The Cloned World
The seahorse once known as the Master of Gold was dead. With his fall, the fishmen reverted to their natural state, ceasing their attacks on the Equator and scattering into the sea. A few still tried to carry out Daldaran’s final orders, but they were eliminated soon enough.
Once the battle was over, I made my way to Al-Alsa-da. News of the Master of Gold’s defeat had spread, and the remaining holdouts surrendered. Valuro returned to Al-Alsa-da alongside our victory and prepared the grandest reception he could muster. Precious metals adorned the massive reefs, and countless seahorses lined up to cheer my arrival.
The ceremony itself wasn’t bad. But afterward, so many noble seahorses came to pay their respects that the rest of the event became a chore. I told Valuro I wanted no part in such tedious formalities from now on.
“Valuro, from today onward, your name is Seahorse King.”
He was forcibly renamed, yet he looked overjoyed.
“From now on, all matters concerning the seahorses will be decided by you, the Seahorse King. Just report the results to me.”
“O-oh! Thank you!”
I left the Seahorse King to enjoy the rest of his coronation and returned to the Equator. Pointless pomp and circumstance didn’t suit me. Resting on the Equator was far better than wearing uncomfortable clothes and receiving empty congratulations.
The first thing the newly autonomous Seahorse King did was dismantle the Fourth Elder and the Gold-Ear Clan. A bloody purge began. Though the seahorse population shrank dramatically, it also provided plenty of corpses to turn into zombies. I immediately began the experiment I had been planning.
The results were a partial success. Even after becoming zombies, the former high-ranking Ghost Shamans could still wield some of their ghost arts. But that was the limit. Their abilities were far weaker than in life, so there was no point in deliberately turning more seahorses into zombies.
Well, it was the outcome I expected.
The Filth Jar was installed on the Equator, and the seahorse migration began. Having witnessed the Equator’s overwhelming military might, almost none of them objected. Those who did became zombie fodder.
The seahorses settled along the promised large river basin as agreed, and the river was named Guicheon.
Five hectic days passed. Park Seona stretched and groaned after signing off on the final document.
“Augh, it’s finally over. Darling, I’m exhausted.”
“That’s what you get for earning your keep.”
“Uwaaang…”
She had handled most of the work. I had been busy practicing control over the power I had taken from Daldaran.
“How’s it going?”
“So far, so good.”
“So far?”
The ability I had received wasn’t anything special. It was a power every high-ranking user possessed after Stage 6. In user terms, it was called Domain.
A summoner could freely summon their creatures within a certain radius around themselves. In other words, they could suddenly create zombies right behind an opponent’s head. Domain prevented exactly that. It created a space centered on a designated point where only the user could summon creatures.
That was why I had summoned my zombies in advance before entering El Dorado. Daldaran’s Domain had covered the golden city, so summoning inside had been impossible.
When the power to control a Domain grew strong enough, the space inside could be overwritten by the user’s own traits. Just like how El Dorado had become a city of gold. The golden city hadn’t been a real place; it was a phenomenon altered by Daldaran’s power.
“The direction still hasn’t been decided, so it feels like the power hasn’t settled properly.”
“Ah, direction. I’m struggling with that too.”
“Think carefully. If you mess up, you’ll end up like the Master of Gold.”
“He was incredibly strong, so hearing I might become like him feels strange.”
“He was just bloated with power. His direction was broken. Compared to the real ones, he was pathetic.”
Daldaran had received the Goddess’s blessing yet failed to use it efficiently because his direction was wrong. The only reason he had survived until the end was because he borrowed the Goddess’s power. Gold, strength—his life had been filled with nothing but fakes that were never truly his.
Is that why he was so obsessed with being a thief…? Because his entire existence was theft itself.
“Anyway, the seahorse business is mostly wrapped up. Where to next? Hunting down the other kings?”
“There’s something I need to do first.”
“What is it?”
“I’m going to clear the final event.”
Park Seona’s face lit up. She had only opened up to the Destination, but she had always been deeply interested in events. To her, they were like goals.
“Wow! You finally found it?”
“Probably.”
The event Cloned World. When I first saw it, I had wondered if it might be the easiest one. After all, wasn’t this world itself a cloned world? But that was exactly the problem. Drawing out Cloned World from within the cloned world wasn’t easy. It was already out in the open. The most obvious truths were often the hardest to uncover.
I had tried other methods. Maybe a mirror? The classic way to reach a mirrored otherworld was through a mirror. I had stared into mirrors late at night and even shattered plenty of them. But there had been nothing beyond the glass.
