46. Old Story (3)
I never expected things to turn out like this.
The moment Zeliel showed tears, it became very easy to figure out what had happened.
The route called [Reforming the Villainess Zeliel], which even among players of Aether World Online only a tiny fraction had ever managed to see.
There was a reason only so few players ever reached it.
The conditions required to get there were brutally difficult.
First condition: raise Zeliel’s favorability enough to enter into a relationship where you could actually interact with her.
Second condition: help Zeliel find the Ancient Carmenset Ruins.
Third condition: Zeliel must defeat Carmenset in Soul Chess.
At first glance those conditions might have looked easy, but an ordinary player would already be blocked by the very first one.
To approach Zeliel—someone so difficult that even speaking to her was no simple matter—raise her favorability, and then actually reach a state of exchange with her? A player who achieved that much would already be treated in the community like a true hardcore veteran.
The second condition was relatively easier.
All you had to do was follow the guides posted by those endgame veterans and obtain the keywords leading to the Ancient Carmenset Ruins.
But the third condition…
was, in practice, close to impossible.
The NPCs in the game each had astonishingly advanced AI and were capable of learning; they could even be trained in Soul Chess, but how often did you ever get the chance to play chess against Zeliel?
And even if you did get the chance, you had to be good enough to beat Zeliel at chess and teach her through that.
Reaching that point was an exhausting journey in itself.
Even I, in the end, had failed.
“…Your father disappeared?”
On the abandoned platform where rainwater still dripped in the storm,
I sat beside Zeliel on a half-broken bench and listened carefully to her story.
“It’s my fault…”
She was blaming herself, but if you really traced it all back, the larger fault was mine.
I was the one who had taught Zeliel Soul Chess while hoping she would defeat Carmenset.
I hadn’t expected her to really win, but still…
By now, every great Magic Tower worth its name was probably in a frenzy trying to find Melian.
After all, if someone directly saved the body of the Chairman of Starcloud, who knew what sort of rich reward might fall into their hands?
But regrettably, I could confidently say all of that was just wasted suffering.
Would I have irresponsibly guided things into this situation if I hadn’t known exactly what would happen once Zeliel defeated Carmenset?
Thankfully, Melian would be able to recover his original form.
Most likely with a one-hundred-percent chance.
I could do it right this instant if I wanted to.
But right now, here, I had to play the part of someone with no blood and no tears.
Because I needed to reform Zeliel.
I couldn’t just save her father without demanding anything in return.
This time too, I intended to place a restraint on Zeliel.
There were many villains in the world of Aether World Online, but there were two main villainesses who stood closest to the protagonist as enemies.
Hong Biyeon, who possessed supreme power.
And Zeliel, who held the world’s finances in her hands.
They were overwhelmingly powerful opponents for the commoner girl protagonist to face, but the benefits of reforming them were also enormous.
The reason hardly needed explaining.
Especially in Zeliel’s case, reforming her brought about immense change in the world.
Zeliel, who had lived only for her own gain, ended up donating that staggering wealth for the development of the world in order to atone for the ugly wrongs she had committed.
Of course, using money to atone did not erase all the infuriating episodes she had inflicted on the protagonist, so despite her pretty face, she was also one of those tragic villainesses who had quite a lot of anti-fans.
…To be honest, I never really liked Zeliel that much myself.
“I’ll personally make sure your father is found.”
“…Really? You can really find him?”
She was the one who had begged me first, and now she said that in a voice that sounded too stunned to believe it. Honestly, what kind of reaction was that supposed to be?
“Yeah. It’s possible. More importantly, there’s something I’m curious about.”
Zeliel stared into my eyes with dazed eyes of her own.
She still looked as though her senses had not fully returned.
“How did you find me, and why?”
To begin with, I was curious why she had come to me and clung to me like this.
By now, 9-Class archmage Hae Seongwol should have been helping her.
Wouldn’t he be a lot more dependable than me?
She hesitated a little, then slowly parted her lips.
