Chapter 160 (1/2)

Get In Line (4)

Igras-Sho spoke threateningly.

[You are shameless. I’m just trying to get the kid I reached out to before you did to get him cleaned and return him to normal.]

The blood drops intertwined in the air to form an answer.

– Did the mortal accept your hand? To worship the god and be part of it has to be a choice of free will. That man hasn’t chosen anyone yet.

[Then it shall be solved by giving him a reason to choose.]

– Oppression that leads to bias in choice? I will protect him from such oppression, ‘Magic.’

The gods were exiled.

No one knew where they were exactly exiled, but there was a place where many assumed.

There was a world that’s full of monsters beyond the Red Gate.

That space, often referred to as the ‘vacant lot,’ was like hell where the meaning of existence could not be found.

It was the manifestation of chaos wherein it was only inhabited by monsters, scattered fragments, and materials intertwined in a mess.

The trapped gods continuously attempted to extend their influence to the material world.

The reason behind it that they became those who could not exist by themselves, unlike before the establishment of the material world.

Dissimilar to the past when matter and ideology couldn’t be distinguished, the deities in the current era required a mortal.

It meant that the more the inferior ones worshipped them and the ones that borrowed their powers spread in the world, the stronger their influences became.

That was all I knew about the theological concepts around them.

‘That’s why they want to make an incarnation!’

One meant to spread one’s color more intensely.

And a vessel that exerted much more divine power than an ordinary priest was an incarnation.

‘But why does that have to be me, out of all the beings out there?!’

For some reason, they seemed to have judged that I was the best candidate to become their incarnation.

Blood droplets formed a sentence that seemed to aim to mock.

– Do you think that the mortal will be able to find your lost leg, the most powerful magic, again? Can he succeed with the imperfect help from a lame god? It’s a vain wish.

Igras-Sho didn’t assume inferiority either.

[Yes, the magic of now has lost its completeness. However, it’s better than ‘life,’ which has lost its offsprings and lost its ability to reproduce. At least the chances are available for me!]

As I watched the conversation, something in my head went spat, then murmured.

‘What a tragic sight. Is that really a conversation between great beings? Where has the beings that once served as pillars that supported everything gone off to? Why do only shadows remain now?’

“?!”

The moment that thought painted my head.

I felt a dizzying sense of incompatibility.

Was that also the memories of the sealed reincarnates?

Perhaps it was similar to the unconsciously recovered sword movements while receiving the god’s ordeal?

I soon denied the speculation myself.

‘No!’

There was a fundamentally different part in my current thoughts.

A sense of alienation that can’t be seen as mine.

I could tell by the natural intuition.

The moment I focused more on it and tried to find out its identity…

“!”

All of a sudden, everything stopped.

The growling faceless doppelganger, the darkness that crept around, the crimson fog, and I were the only ones capable of moving just a moment ago that time-bound space.

But at that moment, everything but me had been frozen.

‘Don’t behave disgracefully and step back for a while.’

Then everything began to flow backward.

The blood fog that intervened and the darkness that flowed next to it all receded away.

It was like someone had hit the rewind button.

After the surrounding area had completely emptied…

The time that was reversed began to flow in the normal direction again.

[What?!]

The darkness expressed its reaction as if it was very baffled.

Then, the god of life, ‘Rom,’ made a mysterious sentence using the blood fog.

– Have you finally awakened, ‘Time?’

The next moment, I lost consciousness.

***

When the occurrences reached past the standard of the soul dwelling inside Seo Jin-Wook that was from the far future perceived by all other material existences apart from him…

The ‘god of Time’ lent its strength in response to the prayers of the last surviving mortals at the time.

It had given the designated soul the power to go back in time and repeat it several times.

Just as the god of space existed in all spaces, the god of time also existed in the past, present, and future simultaneously, but it wasn’t easy to forcibly twist a normal flow.

It was even harder for the deity who had already been weakened to its limits.

Therefore, the god sealed a portion of its existence in the soul.

Even after being sealed, it still continued to exist at all times, all at once. However, it couldn’t actively intervene in the material world as it did in the past. That was because the religious body’s power that served the god of time was as weak as the god of sword’s worshippers.

‘Originally, I’m not supposed to intervene this way.’

In recent regression, the god of time had once again spent another powerful force.

It was because the soul exited from the cycle’s designed shackles and possessed the cycle as another being for the first time.

So, the god couldn’t be sure at the moment.

If Seo Jin-Wook died without achieving his destiny again, would he be able to repeat his reincarnation once more?

The problem was, its strength was unlikely to recover sufficiently until the moment of death came.

In other words, if Seo Jin-Wook died again, instead of being reborn as Seo Jin-Wook or Choi Seung-Hyun the next time, he would enter a cycle wherein he would be born as another entity.

They would be moving to the next step without his current destiny being achieved.