Chapter 592 – 1,000 Years of Memory (2)
I woke up in a dream after falling asleep with the breathing of Aincrad style sleeping gas.
“It’s bad if you get into the habit of falling asleep with sleep magic.”
Even as I said that, it happened. It was a familiar meadow.
‘Nefertiti is… He’s not around.’
It didn’t matter. A higher ability than this shade——If you’ve repeatedly experienced the power of creation, you’ll be able to find it right away. You can fly in the sky or move through space.
Perhaps this shade’s dream itself is the ‘Generation Power’ free server.
It’s like Minecraft’s creative mode or online RPG’s test server. Wouldn’t it be better to call it a trial version of the power of creation?
‘Or is it field magic to awaken spiritual abilities without authority.’
In real life, it would have been quite burdensome for Odin to use his powers freely.
In my opinion, it seemed to be a magic created in consultation with other precognitive powers.
If the [Middle branch] Had joined forces with other gods to create a world, wouldn’t they have been able to do it on their own? You can’t use it if you carelessly touch things that originally belonged to co-owners.
“If you pour the sauce on the sweet and sour pork you made with your money, it’s cheap even if you get hit by one.”
Isn’t that a problem before deciding whether or not it’s a rich group? Admiring the wisdom of Odin, the god of wisdom, I tried to fly, but hesitated.
My heart was shining like the North Star at dawn.
“Sifal, what else!”
Does that mean I’ve become Illidan? Surprised, I found the cause after fumbling around. It was a beautiful golden key.
It was given to him by Letitia, Freya’s
─Rumble!
And the moment I grabbed the key, a door appeared in front of me.
Charrrr—.
Behind a beautiful door that seemed to be made of solid gold, an aerial staircase rose. The stairs led to the castle in the sky, and the appearance of the castle was familiar to me.
“It’s Freya’s castle.”
It was the very castle where I left Letitia.
I bypassed the door and slipped my hand on the stairs. The stairs pass as if it were natural. It would be impossible to step on and climb that far.
‘Of course it would be impossible to fly away.’
That castle is, so to speak, someone else’s dream world.
How can one pass from one dream into another’s dream? That is conceptually impossible.
‘In other words, it means that a method beyond common sense is needed.’
I rolled the golden key in my hand.
This would be the means I rolled an elite dagger and stuck the key in the door. I went so far as to plug it in, but no matter how much I turned it, it wouldn’t open.
The key itself would not turn even if I tried to force it, as if the cruel jokesters at the technical high school had soldered on me and then bounced off.
“I knew I would.”
Did Letitia say that ‘qualification’ or ‘aptitude’ was necessary?
She pulled out the key, threw it, and she received it. She meant that I couldn’t open it.
Then you have nothing to regret.
Deciding on what to do next, I turned my back. The first thing was to find Nefertiti. A door that couldn’t open was no different from a wall.
Turning around, I found a desert stretching to the horizon and half-opened my eyes.
It was a sandy desert with a mountain range. It is such a barren land that a desolate wind blows up to this high place. It was a new landscape that did not match the meadow of my dreams.
Perhaps, that desert was where Equinox’s memories were.
“Sipal, global warming even in my dreams.”
I grumbled and manipulated Shade’s dream.
Whee ae ae ae ae-!!
As she soared into the sky, Nefertiti’s light blue hair was immediately noticeable.
She slept with the Rune Talisman of Mind Protection I gave her, so she didn’t appear to be invaded by the madness of her dreams. She said, looking back at me who had landed next to her.
“Is this in your dream?”
“Yes. It is like the pyramid of Sehetefibra. Of course it’s not real.”
“The other world is also a kind of dream after all.”
Nefertiti gave a somewhat dizzying answer. Her eyes were on the desert in her dreams, resembling the Narmer-Nile desert.
“People also call death immortality.”
“Then you could say that people die every time they fall asleep. The reason we managed to come back alive in Niflheim might be thanks to the experience of being resurrected in bed every morning.”
“… Maybe.”
She jokingly retorted, but I didn’t expect her to respond to such nonsense, so I was rudely surprised.
Could it be that the affinity has increased? That was the moment I smiled.
─Put.
In the mountains of the desert, something like a mountain goat raised its head. He was impressive with his unique leather, and he was an animal without horns.
Of course, they would not be residents of my dreams, but they would be fantasy in a space reproduced here.
By the way, Gonom coincidentally met Nefertiti’s eyes.
Nefertiti did not avoid her eyes, and the goat in her dreams had no reason to avoid her because she was invisible. So the two silently observed each other.
