Ch.134129 – Dummy Data

The brilliant golden hair, reminiscent of the summer sun, caught my eye first.

The amber eyes that shone like topaz blinked repeatedly, and the light pink lips looked as if they held wild raspberries.

It was Adella, transformed into my appearance—or more precisely, me from 10 seconds ago.

And I…

-Wow the streamer became Adella!!!

-Whaaaat

-OwO

-That’s actually possible?

-The ultimate fandom achievement: becoming the object of your own obsession lol

-This is insane hahaha

Swish.

The silver tail moves up, down, left, and right.

‘This actually works?’

Come to think of it, the manager with the cat avatar could move their tail too, but I never realized it could be controlled this freely.

Paying my respects to this world’s advanced neural science, I carefully examined my changed body.

First, my field of vision was slightly lower.

I could see objects clearly without surrounding my eyes with aura, and no matter how much I waved my hands, there was no afterimage. It felt like having a high-performance camera installed.

I twirled the dagger Adella had been carrying between my fingers.

As expected, I couldn’t shake the awkward feeling.

This is exactly why I didn’t create my avatar with a complete stranger’s body.

It’s impossible to properly utilize habits accumulated through experience without my own body.

“Kyaaaaaaah! What? What! Our bodies switched? My body and yours…!”

“Could you please stop making a scene with my body?”

“Huh, I… Wait, is that you, sis?”

“Yes. We’ve temporarily switched bodies.”

“How is this possible…”

“Listen carefully now, Adella.”

I clapped both my palms against Adella’s cheeks. It felt strange doing this to what looked like myself, but anyway.

With her cheeks squished and lips puckered out, I explained the plan to her.

“To resolve this situation, we need to summon Mephistopheles and defeat him ourselves. Understand?”

“Y-yes… I understand.”

“But Mephistopheles can only manifest in limited physical forms.”

If someone asked why, I wouldn’t have an answer. I asked Wearsoft the same question. They mixed in complex ASI technical terms in their explanation, and while I memorized the phrases verbatim, understanding it all was impossible.

I suggested that if Mephistopheles’s summoning required Adella’s body, we could simply save Adella’s consciousness and restore it after clearing, but they said this was impossible.

First, uploading model data to an open world with an ongoing story was impossible, and even overlaying it onto another existing NPC couldn’t accommodate all of Adella’s complex code. They said there wasn’t enough capacity.

So I figured we needed to find a model with no dummy data but large data capacity, and there was exactly one person who met all these conditions.

The player “me.”

This is where the entire operation begins.

“From now on, I’m going to hand over control to the Laurel of Death. Then Mephistopheles will soon descend. Just like how the Pope transformed into Beelzebub.”

“You mean you’ll sacrifice yourself instead of me? That’s absolutely not happening! Please… please don’t do this… Why do you keep doing this, please…!”

“Adella, listen to the end! I’m not sacrificing myself.”

“Then what! Switching bodies without any explanation means you’ve already made up your mind, right? Admit it!”

I shook my head as I listened to Adella’s crying that seemed about to collapse.

I wiped away her helplessly flowing tears and pressed my forehead against hers.

“I’m just going to cross over to another world temporarily.”

“Cross over…?”

Adella looked 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 thrown into another world.”

This part was tricky to explain.

The Laurel of Reincarnation contained a command that sends players back to save points when they game over, and the Curse of Immortality was a trait that granted invincibility for 5 seconds.

While I was wondering how to explain this simply, Adella nodded.

“So I just need to trust you and wait?”

She spoke with determination and smiled with a solemn expression.

It was an expression that could only come from someone who completely trusted me, even without understanding.

Not honoring that trust wouldn’t be the right attitude as an adult.

I firmly grasped her hand.

“I’ll be back soon.”

[RECOVER]

[system: Executing recovery wizard trig/0xf29a31.]

[Object ‘Dawn Cat – Adella’ confirmed.]

[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: Command already processed.]

* * *

The world begins to reconstruct.

First, buildings start to disappear.

Like a civilization trailer playing in reverse, bricks evaporate one by one from the top, creating a majestic sight.

Next, the lush forests and rivers gradually lose their color.

Finally, as the ground supporting the bridge collapses, I found myself floating through space.

And the space in this world was truly bright.

A void filled entirely with white.

“So this is the open world. Still, I think space is more beautiful when it’s dark.”

It was fortunate to at least have the chat window at times like this.

-Something… something is happening…

-I don’t understand any of this anymore

-Is this part of your plan, teacher?

-Everything’s disappeared?

-Did we fail?

“You could say I used a kind of trick. The Laurel of Reincarnation targets the player, but the Curse of Immortality takes the character as its object.”

-????

-What?

-?

-You’re going too fast, Professor!

-Are you playing a different game by yourself?

“Simply put, the Curse of Immortality activates right before your HP drops to 0. Normally, the death judgment would come after all 5 seconds of the curse ended, but the Laurel’s object is the player itself. The curse is superficially placed on Adella’s ‘body,’ so the death judgment comes before the curse ends, creating two worlds. And because I’m still alive, the original world doesn’t disappear.”

Wearsoft had adopted a multi-stack system for their open world overlapping system.

