Chapter 134
The first thing that caught my eye was the dazzling golden hair reminiscent of the summer sun.
Her amber-bright eyes blinked repeatedly, while her vivid pink lips looked as though they held wild strawberries.
It was Adella, transformed into my appearance—or, more precisely, the version of me from ten seconds ago.
And I...
-Wow, the streamer became Adella!!!
-Wakya-pya
-OwO
-So that's possible?
-The ultimate level of being a fan: I become the object of my own fandomㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-This is insaneㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
Swoosh.
A silver tail moved up, down, left, and right.
‘This actually works?’
Come to think of it, one of the managers with a cat avatar could move her tail too. Who knew it could move this freely?
Paying my respects to the advances in this world's neuroscience, I closely examined my changed body.
For starters, my field of vision had become slightly lower.
Even without surrounding my eyes with aura, I could see objects extremely well, and no afterimages appeared no matter how much I waved my hands around. It felt as though I had a high-performance camera installed.
I slipped Adella's dagger onto my finger and spun it around.
As expected, I couldn't shake the awkward feeling.
This was why I hadn't used the body of some complete stranger when creating my avatar.
It was impossible to properly make use of each habit accumulated through experience without my own body.
“Aaaaaaaah! What is this? What is this! Did our bodies switch? Your body and mine...!”
“Could you stop making such a fuss with my body?”
“Huh? I... No, surely it can't be you, Sis?”
“That's right. We switched bodies for a little while.”
“How could this happen...?”
“Listen carefully from now on, Adella.”
I smacked both of Adella's cheeks with my palms. It felt strange, as though I were doing it to myself, but whatever.
While her cheeks were squished and her lips stuck out, I explained the plan going forward.
“To calm this situation down, we have to summon Mephistopheles and defeat him ourselves. Do you understand?”
“Uh... I understand.”
“However, the body in which Mephistopheles can manifest is limited.”
If she asked why, I had no answer either. I had asked Waresoft the same question. They had explained it with complicated ASI technical jargon, so I had memorized the phrasing for now, but understanding all of it was impossible.
I had suggested that if Mephisto's summoning required Adella's body, we could simply save Adella's mind, clear the game, and restore it afterward, but they told me that was impossible.
For one thing, it was impossible to upload model data into an open world while its story was in progress. Even overwriting an existing NPC couldn't accommodate all of Adella's complicated code. Apparently, there wasn't enough capacity.
I wondered if we could simply find a model with a large data capacity that contained no dummy data. When I looked into it, there was exactly one person who met all the conditions.
The player: ‘me.’
This was where the entire operation began.
“From now on, I'm going to hand control over to the Laurel of Death. Then Mephistopheles will descend before long, just as the pope transformed into Beelzebub.”
“Are you saying you're going to sacrifice yourself in my place? Absolutely not! Please... Please don't do this... Why do you keep doing this? Please...!”
“Adella, listen to the end! It's not a sacrifice.”
“Then what is it! You switched bodies before explaining anything to me, which means you'd already made up your mind! Isn't that right?”
I shook my head as I listened to Adella's sobs, which sounded as though she might completely break down.
I firmly wiped away the tears streaming down her face, then pressed her forehead against mine.
“I'm just going to another world for a little while.”
“Go to another world...?”
Adella stared at me with a puzzled expression.
“Yes. With the Laurel of Reincarnation and the Curse of Immortality, I won't die. I'll just be knocked into another world.”
This was where the explanation became difficult.
The Laurel of Reincarnation contained a command that returned the player to a save point upon game over, while the Curse of Immortality was a trait that granted an invincibility status for five seconds.
Just as I was wondering how to make her understand it easily, Adella nodded.
“Then I just need to trust you and wait?”
She smiled with a resolute expression, putting strength into her voice.
Even if she didn't understand, it was an expression she could show only because she trusted me completely.
As an adult, I couldn't respond to that trust with anything less.
I tightly clasped her hand.
“I'll be back soon.”
[RECOVER]
[system: Executing the recovery wizard for trig/0xf29a31.]
[Object ‘Cat of Dawn – Adella’ detected.]
[Forcibly summoning ‘Mephistopheles’.]
* * *
[HP: 18391/43750(40500+3250)]
[HP: 8391/43750(40500+3250)]
[HP: 1/43750(40500+3250)]
[Trait - Curse of Immortality (1/5)]
[YOU DIED]
[Trait - Curse of Immortality (2/5)]
[Trait - Curse of Immortality (3/5)]
[Trait - Curse of Immortality (4/5)]
[Trait - Curse of Immortality (5/5)]
[system: This command has already been processed.]
* * *
The world was reconstructed.
The buildings began disappearing first.
As though a civilization trailer were being played in reverse, each brick evaporated from the top down, creating a majestic spectacle.
Next, the verdant forests and rivers slowly lost their color.
Finally, as the land supporting the bridge crumbled away, I found myself floating between universes.
And the universe of this world was truly bright.
A void filled entirely with white.
“So this is the open world. Still, I think the universe is more beautiful when it's dark.”
At times like this, I was grateful that I at least had a chat window.
-Something... something's happening...
-I don't understand anything anymore
-Is this part of the plan, teacher?
-Everything disappeared. There's nothing left?
-Did you fail?
“You can think of it as a sort of exploit. The Laurel of Reincarnation targets the player, while the Curse of Immortality treats the character as an object.”
????
-Huh?
-?
-Professor, you're going way too fast!
-Are you playing a different game by yourself?
“Simply put, the Curse of Immortality is a condition that activates just before HP drops to 0. Normally, the death judgment should occur after all five seconds of the Curse of Immortality have ended. However, the object designated by the Laurel is the player itself. Since the Curse of Immortality is superficially applied to the ‘body’ called Adella, the death judgment occurred before the Curse ended, creating two worlds. And because I still haven't died and remain alive, the original world doesn't disappear.”