I giggled at the peaceful appearance.
“Nefertiti. I’m telling you this in advance, but you shouldn’t be too immersed in memories.”
“Immersion?”
Nefertiti turned to me. It seemed simple, but it was important.
“No matter how real it is, it’s the past, someone else’s memory.”
It’s called overindulgence.
Nefertiti stayed quiet and nodded as if she understood. Well, it’s the memory of a criminal bastard, so I wondered if there was anything I could immerse myself in like that.
That’s when I turned my eyes to the mountain goat.
Shih hee profit—! Puck!!
An arrow flew from somewhere and got stuck in the goat’s body.
The goat jumped in surprise, but the mana arrows melted away like a mirage. The mountain goat, who had a snowball fight with Nefertiti, ran away without knowing why.
However, since the arrow that pierced the flesh disappeared, all that remained was a deep penetrating wound and bleeding. The goat that was running did not last long and fell over.
The place where the arrow flew was on top of a low hill.
─Pasasak. The man who came down the sand dune undid the old cloak he was wearing to avoid the sunlight. He was a middle-aged Narmer-Nile with gray hair.
He lifted up the goat he had confirmed killed and walked somewhere.
What you see then is a hut built in a place where you can escape from the harsh natural environment.
Did the hunter build it by hand? It was a clumsy, old building that looked like it was attached to it. At the door, there was a young girl waving her hand and smiling brightly.
When the silent hunter saw that smile, he returned to his beautiful brown-skinned daughter with a smile that he hadn’t seen before when hunting. It was the hunter’s return.
His sword had the god mark of Satis, the god of hunting.
‘Are they father and daughter?’
I was able to intuitively realize even the facts that were not conveyed in words.
It must be because I pulled out Equinox’s memory while cheat mode was not completely turned off. The memory density, delivery power, and quantity were much higher than usual.
The hunter proudly showed his prey to her daughter, and her daughter, who had scolded him, smiled and closed the front door. To me it seemed like a peaceful time in a harsh desert.
──The place changes.
How many years have passed What we see inside the cabin, relying on an old candlelight, is the hunter’s daughter lying on a wooden bed and breathing heavily.
The hunter said while putting a towel on the daughter’s forehead.
“Everything will be fine. The Huntsman said that bad diseases come from a lack of nutrition.”
The hunter’s daughter glanced at the scriptures of the hunting god that her father had been reading until he parted. The hunter gently closed her daughter’s eyes.
“I’m leaving soon. If you eat the goat meat you like, this sickness will be cured in no time.”
The hunter’s daughter did not want her father to leave her side, but at last she nodded her head hazily.
He took a bow and sprinted out of the cabin.
The hunter, who went to ask the mortician next door to take care of his daughter for a while, eventually turned around without knocking on the door. It was because the entrance of the undertaker’s house, where the wall had collapsed, was full of nasty footprints.
A mortician who smells like a corpse is always a job that is shunned.
It was for that reason that his next-door neighbor came and lived in the backcountry where he would live as a hunter. Particularly in recent years, there has been a superstition that morticians despise corpses with wicked sorcery.
Young people with nothing to do cried out for justice and persecuted, and sometimes even harmed, the morticians.
And it was the hunter-god Satis who was most reputed to despise evil witchcraft. There was a reason why young men were reborn as clumsy hunters.
They hunt without restraint, and thanks to this, the population of desert animals, which are still low in numbers, has decreased even more. This was the reason why he, an excellent hunter, wandered in the mountains until the sun went down.
According to the doctrine of the Hunt God, hunting was a noble act.
Therefore, hunters were not to take animals they would not eat. The reason why his house is not stocked with much food is because the hunter was such a devout follower of the hunting god.
The hunter finally found the goat that the young men had captured and neglected for fun.
The goat impaled on a tree was so bad that you might want to ask who was insulting the corpse, but it didn’t look rotten. Tired of the series of futility, the hunter approached carelessly.
─Kwajik!
And a trap left hidden on the floor bit off one of his feet.
It was a trap set by hunters who had recently begun to increase. Since he left no mark for other hunters, even the senile man had no way of noticing the existence of the trap.
The momentary vision of the body saw the pattern of the hunting god engraved on the trap. The hunter, staggered by the sudden pain, slipped and rolled down the rugged slope of the mountain.
It was midnight when I opened my eyes.
The passage of time is like noise. The old hunter, who spat out all kinds of curse words, gave first aid to his broken leg and hurriedly crawled down the mountain.
Consciousness was blurred, as if the trap had been poisoned. All I can think of is worrying about my daughter.
