Chapter 141
[In the beginning, there was Yggdrasil in the primordial world...]
I let the narrator's rambling at the ending about Yggdrasil, the Demon King, and the Primordial Annihilation go in one ear and out the other.
It was just uncomfortable knowing that it would remain in my memories forever, but what could I do?
People need to know how to adapt to the environment they've been given and live in it. With that mindset, I had been living as a woman for thirty-three years already.
Should I subtract the seven years from this life? Anyway...
[Streaming starts: 0:00:01 – NoName]
[World of Arseria – .]
[Broadcast Time - 0:00:13]
[Viewers – 5395]
-How'd it go? Did she clear?
-What, it's the ending?
-Where's Adella? Adella? Adella? Adella? Adella? Adella? Adella? Adella? Adella? Adella? Adella? Adella? Adella?
-Did she abandon Adella...?
-Is it for real that the stream crashed?
[‘Save the Grad Student’ donated 1,000 won!]
-Teacher... What about Adella...?
More than five thousand people came in within ten seconds.
However, the chat window wasn't moving very quickly compared to the number of viewers.
Maybe it was because I was sitting there with an unnecessarily solemn expression.
The biggest reason was probably that Adella had disappeared from the party list.
-ㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ
-Adellaㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ
-It's the ending now, so we can't even go back. What do we doㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ
-ㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ
-Adella sleeps here... RIP
-This is seriously unbelievable...
“I guess you like Adella more than me now.”
Even so, watching them keep looking only for Adella made a surge of jealousy rise within me.
I was the one streaming, and I was the one who had actually defeated Mephisto.
-That's not what we meant, streamerㅠㅠㅠ
-ㅠㅠㅠ
-Ah, I usually don't cry no matter what, but damn...
-So this really is the end?
“Adella's alive and well. Don't worry.”
-In our hearts?
-That kind of joke won't work on us, NoName.
-Don't be too hard on the streamer. She really did her best.
-Seriously, wasn't that the first-ever 10/10/10 clear?
└ That was insane.
-She seemed to use 5th Circle magic freely too.
[Would you like to exit the game?]
[▶Exiting World of Arseria.]
The combat power tally could wait until later.
The viewers kept hounding me, so I had no choice but to exit the game.
[Private Room]
Knock knock-
I was summoned just outside the Private Room.
I deliberately made a knocking sound before going in.
However, before I could even turn the handle, the door flew open, revealing a familiar figure behind it.
A short-haired, silver-haired cat-eared girl. It was Adella, the girl we'd desperately wanted to save.
“Phew... You went through a lot, Adella.”
Her hair was an absolute mess. There should have been a comb on the table. She could have at least brushed it a little.
“Who...? Aaaah... hic... s-sis? It's you, right? Sisssss...!”
“What? You recognize me?”
My current appearance was that of a small black-haired child, almost identical to my appearance in reality.
Even accounting for the height I'd gained recently, I was still only 110 centimeters tall. Still, at least I wasn't 103 centimeters anymore.
I'd planned to tease her a little if she didn't recognize me, but that plan had fallen apart from the very beginning.
Adella suddenly dropped to her knees and hugged me tightly.
Then, cradled in arms much smaller than hers, she began shedding tears.
Her tears soaked my shoulder, and despite myself, I felt moved as I was swept up in her emotions.
While I patted her back as she bawled for quite some time, the chat window had already descended into chaos.
-Why is Adella here?
-We're outside the game?
-?????
-It's the Private Room?
-??????????
-What? What happened?
-Explain yourself, NoName!
-ㄷㄷㄷㄷㄷㄷㄷㄷㄷㄷㄷ
-How'd you do it? How'd you do it?
“Sis, what happened to your body? And where are we?”
“Wait... I can't breathe, so could you back off a little...?”
“Eek! Ah, sorry! Did I hug you too hard?”
My body here wasn't all-powerful like it was in the game world.
Of course, Adella had been nerfed too, leaving her with the strength of an ordinary high school girl.
I pulled her away from me, sat her in an armchair, and calmed her down.
“People are curious about who you are. Look at the camera and tell them your name and age.”
-???
-What the fuckㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-That lineㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
“Uh, uh? So my name is Adella, and I'm eighteen years old.”
“That's what she says, everyone.”
“Wait, no way this is heaven? Am I dead? The heaven I imagined wasn't such a cramped, shabby room...!”
“Cramped and shabby...?”
-ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Ah, damn, what is thisㅠㅠㅠㅠ
-Is she really Adella?
-Ask her if she remembers everything that's happened up to now!
-How on earth did you bring her here ㄷㄷ
-NoName's madㅋㅋㅋㅋ
“It's not heaven. And you're not dead. In a word, you could call it the world I live in...?”
“Then it is heaven!”
“I told you it isn't.”
“But you said you were an angel?”
“I said I'm not an angel.”
“...?”
We were going around in circles. The conversation was getting nowhere.
I decided it would be best to turn off the stream for a while and have an honest conversation.
“Please bear with us for a moment.”
* * *
“I was a character in a virtual reality game?”
“Do you know what a virtual reality game is?”