Perhaps the issue was that the world reflected in a mirror was too small. There was that strange notion that if you were trapped in a mirror, you couldn’t escape that tiny space. So I looked for a larger copy. The substitute I found for a mirror was the sea. The scorching sunlight beautifully reflected the sky on the clear waters of the Equator. A rippling, simultaneously distorted and refracted world. It was clearly a replica of this world, something as vast as the ocean itself.
I had played in the water with Baengnae, dived from high places, even submerged into the deep sea one day and spent hours blankly staring at the reflected world. But there had been no answer in that skewed otherworld either. The refracted sea hadn’t been the answer.
There had been all sorts of attempts. But dreams, paintings, even mimicry games had failed to open the path to Cloned World.
Then, at last, I found the answer. I had to flip my thinking from the very beginning.
The question. Was this world a cloned world? Before that, I needed to ask a more fundamental question.
What is a clone?
An imitation of something. Two different objects that are perfectly alike. But could the word “perfect” ever truly exist?
Both “resemble” and “perfect” were incomplete. And then I realized it.
There had never been such a thing as a clone to begin with.
Would this cloned world recognize itself as a clone? No. Only we, looking from outside the frame, called it a clone. The laws of this world would never perceive themselves as something cloned.
From the moment it was copied, they had moved along different timelines. From the instant one became two, clones ceased to exist. A perfect imitation was nothing more than an illusion that existed only in that fleeting moment.
“Therefore, clones do not exist. That is my conclusion.”
Park Seona tilted her head.
“Huh…? So the conclusion is that we can’t find it after all? It’s the final event, so I guess it’s supposed to be difficult…”
“No. I found it.”
“But you just said clones don’t exist…”
“I told you, didn’t I? A perfect imitation only exists in that single instant when the branch occurs.”
“Yes… So you’re saying that right before users arrived, it was copied from the original world, and after that moment passed, it was no longer a clone?”
Park Seona had gotten smarter. Honestly, I hadn’t expected her to understand right away, but her growth was remarkable. It was probably thanks to repeatedly experiencing the laws that governed this world together.
“Yeah, you’re right. So we’re going back to that moment. To experience the instant of copying.”
“How…?”
I grinned.
“We have something that records the moment we never experienced. Something that materializes memories.”
The Filth Jar.
Bad memories never got a day off. According to the Seahorse King, the five elders had visited the cathedral once a day to deposit the “bad memories” the seahorses had collected into the jar. A duty repeated since ancient times. That meant they had also placed bad memories into the jar on the day I arrived in Stage 5.
“Wait, wait a second, darling!”
Park Seona’s sudden cry made me pause.
“What’s wrong? Did I miss something?”
“It’s just… I mean, if we mix the keyword ‘bad memories’ with the Filth Jar to create the Cloned World event… Uuu… Won’t it be swarming with ghosts? It might, right? What if it does?”
“It’s not a possibility. It’s a certainty.”
“N-no way…!”
I honestly didn’t understand her reaction. Park Seona’s twin swords were items imbued with attributes. Not just her—most high-ranking leopard beastmen had gained enough strength that petty ghosts couldn’t even touch them. So why was she acting like this?
“Do you have some kind of trauma with ghosts?”
“Even without trauma… ghosts are dangerous. You never know what weird things might happen. Uuu…”
Of course it would be dangerous. It was the final event of Stage 5, after all. And I already had a countermeasure in mind.
“Don’t worry about that part. We’ll be working with experts, so there won’t be a problem.”
“Experts?”
I had taken control of the Seahorse Kingdom. If Ghost Shamans weren’t experts on ghosts, then who was? I would select the most skilled among them to accompany us.
“Wow…! Then the ghosts will be on our side? Th-that might be a little better? Or not? Will the ghosts fight each other?”
Park Seona’s expression brightened slightly. She immediately started preparing documents, declaring she would send an official letter to Guicheon to invite the kingdom’s finest Ghost Shamans.
Good. She’s perked up a bit.
Even though Park Seona seemed afraid of ghosts, there was a reason I was bringing her along. Spirit-type entities were usually recognized as special individuals, so they had a very high drop rate for essences. For her, whose method of increasing summons relied on gathering essences, there was no better goldmine than this.
And whatever profit she gained from essences, I could take something else from her in return. It was a roundabout way of profiting. Since spirit-types couldn’t become zombies, this was the best method I had to make gains.
This tiresome Stage 5 will be over soon.
Preparations to clear the final event were progressing smoothly. That was why I hadn’t realized it.
Just how bad bad memories could truly become.
Moderately bad memories lingered in the mind. But truly terrible memories sometimes got erased entirely.
I hadn’t considered that possibility at all.