Chapter 422 (2/2)
“Excuse me, but can you give me a minute?”
“Sorry?”
“It’ll only be a minute. Go on ahead without me, I’ll catch up to you,” said Su-hyeun and then he turned around to walk up the stairway. He then blocked the flow of sounds in the surroundings and activated the necklace.
“Hello? What’s going on? You’re also contacting me first and all,” a bright and happy voice that didn’t suit the mood came out of the device.
Su-hyeun asked while holding his head, “What on earth have you been telling people of this place?!”
“This place? Oh. Aaah!” Luslec seemed to recall something and quickly replied, “I did good, right?”
“Just what have you made me into in this place?”
“The people of that side, their lives are hanging in the balance every year simply by believing in some bullsh*t religions. Once every year, which is about four days on that planet, tens of billions of people get killed, you see. And all those people are served up to the fake gods.”
Su-hyeun’s question was replied with a seemingly unrelated topic.
“Most people there think such a thing is the correct logic of that world, but a portion of them do not agree with that view. I’d say, around one to two out of every hundred fear their demise. It’s the instincts of humankind triumphing against even the most stringent brainwashing method, in other words.”
The fear of one’s death—Su-hyeun was intimately familiar with that. Honestly, no one out there would be as familiar with that notion as Su-hyeun was. He had already died once, after all.
“However, they end up accepting their death eventually. Sure, some try to run away, but they are the exception. That’s why I decided to create a new god that they could believe in.”
“Is that…what you did here, Mister Luslec?”
“Yes. Unfortunately, though, that’s as far as my abilities could take me.”
The proxies of the gods, Apostles—their role was to heed the will of the gods and hunt down various Predators or rebuild the worlds wrecked by the Predators’ rampage.
Luslec had stopped by in Pangaea in the past, but he failed to hunt the Predator at large, and so, he decided to revise his goal to establish a new religious order instead.
It turned out to be “Atheism” or simply creating a new religion that worshiped a new deity.
“Since that was the case…I can’t even scold him for it,” Su-hyeun thought.
Su-hyeun had to swallow back the heavy groan wanting to jump out of his mouth.
This was basically the same as helping these people save their lives by discarding their old religions. Never mind getting angry, the situation actually called for Su-hyeun to praise Luslec for a job well done instead.
“Just what on earth is going on in this place, anyway?”
Luslec had already done some “work” in this place, so he should know many secrets of Pangaea, at least much more than the people of this place.
“You know that this is against the rules, right?”
“Really? It is?”
“Yes. One of the rules says that you’re not supposed to get help from other Apostles during the trials of the gods. It’s common knowledge among us Apostles.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, but well, I don’t really worry about stuff like that anyway. I’ll just sit through another round of an earful and that’ll be all!” Luslec laughed.
His laughter seemed to express genuine happiness no matter when one heard it.
Su-hyeun also faintly grinned at Luslec’s explanation. By saying all these things in advance, even though he already made up his mind to tell Su-hyeun the necessary information, Luslec was asking the latter to understand the amount of trouble he was getting into.
However…
“If you’re worried about that rule, then you can breathe easy, I think.”
“Sorry? How come?”
“Well, I’m not an Apostle anyway, and I’m also a real god now, you see.”
“…”
A short bout of silence came to visit their little chat.
Su-hyeun, waiting for some kind of a reply, could only make a puzzled face. The reply did come, albeit much later than expected.
“B—but it hasn’t been all that long since you became a demigod, though?”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“If it was someone else telling me this, I would’ve never believed it. Wow. Wooow. Wooooooow….”
His voice sounded rather deeply moved just then.
“So damn incredible…”
It was right then that Su-hyeun was reminded of something, “Wait, he said he was my fan, right?”
Luslec was Su-hyeun’s fan.
It was rather likely that, right now, Luslec was seriously excited by what Su-hyeun said, reveling in the fact that someone he liked and respected shot past being a demigod and ascended to full godhood in such a short time.
“I don’t know all the details, but I’m not an Apostle anyway, so you won’t have to worry about any penalties. That’s why you can tell me everything without any reservation.”
“Alright, then! First things first, I was in that place around eight hundred years ago.”
“Eight hundred? Mister Luslec, just how old are you exactly?”
“That’s a secret. In any case, I was also your fan back then, Mister Su-hyeun. I thought about who to use as the god of the new religion and ended up using your name.”
“Okay, enough about that. More importantly, though, there is a Predator in this world, isn’t there?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
He knew it.
Even if things looked outwardly peaceful, the only reason why Su-hyeun would get sent to this place called Pangaea was because of the Predator’s presence.
The problem was that locating a Predator in this vast world would be no easy feat.
It was a fortunate thing that he was about to get a hint from Luslec without needing to search around blindly for clues on his own.
“What kind of creature are we talking about? There were more than one or two fake gods in this place, after all.”
When Su-hyeun asked that, Luslec didn’t reply for a little while. His reply only came after a bit of pause.
“It’s not just one.”
“Excuse me?”
“All those fake gods you learned about…They are all Predators, Mister Su-hyeun.”
“All of them…?!”
Su-hyeun immediately recalled all the gods he learned about from Millie. They were monsters that made people sacrifice their lives as offerings—monsters who derived entertainment from their lives.
He didn’t believe there would be a single “real” god among their ranks but to think that every single one was a Predator.
“Wait, why did I think that there would be only one Predator per world?” Su-hyeun reflected on his mindset right there and then.
Back then in the world of the false World Tree, several Predators formed a group to act together. The situation was the same in this world.
Since the planet boasted a humongous scale, several Predators had come together to act as a group. In a way, this development seemed quite logical.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the problems.
“I don’t know the nature of the trial you’re in right now, but whatever the case may be, that world you are in is incredibly dangerous, Mister Su-hyeun. That’s because…” Luslec sighed deeply as he continued with the rest of his explanation, “One of the Ten Great Evils, Kali, calls that place home.”