Waresoft's open-world overlapping system used a multistack method.
Therefore, when retrying, it didn't destroy the existing world and rebuild it from the beginning. Instead, it saved a seed value at the checkpoint, prepared a subworld in advance, and replaced it whenever necessary.
“Suppose there are five poker cards. If the world where Mephistopheles was summoned is the ace of spades, that card has been moved to the back. How do we draw that card again?”
-We keep drawing until it comes out.
“Correct. As expected, I like smart people. So we simply have to retrace the path we've taken since Part 1. Since the worlds are overlapped, all the enemies will be in the ace of spades too, so we won't have to fight them.”
Wasn't it unusual how they understood everything the moment I explained it?
No matter how sturdy a system created by humans looks, it is bound to have flaws.
Just like when I discovered that Asteria's ultimate in LoL could damage a fortress if I had a Tiamat item equipped.
After all, the uncertainty principle exists in science, and the incompleteness theorem has been proven in mathematics. There was no way a technology created by humans by combining magic could be ‘perfect’ in itself.
If impossibility cannot be rigorously proven, that means it is possible.
In the end, once I had really leaned on the engineers, this ingenious idea had emerged in a single day.
At the thought of finally ending this damn game, my tail twitched reflexively.
-Gasp, the tail...!
-ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Looks like you're in a good mood.
-If what the streamer says is true, we might actually clear it?
-I can only marvel at this ridiculously detailed implementationㅋㅋㅋㅋ
[‘CatMatingIsTheBest’ donated 1,000 won!]
-NoName, sorry for the completely random question, but your pronunciation was a little off during yesterday's stream. Did you get braces?
While waiting for the next open world to load, I had some room to pay attention to the stream.
Perhaps they couldn't stand even a brief wait, because they quickly dragged me into another topic.
“No. When did I ever slur my pronunciation?”
[‘CatMatingIsTheBest’ donated 10,000 won!]
-Then could you try saying ‘Hanyang Tailor Shop next to Hanyeong Tailor Shop, Hanyeong Tailor Shop next to Anyang Tailor Shop’ once?
This was child's play. It wasn't a rune, just Hangul.
The runes used in high-level magic of the sixth circle or higher were so complicated, starting with their naming conventions, that even I often got confused unless I recited them aloud.
They weren't letters created through a social convention in the first place, so they made no consideration for the structure of the human mouth.
A phrase I was merely trying to practice before an interview was nothing to worry about.
“Han-yang-nyang Tailor Shop next to Han-yang-nyang Tailor Shop, Han-yang-nyang Tailor Shop next to An-yang-nyang Tailor Shop”
-ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Is she actually a genius?
-ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Wakya-pya
-This is a cat, and this is Catsㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Why even go see a musicalㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-So Adella adding ‘nyang’ to the end of every sentence wasn't just a character quirkㅋㅋ
└ She couldn't help itㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Seriously adorableㅋㅋㅋㅋ
“Huh?”
-Everyone, quiet!
-Shhhhhhh!
-Hide, hide, hide
-Run awaaaaay~~~~
“Wait, this is taking longer than I thought...”
The gently swaying tail drooped, and the ears stiffly flattened backward.
It was taking far too long.
I was going too far back into the past.
The open-world stack wasn't building up as much as I had feared, but the world currently being generated was similar to the place I knew and yet different from it.
The white background had already filled with a dark night sky.
When a cold wind brushed against my arm, I wrapped Adella's black cloak tightly around myself.
Then I turned around absentmindedly, and my shoulder struck something with a thud.
It was a neatly built stone wall.
In a deserted alley somewhere in the capital, everyone had already fallen asleep, and not even the faintest light spilled from the homes.
This was neither the Arseria Forest from the prologue nor Abyss's fifteenth branch in Part 1.
This was a world where all the boss monsters had disappeared. As a result, my plan to simply mark each boss's spawn point and hurry on to the next open world instantly went up in smoke.
I had absolutely no idea where I was walking. My footsteps grew heavier with every step, to the point that I felt as though I were sinking into a swamp.
After walking endlessly along the uneven stone road, I heard a baby's cry amid the hooting of owls.
“That's a baby crying... right?”
-This is fucking scary...
-Where the hell is this?
-Isn't that a cat crying?
-No, no, it really sounds like a baby crying.
-I've never seen a story like this before.
The viewers and I simultaneously sensed that something was suspicious.
Until now, World of Arseria had contained neither ‘babies’ nor even ‘children.’
When Adella and I left the capital, even in that crowded marketplace, there had been nothing but adults and old people.
Just as I was about to dismiss it as a game convention, the baby's cry sounded so realistic that I turned on every interface I could.
[▶Quest Notification – ON]
[▶NPC Subtitles – ON]
[▶Navigation Assistant – ON]
[▶Minimap – ON]
[▶Hit Effect – ON]
[▶Critical Effect – ON]
[▶Kill Count Notification – ON]
As expected, nothing appeared.
Finally, when I turned on the notification describing the current chapter,
[▶Chapter Notification – ON]
[Unused Data / Access prohibited to anyone except A-2-level administrators]
I realized that I had entered a world that couldn't be accessed by normal means.
A world forgotten and abandoned by everyone, one that could never be found in the story: dummy data.
That was when it happened.
-Behind you, behind you, behind you!
-Streamer, something's coming!
-Aaaaaaaah!
It had closed the distance from the darkness in an instant, leaving me no time to react.
I felt a heavy impact in my side, and my body gradually tilted. At this rate, I was certain to fall.
But before the impact with the hard ground could even reach my ears,
All the interfaces faded along with it, and my vision went dark as though the film had been cut off.