He managed to survive by eating a few herbs in between. So, when he descended the mountain, the sun god’s blessing was wafting in the air at the corner of the mountain range.
The hunter, who gave a blurry gaze toward the hut, thanked the hunting god.
Goat skin that cannot be recognized even with eyesight blurred by poison.
The moment he noticed the shadow crawling around the dried herbs on the hut’s wall, the hunter drew the bowstring in gratitude for his good fortune.
It was after the protest was over that I realized it was my daughter.
Even the more desperate screams than when bitten by the trap did not stop the flying arrows.
Worried about her father not coming back until late, the hunter’s daughter, who had been waiting outside the house, raised her head at the sound of her father’s voice.
And an arrow pierced her chest. The hunter, who even threw down his bow, forgot his pain and ran, but his leg, broken by the trap, could not move easily.
When he sobbed and hugged his daughter, she was already dead. Without leaving a word of resentment or encouragement for her father.
After howling for a while, the hunter found human footprints left in a mess near the herb. It was the same footprint I saw near the undertaker’s house yesterday.
The hunters who had come to persecute the undertaker had been snooping around the house of his neighbor, the hunter and his daughter.
Desert nights are cold. Her daughter, worried about her father, came out dressed in goatskin, and she bent down to pick up the herbs they had ruined.
The hunter’s eyes, clouded by her venom, saw her as an herb-eating goat.
Swallowing anger and resentment to go everywhere, the hunter ran to the Church of the Hunting God carrying her daughter’s corpse.
You could have blamed it on your followers for not teaching you properly. But the hunter just pleaded with the hunting god.
“I don’t want anything else. Please let me at least say goodbye to my daughter who died because of my mistake.”
Even the hunting god responded to his earnest prayer, which even the priests admired. The goddess felt sorry for the hunter’s story, and she bestowed her favor on him.
──The hunter acquired the eyes of a hunting god who can discern the soul of his prey.
“The dead cannot come back to life.”
The goddess said that and left. There was no reunion with her daughter, and her body remained cold. The hunter clutched his eyes and cried day and night before turning his back on the temple.
And I realized. She says she can’t even find a funeral director for her daughter.
The persecution of those who came into contact with the corpse intensified, so most morticians washed their hands and lived in hiding. Young men ran to the hunter who was in agony about what to do.
—You are a warrior who has received the protection of the goddess.
-The undertaker is a poor quality being who scorns evil mana and spirits.
—Your eyes are the power to oust more morticians.
The hunter beat them up and drove them away. He was not interested in the news that the exiled people had received similar powers in their eyes at the cost of their lives.
He just went back to the cabin and asked the neighbor’s mortician for his daughter.
Even the undertaker, who was about to leave after washing his hands, couldn’t push him away as he roamed the streets holding his decaying daughter. The undertaker, together with his assistant daughter, prepared his final burial.
The hunter, who could not bear to see the funeral procession, went back to his cabin.
《I subdued the evil black magician!!》
After half a day. After sorting out her daughter’s things, he was greeted by a mortician with a crushed head.
Looking at the undertaker’s daughter embracing her father’s corpse, the young men of the past gave a speech holding the undertaker’s book with the requiem law written on it.
The hunter’s daughter had been left unattended as she was being gutted. She rubbed her hand with a fly sitting in her eye.
《Warrior? The warrior is also here. Look! That woman over there also has dark and negative mana. That year must have been a black magician, so the hero will execute you.”
The hunter cut off all the young men’s throats.
In a space filled with the smell of corpses, only the father who lost his daughter and the daughter who lost his father were left.
《… I can’t bear to ask you for a funeral.”
The mortician’s daughter answered the hunter who stuffed her daughter’s intestines into her stomach.
《It wasn’t black magic, it was magic for requiem.》
“Yes.”
“My father respected the dead more than anyone else.”
“Yes.”
《Your uncle has now become a gang of black magicians as well.》
“Yes.”
“Then, do you really want to become black magicians?”
The hunter’s answer stopped.
“Your daughter’s spirit still remains in her body. Even my father.”
The mortician’s daughter raised a book with a requiem from the pool of her blood.
It was the eyes of a dead person, the eyes of madness.
Both she and the hunter reflected in her eyes.
“I am. I want to see you again.”
《… Yes.”
He tore off the hunting god’s badge from the blood-soaked sword pommel.
“Me too.”
─Kwasuk!
The hunter’s sword pierced the hunting god’s god mark with a sword.
──The flow of time is like noise.
A thousand years or ten thousand years? At the end of a long period of time that lasted more than half of human history, a lich fell face down on the altar. An arrow pierced his back.