“A fortune-teller… came to me and said that if I came here, I would find someone who could help me.”
“…Wait. A fortune-teller? A fortune-teller?”
Could that fortune-teller possibly be the same one I knew?
Silver Age November had said it before.
Someone I had met recently, someone who liked me, was in fact one of his relics.
A number of candidates had come to mind, but among the people I had met recently, the most suspicious by far was that mysterious fortune-teller from the train.
I hurriedly pulled out the poster I had tucked into my pocket and showed it to her.
“Did they look like this, by any chance?”
- Distinguishing feature: total quack
Zeliel looked at my drawing, then immediately scrunched up her face with an expression that plainly said she had sobered right up.
“You… can’t draw…”
“What? I draw very well.”
“No… you don’t.”
“I do draw well.”
This girl simply didn’t understand art.
Then again, perhaps it was too much to expect a modern person to appreciate my drawings.
My art was about a thousand years ahead of its time, after all.
What a painful thing, that there was still no talent in this world capable of recognizing my genius.
Zeliel frowned, stared at my drawing for quite a while, and then nodded.
“I think… it was this person.”
“Really?”
“W-where are they now?”
When I asked urgently, Zeliel widened her eyes in surprise.
“I… don’t know.”
And then she said she had only met them by chance.
Honestly, I didn’t believe that.
“By chance, huh.”
If my guess was right, that fortune-teller was unquestionably one of Silver Age November’s relics.
A being like that would never arrange this sort of meeting by mere chance.
Especially if, as I’d heard, it was the one that governed the future.
When it came to the pure ability of peering into the future, Silver Age November had said it surpassed even himself.
‘Just how much did that old man split his abilities up…’
Then again, it made sense.
If you grew close enough with Silver Age November in the original game, he would sometimes finally lay his heart bare, and one of his grievances had once come out like this:
‘To see the past, present, and future all at once is not a happy thing. Imagine being able to see plainly when a beautiful bond you have just formed will end.’
Imagine meeting someone you love, and from that moment onward, the sight of her death hovers forever before your eyes.
That…
would never be a blessing.
It would be a curse.
“Well, whatever.”
I stood and tilted the umbrella toward Zeliel.
According to the Magic Tower’s forecast, the monsoon front had rolled in, and this downpour would not stop for quite a while.
And had I heard that Hae Seongwol, Master of the Full Moon Great Tower, was helping Zeliel right now?
Perfect.
Under normal circumstances, I would never even dare speak casually to a great archmage like him, but perhaps this once I ought to make proper use of him.
A watchtower built atop a cloud, roughly a thousand ri away from Lotus Inn.
Once famed as the place that served as the model for the immortal-go painting ‘Shinseondo,’ it had nearly been developed into a tourist site in modern times, only for those plans to be cancelled, and now no human foot ever reached it.
All the immortals had already left this place,
and ordinary humans could not find it.
Tap!
There,
Silver Age November was playing baduk alone.
It was an open place where anyone could have come,
but because no one ever did, it had become entirely his own nest.
“…What brings you here?”
Without taking his eyes off the board, the Divine Moon spoke, and the cloud behind him parted to reveal a certain woman.
She carried an old bag in one hand, had bundles of cards hanging from her waist, and her entire body was plastered with accessories so cheap-looking one could tell at a glance they were junk.
She had no name.
Silver Age November had never given her one.
If there was any word by which modern society might refer to her, it would simply be:
fortune-teller.
She lowered a pair of gaudy cheap sunglasses so dark they nearly hid her eyes altogether, and smiled, showing her crooked teeth.
“Old man, I wondered what you’d been up to these days, and here you are moping around in a place like this?”
“Time is precious, but not every moment must be spent in haste.”
“Has there ever been a day in your life when you lived busily? Far as I remember, not once.”
“What brings you here?”
Tak.
The old man set down his final stone.
The black and white stones on the board were perfectly symmetrical, and yet strangely enough, White was ahead by one house.
“Just came because I was bored. Hohoho. Does an ajumma need a reason to travel?”
