'Subdue gods and nature through power and slaughter.'
Silence.
It was dizzying.
Then, a single thread of intent drifted out.
The Karma Root Collective offered no response to Dong Bong-soo's declaration for a moment. Only the shadows flickered for a while.
— Impossible.
"..."
— Humans are nothing more than a fraction of nature. In the end, no matter how desperately a single hair struggles, it cannot shake the body it belongs to.
"I'll know once I try. After all, nature is nothing more than variations of 'eating' and 'being eaten'."
—
...
Even as he spoke, Dong Bong-soo methodically stored every single thread of intent transmitted by the Karma Root Collective, stacking them neatly into his frontal lobe.
The outside, the scattered doors, the will of darkness, the law of total quantity. He placed each concept onto his own scale, weighing their value one by one. He even calculated whether this entity before his eyes was an ally to join hands with, mere data, or prey to be harvested someday.
There was no need to rush an answer. This much was enough for now.
— Arrogant, arrogant, and even more arrogant. As expected of a Screen Holder worthy of the title.
"You've been calling me a Screen Holder since earlier. How does that qualify me for anything?"
The entity wavered its shadows, spreading outward in all directions as it drew closer. Countless eyes seemed to gather into one, fixing directly on him.
— The stopped and the unstopped. You and we branched from the same root, only to walk in opposite directions.
Shadows overlapped upon one another, flickering.
— We laid down our lives because we had nowhere left to go, but you do not know how to stop. A madman driven by greed, endlessly advancing by killing and killing to swell his own body. In the eyes of Great Nature, you are nothing but a disease, a act of pure madness.
A low resonance supported those words.
— Yet that very disease, that mad stride may be the qualification to open this door. Only those who never stop can stand before us. Others have stood here before, but the door never opened. Not because they failed the test, but because they lacked the vessel to even qualify for it.
Dong Bong-soo listened silently, then looked around and murmured softly.
"You didn't test me. You were simply here, and I simply came here."
Something resembling a faint smile mixed into the chorus of weeping. It was neither a scolding nor a welcome, but the tone used toward someone long known.
— Perhaps. Either way, the fact that you came here of your own free will does not change. So there is no need to try so hard to draw a line between us. Now that you have crossed the threshold, you too are one of us, qualified to be here.
Dong Bong-soo cut his response short.
"I hate being lumped together. I didn't come here to stop like you guys. I'm just passing through."
The sound fell silent for a long moment.
— Passing through...
The tail of that intent sank low.
— If so, then hurry. The boundaries in all directions are collapsing. The very frame confining us has long since begun to shake.
Before long, more will spill into your world.
Spilling in.
Dong Bong-soo chewed over the word. He had no way of knowing what, how, or why things were spilling in. However, for things to spill meant there would be that much more to harvest.
"More, you say."
The end of his softly repeated words trailed off slightly.
"That's not bad news."
— 龘顧觱爩, 讟銷虋鸜...!
— Ξφθς ςαζψ ώρρξ....
— Жъдгы щшчъ, брвуо гхы...!
— ཀྵཛཟ ངཥཤ ཟཛ....
— ʃʒ∫ʒə ðæŋɸ ʕʔʔ...!
— ㄅㄆㄇㄈ ㄉㄊㄋ ㄌㄍㄎ....
— ღჭყნ ხშძ ჟჭ...!
— 驫爨鸛 灪齾馨....
Until now, the Karma Root Collective had simply received whatever Dong Bong-soo threw and answered what he asked. This time, however, the roles were reversed. At his trailing remark about the news not being bad, the collective did not let it pass, unleashing a barrage of chaotic screams.
Of course, it was an incomprehensible string of characters.
Tens of thousands of shadows flickered wildly again around the edge of its outline. Repeating the cycle of scattering and gathering, this time they coalesced into a single body, pressing their weight toward him.
Dong Bong-soo neither blocked nor dodged it. After all, it wasn't killing intent.
He simply stood facing it, waiting for the next intent.
— Do you know what you are?
It was a question, but not one expecting an answer. In a tone suggesting it didn't matter what Dong Bong-soo replied, it simply read down what it had already seen and judged.
"A thing rooted in karma. A body that feeds on killing. A baby that never grows old. A mass of filth and impurities, burdened with the single-minded obsession to grow stronger."
Those words descended one by one. There was no rebuke, no praise. They simply flowed out, level and steady from somewhere in the middle of that tangled mass, as if measuring something.
Dong Bong-soo just listened quietly.
There was nothing new. Regardless of the tone, it was all a fact he had already acknowledged.
He had once replied that no one asks a nursing baby why it sucks its mother's milk. A baby that never grows old, a body that feeds on killing—these were no different from the truths Dong Bong-soo had harbored alone. This time, he was simply hearing the words he kept inside spoken by someone else.
Dong Bong-soo replied in a low voice.
"Not a single word is wrong. So, does that pose a problem on the path I am walking?"
The question went unanswered. Instead, another statement came.
— You are not the only one.
The resonance at the end of the sentence grew heavy.
