Chapter 419
Chapter 419
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Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 419
Chapter Title: Racial War (58)
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Wearing the Crown of the Weakest meant exactly that—they were the weakest.
As the warrior with the lowest level, heading toward the "Gateway" was bound to be an uphill battle.
They had to overcome the scrutiny of the other races and reach the Gateway before the door would finally open.
No matter how skillfully they wielded the crown's power, there were limits.
And yet.
'He destroyed it?'
'From this far away?'
He had forcibly "destroyed" the Gateway.
The Gateway, which was barely visible to their eyes from this dizzyingly distant spot.
Using unmistakable "magic," no less.
Even more astonishing was...
'Heaven's Punishment.'
'It was definitely Heaven's Punishment.'
'The most basic of basics!'
The dragons' pupils trembled as if an earthquake had struck.
Dragons were all master artisans and researchers of magic.
Their eyes could pierce through the structure and flow of even advanced spells at a glance.
So the dragons were certain.
What they had just witnessed was, without a doubt, "Heaven's Punishment."
There were no tricks or illusions.
The structure of the mana circuits, the manifestation form, the lingering afterglow—everything pointed to the most fundamental lightning spell.
But.
That very fact made it incomprehensible.
That very fact made it all the more terrifying.
'Impossible...!'
Magic follows laws.
Mana dissipates in the atmosphere the farther it travels, growing weaker.
At hundreds of meters away, a basic spell like Heaven's Punishment should amount to nothing more than a mild static shock.
The Gateway was made of primordial matter.
It boasted absolute hardness, impervious even to all but the most powerful high-tier spells.
To snipe and destroy a primordial Gateway with a basic spell from extreme long range?
It was like claiming to extinguish the sun in the sky by tossing a single spark meant to light a campfire.
No physical law of the Abyss, no magical engineering, no causality could explain this phenomenon.
Conventional magic couldn't do it.
Not even grand magic fueled by a Wish could reach that level.
'Only Absolute Magic makes this possible.'
Yet, beings capable of wielding Absolute Magic were rare even in the Abyss—countable on one hand.
For example, Dragon God Sepiro.
He could wield Absolute Magic as naturally as breathing.
But even Sepiro had limits to the number of Absolute Magics he could command.
Absolute Magic was akin to authority forged by expending a "Wish."
Of course, it couldn't be produced infinitely.
Refining something as trivial as "Heaven's Punishment" into Absolute Magic was utterly absurd.
No matter how unpredictable Sepiro was, he wasn't that irrational.
...All possibilities, all logical inferences hit a dead end.
Conventional magic: impossible.
Grand magic: impossible.
Absolute Magic: the process defies common sense.
No, even if it were possible...
'To manifest magic on the level of Absolute Magic without racial traits?'
Even the dragons, lords of magic, couldn't cast spells in this situation.
Could a mere human have grasped a truth beyond their comprehension?
At this moment, Park Chan-woo's "Heaven's Punishment" had...
'...Transcended the framework of a lord.'
It was magic that couldn't be judged by ordinary frameworks.
They realized this.
Yes.
'It must be an entirely new system of magic.'
Elevating first-realm magic to the tenth realm was already an unprecedented miracle in Abyss history.
But Park Chan-woo's magic could be seen as elevating first-realm magic to at least the fifteenth realm.
In the Abyss, the "realms" of magic were an absolute standard.
The first realm was, quite literally, the basics.
From level 1 to 9—the level mortals fresh to magic could typically wield—was called the first realm.
The second realm: levels 10 to 19.
The third: 20 to 29.
And so on, until reaching the tenth realm, considered the pinnacle for mortals.
Level 99. The final frontier self-proclaimed "mages" mimicking magic could reach.
Advancing even one realm beyond could take thousands or tens of thousands of years.
Of course, dragons naturally handled twelfth-realm magic simply by growing.
They were the lords of magic, after all.
But from the thirteenth realm onward, innate talent alone wasn't enough. Even dragons required grueling effort.
That "effort" was on a whole different plane from humans studying and training in magic.
It demanded a protracted struggle akin to deep meditation, staking their very existence.
To ascend to the thirteenth realm, a dragon had to delve into its inner self, dismantle and reassemble the structure of its dormant "dragon soul."
A painful process of self-reflection: understanding oneself as the origin of magic and elevating one's mode of existence to a higher dimension.
Those who entered a profound slumber—shortest decades, longest millennia—to confront their soul and pierce its essence alone earned the right to open the door to the thirteenth realm.
Many dragons failed this trial.
But those who reached the deep third realm were thereafter called "ancient dragons."
They gained the qualifications to lead their clans.
And beyond that...
The fourteenth realm.
An area unreachable by effort alone.
To attain it, one must inevitably awaken a single "Wish."
