46. Old Story (1)
Today’s diary.
Entered the gambling hall—lost my entire fortune!
The end.
‘…I lost every last bit of it.’
If I thought of it as the price of admission for raising Silver Age November’s favorability, it was not all that expensive, but it had been such a massive sum that there was no helping the ache in my gut.
Of course, even now, an enormous amount of money was piling up in my account thanks to the item copyrights, but that was separate from the feeling of watching all the cash right in front of my eyes get cleaned out.
People often said that when you lose all the money you poured into gambling, you should just think of it as paying dearly for a life lesson.
No.
That was just coping.
Not even the Blessing of Crimson Spring March could do anything about this stomach-burning misery.
“…Hnghh…”
While I was busy crying tears of blood all by myself, Silver Age November abruptly spoke.
“Very well. I happen to love gambling very much, you see. And your proposal, I’d say, is exceedingly interesting even within my rather short life of only a thousand years. I accept.”
He burst into loud laughter as he stroked his beard.
Of course he was laughing like that.
He was the one who had won the money.
“I’ll return this.”
The moment he said that, the corners of my mouth blossomed into a smile too.
“Oh, you really don’t have to, but if you insist on giving it back, well…”
“I wasn’t gambling for money in the first place. However, it seems we need to have a somewhat deeper conversation.”
Freeze.
My hand, which had been reaching toward the coins, stopped in midair.
Right.
The one sitting across from me was Silver Age November.
I had relaxed for a moment because we were speaking so openly, but this was no time to be worrying about money.
“First question. You already knew who I was. How did you know?”
It was a scene that often came up in transmigration-story clichés.
The protagonist sees through someone’s identity, and the other party is shocked.
It would be nice if I could lie here and say I figured it out through insight, but that would be useless.
Even though his power was currently weakened because he had divided it among three relics, among the Divine Moons, his mind still might as well have ranked at the very top.
A clumsy lie would never work on him.
So here, I needed to come up with the most plausible excuse possible—
“That will do.”
“…Pardon?”
“There’s no need for me to ask. I’ve grown curious about your past. I think I’ll check it myself.”
“No, wait, hold on—”
Worried that he might find out I was originally from Earth, I hurriedly tried to get up from my seat.
But it was already too late.
‘Now. Calm yourself, and let your mind loosen.’
The instant I met his eyes—
the strength drained from my body,
and space-time came to a complete stop.
[Silver Age November rewinds the ‘Clockwork of Time.’]
[You surrender yourself to the flow of time.]
Splash.
Silver Age November cast himself into the sea.
The sea called time.
This was different from the waterfall of time.
Here, resistance itself—let alone swimming against it—was no longer possible.
And yet Silver Age November was special.
He could swim freely through this sea of time.
‘…It’s vast.’
The old man felt something strange from the very moment he plunged into it.
To begin with, the very premise of it being a “sea” was odd.
If one were to compare an individual’s time to something, it should normally be a kind of river.
Beginning as a narrow stream, then gradually growing thicker and wider as it becomes a greater current.
And yet—
‘What in the world is this…?’
Silver Age November.
Over the course of a thousand years, he had crossed countless eras, observing all the time in the world.
But even for him, this was the first time he had seen anything like this.
‘To think a time this vast… is shattered into fragments…!’
Baek Yuseol’s time was not merely immense.
This great sea called time…
had been broken into pieces, like a kaleidoscope.
With the past and future all jumbled together, the being called Baek Yuseol was barely clinging to the lifeline called the present…
and somehow continuing to live within this era.
Unstable.
Incomplete.
He was so fractured that it would not have been strange if he shattered into dust and disappeared at any moment.
‘Just how long a span has he lived…?’
Compared to the thousand years Silver Age November had endured, Baek Yuseol’s clock was so worn and ancient that the mere fact it was still turning at all could only be called a miracle.
‘That is…’
One fragment of the future entered Silver Age November’s sight.
Ten years from now.
It was the very day when Black Night Thirteen Months would descend upon this land and the whole world would be destroyed.
He had seen that scene countless times, from the moment he was first born until now—
and yet within Baek Yuseol’s time, that scene was utterly different from the one he knew.
‘Black Night Thirteen Months… has fallen.’
Before that colossal black dragon stood a lone figure.
And without even trying to understand who it was, he already knew.
…Fwaaash!!
The moment he saw that, Silver Age November’s body was yanked backward, and Baek Yuseol’s journey up to the point of confronting Black Night Thirteen Months flashed past in an instant.
Hundreds.
Thousands.
Deaths and revivals.
‘How?’
That was a scene even the old man could not understand.
Silver Age November, one of the Twelve Divine Months.
He unquestionably possessed the power to rule time.
But that power was so overwhelmingly great, and so utterly impossible to control, that he had divided all of it evenly and stored it away in three relics.
One governed the future.
One governed the past.
And one governed the present.
As for he himself…
he had spent his life simply watching the past, present, and future all at once, and being satisfied with that.
Time reversion?
If asked, he could do it. He could go back whenever he wished by bringing out and turning the ‘clockwork of the past.’
But there was no way time reversion could ever be perfect and costless.
There was one restriction:
‘Even if you return to the past, events that took place in the future cannot be changed.’
If someone you loved died and you returned to the past, all it meant was that you would witness their death all over again.
You would not be able to stop it.
Time reversion?
For all the grandeur of the term, it was no different from a recorded videotape.
You could not interfere with anything.
You could do nothing—
except watch.
That was why, even knowing that the world would be destroyed, Silver Age November had lived on in resignation.
Because the future could not be changed.
And yet—
‘What exactly are you?’
