Chapter 802: Release (3)
“I, with Crescent Moon…”
“Honey.”
Rookie looked at me with an expression more serious than I had ever seen on him.
“You’ve lost some of your memories.”
“…My memories?”
“Yes. Memories connected to Chain.”
Chain.
Surely he didn’t mean an actual chain. It sounded like one of those nicknames, like Droplet or Tree, but no one came to mind.
“Even if I tell you myself, it will fade once you wake up.”
“I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean.”
“I can pass it along because I’m in direct contact with your consciousness and using a Transcendent’s power, but…”
Rookie closed his mouth.
Then he opened it again.
“Honey. Forgot. Seong Hyunjae.”
He spoke each word separately, pressing them down with deliberate precision.
Seong Hyunjae.
“That person who’s a Transcendent, or a dependent, or whatever?”
The instant I heard Rookie’s words, something in me screamed that this was wrong.
Everyone knew him. Yuhyun, Chief Song, Liette, of course—and even Yerim, who had been A–rank before the regression, and Myungwoo and Peace, who shouldn’t have been all right back then either. At the very least, Myungwoo and Peace must have met Seong Hyunjae after the regression, so there was no way I alone wouldn’t know him.
No.
I was supposed to know Seong Hyunjae too.
“Seong Hyunjae. Is the pseudo–Source. Crescent Moon is after. Honey. Tried to protect. The pseudo–Source.”
“…I did?”
“Think carefully, Honey. The information about the pseudo–Source should still be there.”
The pseudo–Source.
Crescent Moon had… sent it through several worlds…
Ah.
‘So the situation I’d end up in after using Keyword Release and falling into the Mermaid Queen’s hands felt similar to the pseudo–Source.’
That was the déjà vu.
But Seong Hyunjae was the pseudo–Source?
For a moment, the inside of my skull throbbed as if electricity had run through it. I felt like I was wandering through empty space.
“About Mister Seong Hyunjae… nothing comes to mind.”
“Because Seong Hyunjae. Took it. From you. You can’t remember. Something that isn’t there.”
Was it the same as Yuhyun’s memories of the watch?
I thought of my brother, who had been unable to even recognize that he had lost those memories. If Rookie hadn’t helped me like this, I would have gone on knowing nothing too.
“Why the hell would Seong Hyunjae do that?”
“I don’t know the details either. And even if I did, I can’t give Honey too much information. It would be like forcibly dragging the empty space together and trying to make it stick.”
“…Ugh.”
My head throbbed again and again.
“But Honey, you have to be wary of Senior Crescent Moon. You should be careful of the other Transcendents too. There will definitely be Transcendents who can infer Senior Droplet’s plan just from seeing part of the system’s modification. They may try to deceive Honey, the way we were going to.”
…
So that was why Rookie had explained it all to me in such detail.
I had to know about Keyword Release in order to guard against it. In order to prepare.
“I want Honey to be happy.”
Rookie took one step back, his eyes and shoulders drooping.
“As a Transcendent, and as one of the Unfilial Children, maybe sacrificing Honey would be the right thing to do. At least, that was how I lived. From the time I was very young.”
“From when you were young?”
“Yes. I lived inside the tower only for the sake of our world. Because if only I sacrificed myself, everyone else could be happy, safe, and at peace.”
…
The king trapped in the tower.
Was that why Rookie, despite being a Transcendent who had lived for countless years, felt especially young compared to the others?
“A small number of sacrifices always seemed natural to me. Natural, right, desirable… It had to be that way.”
Rookie drew in a short breath.
“I… the time I spent alive… all of it…”
“Rookie.”
I reached out my hand.
Instead of a hand, a tentacle slowly crept toward me. I flinched reflexively, but still took hold of it.
“I’m grateful you’re here. I think it’s a good thing.”
His round eyes blinked.
Everyone lived a different life, and among those lives, there were bound to be some people wanted to hide and bury forever. Mine hadn’t exactly been smooth either.
“I was F–rank Han Yujin, and I thought low–rank Hunters couldn’t do much. I even tried to force my brother, who wasn’t an ordinary person, to fit into society. In the end, I failed and lost him.”
“…Honey.”
“But look at the present. It didn’t change simply because time was turned back. It changed because that past existed. Rookie, I don’t know the details of how you’ve lived. But I believe no life is meaningless, no matter what kind of life it was.”
“I… still don’t really know.”
Rookie shook his head hard. His hair, soft and fur–like, fluttered with the motion.
