Cheolgeuk (2)
A shabby room in an underground facility.
Iruki was painstakingly filling rare paper with numbers when Dorothy brought over a pot of tea.
"Drink."
To the other survivors it was something they couldn't taste, but in truth it was just boiled common herbs.
Iruki let the steam calm him, set the pen down, and sighed. "This is serious."
"Yeah. Saying 'serious' almost sounds like a joke."
Literally, humanity had been annihilated.
He ought to have felt at least some relief, but Iruki couldn't let himself relax.
"Is there no way to contact the surface forces?" Jinseong-eum had thrown everything into evacuating people, but some had stayed by choice.
"You know the risk—go up and you die. They stayed knowing that."
Iruki looked down at the sheets.
'Those left on the surface.'
He'd pulled data from every available system; it wasn't perfectly accurate, but it was substantial. Iruki quickly picked out the key names.
'Ikael. Ashur. Wizard. Son Yujeong. Kira. Eden. And…Adrias Miro.'
'A clash of good and evil. If Miro runs, that means evil wins…'
Iruki asked, "How's Gaold?"
"He's calmed down a bit, from what I hear. Of course nobody dares get near him."
"I see."
Iruki buried his face in his hands and thought.
'Can they hold out?'
According to the reports, the surface was no longer a habitable environment.
Dust storms stirred up by the world's buildings crumbling into powder had reset the clock to zero. Habitz's Death Field was scorching the land at terrifying speed, and demons would be roaming in search of survivors.
"This place isn't safe either."
"Even underground is still underground. If the surface fully burns, new passages will form here too."
Iruki nodded. "Above all, the Cell Burst."
Sing had warned them: once the Taeguk's power broke, it wouldn't hold for more than twelve hours.
Dorothy asked, "Can we stop it? It's the most extreme code you can execute in the outside world."
"We have to stop it."
Iruki stood. "We can't rely on Shirone. For the first time in his life, he's going into a fight for himself."
He wanted to help because they were friends.
"What we can lean on is—"
The door opened.
"Guitar Man."
Robe Lanstin and Taira Lyn waited there.
In the circle where survivors had gathered, the performers put on a small concert. Reina's piano and the voices of Maya and Elkiana blended beautifully. For a moment, Raido, Kaiden, and the soldiers could forget reality.
When the performance ended, someone called, "Bravo."
"Teacher Panier."
Once the most famous musician in the world, he now sat among the people applauding.
Elkiana asked, "Where did he go? I heard a famous performer came. Do you know who it was?"
"Of course. He's the guitarist I told you about—Robe Lanstin."
Maya leaned forward. "The one who insisted on his music to the end? Why didn't he come here? I wanted to hear him."
"He didn't come to play music."
"Then why?"
Panier hesitated. Fermi had given him a rough explanation, but it was hard to believe.
'The Mado Seven.'
When Panier sat, the performers gathered around him.
"Artists hate being called lazy. Honestly, people like us have to at least look busy every day, or we seem no different from unemployed drifters."
The survivors snickered and leaned in.
"That fellow used to sit lost in thought, play a few bars, then sink back into thought. I lost my temper and pushed him hard. I told him to bring me a new piece every day—no contract, no support if he broke the rule."
"Elkiana: "So he wrote them?"
"Of course. Quite well." Panier smiled. "I was pleased—I was right. If I could make that lazy musician industrious, I could succeed. So I raised the whip: more, more, more. Then one day he stopped bringing pieces. He wouldn't even show up. I wasn't angry; honestly… I felt sorry."
"It was a relentless push. When I went into his studio he threw hundreds of sheets of music at my face and screamed. Half-mad."
Panier looked around. "I'm not saying artists should be lazy, or that industry is the only path to success. I mean this: the common sense we agree on can be applied so sadistically to one person that it wounds the soul."
He should have been respected as he was.
"That man must have been fighting alone—me, the world, people's eyes. He complied with my demands every day to prove he was right. Looking back now, why did it have to be that way? Why couldn't we have given a human who loved the guitar the freedom to fail? Why couldn't we leave his soul alone?" Panier confessed.
"And now—the Robe Lanstin I used to talk about is dead. What's come here is Guitar Man, the murderer of the Mado Seven. He committed crimes so monstrous that even his miserable past looks trivial. There's no room for pity. But…"
His voice faltered. "Did it have to come to this?"
He didn't think that man would pity a world brought to this… yet the thought made him sad.
Shirone asked, "A fight for me?"
"Yes." Was there anything left to fight for in someone who'd already lost everything?
Fermi said, "When we first mined information from future Apocalypses, the plan was to use it. You did well. Omega ended according to divine consequence."
Shirone was silent.
