episode_0034

“…By the way, what about Galvein? You didn’t kill him, did you?”

“No way. I’m listening to this conversation too. Didn’t I tell you, you’ll listen on your own?”

“That’s fortunate.”

I felt a faint sense of relief. I was anxious because there had been no answer since a while ago, but it seems like he was okay.

“I really wanted to personally reveal the secrets of heaven to you, thinking of our relationship from a previous life, but I didn’t expect you to trust me this much.”

“There are things you’ve done.”

“You don’t even know exactly what it is.”

“…You’re not going to tell me.”

He shook his head. If I had asked, he would have told me. It was as if he was teasing me, but when I looked into his eyes, he wasn’t looking at me, but rather projecting something. His eyes were blurry and unfocused, like a madman’s. It was hard to look at those odd eyes, so I turned my head away.

That’s dangerous. My instincts are screaming at me to keep talking, but I like to keep talking with my mouth shut. I have to listen to the story. When I throw a tantrum, I decide to listen to the rhythm of the story, but my heart wavers.

The man in front of me, yes. My ability to describe is lacking, but let me recite a little for the sake of explanation. He had horns that seemed to have been red at one time but had a slightly reddish tint to them, but they had become worn-out and pure white, and he had red and purple odd eyes. He seemed to be smiling foolishly but his smile was tinged with madness. He wore a cloak that was half white and half black, and he was even wearing a uniform. He was a creepy man who looked similar to the Demon King I knew, but I couldn’t even imagine him similarly. Despite his kindness.

“What you need to know… First is how to heal your remaining body until next spring, then the origin of the Demon King, third is about the people who have been here, fourth is why the goddess has become so ugly, and last is about the ark, the purpose of your coming here.”

“…The reason why you are so kind to me.”

“Oh, then let’s add that too.”

He pretended to write something in the air, but there was nothing to see. Was he magically writing invisible notes to me? If so, it would be like he was just waving his hand in the air, since Mana hadn’t moved even a speck of dust.

“Do you like tea? This story is going to be quite long. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something to drink?”

“I’ll just listen to your story and leave right away. Your trust level has dropped even lower because of what you just did…”

“Yeah. It’s a limited time… It’s nothing. Just receive my strength. It was promised to be like that in the first place, but didn’t you die before you could fulfill it? No, no. Rather, it was a blessing in disguise? Who would have known that I would have a limited time in my next life, but it ended up going well, so maybe it’s a good thing!”

“…over there.”

“Oh, huh?”

“Your description is getting more and more nitpicky. It’s a bit like a historical drama, but it doesn’t feel like normal conversational speech.”

“Aha, this is just… a habit. If you live like me, you might end up like this. Don’t look at me like a cockroach.”

As I watched him mutter to himself, which soon grew more and more intense and turned into shouting, I couldn’t help but look tired.

When I urged him to hurry up and explain his frustration, the man finally came to his senses and continued speaking.

“Hmm… To tell this, you first need to know about our meeting, and to do that, I need to briefly talk about my footsteps. Where should I start… It doesn’t have to be everything. Oh, right. Did you see the outside before coming inside?”

“I watched it for two hours and got bored…”

My legs felt even more numb for no reason. When I rubbed my legs and puffed out my cheeks in a show of discontent, he chuckled instead of apologizing.

“Do you think the wall is pure white? If so, how white?”

“Are you kidding me again…? It was a bit shaky, but it was all white.”

“It was originally black.”

“…Huh? Huh? ”

“I thought you would know since you touched it too. Don’t you still have powder on your hands? Okay. This is the material of the wall.”

And then, what he groaned and brought in and placed heavily on the table was a stone slab as thick as a thumb, emitting a beautiful, almost mysterious light.

“…It’s black?”

“It doesn’t look like that. But if you scratch it like this… a little deeper, the inside will show white. ”

Oh, indeed, as he said, he scratched the slab with a sharp stone the size of my thumb, and a white scratch exactly the length of the stone appeared. Unlike the outside, it was a spotless white, but when I ran my finger over it, the powder shined black, exactly the same as what I had on my hand before.

“This is one regression.”

“…Huh?”

