Ch.317Side Story: A World with Too Many Heroes (3)

After a very long time, I took out my ‘main body’ and completely devoured the world called ‘Hersema’.

I couldn’t help but lament at this insane world that somehow felt familiar, one I had experienced before in Dungeon & Adventure.

‘Hersema’. This world, commonly referred to as ‘the world with too many heroes’ during the Dungeon & Adventure era, was originally part of a user-created mod’s worldview before being incorporated into the official setting.

······And it’s also infamous as a “healing material” (critically harmful material) filled with settings sufficient to shatter the mental stability of anyone who sees it.

From its unique setting where summoning slaves called heroes has become commonplace, to a worldview that goes beyond twisting Japanese isekai hero stories—it’s more like spinning them 540 degrees.

Thanks to its spiciness and the fact that the mod creator was Korean, it became a hot topic, and the community showed tremendous interest in this worldview. As a result, I know fairly well about this world that was so twisted that people said the creator needed a psychiatric evaluation.

······Perhaps because it had already been twisted beyond recognition over hundreds of years, I knew this worldview could never continue in any normal direction.

No gods exist in this world, so dead souls gradually forget what constituted them as they drift through the spirit realm, eventually disappearing as they return to the cycle of reincarnation and are born as different beings.

Therefore, there isn’t a single god to properly manage things, and all that remains is the interference function left behind by the last god who sacrificed himself to reach other dimensions······what do you think happened?

Not knowing what they were doing, they continued to kidnap people from other dimensions, and in this process, the dimensional boundaries of this world gradually thinned.

It deteriorated to the point where even a being like me, a novice among pan-dimensional entities, could easily locate and completely absorb it.

And besides that, the society within the dimension was also heavily distorted and twisted.

They periodically abduct humans from other dimensions, call them heroes, use them as labor and military power, and simultaneously assign them the lowest social class, “consuming” them in various ways by exploiting the fact that they can be perfectly controlled.

When you consider that this repulsively disgusting mindset forms the most important foundation of this world’s society, there is absolutely no hope for this world.

The society has become so distorted that it cannot be maintained without kidnapping people who were living normal lives in other dimensions and enslaving them. The expression that “not a single innocent person exists in this world” is cruelly accurate.

Even the “small minority of conscientious people” that typically appear in such worlds don’t exist due to the absence of gods, so there is no reason for me to show mercy.

In this world, there are no innocent civilians.

All the civilization and prosperity they enjoy comes from the slave labor of heroes they knowingly ignored, and even the inevitable poor often sustain their lives by exploiting heroes.

Moreover, 90% of isekai residents have a “household hero” in their homes, treating them as cheap consumables to be “used” in various ways and then discarded.

Even the children born to heroes inherit status screens and must live with the stigma of being “heroes.” Considering that their souls are actually recycled from the souls of heroes who died in this world, there truly was no hope.

Their exploitation has transcended the realm of humanity.

It’s all too common to summon a pregnant woman from a happily living family and send her to a death match battle royale using heroes. Battle royales using heroes summoned while pregnant were even quite popular.

There are no exceptions to the conditions for summoning heroes, so children are also summoned. In more than half the countries, they kill very young children, and if they’re deemed old enough, they simply exploit them as is.

Additionally, in some technologically advanced countries, they cut off the limbs of incapacitated heroes, stuff them into machines, and use them as war weapons or energy sources. A significant amount of energy produced this way was openly supplied to many cities.

In the Kingdom of Wallon, this world’s only religious state, human farms that raise humans like livestock were still operating, and the babies produced there were sent to the military if they had rare jobs, or left there to become livestock if their jobs were common.

In some countries, after developing a method to grind heroes into life-extension drugs, these drugs were distributed to people of all ages and genders by a so-called “wise ruler.”

Mercy was not necessary.

※ ※ ※

First and foremost, what needed to be done was to implement relief measures for the victims—those who were kidnapped as so-called heroes and brought here.

For souls that had died and forgotten, I rewound time slightly to restore them to before they forgot. Similarly, for souls that had died and reincarnated in this world, I separated their souls into pre- and post-reincarnation states.

In the same way, I fixed the collapsed minds of those who had mentally broken down, repaired those who were mentally damaged, and then asked them their wishes.

Those who simply wanted to return to their original state, regardless of revenge, had their bodies and souls restored and were sent back to their original dimensions. Those who desired a life away from the modern world were offered relocation to areas where my order had established itself.

However, the vast majority of souls harbored fierce anger and hatred toward this world that had reduced them to such a state, and they desired revenge. I gladly accepted this and began to modify the ‘Hersema’ I had devoured for their sake.

After temporarily evacuating the souls of this place, I caused various changes by breaking down the boundary between Hersema’s material world and spirit realm.

Among the various “reincarnations” that occurred due to the soul reincarnation structure, all souls directly connected to this “corrupted hero summoning” were separated into independent souls based on their past life memories.

And at the center of this transformed Hersema, I built a tower made of massive and beautiful blood-red bricks—standing at least 50km high.

The true nature of this tower was a repository and backup device for the souls of those who would suffer eternally in Hersema from now on.

Thanks to their essence being backed up inside the blood-red tower, these souls would revive shortly after experiencing physical death, and even if they somehow managed to destroy their own souls, it would be undone by rewinding time—there was no way for them to die.

Of course, these souls would maintain their consciousness clearly, without going insane from suffering or adapting to the pain. By this point, I could consider my work completely finished.

《Go, go forth, my children. Take your revenge to your heart’s content.》

I simply entrusted revenge to those who harbored the deepest grudges against the souls of this world. Those who were dragged here as so-called heroes and forced to endure unspeakable things now poured all their resentment onto the souls of this place.

They locked families who had treated them as less than slaves for generations in enclosed spaces, threw in a single knife, and left them there for months, allowing them to revive inside and forcing them to kill and eat each other.

They gathered all the humans who had contributed to selling them to brothels when they were deemed useless, threw them into cauldrons, and boiled them diligently for months, reducing them to protein paste while keeping them conscious.

They also wanted to repay the tournaments that had been inflicted upon them, and the lineup for these tournaments was truly extraordinary.

In one case, they connected the bodies of a noble lady and her son—who had deliberately kicked pregnant summoned heroes dozens of times to cause miscarriages—and made them participate in that state.

Workers and owners from human farms received sensory enhancement surgery that increased sensitivity 10,000 times, making them feel like their bodies would tear apart at the slightest breeze, and were then driven out naked.

A scientist who had conducted human experiments on heroes under the pretext of research but actually to satisfy sadistic urges was fitted with a pain-sharing device that drew in surrounding pain and made him feel it too, then was half-cyberized before being sent out.

Beyond these, they repeated the human atrocities they had suffered while enthusiastically venting their desire for revenge, and simultaneously developed a deep faith in Bjorn and me who had liberated them.

《How is it, Bjorn?》

《·····It’s magnificent, my master.》

Their revenge was so fierce and perfect that both I and Bjorn, who had half-ascended as a god of revenge, watched with satisfaction at their performance as devotees of “vengeance.”