Condensing one's entire narrative and will to momentarily defy the Abyss's causality and etch one's desire into reality—an authority unto itself.
Dragons who awakened their own Wish earned Sepiro's favor.
But even this was not the end.
The fifteenth realm.
The realm of Absolute Magic.
Reaching it required not just awakening a Wish, but a "realization" and "awakening" beyond that.
Going from imposing one's desire on the world to becoming one with the world's providence.
From one who "uses" magic to becoming "magic itself."
That was the fifteenth realm.
Fifteenth-realm magic was truly absolute—even most demon gods couldn't withstand it.
It ignored absolute effects and could even shatter "indestructible" gear.
All Twelve Lords were beings at the fifteenth realm or higher in terms of magic.
They didn't use magic; their very existence was a vast spell, a living law.
Thus, they wielded "Absolute Magic"—or powers comparable to it.
But for mortals, realms beyond were so distant they couldn't even imagine them. Officially, the fifteenth realm was deemed magic's final frontier.
An unattainable ultimate realm.
The domain of true transcendent beings!
Yet what this human had just done bore an uncanny resemblance to that realm's power.
He had erased an indestructible primordial Gateway as if it had never existed.
Diar, the leader of the Light Clan, muttered.
"Has he truly stepped into the fifteenth realm...?"
Wasn't he a fake?
Park Chan-woo had been deemed a "fake" by the dragons.
Sepiro, emerging from the great rift, had declared it so.
He was merely a fake mimicking the original.
But how could they dismiss that display as mere "fake"?
He had reached the fifteenth realm by following the truth.
That meant his very existence had become a "truth."
...A realm no "fake" could ever attain.
Diar was bewildered.
The other dragons were the same.
Though they served the god Sepiro, their root was adherence to "truth."
Truth does not lie.
Yet as dragons, they had to believe without question the verdict of their god.
Diar, too, as one who walked the path of Light and Truth, had never once doubted Sepiro's words.
That was why he had been furious.
He believed everyone had been deceived.
He thought that arrogant human daring to claim divinity needed to be shown true divine might.
But.
What was this phenomenon unfolding before their eyes?
How could a fake, an imitator, wield the power of the fifteenth realm?
For a false being to open the gate of truth was as impossible as darkness birthing light—a perfect contradiction.
Then, there was only one answer.
'...Which of them is lying?'
The moment that thought struck, Diar felt a chill as if his blood had frozen solid.
He had dared to doubt a god.
Sepiro, their creator and one true god.
But his reason, his soul forged on the path of Light, could not ignore this blatant contradiction.
Sepiro had declared: that one is a fake.
Yet this fake had accomplished what only the real could.
Ataraxia and Darkan had ultimately circled back to following the fake.
'We must kill him.'
Two out of ten.
Eight remained.
However.
'...How do we even kill him?'
In that fleeting instant, Diar reached that conclusion only to mock himself.
This was no time to ponder methods of killing.
They couldn't use magic.
Not even their most primal tongue, Dragon Word, could manifest.
The mana they had breathed and wielded their entire lives now ignored them—this great dragon race.
As if a mother could not recognize her child, mana utterly shunned them.
Realizing what that meant, his breath caught in his throat.
A horrific sensation as if all his organs had halted at once.
Moreover, inability to use "magic" was a matter of survival for them.
"Kkh...! Air...!"
The first to sense the anomaly was a relatively young dragon warrior.
He suddenly clutched his throat, gasping raggedly.
Dragons didn't breathe air like humans.
They naturally inhaled ambient mana, controlling and circulating the vast mana within their bodies.
But now, that circulation had stopped.
They could neither inhale nor exhale mana.
It was like a dam with all gates sealed shut while torrential rain poured upstream.
"Gahk...! Uwaaaah!"
Starting with one, screams spread like a plague.
A gruesome transformation began in the bodies of all dragons who had not sided with Darkan and blindly followed Sepiro's authority.
Pzzt-!
The countless self-reinforcement spells that had wrapped their bodies like armor sparked and unraveled all at once.
For the first time in their lives, the pure "weight" of their flesh and bones, the natural law of gravity, began to crush them.
But that was only the beginning.
The true catastrophe was brewing from within.
"M-My body...!"
The dragons' sturdy scales cracked and peeled away like withered bark.
Uncontrolled mana bulged like veins over exposed flesh, writhing grotesquely.
With nowhere to go, the mana rampaged, treating its host's body as fodder and going berserk.
Krunch! Kraaaunch!
Skin flayed, flesh ballooned explosively.
Muscles tore, bones twisted, swelling into monstrous tumors.
This was no attack from Park Chan-woo.
No external impact whatsoever.
Their own power was destroying them from the inside.
The lords of magic were dying by magic.