So when retrying, instead of destroying the existing world and rebuilding from scratch, they prepared a sub-world by saving seed values at checkpoints and replacing them whenever needed.

“Imagine you have 5 poker cards. If we call the world where Mephistopheles is summoned the Ace of Spades, that card has now been moved to the back. How do you draw that card again?”

-You have to keep drawing until it comes up

“Correct. I like smart people. So all I need to do is walk the same path I’ve walked since Part 1. Since it’s an overlapping world, all the enemies will be in the Ace of Spades world, so I won’t have to fight.”

You understand so quickly, it’s impressive.

Systems created by humans, no matter how robust they seem, always have loopholes.

Like when I discovered that Asteria’s ultimate ability in League could damage fortresses when equipped with the Tiamat item.

Even in science, there’s the uncertainty principle, and in mathematics, the incompleteness theorem has been proven. So mere technology created by humans combined with magic cannot be “perfect” in itself.

If impossibility cannot be rigorously proven, then it means it’s possible.

In the end, after pestering the engineers, such a novel idea emerged in just one day.

At the thought of finally ending this damn game, my tail reflexively twitched.

-Oh! The tail…!

-hahahahahaha

-Someone’s in a good mood

-If what you’re saying is true, we might actually clear this?

-I’m just amazed at this twisted implementation lol

[‘ILikeCateMatesBest’ donated 1,000 won!]

-NoName, I’m sorry for the random question, but when you were streaming yesterday, your pronunciation seemed a bit off. Are you getting dental braces?

While waiting for the next open world to load, I had time to pay attention to the stream.

These viewers quickly pulled me into another conversation, as if they couldn’t stand even a moment’s wait.

“No. When did I ever have a speech impediment?”

[‘ILikeCateMatesBest’ donated 10,000 won!]

-Then could you try pronouncing “Hanyang Tailor Shop next to Hanyoung Tailor Shop, Hanyoung Tailor Shop next to Anyang Tailor Shop”?

This was a piece of cake. It’s not like it was in Runic language, just Korean.

High-level magic runes of 6th circle or higher have very complex nomenclature, so even I get confused if I don’t recite them orally.

Since they’re not characters created by social convention, they don’t accommodate human oral structure.

This phrase that people practice before interviews is nothing.

“Hanyang Tailor Shop next to Hanyang Tailor Shop, Hanyang Tailor Shop next to Anyang Tailor Shop”

-LMAOOOOO

-hahahaha

-Are you actually a genius?

-hahahahahahaha

-whaaaat

-This is what being a cat is all about lol

-Why even bother going to see CATS the musical!

-So Adella adding “meow” at the end of sentences wasn’t just a character quirk lol

└ She couldn’t help it hahaha

-This is seriously adorable lol

“Huh?”

-Everyone quiet!

-Shhhhhhh!

-Hide hide hide

-Run away~~~~

“Wait, this is more than I expected…”

My swaying tail drooped, and my ears flattened stiffly backward.

It’s taking too long.

We were going too far back in time.

Although the open world stacks hadn’t piled up to a concerning level, the world being created now was both similar to and different from the one I knew.

The white background had filled with the black night sky.

A cold wind brushed against my arms, so I wrapped Adella’s black cloak tightly around me.

When I instinctively looked back, my shoulder bumped into something.

It was a neatly stacked stone wall.

In a deserted alley somewhere in the capital, everyone had fallen asleep, and not even a faint light shone from the houses.

This was neither the Arsheria Forest from the prologue nor the Abyss Branch 15 from Part 1.

It’s a world where all boss monsters have disappeared. So my plan to quickly mark each boss’s spawn point and move to the next open world instantly fell apart.

I had no idea where I was walking. Each step felt heavier, making me feel like I was sinking into a swamp.

As I walked endlessly along the bumpy stone path, I heard a baby crying among the hooting owls.

“That’s a baby crying… right?”

-This is creepy…

-Where are we now?

-Is it a cat crying?

-No, it really sounds like a baby

-I’ve never seen this kind of story before

Both the viewers and I simultaneously felt something was off.

Until now, in World of Arsheria, there were no “babies,” not even “children.”

When I escaped the institution with Adella, even in that busy marketplace, all I could find were adults or elderly people.

Just as I was about to dismiss it as a gaming convention, the baby’s crying sounded too realistic, so I turned on every interface available.

[▶Quest Alert – ON]

[▶NPC Subtitles – ON]

[▶Navigation Assistant – ON]

[▶Mini-map – ON]

[▶Hit Effect – ON]

[▶Critical Effect – ON]

[▶Kill Count Alert – ON]

Still nothing appeared.

Finally, when I turned on the alert describing the current chapter,

[▶Chapter Alert – ON]

[Unused Data / A-2 level Access restricted to administrators]

I realized I had entered a world that couldn’t be accessed through normal methods.

A world forgotten and abandoned by everyone (dummy data) that could never be found in the story.

That’s when it happened.

-Behind you behind you!

-Something’s coming, streamer!

-Aaaaaaaaahhh!

It closed the distance from the darkness so quickly that I didn’t have time to react.

I felt a heavy impact on my side, and my body gradually tilted. I was clearly about to fall.

But before the impact with the hard ground could reach my ears,

All interfaces faded and my vision went black, as if the film had been cut.