“Huh? How do I know that...? I could swear I'd never heard those words before, but I understand them automatically.”
Adella trembled with confusion.
“So you're saying I'm fake...?”
Fake, copy, replicant.
All of them were things derived from an original.
But I shook my head and denied what she said.
“No. The Adella I know is the only one.”
I took a fine-toothed comb out of my inventory.
She sat on the floor while I sat on the bed, calmly combing down her hair.
The ends of her hair had been badly damaged by her long battles.
“I combed your hair like this in the Abyss too. Do you remember?”
“Hic... yes...”
Adella's back heaved.
I continued brushing her hair without paying it any mind.
“We leveled up together, shared experience, distributed equipment, and defeated enemies. You have all those memories with me. How could you be fake?”
We talked in detail about everything we'd done together in WoA.
Why she'd first dreamed of taking revenge on the Academy, her noble sacrifice to defeat the demons, and the worlds crumbling away from countless regressions and bugs.
Even if a doppelgänger with DNA that matched 100 percent existed in this world, they would still become different people if the experiences they'd accumulated afterward were different.
Perhaps my sincerity had gotten through to her to some extent, because Adella's head suddenly whipped toward me.
“Goddamn world...”
Then she suddenly spat out a curse and furrowed her brow.
“Hm?”
“I knew something was strange! How can a person's name be Etteugab C'pn (etteugab c’pn)? Any sensible parent should know not to give their child a name like that!”
Adella shouted in an aggrieved tone.
After thinking it over, I realized that the name she was talking about belonged to an NPC.
Reversed, it was npc baguette. It was definitely bizarre.
“And... and... sob...! I was on my way to buy bread, but everyone just walked along looking straight ahead, and even when I talked to them, nobody answered... Damn, just what kind of nonsensical world had I been living in!”
A lament bordering on resignation mixed with her sobs.
She threw herself into my arms again. I stroked her back and answered her questions until she calmed down a little.
“So is this the real world?”
“No, you can think of this as an in-between world.”
“What? This is a fake world too?”
She pulled away from my embrace for a moment and opened her eyes wide.
Her tail suddenly stood straight up. What, did she want me to comb that too?
“To be precise, it's virtual reality, but it's not a world inside a game. Everyone you can see if you go outside that door is a ‘real’ person.”
“Haaah, damn it... Why is my life so cursed...!”
“You're not using cat-speak anymore?”
“What are you talking about? Huh? Now that you mention it, something does seem different.”
Appending ‘nya’ to the end of every sentence had definitely seemed like enough to drive both the speaker and the listener insane.
I spent quite a while explaining the world we lived in to her.
Adella's ears occasionally twitched as she listened intently.
It was difficult to suppress my urge to touch them.
The viewers urging me to resume the stream in Twisy End Space had somehow become even more numerous than when I turned it off, which was confusing, but there were still many points I needed to address first.
“So you're closer to a human than an artificial intelligence.”
I didn't know how they'd done it, but even on this Earth, they had managed to imitate the magic Persona Pyxis as a form of modern technology, however imperfectly.
They had given the name ASI to entities that maintained a sense of self. And it was crystal clear that ‘Walpurgis’ had been involved in the process.
The model governing Adella's thoughts in the game was probably in Redwood City, California, but when I checked the map, it was under Waresoft's jurisdiction.
Judging from what I'd heard when I met with the company's internal ASI personnel last time, they didn't seem particularly knowledgeable about AI design either.
So if I wanted to dig into Walpurgis, I would have to go to the company that had supplied the ASI here and demand answers, rather than Waresoft. Easier said than done...
I didn't have enough time to explain all those minute details, but Adella already looked thoroughly overwhelmed.
And finally,
“Have you ever heard the name Alzahab? Or the Kaizen Empire? In the game, perhaps, or anything that remains in your memory.”
“...Alzahab? No, I've never heard of it before. Is it someone important?”
“No, it isn't important. I was just asking.”
Adella had not even the slightest connection to my past life.
Then again, even Persona Pyxis hadn't been able to uncover it, so it was only natural that she didn't know.
“Oh, but I did hear something like that. I mean, when someone else possessed your body, that person definitely kept asking me to defeat Mephistopheles.”
“Kept asking?”
“Yes.”
I seemed to have caught a fleeting glimpse of it in my memories.
Even when I'd lost control of my body, Adella had continued talking with someone. It might have been the will left behind by my original self.
But Mephisto only appeared once. What could it mean that someone kept asking her to defeat him?
“Sis, sis.”
“Hm?”
“There's one more thing I want to ask.”
“Ask me anything.”
“How old are you in the real world? You know what I mean! If it turns out you're actually in your forties or fifties, it would be a little embarrassing for me to call you ‘sis’...?”
“...”
The obnoxious cat girl hemmed and hawed, trailing off.
“Seven.”
“Huh?”
“I'm seven years old, just as I look. You still have to call me ‘sis.’”
Maybe it was time to go see the viewers. I took her by the wrist and opened the front door.
“Whaaaaa? You're lying, right? Huh? No? I mean, are you lying?!”