Squeak, squeak.

The sound of the stone slabs scraping continued. And every time there was a single scraping sound, two, three, four. The numbers kept increasing.

He repeated this mechanically until the stone slab was covered in white scratches, leaving no trace of black, only white, and the numbers reached hundreds or thousands, and I was so overwhelmed by the madness that I kept my mouth shut and continued to stare at the stone slab as if under a spell.

“The regression continued. When I filled one slab, I thought it couldn’t get any more worn out. But I was wrong. The path I made by filling the ceiling, walls, and floor with slabs was as tall as me! That’s when I felt something was wrong. But when a year passed, without fail, the warrior would cut off my head and time would return. Tick, tick, tick. ”

“Over there.”

“Have you ever been so tired of anticipating what someone is going to say next that you get sick of it? When time goes back, no matter what I do, it all ends up being for nothing. The person I loved is already buried in time, and I can’t remember their face or name. When I start my day, I know everything, and I remember every single word. I’m going crazy because I’m forgetting my memories, but I’m also going crazy because I can’t remember some things. It’s like I closed my eyes and opened them again, but months have passed. Until the stone slab road stretches on endlessly…”

Should I stop him? He kept mumbling, and it seemed like he wasn’t explaining anything to me anymore, but was instead recalling the past and killing himself from the trauma. I wasn’t sure if that madman would attack me if I approached him again.

“Ha, hahaha… When will this damn regression end? How many more perfect happy endings do I have to make? Are you telling me not to kill anyone? Even if I do nothing and just sit still, they keep killing each other? How much do I have to do to satisfy you? Oh, isn’t this it? That’s right, I’m the Demon King. Maybe killing them all would have been the right answer.”

Haha. The madman continued, making a sound that was hard to tell whether it was a breath he took again or a laugh of insanity.

“That’s why I killed them. I killed them all. I wanted to end it now because I thought it was good. But…”

His eyes became clouded with madness, and his body sagged as if it had lost all its strength.

Only then did I calm him down, expecting this madness to be over. It didn’t seem like much was needed. It would have been more meaningful to just pat him on the back quietly than to talk. I wasn’t the kind of cold-blooded person who wouldn’t even reach out to someone who was suffering so much.

“It was meaningless… They were just a part of me. Whether I was in pain or not, they didn’t care. No, some of them even watched the pain. My hands were already dirty. …Where have I heard that before?”

“The goddess of scales.”

“She is one of them. They are all gone now. Old Pangea was abandoned… Do you know this?”

“I heard what the Libra goddess said.”

“I guess you’re just going to leave. Well, most of the gods are gone anyway, so it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“…Disappear? Come to think of it, isn’t the Goddess of Libra the only god? Other gods are good and evil.”

“Hahahahaha!! Oh, sorry. I heard you say something funny. In other dimensions, there are thousands of gods… Anyway, not until my generation. …Until my generation.”

“…You did it?”

How many more people have they killed? No matter how much I dig, something comes out, and it’s a little creepy. Actually, everything that was going to come out has already come out, but the new killing is a different story.

“It was revenge. Actually, I didn’t know that would be the last time. I just stabbed it out of anger and it died. That felt pretty good, so I stabbed it, poked, poked, poked… and one fell off. It was the Goddess of Libra. I poked a hole in her stomach, but how did she escape like that? She abandoned her sanctuary. ”

“…”

I take back what I said earlier. That Demon King is a god… no, the best! Who would have thought that there would be a pioneer who would strike that damned goddess in the face!

“Hey, you must have been through a lot in this life. Judging from your expression. Well, anyway… You tried to reuse the talisman as a puppet for the play, and all your comrades died, and you barely survived, so you must have been trying to abandon the old Pangea from then on. Doesn’t it feel like you’ve seen a cursed puppet? ”

He shrugged, his shoulders moving, then seemed to pause for a moment. Then he opened his mouth to say something, stopped, and did it again.

But I really didn’t know that it would create waves like this.

“Well, this is something I actually wanted to avoid saying… But after you died in Noah’s time, I thought about it. It might be my fault that the Demon King’s past turned out that way. No, it’s definitely my fault.”

…what?