Waking up at the altar, the young maiden saw her body full of blood and corpses, and to her horror, she cried out to the undead reaching out to her.
《Monster, Monster!!》
Richie didn’t mind the accusation and handed a small bead to her maiden hand.
It is an orb containing his soul, and it was the heart of the lich, which people call the Life Vessel. The supreme black magic that was polished transferred the lich’s memories to the maiden’s soul.
The Maiden, who had lost her life in her age of gods, opened her eyes at the end of her golden age, staring blankly at her dying lich.
《… Dad?”
The hunter, who passed all his remaining strength and memories to his daughter, was powerless to answer. Without the power of black magic, there was no way he could speak with his boneless jaw without a tongue.
Rumbling…
Embraced by the crumbling bones, the hunter’s daughter inherited all of her father’s memories spanning tens of thousands of years.
She shuddered at her father’s atrocious misdeeds, shed tears at the dignity of the lives sacrificed to revive her own soul, and searched for the reason why her family had become so.
《… Why?”
Recalling her memories of 10,000 years, she asked the sky.
The arrows of divine power that pierced the lich’s chest were pouring down from the sky.
“Why didn’t you stop the believers from rampaging? Is it all your will that they killed the neighbor Mr. Gotsor and trampled on herbs in my house?”
—Gods should no longer intervene easily in the human world. After Ragnarok, the days when the gods were allowed to intervene in human conflicts were over.
“Then why!!!! Why did you have to come now!!!!!”
Her shout shook the sky where Niflheim’s fissures had opened.
The hunting god responded to the call.
—Because your father shook the laws of the world.
《… Law?”
—There are too few gods who can handle the power of creation. The rules of the world should not be broken anymore. Your father dreamed of your resurrection by wrong means, and this is his retribution.
“If that’s the case, why didn’t you stop it from the beginning!!!! Why did my dad let so many people die just because of me!!!!
-I don’t say it twice. In a world that shouldn’t intervene, there’s just a crack that must intervene.
At the cry of vomiting blood, the hunting god spoke calmly.
——I, who was only watching, had a wish.
The sky goddess aimed her bowstring with sad eyes.
—I, too, wished you and your father to live in peace.
The punishment was pierced in the form of an arrow.
The hunter’s daughter was shot again by an arrow through her chest, pierced by her father, and she died without being rewarded for being revived.
If he had closed his eyes as it was, perhaps he could have died painlessly through the consideration of the hunting god. The hunting god did not want the tragic maiden to fall into the underworld after losing her master.
But was it her hatred towards the goddess? Or was she an arrangement left by her father?
Her soul fell into the snowfields of Niflheim without being immortal.
The hunter’s daughter, crawling on the ground, had to see a group of monsters gathering in front of her. Ugly giants and dog-headed humans were lured by their prey.
She once asked her father why there are such monsters in a God-caring world. Why, she asked, did her mother have to lose her life at the hands of such monsters?
Her father couldn’t answer.
Was it like that?
The hordes of monsters that seemed to symbolize the gods’ malice or incompetence seemed to her to be the flesh and blood of the absurdity of the world.
《Lee Seung-do, Underworld… It’s the same after all.”
People were destined to die once again in this snowy field after suffering from death and suffering during their lifetime.
The hunter’s daughter clutches her eyes at the first sight of her life, and she has learned it.
The giants came, shaking the ground. She sat there blankly, then she picked up and burst into laughter.
“Thanks to you, I realized what I had to do.”
She waved her hand nonchalantly, as if she had no interest in the monsters rushing at her.
Oh oh oh oh oh-!!
The giants who were greedy for human flesh were pulverized by the mana of darkness and yin that radiated from her hand, and were resurrected from the dead.
She clasped her hand and moved it. She was not yet beyond her life and death like her father. The power handed over to him when he was dying is only a fraction of it.
But I have no choice but to do it. Whether it takes a thousand years or ten thousand years.
Perhaps from the beginning, she was born with such a fate.
《If God does not take care of human death, I will do it instead.》
Stepping on the giant’s corpse, the hunter’s daughter stood up.
《My father and the people he killed–and the people I will kill in the future, I will bring them all back to life with my own hands and lead them to a paradise for the dead.》
Having touched the wound on her chest, the maiden threw herself on the rails of her destiny.
It became possible to revive the soul that had gone into permanence. All he had to do was bring back his father, who had stained his hands in sin, and the people he had killed for himself.
And when you can do that, the distinction between life and death is meaningless.
All will die one day, and all will be resurrected.
