50. A Noble Soul (6)
The garden of the thousand-year divine spirit, Iphanel.
Was it around the beginning of the semester when I first came here? Back then, I still did not properly understand my Mana Leak Physique.
Mana Leak Physique. Thinking of it that way, had I not received the greatest help from her of anyone?
Because of her, I was able to understand the secret of my body,
and thanks to that, I overcame the time limit on my life.
There might have been plenty of other ways even without Iphanel… but honestly, I had no idea whether I would have been able to pull it off before graduating from Stella,
so I had always been grateful to her.
But I never had the chance to express that.
My time with her had been short, and even after she awakened, she kept sleeping, so we never really got to talk properly.
As the distance grew, so did the distance in my heart…
and honestly, until now, I had been living as though I had completely forgotten her.
If I absolutely had to make an excuse, I really had been busy.
So busy that even “busy” was not enough of a word—I had spent the entire summer break running nonstop all over Aiter, and had even gone time traveling.
…Even so, Iphanel had only just awakened, and she had been extremely weak and vulnerable, so I should have taken an interest and checked on her often.
The story had developed completely differently from the original game.
“The density of the mana… is sinking more and more.”
At Kkotseorin’s words, I nodded.
Ordinary people would not be able to feel it, but because the two of us were sensitive to mana, we could very faintly sense that something had gone wrong.
The path leading to Iphanel’s garden was not a road laid down for normal people to walk on, but completely rough terrain, so when I came here alone it had been incredibly difficult.
But with Kkotseorin beside me, the burden was much lighter.
Srrrk…
Whenever she walked, a path formed even where there was no path,
the leaves blocking our sight moved aside on their own,
and flower petals drifted down from the sky to make footholds.
Someone might look at that scene and call it pretty, mystical, beautiful, and so on,
but honestly, more than any of that, it was just convenient, and that was what I liked about it.
It would be really nice if I had an ability like that too….
When Kkotseorin, who had reached our destination, stopped walking, the flower petals and branches that had gathered to help her quietly withdrew to the rear.
“…I don’t like this feeling.”
The entrance to the garden was tightly wrapped in World Tree branches, so ordinary elves would not notice it.
But with a single gesture from Kkotseorin, the vines were brushed aside, and an old stone monument covered in moss revealed itself.
That was the garden’s entrance.
I stepped forward and took out the key that led to the garden.
“That is…”
“I received it as a gift a while ago.”
“As a gift… you received a key?”
“Yes.”
The one who gave me that present was the Constellatio Project, but still, it was not a lie.
Click.
[The door leading to the garden of the divine spirit Iphanel opens!]
When I pressed the key to the stone monument, it slid aside and a mass of pure white light revealed itself.
The place where Iphanel stayed was slightly removed from ordinary three-dimensional reality, so in that way space itself was subtly distorted.
After exchanging one glance with Kkotseorin, I took a deep breath first and stepped inside.
Wooooong!!
After the familiar sensation of space flipping over brushed past in an instant, I opened my eyes…
and the inside of the garden, dyed entirely violet, came into view.
“Ugh!”
At once, dizziness struck me, and I hurriedly reached into my subspace and pulled out a mask.
Made in imitation of a gas mask from reality, it was designed to block out murky mana instead of poison gas.
I had made it after learning that my body was particularly vulnerable to mana saturated with intense color,
but I had never imagined I would end up using it in Iphanel’s garden.
“This can’t be…!”
Kkotseorin, who entered the garden behind me, slowly swept her gaze over the interior with a stunned expression.
Iphanel’s garden, which should have been a beautiful, mystical place full of green aura…
had been contaminated by a dense violet foulness.
Even with the gas mask on, it was hard to breathe properly.
At this rate, I really should ask Alterisha to upgrade the performance of this thing a little more.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes… more or less. Rather, I should be the one asking you that.”
“Me?”
Kkotseorin’s complexion had gone pale.
Just from seeing her lips tremble and her pupils shake without any sign of stopping, it was obvious that she was not in good condition.
Because of the dark-mana contamination?
No, that could not be it.
There was no way someone who had received the World Tree’s blessing would be harmed by this level of dark mana.
Kkotseorin was panicking now…
because she was faced with the unbelievable situation of sensing this kind of dark mana in Iphanel’s garden.
Amazingly, perhaps thanks to the Blessing of Crimson Spring March, she barely showed it outwardly enough that I almost failed to notice.
“Calm down.”
“Ah….”
I gripped both of her hands tightly in mine and spoke.
“We still don’t know what happened inside yet.”
She looked at me with trembling eyes, pressed her lips shut, and then squeezed her eyes closed.
“Yes. Let’s go.”
Even if it had been contaminated by dark mana, nothing in Iphanel’s garden itself had changed.
Back then there had been plant-type monsters here for me to hunt, but those had all been things like golems Iphanel had scattered around to protect herself, so they were nowhere to be seen now.
If anything, the place looked more like a dungeon now than it had then, and yet there was not a single monster in sight.
What an irony.
After carefully walking for a long while with Kkotseorin, we reached the end of the garden, where a large rock wall blocked the path.
It had not been there before… but seeing Kkotseorin approach it as though familiar with it, it seemed it had only been absent when I came here.