Baek Yuseol had undertaken tens of thousands of regressions, something even Silver Age November himself would never dare attempt—
and in the end, he had brought down Black Night Thirteen Months.
A future he himself had not seen.
A future he himself had not been able to change.
That boy before him…
was a being who had accomplished everything he could not do, everything he had believed impossible.
…Clink!
Before he knew it, Silver Age November had already emerged from the sea and dropped back into his chair, taking out a bottle of dongdongju and raising it to his lips.
“…Huh?”
Baek Yuseol looked around blankly.
He had definitely felt, for an instant, as though time had stopped, but before even a second had passed, everything had returned to normal.
‘What the…?’
As he felt at his chest and glanced around, the Garam Tribe guards and the dealer who had been handing out the cards were all wearing puzzled expressions.
They did not understand what had just happened.
“So it turns out… we had met before.”
“…What?”
“Perhaps… at some point in the past, you and I met.”
On some other timeline, different from the one now before them.
‘W-what is he talking about?’
Whether Baek Yuseol looked puzzled or not, Silver Age November gulped down his dongdongju and said:
“I understand now why you came looking for me. Most likely, you needed my blessing.”
I had never expected the conversation to progress all the way to that point.
‘This wasn’t part of the plan.’
No matter how well I might impress Silver Age November with gambling and sweet-talk him afterward, his blessing was an absurdly expensive thing.
I had planned to visit him dozens, perhaps hundreds of times, becoming his drinking buddy, his gambling buddy, and only then broach the subject of the blessing.
“Very well. I will grant you my blessing. However, with my strength as it is now, I cannot properly bestow a complete blessing. I divided my power into four pieces and distributed them among three relics.”
That much Baek Yuseol already knew.
Whereas ordinary Divine Moons sealed off only tiny portions of their power into relics, Silver Age November had poured far too much of his own power into his.
Because of that, his relics had gone so far as to take on bodies and act on their own.
Even Baek Yuseol did not know their exact forms.
Silver Age November’s relics had each taken on different appearances, races, ages, and genders, and wandered about in whatever place they pleased.
There were a few places he could roughly guess, but…
“You need not worry. You have already met one of my relics. And it seems that one has taken quite a liking to you.”
“I met one?”
“Yes. It must have been very recent, so search your memory carefully. He will remain near your side, by destiny.”
“Ah…”
With that, Silver Age November rose to his feet with the dongdongju bottle still in hand.
His face had gone slightly red from drink, yet his eyes did not waver in the slightest.
“Well then. Until next time.”
…Read only on MugenCodex…
Having successfully conquered the Ancient Carmenset Ruins, Zeliel’s Starcloud expedition returned under a barrage of reporters’ cameras.
The story of Zeliel, who had directly encountered the legendary Carmenset, challenged him, and won at the mere age of eighteen, was more than enough to become a sensational headline.
Of course, it also helped that the Starcloud Merchant Company had already fed the media plenty of bait in advance to raise Zeliel’s image.
Click-click! Click-click!
The reporters were shouting something outside the carriage, but none of it reached Zeliel.
‘Annoying.’
She let their voices flow in one ear and out the other.
They were surely just asking the obvious—how she had found Carmenset’s ruins, how she had conquered them.
There was no need to waste her energy answering here. Later, at a proper press conference, she could tell the story in full if necessary.
More than that—
what filled Zeliel with joy was the fact that she had given her father “immortality.”
At the final moment, Carmenset had said:
‘Your wish has been granted!’
Immediately afterward, every member of the expedition inside the ruins had been expelled outside the dungeon, and the gate to the ruins had shut completely.
It no longer mattered.
There would never be any need to find those ruins again.
If she had extended her father’s life, that alone was enough to satisfy her.
‘Still… what exactly was that scene back then?’
And yet one small thing still bothered her.
The instant she made her wish to Carmenset, why had a memory from her childhood suddenly surfaced?
That memory of spending a night with her father after renting out the amusement park beneath a moonlit sky…
was, to this day, the one and only memory Zeliel held precious above all others.
A truly magical memory—one that brought peace to her heart and mind whenever she recalled it, no matter where she was.
Even now, simply remembering that time would make her smile and leave her wrapped in happiness.
‘Who knows.’
Perhaps the sheer ecstasy of finally saving her father had naturally brought forth the happiest memory of her childhood all by itself.
Thinking that way, Zeliel relaxed and leaned back against the carriage seat.
“…My lady.”
The driver of the motor carriage turned around, his face pale.
“Are you… truly alright?”
“Hm? About what?”
“It’s just… what the reporters are saying…”
The reporters?
What could they possibly be saying?
…Thinking that, she tilted her head slightly, and at that moment, the strange questions pouring in from outside crashed into her ears like a wave.
“What are your thoughts on the disappearance of the Chairman of Starcloud?!”
“There are mounting testimonies that he suddenly vanished in the middle of the summit hall!”
“Do you know anything about this incident?!”
“Can you guarantee that this had nothing to do with you?!”
“…What?”
Those were strange questions.
Why were they not asking about Carmenset?
Weren’t they supposed to be praising her?
With vacant eyes, Zeliel slowly turned her head toward the reporters.
The expressions of the reporters thrusting microphones forward so fervently, spittle flying from their mouths—
why did the way those faces twisted and crumpled seem so painfully slow and vivid?
“What… what are you talking about…?”
Zeliel shook her head, denying reality.
And yet—
“Chairman Melian turned to dust and disappeared last night in the middle of the World Summit Conference! Please say something!”
This moment—
was reality.
And that, in turn,
was pain.
