Ch.196The Hourglass That Flows Backward (4)

Ortes felt fear at the Pope’s idea.

The Demon King who descended in the mythical era was clearly a divine being.

At the same time, the power of the Demon King who came to this world was much weaker than his true form that had existed beyond the realm of ascension. Historical records of the Demon King “growing” as he created magical power and spells prove this.

Crossing the dimensional wall to descend into this world inevitably comes with restrictions on one’s power.

This is why the gods of the Divine Faith do not directly descend to solve everything, but instead bestow only a tiny fraction of their power to priests, or interfere through demigods or avatars.

The Pope focused on this point. When a god descends inside the world, they cannot arrive with their complete power and form.

Divine artifacts are tools that borrow part of a god’s power. They can function as shackles to constrain part of a god’s existence.

The god that the Commander would summon down was the Primordial God, the original form of his divinity. A being that handles the providence of time and space.

No altars to the Primordial God remain in this world anymore. So the Pope gave the Commander the significance of a pantheon and bound him with the Pope’s holy spirit. He assumed the existence of the Primordial God among the various gods.

The Commander-altar also served as an anchor to fix the Pope’s activities in this world. Under the world order that rejected divinity other than the Demon King’s, the Pope’s movements were restricted, but conversely, his power finally spread its wings and soared in the pantheon filled with divine power.

The Pope himself, a demigod with the Primordial God’s blood fully awakened within the altar’s domain, performs the role of priest. As a natural consequence, the deity the Pope worships as a priest becomes the Primordial God.

The three elements of a temple: altar, priest, and sacred object. When two of them imply the Primordial God, the remaining one naturally connects to the Primordial God as well.

But the problem was time. The plan to corrupt an empty divine artifact through subtle hints and symbols to draw in and bind a god’s power required far too much time.

Even if the Pope used his own holy spirit to accelerate time, even if he used up his near-eternal lifespan as a demigod, it was still not enough time to guarantee the completion of the divine artifact.

That’s how vast a being a god was.

However, the “Ten Commandments” was added to this. The greatest artifact in history, with ascension and a channel to divinity already formed.

The Ten Commandments’ power is connected to magic of each attribute. If the nature of its power could be reversed to connect to the Primordial God’s domain…

Finally, the power of the Primordial Time God would come under the Pope’s control.

A god as pure “power,” without freedom or will.

This is why the Divine Faith would have considered the Pope’s plan heretical. Because it degrades gods, who should be objects of worship, into mere tools.

But what made Ortes afraid wasn’t the Pope’s plan itself.

It was the future the Pope sought to achieve with that plan.

There was no future in his plan.

The outcome that only Joaquin, the Pope’s close aide, would have shared. Ortes recalled the prophecy¹ Joaquin had demanded from him at their first meeting. He had asked what the greatest tribulation to befall this world would be.

It seemed the Pope had used Joaquin as his answer sheet for mistakes.

Observing the future through prophecy, he would make different choices if his plan failed.

During the process of observing the future, Joaquin must have seen possibilities where they failed to control the Primordial God’s power, leading to the destruction of the world and universe, or where all the world’s timelines became tangled and perished.

After going through such wrong answers, the Pope and Joaquin would have arrived at the correct answer.

The Pope’s true plan, which Coreman might have vaguely guessed.

The wish the Pope would achieve with the Time God’s power.

He wanted to replace the future with the past.

The 2,074 years of the Magic Era, where the Demon King wrote a new history.

He would reverse all of it and turn it into nothingness. Rewind the flow of history. Erase events that occurred. Delete people’s stories.

Make the Magic Era nothing, and go further back in time until even the fact that the Demon King came no longer exists.

Like time on Earth, time in this world was also linear. Like an hourglass. The flow of sand falling from top to bottom is constant.

The Pope wanted to flip that entire hourglass. Make the sands of time converge back to the starting point. And thus history would restart. The correct history, unpolluted by the Demon King’s magic.

The Pope sincerely believed this.

The Pope’s plan to deny the time this world had experienced, to negate the records of everyone who had lived in it. Ortes felt fear.