“This… is a barrier Iphanel puts up when she doesn’t want to let outsiders in.”
“A barrier?”
It looked like an ordinary rock.
Fortunately, Kkotseorin seemed to know the password. She placed her palm against the barrier and recited a spell.
Wooooong!!
Red, blue, and yellow circular magic formations spread through the air like ripples, and the rock wall began making clicking sounds before sliding aside with a loud rumble.
Then, as wind brushed my cheek,
moonlight poured down.
Even seeing it again, it was a beautiful sight.
In the wide-open sky hung three moons, each larger than Earth’s moon, and a silver Milky Way stretching across the heavens filled the flower field below to overflowing.
And beneath that broad field of flowers, under the collapsing moonlight,
she was there.
The thousand-year divine spirit, Iphanel.
She who had once been trapped in time that had stopped forever, then gained a heart once more and been granted a new life…
was still there, rigid, with her eyes closed.
It was the same posture I remembered from then.
The figure of a girl kneeling with both hands clasped together as though praying.
Back then she had been in the form of a woman, but now that her outer appearance had grown younger, her expression looked somehow sorrowful, her brow slightly drawn.
“Iphanel….”
Iphanel, whose color had originally been a blue colder and sharper than moonlight, was now dyed violet,
as though someone had deliberately stained her with dark mana.
Kkotseorin covered her mouth with a shaken expression, but I, on the contrary, forced myself to think coldly.
‘Why?’
Why had someone suddenly dyed Iphanel black?
As far as I knew… about a year from now, the “Dark Holy War” was supposed to occur.
At that time, Iphanel would happen to be stained with dark mana as well…
but it had never been revealed who exactly had done it, or why.
Players had only guessed that perhaps someone intended to brainwash Kkotseorin with dark mana and use her as a chess piece in the Dark Holy War.
But right now, the Dark Holy War was still far off…
and to begin with, it was questionable whether it would even happen at all.
Because… the Dark Holy War was an event that only occurred on the route where Ma Yuseong fell into corruption.
“This… makes no sense.”
“…What?”
At that moment, beside me, Kkotseorin shook her head slowly and spoke.
“It’s impossible to stain a divine spirit black.”
“With the concentration this dense… even Iphanel might not have been able to hold out. And she’s weakened now.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“What?”
With a hardened expression, she said:
“Iphanel is a divine spirit. The moment one ascends as a divine spirit… one gains the qualification of a ‘Noble Soul’ that cannot be corrupted by anything in this world.”
“Ah.”
For an instant, it felt as though someone had struck the back of my head with a hammer.
It was a question I had never once entertained.
A Noble Soul does not fall to dark corruption, and the soul of a divine spirit is always noble.
The reason I had always somehow forgotten that simple, obvious premise was equally obvious…
because, unexpectedly enough, the route where Iphanel was corrupted had been extremely common in the original game.
But I did not know the cause.
That story had simply existed, so I played it, and all I ever did was head into the dungeon and fight Iphanel exactly as the episode instructed,
without ever once trying to think about what had made her that way.
‘How in the world had they corrupted a Noble Soul? Was there really a villain capable of something like that?’
Everything was nothing but questions.
“Haa….”
I did not know the cause, and I did not know the culprit.
Slowly, I approached Iphanel.
She still had her eyes squeezed shut and both hands drawn tightly to her chest, and the way her expression looked as though she were frightened of something made my heart ache even more.
“I should have come sooner….”
She could not hear my voice.
Even that tiny scream that had kept circling by my ears no longer came anymore.
So the thing I had thought was an auditory hallucination had actually been Iphanel’s cry for help.
‘…Wait. Then that means she was still in her right mind at least until a week ago.’
Could someone really become this completely contaminated in such a short span of time?
Even if the Dark Mage King himself came here, contaminating a divine spirit to this extent would be impossible.
My eyes suddenly swept over the surroundings.
Dark mana dyed an entirely clear violet.
Now that I looked at it properly… not even a trace remained of the green mana Iphanel had originally possessed.
Only violet mana remained.
And that violet spread throughout this entire space…
had melted into the environment so naturally that it felt as though it had existed here for hundreds of years.
“This, don’t tell me…”
I was about to say something to Kkotseorin because something felt terribly wrong, when suddenly she staggered and dropped to her knees.
“Wh-what? Are you okay?”
I hurriedly held her up, and Kkotseorin pressed a hand to her throbbing head, a line of cold sweat running down as she said:
“…Yes. I’m fine.”
“What happened all of a sudden…? Don’t tell me the dark mana really was too much for you?”
“That’s… not it…. It’s just that the World Tree keeps speaking to me….”
“What is it saying?”
Kkotseorin shook her head slowly, then parted her pink lips and said:
“It says… an unwelcome guest carrying a tawny-brown aura has arrived….”
“Tawny-brown…?”
For a moment, that unfamiliar yet familiar phrase blanked my mind.
Then the Jikbakguri Glasses automatically searched and displayed information before my eyes.
The next instant, I felt my chest go cold.
‘No way…?’
There were only two beings in this world with such a distinctive aura.
And one of them would never move from its place.
Which left only one person.
‘Cheollibeon.’
There was no one else but that legendary dark mage.
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