Chapter 488
Chapter 488
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Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 488
Chapter Title: The Heaviest Thing
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Last chance.
Those words crushed every last bit of Park Chan-woo's remaining will.
Helplessness enveloped him.
If not himself, not all futures...
Then what more did he have to place upon it?
He no longer even had the strength to face the scales.
Staggering backward, he collapsed onto the cold floor.
The Lord of Strength looked down at Park Chan-woo's pathetic form and prodded him.
But there was no time limit.
This trial would continue eternally, until the challenger himself admitted defeat and withered away in despair.
Park Chan-woo gave no reply.
He simply closed his eyes.
'There's nothing left to put on it.'
He wanted to give up everything.
The countless repeated lives. The vicious cycle of regression.
If this futile defeat awaited at the end, was there any reason to struggle further?
His mind emptied.
His consciousness sank into a distant abyss.
That was when it happened.
From a forgotten corner of his supposedly empty heart, a faint yet vividly clear 'scent' rose up.
The rich aroma of doenjang jjigae.
'...I want to taste it one more time.'
A scene floated into his mind like a lantern lit in the darkness.
A small villa in Gyeonggi Province.
A worn but tidy living room.
And in the kitchen, a woman in an apron, smiling brightly.
It was Lee Hyuk-soo's mother, Kim Ji-yeon's smile.
-"Welcome, Prophet."
Her warm voice seemed to echo in his ears.
A small brass coin hanging from the ceiling.
-"It's the first gift our Hyuk brought home."
Her proud voice.
And on the dining table, a spread of steaming, warm evening meals.
-"It's nothing fancy, but eat up."
Park Chan-woo remembered.
Himself, shoving rice into his mouth frantically.
The harmony of flavors on his tongue back then—salty, sweet, rich.
It was the 'warmth' he had yearned for all his life.
The tenderness that melted his soul, chilled by countless deaths and solitude.
'...If I could just taste it once more.'
It was the taste of hope.
He couldn't even remember the last time he'd truly savored it.
A aching longing in itself.
If he could taste it again...
'I'd stake the whole world on it.'
It wouldn't be a waste.
Park Chan-woo suddenly felt it.
The emptiness.
The longing for what he'd lost.
Park Chan-woo realized.
What he truly desired.
At the start and end of all this exhausting struggle, it had never been humanity's grand salvation or a divine throne.
It was something so ordinary and trivial that even he had forgotten it.
The one wish he'd yearned for all his life but never fully possessed.
'Ordinary life' and 'peace'.
He had always been in the heart of the battlefield.
Before regression, in the hell of the Abyss; after, in the prison of fate.
An ordinary day had never existed for him.
Because he couldn't have it, it was what his soul craved most deeply and desperately.
To him, it was heavier than anything in the world.
Park Chan-woo slowly opened his eyes.
He approached the scales again.
And used his final chance.
He placed nothing on the plate.
Instead, he answered the root question of this trial himself.
'What is power?'
It is responsibility.
The heavy duty of bearing the world, protecting the weak, and upholding order.
But at the deepest core of all that responsibility, the true essence of power is...
...protecting the ordinary.
The will to endure every moment: safely living each day, laughing and crying over trivial things, finding warm rest at the end of a hard day.
That was the greatest, quietest force that truly moved the world.
Park Chan-woo, unable to have it, would gladly trade the entire world for it.
Yes.
'...I didn't wish for peace.'
He knew. He understood.
He had only wished for the ordinary.
Like Kim Ji-yeon's doenjang jjigae.
A warm dinner that washed away the day's worries.
The power to protect one full day intact.
Wasn't that the most important, the only reason he needed?
Park Chan-woo placed that wish on the empty plate.
That utterly ordinary scene.
A deep silence fell over the Lord of Strength's will as it watched.
And at the end of that silence erupted a pure question, laced with incomprehension.
It wasn't the mockery or contempt from when Park Chan-woo had mimicked the Creator. This was genuine bewilderment, true inability to understand.
In the Lord of Strength's world, value was always grand, overwhelming, glorious.
Power to shatter planets, feats that shook history, authority to subjugate gods.
That was his measure of 'weight'.
Yet the human before him denied it all.
A single dinner at the end of the day.
Heavier than the world's fate?
The Lord of Strength declared.
It was his conviction, absolute faith in the logic of power he had upheld.
But before his words could finish...
Kiiiiiiieeeeek!
The massive scales, unmoved for eons, began to shift—slowly, with a rusty screech like screaming metal, but unmistakably.
The Lord of Strength's consciousness froze.
An unbelievable sight unfolded.
The crystal orb containing the world's fate slowly rose.
And Park Chan-woo's humble wish pressed it down, sinking lower, lower.
Finally, the scales achieved perfect balance.
No—beyond balance, they tipped ever so slightly toward Park Chan-woo's side.
A question he'd never once considered echoed in the Lord of Strength's mind.
He couldn't understand.
And likely never would.
The brutal weight of longing for what one has never had.
To the Lord of Strength, the world was always beneath his feet.
From birth, he reigned at power's pinnacle, possessing whatever he desired.
'Lack' was not a word he knew.
But Park Chan-woo was different.
His life was a chain of lacks and losses.
Thus,
the value of that ordinary daily life he yearned to protect held infinite weight, incomprehensible to one who had everything.
The Lord of Strength blankly stared at the tilted scales and the mundane scene atop them.
A dinner table with warm steam rising.
A family smiling at each other.
Longing for that pathetic, sentimental, fleeting moment...
Heavier than the fate of the entire Abyss?
'...What is power?'
The Lord of Strength pondered.
A primal question he'd never considered in eons.
To him, power was always destruction, domination, a means to fulfill his desires.
But now he witnessed a different kind of power.
'Lack.'
Perhaps the strongest power's root was not overflowing abundance, but desperate 'lack' for the unattainable.
In other words, power was akin to 'wish'.
The earnest desire for something.
The will to cast aside everything to obtain or protect it.
That was the weight of Park Chan-woo's wish.
The Lord of Strength realized.
He had never truly wished for anything.
Having everything, he felt no lack, thus never harbored a true 'wish'.
His power was vast but hollow.
Nothing to protect, no dreams to chase.
Power for power's sake alone.
Before his own trial, he learned the greatest truth from the challenger.
The Lord of Strength's will resounded lower than ever, incomparable to before.
Like a seeker's confession, admitting the creed he'd devoted his life to had crumbled before a greater truth.
He acknowledged Park Chan-woo.
As one qualified with true 'power' to surpass him.
From the massive figure's heart, a crimson seal blazed like flame.
The 'Stigma of Strength'.
The Lord of Strength willingly yielded his throne, everything, to the god of a new era.
At the same time.
Hwaaaaaah!!
A storm of light enveloped Park Chan-woo's body.
Each muscle, every sinew, was recreated like those of a primordial giant.
Another curse of pure ability '1' was lifted.
The vessel completed once more.
The cracks patched by stamina's transcendence were now perfectly filled with lava-hot power's fervor, forged stronger than before.
When the light faded, Park Chan-woo lightly clenched and unclenched his fist.
His slightest motion pressed the surrounding space with subtle pressure.
Park Chan-woo checked his status window.
'500...!'
Indeed, 500.
A satisfied smile curved his lips.
But before it could fade...
In the space the Lord of Strength vacated, a new presence appeared like the wind.
The third of the five wills in the Tower of God.
The Lord of Agility had descended.