Chapter 140
Chapter 140
It was just as I was letting out a foolish laugh of relief at the fact that my life wasn't someone else's artificial setup or a fake.
“……Huh?”
Suddenly, my heart gave an unpleasant lurch.
Wooong───!
I could feel the mana within my body, which had been calm until just moments ago, once again trying to run wild of its own accord.
A heavy, foreign sensation flowing through my veins.
“What is this? Why is this happening?”
As I hurriedly tried to sit up, my eyes turned toward the palm I had pressed against the bedsheet.
“……!”
Something was rippling in the very center of my palm.
Even after rubbing my eyes and looking again, it wasn't an illusion.
It was the mysterious, dazzlingly multicolored light that had seeped through the cracks just moments ago when that pitch-black subspace shattered.
That radiant, overwhelming mass of light was now slowly oozing through the skin of my palm.
“Fuck, no way.”
I yanked my hand back in terror.
No, it wasn't as if I were some radiation-exposure victim.
Could a person really start emitting light like this just from catching a brief glimpse of that radiance when the subspace shattered?
Along with the visual shock, an enormous, unidentified energy began boiling over madly inside my body.
My mana core and blood vessels swelled as though they might burst at any moment.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
The sound of my heartbeat thundered beside my ears, loud enough to tear them apart.
If energy this powerful lost control and tried to run wild, then naturally, I should have felt my life threatened and been gripped by extreme terror.
'Huh.'
Why was that?
For some reason, I didn't feel even the slightest bit afraid.
These overwhelming currents and brutish flows of energy that seemed ready to devour my body.
Because they felt strangely as though they were clinging to my veins and muscles, gently wrapping around them.
Not like savage waves, but like a warm current trying to carry me somewhere higher.
“Haa……”
I exhaled slowly and gradually released the tension from my rigid body.
There was no way I could block such a powerful flow even if I resisted, and I was certain that this energy wasn't trying to destroy my body.
I sat cross-legged on the bed and calmly closed my eyes.
Then I began accepting the changes taking place in my body.
Fwoooosh───!
Even with my eyes closed, I had the illusion that my vision was growing brighter.
The multicolored energy that had seeped into my body soon passed beyond my blood vessels and began taking over every cell in my body at a furious speed.
It was a wondrous sensation, as blocked channels burst open and circuits that had never existed were newly carved into being.
Crack. Crack.
At the same time, I heard fine cracking sounds from the surface of my skin, as if thin porcelain were breaking.
Hairline cracks spread across my entire body like a spiderweb, and brilliant multicolored light began pouring through them.
The dark bedroom was instantly filled with dazzling colors, like sunlight shining through stained glass.
* * *
Farne Marquisate Estate, the head of the household's office.
Silence settled heavily among the towering stacks of documents.
In this room, where even a single short sentence was treated as fatal information, Corinth was drawing his fountain pen across the papers.
But that lasted only a moment.
He stopped writing and pressed firmly against his temple.
A deep crease had settled between his brows, one that had not disappeared for days.
'The brat who said he wanted to live quietly—why does he keep touching off the Empire's detonators everywhere he goes?'
It was a problem concerning his second son, Cassian.
Why was there not a single ordinary family that he ever got involved with?
House Rohanna, of all things.
It was at that moment, while Corinth was lost in thought.
Wooong───.
“……?”
Corinth's eyebrows twitched faintly.
The nib of the fountain pen on his desk trembled slightly, and the red tea remaining in his half-empty teacup rippled in concentric circles.
A strange wave.
It felt like a low-magnitude earthquake, as though a massive bedrock were twisting deep beneath the ground.
However, Corinth possessed swordsmanship powerful enough to contend with an archmage, and he immediately saw through the nature of the vibration.
'This isn't natural.'
Corinth frowned and rose from his seat at once.
It was a phenomenon far removed from an earthquake.
It was a resonance of space itself, caused by the enormous mana scattered through the atmosphere being fiercely sucked into one place in an instant.
Its epicenter was not far away.
Amazingly, it was inside this estate.
Creeeak.
With a hardened expression, Corinth opened the office door and stepped into the hallway.
“M-My lord!”
Several maids and servants came running from the end of the hall, but when they spotted Corinth, they stopped dead in their tracks, their faces pale.
Even the trained servants were clearly frightened by the bizarre pressure they could feel against their skin.
Corinth raised a hand, firmly stopping them from approaching or offering their greetings.
“There's no need to follow me. All of you, stay at your posts.”
At his command, the servants retreated, suppressing their fear.
Corinth walked soundlessly along the long hallway.
With every step he took, the density of the mana pressing down on the air grew exponentially thicker.
Every breath felt as though it were burning his lungs from within.
An ordinary knight or mage would have fallen to their knees merely by approaching this area.
Corinth stopped walking.
Where his gaze came to rest.
The place where the foreign energy poured out like a waterfall was none other than the room of his second son, Cassian.
Even the household knights who should have been standing guard outside the door could not withstand the waves; they leaned against the wall, sweating coldly.
Corinth gave them a silent gesture with his chin, ordering them to withdraw.
Only after the knights hurried away did Corinth place his hand on the doorknob.
Through his grip, he could feel the energy boiling on the other side of the door in its entirety.
He carefully opened the door and stepped inside.
Creeeak──.
“……!”
The instant he opened the door, Corinth's eyes widened, unable to maintain their composure.
Cassian's room was filled with a beautiful, radiant mass of dazzling colors that no language in the world could describe.
Colors impossible to reproduce even with magic.
At the heart of this mesmerizing storm of light filling his vision, Cassian sat cross-legged on the bed with his eyes closed.
Flit, rustle.
It was a wondrous sight.