"So the world's destruction—that part's acceptable. But we knew it would be destroyed. We guarded the future, even controlling the information you could access."
"Why?"
It was time to ask the question Shirone had once asked in that room.
"To change it." Fermi raised a finger. "I felt a dissonance. We mined the future's destruction from the Apocalypse. That future—what belongs to the future—must be the property of someone not present now. In other words, for a result to manifest, all causes have to be supported. Then…"
"In the final future you visited, who left the records stored in the core?" Fermi asked.
Shirone's eyes flickered. "Right. It wasn't God. God is the pure result itself. God can't author the past. Because someone recorded the past, that future containing the past existed."
"Who?"
Shirone asked, "Who was the recorder?"
Someone who recorded every event up to Omega's termination exists in this world now.
"The Freemasons."
Fermi turned. "Come. You know him well enough."
Jinseong-eum, who'd already climbed off the bed, prepared to cast the ether wave again.
Seriel said, "Go. Confirm Jinseong-eum's condition. I'll finish preparing here."
Seeing her fragile state, Shirone asked, "Can't we go to the surface? With my magic—"
"No. There's no path. The place we're going is a completely sealed space with no entrance or exit."
"No doors?"
He couldn't immediately imagine how anyone could have survived there.
"You'll see when we get there."
Fermi finished speaking and Jinseong-eum cast his spell. As the ether wave dragged a space into view, a wall of pitch darkness loomed.
"Careful. Here 'front' is actually vertical."
Nade led the way.
He vanished into the darkness in an instant and Shirone followed. Falling with his arms spread, he spotted a faint gleam far below.
'It's incredibly deep.'
He used Fly to stabilize and scanned the surroundings as Fermi and Jinseong-eum approached.
"This way."
Following them, he felt an electromagnetic field stronger than air thrumming through the space.
As they neared the light source, a visibility of roughly twenty meters opened up.
"It's been… a long time, Shirone."
"Richard."
The face of Richard of the Ainka family—once a member of the Golden Halo back in school—floated in midair.
Shirone's expression sagged. There was nothing below his neck; only a tangle of live wires hung down, fanning into the void.
"How did you end up like that…?"
Richard adjusted a voice device. "It's fine. I chose this. This face is a machine too. Only my consciousness was transmitted. You can consider my real body dead. Well… since I'm here, saying I'm dead is odd, but yes."
He felt like a prototype of the outside world.
"Did you record the Omega?" The lack of humanity in the final record made sense if the recorder was mechanical.
"Yeah. The final transmission you received was built on my data. But that was an old achievement."
Fermi explained, "Richard's Ainka family runs the world's second-largest alchemical foundation. It was founded by descendants of those called the Freemasons. Their goal is to make humanity exist forever through science."
The sum of those causes produced the outside world's result.
Richard said, "Who knows—maybe someday I'll become a god and create a world for the Illuminati. Maybe. The point is, meeting me means you still have a chance, Shirone."
"What do you mean…?"
Someone stepped out from the peripheral darkness.
Mirak Minerva of the Tower's Five Stars and the four-star celestial Seongnoe Adam appeared.
"Minerva."
Shirone was relieved to see her alive, but she looked at him apologetically.
"You've been through a lot, haven't you?"
"Well…"
Seongnoe Adam approached as an apparition of the Gaia. "O Yahweh. Descendant of Gaffin. All of this is my responsibility. Grant me a chance to undo it."
Again… humanity?
"I can revive Amy."
At Minerva's words, Shirone turned his head. "What?"
Richard repeated, "We can bring Amy back, Shirone. If you fight again, we'll make it happen."
His heart raced, but his mind filled with misgivings.
"How is that possible?"
"By reversing history."
Fermi said, "Use tachyons to create a cause in which Amy doesn't die. You'd be fighting for yourself."
"It's paradoxical."
Shirone's thoughts sped up. "Whatever illusion you cling to, it's still an illusion. If I go to the past and save Amy, what becomes of this place? Will Amy suddenly pop into being here? Will Nade be different?"
No.
"A world where Amy survives would be a different universe—just one branch of the multiverse. Sure, if you surrendered your heart you could live there. But if you're willing to lose your heart, why must it be Amy? This is exactly what God tried to do to us."
It's about producing a result.
"It's not the same as protecting your heart with Ouroboros. This is trading your heart for the Law. I can't do that. I could never come back here."
"If you could come back—"
At Richard's question, Shirone turned. "If you could return to the place where you cast aside your heart, Shirone—would you fight again?"
"In an infinite number of universes…"
"In a multiverse where even a single finger can create infinite patterns."
"How did you find this place?"
Richard said, "Cheolgeuk."
It was the fixed, unchanging coordinate planted in this world by Amita Banya and Beron of the Ten Council.