“Wanting Honey to be happy is just my own personal selfishness…”
“So what? If you get down to it, saying, I’ll save every world! is a personal goal too. You said there are all kinds of cultures, right? There might be some society out there that wants to go extinct. There might be places where people think it’s better to die honorably than accept help from another civilization. It’s not like you all went around taking surveys one world at a time.”
Living was desirable for a living being, sure, but then there were cases like Yuhyun.
Did absolute values or standards even exist in the world? Plenty of things that seemed right by the standards of modern human society would look insane to ancient people, medieval people, or the eyes of an entirely different species.
“You just have to try to live well. And avoid hurting other people as much as possible. Saving the world is great. But it isn’t wrong for me to refuse to save it by giving up my life, is it? The people who save others are incredible, and if someone wants to live, they should use their own legs instead of hoping someone else will be sacrificed for them.”
Of course, I had survived safely thanks in large part to the social system, so I would cooperate. If this had been a lawless wasteland, the moment my parents died, everything down to the house would have been stolen, and I’d have been thrown into the street. The Hunter world would have been much harsher too. So if I had room to spare, sure, I’d do good things.
“Rookie, you should do what you want too. The Filial Duty Addicts do whatever the hell they want and live however they please. Just don’t do what they do—don’t deceive and hurt people for your own benefit.”
“I won’t… Though I did lie to protect Honey.”
“That was self–defense.”
Rookie came right up against me again. I patted the head he pushed toward me.
“Honey, you want to recover your memories, don’t you?”
“Obviously. I thought that Seong Hyunjae guy was decent, but he goes around stealing other people’s memories?”
Having a hole in my memory felt unsettling, of course, and it would also put me at a disadvantage when dealing with the Transcendents. Even without reasons like that, they were my memories.
“Honey.”
Rookie met my eyes straight on. Our gazes locked together, frozen in place.
“Swallow it again.”
His low voice dug into my head.
“It was originally yours, Honey. Before the empty space heals over and what was taken melts away, take it back.”
“…Ugh.”
“When the chance comes, so that Honey can reclaim it, I’ll engrave my voice into you. Even if you forget this fact, Honey will move.”
I blinked.
The headache subsided.
Rookie had just… What had he said?
“Firstborn.”
A deep voice rang out.
I shot to my feet.
“Sir?”
At some point, Chaos had appeared beside Rookie.
And he wasn’t in his usual childlike form. I couldn’t help staring openly at him.
Maybe because the twenty–six–year–old Yuhyun had grown taller, he looked even more like Chaos now. They weren’t completely identical, but anyone would think they were close relatives, or brothers. Chaos, though, had more of a feeling of age to him. His air was more mature.
“As for that chain bastard…”
Young Chaos clicked his tongue.
Chain bastard?
Was he talking about Seong Hyunjae? He had said he knew him, hadn’t he?
“There’s no way for me to look kindly on him. Not even if I wanted to find him cute.”
“But he did help us. He was fairly kind—agh!”
“Why is the nonsense still exactly the same?”
Chaos grabbed my ear and yanked it in clear displeasure.
No, I was only telling the truth!
I clutched my aching ear and tried to step back, only to trip against the chair and sit right back down. When I tried to get up, Chaos pressed a hand firmly onto my head and stopped me.
“Uh, so Mister Seong Hyunjae must be a Transcendent a lot younger than you, sir.”
“He is not a Transcendent. If he were, I would have grabbed him immediately and thrown him out.”
I see.
He was radiating irritation from head to toe, but it didn’t seem like Chaos truly hated Seong Hyunjae either. Well, it was kind of pitiful, thinking about how Seong Hyunjae had suffered while being jerked around by Crescent Moon—
Right.
He was the pseudo–Source, so of course he wasn’t a Transcendent.
“Are you all right, sir?”
“More or less—”
“Senior Tree helped, but the curses and restrictions placed on Lord Chaos are so severe that we would need several Transcendents with truly outstanding curse–breaking abilities to deal with them. As things stand, removing them is impossible. They’re really, terribly—”
“Enough.”
This time, Rookie’s ear was the one that got pulled.
“I tried to stop the summoning of Transcendents into your world, Firstborn, but it proved difficult.”
“Don’t overdo it. If something happens to you too, sir, I’ll have no one left to rely on.”
“Worry about your own body.”
Chaos looked me up and down with the eyes of someone staring at a scrawny child on the verge of dropping dead any day now.
My body itself was healthier than average, for the record.
“Honey, Lord Chaos should know about the First Flame!”
Rookie said to me.
Reflexively, I looked up at Chaos. The moment my gaze met his red eyes, I remembered the last twenty–one–year–old Yuhyun I had seen.