The fortune-teller sat across from him, swept all the stones aside, and picked up a black stone.
“So you should go easy on me, old man.”
Tak!
The moment the fortune-teller placed her stone, Silver Age November picked up a white stone with a dry clatter.
But before placing it, he spoke first.
“It seems you are still wasting your time with futile efforts.”
The fortune-teller, who had been chattering without pause, gave no answer to that question.
“Give it up.”
“Well now~ that’s a bit hard, isn’t it? From the moment you gave me this power, old man, this became my fate.”
Silver Age November possessed eyes that looked into the future.
The fortune-teller had inherited that power in even stronger form and could see the future more clearly than he.
Naturally, she too knew well that the world would be destroyed ten years from now.
And so…
the fortune-teller was struggling now to change the future.
She had labored in places no one could see, seeking out countless variables and nudging them in the right direction to create a slightly better world.
But—
“And so, have you changed anything?”
The fortune-teller still did not know.
All of those countless efforts she had made—
Silver Age November himself had once made them too.
Back when he still possessed the complete power of time, before he had divided it among relics,
he had rewound the world hundreds of times, over and over, trying to lead it in another direction.
And he had failed.
What remained to him after all of that was only despair—
the despair that the world could not be saved.
‘In exchange for wielding the power of time, one cannot interfere in the events of the world.’
Because of that curse imposed alongside his blessing,
he had been able to do nothing.
“Well… I have changed a few small things here and there.”
For example, arranging the meeting between Zeliel and Baek Yuseol not long ago.
The two of them were fated to meet somehow and help one another in the end.
But if that meeting came too late, something unpleasant might have happened, so in order to prevent that possibility in advance, she had nudged things so they met a little sooner.
Since they were destined to meet anyway, making them meet a bit earlier…
hardly counted as changing the future at all.
“Baek Yuseol. You too seem to have taken an interest in that child.”
“Hoho, yes. In every future I kept looking at, that child kept appearing.”
“…I see.”
Silver Age November had not been able to see that.
His powers were currently so weakened that all he could do was calculate, by probability, the events directly in front of him.
“That child is special.”
He too had once tried such an idea.
What if the power to turn back time were given, not to himself, but to another?
He could turn back time, yes—
but he could not interfere with time.
Then let someone else return and alter the future in his place.
And the result?
A catastrophic failure.
Some lost sight of their purpose and wandered all their lives knowing only that they had regressed.
Some lost all their memories and lived on like broken shells.
Some could not even recognize that time had turned back at all.
Because the toll ordinary living beings had to pay for travelling backward through time—
was ‘memory.’
Time took from them, as the price, only their happiest memories.
For human beings, who lived by leaning on memory above all else, it was a truly cruel cost.
From that day on, Silver Age November gave up completely on the idea of sending someone else back in time to stop the future’s destruction.
And so he spent his days waiting for the end of the world to arrive, playing games day after day—
until, one day,
Baek Yuseol appeared.
“That child changed the future.”
Silver Age November said this as he placed a white stone.
It landed in a bizarrely inappropriate place.
“A truly, truly trivial future… and yet with that alone, the child showed me possibility.”
He raised his head, met the fortune-teller’s eyes directly, and spoke in a voice sunk heavy and low.
“From this moment onward, I intend to reclaim your powers.”
The selfhood of the relics had been created from Silver Age November’s power.
And to say he would take that power back—
was, in effect, not so different from saying he meant to take their lives.
And yet…
even hearing those savage words from the man who meant to kill her, the fortune-teller merely bared her ugly teeth in a grin.
As though she had already set down every lingering attachment.
That was how she smiled.
“Old man, for a last game of baduk, your tongue’s awfully long. What, getting scared because you think you might lose?”
“…You rotten bitch.”
Tak!
The fortune-teller placed a black stone on the board.
There was no trace of regret at all in that motion.
It looked utterly light.
And so,
the final game of baduk began between two beings who possessed eyes that could see the future.
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