But at the same time, a thought occurred to him.

Perhaps.

Perhaps by supporting the Pope’s plan, even the fact that Ortes himself had come to this world could be reversed.

If all events disappeared, the fact that he came to this world would also be erased. The plan he had conceived while watching the bubbles of annihilation would finally be realized.

He could go home.

Ortes, who had scoured the extra-dimensional contamination zone for this one thing, felt tempted to abandon everything and lend his hand to the Pope. The only means to be compensated for all those years of fleeing for survival amid inexplicable hostility after falling into this damned magic-gap society.

But what lay on the other side of this choice?

If the Pope’s plan succeeded, ultimately even the Pope himself would disappear. Because to the Pope who wanted to erase the time of a world contaminated by magic, even he himself was an entity that should rightfully vanish.

Carisia, who was like a crystallization of the contaminant called magic, was an object that must be unconditionally destroyed.

On one side of the scale was return; on the other side was Carisia.

The President’s confidant made his choice.

***

Haltos saw the scythe rushing toward him.

It was too close. That scythe possessed a strange power that could sever even regeneration blessed by extra-dimensional forces. A severed arm wouldn’t grow back, and torn organs wouldn’t mend themselves.

So Haltos had been responding by destroying the points where he was attacked. If an organ’s wound wouldn’t stop bleeding, he would cut it out entirely and regenerate a new one; if an arm was cut off, he would cut the stump once more to return it to a state where regeneration was possible.

But now the scythe was aimed at a place that couldn’t be endured by forcibly attacking it again.

His neck. If his head were severed, how would he control the body below? Perhaps it might be possible through magic to pulverize the wounded area again.

But the Commander would tear apart his incapacitated body faster than Haltos could chant a spell.

Haltos sensed the end. Not a life-or-death struggle with an adversary, but a demise at the hands of a Commander controlled by others.

How ironic. Just as Haltos was about to exhale his final breath—

Clang!

With a clear sound, the scythe’s trajectory was deflected. Blue eye-light that filled one with anger and disgust just by looking at it. The squinted eyes with an unusually faint impression were now wide open.

“What are you doing? Not fighting?”

“The Pope?”

“Found someone to cover my shift.”

Haltos witnessed, far away, a downpour of light raging as if to destroy the world. Once again, familiar anger arose. Magic he had faced in dim memories. That was the bastard child of white light.

A joint struggle with two adversaries. What on earth was he doing?

Whether Haltos was experiencing a crisis of self-identity and professional ethics or not, Ortes, who didn’t care, urged him on.

“That thing. Does it get injured?”

“That’s not a ‘thing.’ That’s the Commander of Blasphemia, a gathering of like-minded individuals.”

“Yes. So. Does it get injured?”

Haltos shook his head. He was the strongest mage among those in Arguirion. It was one of the reasons he was nominated as the head of Arguirion.

Another reason was, of course, his ability to deal with “adversaries.” In fact, this contribution was greater.

With his powerful magical capacity and ability to handle anomalies accumulated from facing adversaries, Haltos, who combined both orthodox and unorthodox methods, was not one to be helplessly defeated by the Commander.

Rather, if it had been the original Commander, he would likely have been disarmed by Haltos long ago. After all, Haltos could freely use extra-dimensional currents and had virtually unlimited regenerative abilities.

But this time, the Commander’s immortality was even more robust. No matter what wound was inflicted, time would revert to before the attack. The only strategy Haltos could think of was to “bless” the entire artifact with extra-dimensional magical power.

However, even the blessing would be chased away by the reversing time.

Ortes calculated the odds of victory. If he could cover the time reversal technique with his eyes, Haltos’s extra-dimensional corruption could stop the Commander.

But in that case, after stopping the Pope’s plan, he would likely have to face both Haltos and the Commander.

His resolve was firm.

If they didn’t stop the Pope right now, the world would disappear. Haltos and the Commander? Even when they were together in Blasphemia, they couldn’t stop Carisia and himself.

Ortes believed in Carisia.

“I’ll break the reversal technique from here. I’ll leave the corruption to you.”