…
Maybe it was because they looked alike, but even their eyes seemed identical.
Those two reddened eyes.
“What about the First Flame?”
“Well, Yuhyun…”
I explained everything that had happened so far to Chaos. He let out a short sigh.
“It will happen again.”
“…Sorry?”
“Even if you put things back, you will keep colliding with each other. As long as the two of you are fundamentally different beings, it will continue for as long as you live together.”
“I know. But that’s just what living with people is.”
If something like this happened again, then we would collide again, fight again, explain again, accept it again, and reconcile again.
Chaos closed his eyes for a moment, as if searching through his memories, then opened them.
“They say the First Flame appeared in the heat of the collision when the Source was born and light and darkness split apart. No living beings existed then, so it is only a theory. What is certain is that it existed before the first Transcendent was born.”
“So it’s almost as old as the Source itself.”
“The Source is the beginning of all things, but the First Flame is exceedingly ancient as well. However, it no longer exists now.”
“Sorry?”
“It shattered.”
Ah…
Now that he mentioned it, the item’s name was Fragment of the First Flame.
“Before the system was created, around the time I had only just become a Transcendent, the First Flame scattered into pieces and seeped into every world. I don’t know the exact reason. It was probably from that point on that fire spirits began to appear, and Primal Origin people with the fire attribute began to be born.”
“Then there weren’t any before that?”
“No. There were only other attributes. That means Secondborn was, in effect, a Primal Origin person while also carrying part of the First Flame within him. It would have been extremely faint, unlike the version turned into an item.”
“…Was it swallowed more easily because it was power he already had inside him?”
Young Chaos tilted his head faintly.
“In my memory, there is no precedent. What about you, Rookie?”
“I searched too, but I couldn’t find any similar cases. It’s common for fire to be swallowed by stronger fire, but a Fragment of the First Flame that had been turned into an item corroding an intelligent being… there were no cases. It’s only a simple fragment without a will of its own. There were only cases where someone couldn’t handle the power and went berserk or destroyed themselves.”
But Yuhyun had definitely not seemed burdened by the First Flame’s power.
“Cut it off.”
“…What?”
“Cut off the arm and regenerate it. Usually, that is enough. Even if the corrosion has gone past the arm, once the item causing it is removed, he should recover on his own somehow. Secondborn is not weak, and if you take good care of him, Firstborn, he will not waver.”
Was that truly the only way?
Fortunately, we had an elixir, and if we returned safely, I could ask the Saintess, so regenerating the arm itself would be easy. It would hurt to do, but there was no helping it.
Yuhyun, let’s think of this as karma for cutting off Chief Song’s arm. Hyung will fix it right away.
“Then the summoned Transcendents and the Gardener are the problem. Rookie, did you find out about the Transcendents?”
“Yes! I gathered as much as I could! I also looked for ways to help Honey.”
That was our Rookie, all right!
He came through when it counted.
I quickly began going through the information Rookie spread out before me.
“…Ugh.”
“Hyung, you’re awake?”
I opened my eyes.
Yuhyun’s face was looking down at me.
Oh, my head.
How much time had—
“Master.”
Chief Song abruptly spoke.
I nearly jumped out of my skin while still lying down.
“Are you insane—no, I told you not to call me that! Sir!”
“Restoration is required.”
No. 71, wearing Chief Song’s appearance, spoke.
Restoration?
Now that he mentioned it, we were indoors, but for some reason, a chilly breeze was blowing in. With Yuhyun’s help, I pushed myself up into a sitting position.
Between Myungwoo and No. 71, far off in the distance…
“…Where’d the wall go?”
The wide, open lake was in plain view.
Wow.
I close my eyes for one second, wake up, and the wall is gone.
“Chief Song and Mister Seong Hyunjae fought!”
“I wanted to jump in too, but I held back for your sake.”
“R–right. Good job. I’m proud of you. No, wait, how did that even happen?”
I thought those two had made up. Had they not?
Yerim shook her head, looking just as confused.
“It seemed like they were talking quietly, but then they suddenly started fighting. Mister Seong Hyunjae used a sound–blocking item, so I couldn’t hear them.”
“Yujin, your meal is safe. Let’s eat first.”
Myungwoo lifted a tray as he spoke.
No, shouldn’t we hear what happened first?
I looked toward Seong Hyunjae, who was sitting on a collapsed pillar and gazing out at the lake. He turned back to look at me.
The moment my eyes met his golden ones, I was seized by the strangest urge to grab him by the collar.
Why did he suddenly look so damn annoying?
–TL Notes–
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