The old husks covering the surface of Cassian's skin were splitting apart in tiny cracks, like worn porcelain breaking.
Brilliant light poured from every crack, filling the room as it stripped away the old shell and molded a new body.
The reconstruction of flesh and soul, something only transcendents blessed by mana were said to be capable of achieving, was unfolding before Corinth's eyes.
“Haa……”
A long, deep sigh escaped between Corinth's lips.
It was a lament mingled with wonder, awe, and an inexplicable bitterness.
“Even without his mother's help, how is this possible?”
His dry murmur quietly scattered into the mass of light.
Standing by the doorway, Corinth silently gazed at his son breathing peacefully at the center of the radiance.
It was something he always felt.
His second son struggled with his words, acting as though he knew nothing and found everything bothersome.
Yet, as if it were a lie, he seemed to understand his roots completely and stride forward without hesitation.
Corinth left the door open and silently watched his son's metamorphosis.
* * *
In a pitch-black universe of void.
At the center of an absolute nothingness where not even the boundaries of up, down, left, and right existed, a massive temple carved from pure white marble floated haughtily.
It was a transcendent space where even time seemed to have stopped.
At the center of the temple stood a lone black-haired woman in a black dress.
Before her, a massive crystal orb floating in midair shone brightly.
“Haa, this is seriously a pain in the ass.”
The black-haired woman ran a hand irritably through her hair and let out a groan.
Inside the crystal orb was an image of Cassian, wrapped in multicolored radiance as he shed his old shell.
Her brows drew together.
When Cassian recklessly tried to force-load the records of another dimension by overexerting the Fixer's supernatural ability.
To stop that madness, she had dragged him into the subspace, twisting even a loophole in the system and assigning him a negative value.
And yet, he had ended up absorbing every bit of the dimensional light that leaked through during that brief opening.
“What the hell is with that insane adaptability? What kind of human does that?”
It was just as she was grumbling in displeasure.
Zzt─! Fwaaash!
The space in the middle of the temple tore open in an instant, as if it had been slashed by a sharp sword.
Then someone radiating a golden brilliance stepped through the torn dimensional rift.
“……!”
The black-haired woman reflexively hunched her shoulders.
The person who emerged from the rift was a woman with dazzling golden hair cascading down her back.
The moment her feet touched the temple floor, the entire void universe seemed to tremble faintly and bow before her overwhelming presence.
But what pressed down on the black-haired woman even more heavily than that divine aura was the murderous fury filling the blonde woman's face.
“You.”
The blonde woman shot a glance at the crystal orb, then asked in an icy voice,
“I told you never, ever to do anything dangerous without consulting me.”
Her voice was low and calm, but the killing intent within it was so frigid that it could have frozen the temple pillars.
The black-haired woman ground her teeth inwardly.
She sincerely wanted to grab the other woman by the collar and demand an explanation.
The 'dangerous thing' that woman had just mentioned—what was it referring to?
Whether it meant this crisis of providence and the world, which had nearly caused the balance of dimensions to collapse.
Or whether it referred to the man inside the crystal orb, who had nearly died from a ruptured cerebral blood vessel and was now shedding his shell.
Because to anyone who saw her, it was obvious that she was going completely insane over the latter in an overprotective frenzy.
But.
The black-haired woman did not want to make trouble by scratching an itch, so she had to once again stir up the patience she had painstakingly dredged up from rock bottom in recent days.
She forcibly swallowed the venomous retort that had risen to her throat and subtly looked away.
“……It was an unavoidable situation.”
The black-haired woman tossed out the excuse.
Even if she explained that it had been a side effect of containing the system after it nearly collapsed, it obviously wouldn't work on the woman before her.
Sure enough.
The blonde woman took a step forward and snapped coldly,
“Don't create situations that can't be helped.”
'Ah.'
This is seriously impossible.
The black-haired woman's patience was about to snap.
She had merely exercised her legitimate authority as an administrator, so why was she being forced to endure this kind of treatment here?
Her lips were just beginning to open in protest when.
Wooong─.
The blonde woman's right hand hung loosely at her side.
From her slender fingertips, dazzling white mana shimmered and rose like a mirage, seemingly capable of burning even the pitch-black void white.
The absolute power of destruction.
A concentration of ominous energy powerful enough to erase an entire dimension as easily as flipping over one's palm.
“……”
The instant the black-haired woman saw that white mana with her own eyes.
Her anger-management disorder was instantly cured, leaving her with excellent anger management.
Her survival instinct easily crushed her pride.
“All right. All right, sis.”
The black-haired woman quickly raised both hands and tucked her tail between her legs.
“I was wrong. I'll really be careful from now on.”
At her obsequious, groveling attitude, the blonde woman slowly withdrew the white mana gathered at her fingertips.
But her gaze remained arrogant and cold.
“Behave.”
The blonde woman took one last look at Cassian inside the crystal orb, then whispered,
“While I'm asking nicely.”
“……Uh.”
After hearing the answer, the blonde woman did not even look back.
With a light wave of her hand, a rift opened in the air again and swallowed her radiant silhouette.
Fwaaash!
The rift closed, and the temple once again sank into silence and the void.
The marble temple was left alone once more.
With her tension released, the black-haired woman slumped to the ground and raised her middle finger toward the air.
“Shit.”
Pouting her lips, she grumbled in a voice thick with indignation,
“Am I really the kind of person who deserves to be treated like this wherever I go?”
Despite possessing authority rivaling that of the Creator, she lamented how she always had to shrink back and not dare make a peep in front of that overprotective crazy bitch.
“This is seriously too disgusting to put up with……”
Yet her pitiful grumbling scattered helplessly into the pitch-black void and vanished without even producing an echo.