyline of ‘Twilight of the End’.

The Order faction’s performance in this apocalyptic war was nothing short of catastrophic. Key characters engaged in various ‘intelligence-reducing’ actions and abnormal behaviors, utterly shattering the excellent personas cultivated over previous expansions.

Even with a formidable enemy at their gates, they indulged in internal power struggles, purging political rivals. Allies like the High Elves, Human Empire, Sacred Dragonkin, and Highpeak Dwarves constantly backstabbed each other. Southern Electors formed factions to undermine the Imperial Emperor, while the Empire’s power structure was infiltrated like a sieve, riddled with spies and internal agents from the Bloodline factions and the Tzeentch cults.

In short, the overall impression left by this doomsday expansion pack was profoundly strange.

The Order faction’s failure seemed less due to the enemy’s strength and more to the incompetence of their own allies. Beloved legendary figures of the Order either met tragic ends or had their characterizations forcibly undermined by the developers, stripping them of their intelligence. This was the true reason ‘Twilight of the End’ faced such widespread criticism.

As a ‘lifer’ player who had stuck with COG from its launch in middle school until its shutdown in university, Bertram naturally harbored resentment towards the ‘Twilight of the End’ expansion. What he found utterly unacceptable, however, was that the beautiful female legendary characters either died tragically in desperate losing battles or were betrayed and sold out by their cowardly subordinates.

As a core member of the earliest raid groups to clear the final dungeon, there was no way anyone could have spoiled the plot for him, short of a data-mining insider. Thus, when he witnessed these story cutscenes, he ‘red-lined’ in front of his screen, boiling with rage. When the forums erupted in flames against the developers, he was at the forefront, leading the charge.

The game had already been completely shut down. Before his transmigration, Bertram had been playing a private server version of COG.

A ‘private server’ was, by definition, an unofficial server. It was essentially like installing a single-player version of COG on his own computer.

Shortly after the game’s official shutdown, a mysterious account on the forums suddenly messaged him, claiming to have set up a private server installation program. They wanted Bertram to be among the first batch of test players.

Bertram, naturally, wouldn’t miss such an opportunity. He downloaded the installation program, and after some tinkering, successfully set up a private server on his computer. Out of nostalgia, he reverted it to the launch version, ‘Shadowy Gloom’.

Besides preparing the server installation program for him, the mysterious account also included some ‘small gifts’.

Bertram curiously clicked to open them. To his surprise, they were the legendary R18 MOD compilation packs, containing everything imaginable: female beautification, suggestive clothing, defeat penalties, a pregnancy system, and more.

‘What kind of person do they take me for!?’

‘A dedicated player like me stuck with COG for its rich gameplay and grand world-building, not for vulgar reasons like well-endowed, fair-skinned female character models!’

‘Installing something like this on the official server would lead to a permanent ban!’

‘Such illicit behavior must be severely condemned!’

Thus, with a ‘critical’ mindset, Bertram extracted all the MODs into the root directory. He then swiftly launched the .exe, created a new female character, chose the half-blood race for its superior appearance, and immediately spent his meager starting funds on a carriage to the St. Mary’s Religious Domain, a place exclusively for women. There, he provoked a guard nun to trigger a defeat penalty.

And then, there was no ‘then’ after that. It definitely wasn’t because the defeat CG involving yuri was too alluring, prompting him to immediately ‘release’ himself, causing the keyboard to short-circuit, fry his ‘tool’, and transmigrate to another world. Such a thing simply did not happen.