What if it is impossible, I did not assume.
That is an assumption against the very nature of her existence. It was not something for her to worry about, just as no newborn baby opens her eyes wondering what to do if she is not born.
There is a word called Equinox.
Its etymology means, ‘equal night’.
Day when night and day divide the day into 12 hours each. It was the ancient Romanian term for the ancient feast period of Narmer-Nile, which celebrated the resurrection of Osiris.
In other words, Equinox is a day that signifies resurrection and regeneration.
《The goddess of the underworld. It’s a bit overdone.”
Warlock Equinox whispered as he looked at the World Tree spread out in the sky of the underworld.
《There is no need to go to God, a queen would suffice.》
Equinox, with an army of the dead, took his first steps.
The cold she had never experienced in her life was no colder than the storm that raged in her heart.
“──Nefertiti.”
Then, I touched Nefertiti’s shoulder.
“… Awesome!”
As she tried to follow Equinox, she trembled as if she had just woken up.
As if she couldn’t tell where she was, she looked around and suddenly her white breath blew out as if it were cold. I made a coat with a frown.
“I told you? Be careful not to get too involved. It’s just a memory, a dream, but it can’t be cold.”
She draped her robe over her and patted her back.
As if she finally understood the situation, Nefertiti carefully adjusted the coat that had been draped over by my hands.
“… Is that the past of Equinox?”
“It seems to be exactly that father’s past.”
Rather than evaluating the past, I just accepted it as if it had happened. Archaeologists are not in the profession of arguing right and wrong in history.
“… The first hound of Satis, a warlock?”
“It’s the truth that you won’t believe no matter where you go.”
Damn why do I only know these things.
If I told Oftum, would they believe it?
No, I feel like I’m just going to have a bad mood on the way.
‘Rather than that, the personality of the goddess Satis is a bit surprising… The next time we meet in person, I don’t know if they’ll do my favor.’
I almost clicked my tongue, worrying about you before anything else, but I held it in because Nefertiti, who hadn’t gotten out of his immersion yet, seemed to hear me.
Why, isn’t there such a thing?
In a dream, no matter how disorganized and strange a situation may be, strangely, it is very happy or sad. I even dreamed of crying because the mosquito I had raised for over 10 years died.
It’s absurd, but it’s only during dreams that the sensitivity explodes.
Of course, it is not a story to be forgiven even though it deserves sympathy, so Nefertiti quickly returned to her usual expressionless expression as if she had drawn the line.
I said, stopping to stroke her back.
“It seems that Equinox inherited his father’s memory, so we were able to see the situation after the bitch’s death. It’s a little bit to be lucky.”
I pointed at the departing Equinox.
Repeatedly fading out, hundreds of years flew by.
Equinox, who had stolen the power of creation from the pharaohs like a video playing at a tremendous speed, climbed to the ground with his gear.
“You are still there. I don’t think it will be very long.”
The scenery on the ground also goes by strangely fast.
Time is relative. Since the brain easily erases memories that it considers to be of no value, dreams, which represent memories, are also subjective.
In other words, 1,000 years was mostly worthless to Equinox.
Buildings built by people collapsed, were erected, flew in the sky, or rolled around on the floor. It was proof that memories were so ubiquitous that they could not even compose dreams.
A sight mixed together like a bug scene in a game with a broken physics engine!
Nefertiti hesitated for a moment, unable to enter. He seemed worried that if he went in there, he would be eaten by Equinox’s memory again.
Roughly speaking, it is similar to the feeling of avoiding sites full of human beings. You don’t avoid poop because you’re afraid, you avoid it because you might bury it.
I smiled at Nefertiti and held out his hand.
“Would you like to hold my hand?”
“… It’s okay?”
“Yeah. If you feel that someone else is by your side from time to time, you will not easily assimilate. Hold my hand tight whenever your consciousness seems to mix. Or would you like to stop at this point?”
“… No.”
Nefertiti shook her head. Her palm squeezed my hand.
“If I’m with you… It’s okay.”
“Am I a little trustworthy?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t expect to answer this with YES. I shrugged.
So we held hands and walked into the center of memory.
As we entered, the world changed drastically and formed a certain desert city. I glanced around at the scenery and stuck out my tongue. He noticed how much time had passed.
‘It’s almost the same as the style of the modern other world now?’
There was no big difference from Alishik.
As I thought so, I heard a gasping sound next to me.
“Nefertiti?”
I turned her neck to examine her and was slightly surprised.
Her complexion, which had not lost her cool even before her death, was strangely new.
“… This is my hometown.”
It was a story about what would happen next.