— Countless beings like you have crossed over into this world. The vast majority failed to walk their path to the end and were submerged within us.
Even in the voice addressing you now, the portion of such beings is mixed in.
"That means..."
Dong Bong-soo's eyes flashed for a moment.
"Are you asking me to kill you right now?"
— 龘龘龘 麤齾爩爩...!
— Щъгрх! Щъгрх! Щъгрх!
— Ξφθςς άζζψψ ώώ...!
— कठج झदध रढ...!
— ʕʔнɟʒ ŋɷɸððʒ...!
— ƎƐƤ! ᄃɿ! ɱƐ!
— ƱՁժԽ պըֆթ ղճժ....
— ㄓㄜㄗ!ㄨㄦㄎ!ㄅㄨㄍ!
— Ξжღ ʒ獻ㄦ 讀ъ...!
— 讀讀讀讀讀....
Once again, tens of thousands of shadows flickered violently around the outline. Scattering and gathering repeatedly, they coalesced once more into a single shadow spanning dozens of zhang, sweeping over him long and wide.
— If you are planning to swallow us, put that thought away.
"..."
— You cannot swallow us, and we cannot accept you. Our realms are different, and what lies within is different.
There was nothing to hide, so Dong Bong-soo didn't bother to feign an expression. He simply looked up at them emotionlessly.
Can I win? No, are they even opponents I can fight in the first place? Are they prey I can gain experience points from?
The questions remained unanswered.
Yet he felt it intuitively. Even as he was now, they were neither something he could swallow in a single bite nor cut down with a single stroke.
— Even if you swallow us, there is nothing to gain. As long as you possess that power and remain divided in two, you will ultimately lie down beside us.
you will eventually lie down beside us....
Divided in two...
So they knew everything after all.
He wasn't surprised; it simply piqued his curiosity.
"How do you know that?"
— Because it is simply the providence of nature. I—we—are errors of nature, but also merely components of that providence. We cannot escape its boundaries, and thus we know.
The providence of nature, huh.
He was curious, but this wasn't a puzzle piece he could force into place right now. It would reveal itself naturally when it meshed with the other pieces someday.
Dong Bong-soo shifted his question to a more urgent matter.
"You said earlier that all directions were collapsing. What exactly is falling apart?"
— The path.
"The path?"
— The gap connecting world to world. The boundary separating dimension from dimension.
Is it saying that tunnel between worlds I experienced before is collapsing?
"What's causing it?"
The collective withdrew its intent for a moment. Before long, however, the will of ten thousand souls transmitted into Dong Bong-soo's mind once more.
— Things from the outside, like us, are gnawing at the seams of the world from the deepest reaches of your heavens.
Rumble, rumble, rumble.
The moment those words fell, something stirred deep within the darkness.
It was not just one. The low vibration of countless entities turning in unison echoed through the space.
The darkness was so absolute that the walls were invisible, and the echo circled them from all directions without beginning or end.
Ever since the door opened, every sound inside this Academy had been distorted. Even his own footsteps trailed behind, stretched and blurred, sounding like someone else's. Yet now, the presence of some new space—neither blurred nor stretched—vibrated through the air.
The moment the phrase "thing from the outside" was conveyed through intent, the entities crouched deep within responded and turned their bodies.
Why they responded could not be known.
Whether it was simply the providence of nature, as the Karma Root Collective put it, or if there was another reason.
Only one thing was certain: in this darkness, or perhaps connected to this Heavenly Secret Academy, the entity before his eyes was not the only one.
— It is a disaster in the form of a woman. It was a disaster from the moment it crossed over, and now it has grown far larger than it was then.
"A woman? A disaster?"
To Dong Bong-soo's counterquestion, ten thousand sounds converged into a single stream.
— Indeed. And what it devours is not merely this space. It devours yesterday and tomorrow as well.
"A being that devours... even yesterday and tomorrow?"
* * *
Ascending and ascending to the very edge of the sky where there was nowhere higher to climb. There lay a deep abyss to which even the immortals had never given a name.
Snow stopped falling and drifted back up into the sky. Beside it, rain that had yet to arrive fell ahead of its time. The sun retraced its path, rising from where it had set, and stars twinkled in broad daylight. While hail poured down on one side, a gentle spring rain misted the other. Yesterday and tomorrow lost their sequence, flowing tangled together in a single sky.
In the midst of it all, a mountain towered high.
It was made of neither soil nor stone. It was a mountain formed from sacred beasts with crane necks, horned monsters, and immortals in flowing robes, piled high upon one another.
Every single one was coated in frost, withered and dry like an empty shell.
At the very peak of that mountain of corpses, a woman sat slumped.
Her hair was white, her skin so pale it was half-translucent. Resting her chin on one raised knee, she looked down with bored indifference at an immortal sprawled beneath her feet.
"Are immortals merely at this level? As expected, for me..."
The woman raised her head, her gaze sweeping the surroundings. As far as the eye could see, there was not a single living thing.
"It seems you're the only one left."
She sat there like that for a long time. The same day came and went over and over again.
[ Kill them. Kill them all. ]
"Shut up. It's going to be like that forever anyway."