100. My Buff is a Drug
100. My Buff is a Drug
"So, can you at least give a rough guess as to when the Virus will show up?"
"No. But the fact that I felt its presence is a sign that it will appear soon. You should be prepared."
Not that there's much I can actually do to prepare.
Hye-yong smoothly moved on to his next question.
"By the way, there's something I was wondering about from last time. I forgot to bring it up."
"What is it?"
"That Murderer Virus from before."
More than anything, Hye-yong had been curious about the Executioner.
Executioner.
Sure, it fit the scenario of a murderer appearing.
But did it really need to appear at all?
The Virus's objective was to corrupt and destroy the characters of this world.
If that was the case, couldn't it just have the murderer show up and go around killing people with gusto?
Why was there a big, obvious Executioner who conveniently provided the murderer's weakness?
It was a pretty important point, but he'd completely forgotten about it amid the exhilaration of victory, after getting tangled up with Park Yuri and tricking Kwon Jin-ah.
Hye-yong laid out his thoughts to Mina.
"That's probably because of my existence."
"Your existence?"
"Yes! I'm working sooo hard to suppress the Virus, you know!?"
Mina explained the Virus to him.
"The Virus, you see, will keep growing if left alone."
"Even pouring almost all my power into suppressing it only slows its growth rate—it doesn't stop the growth itself."
"In fact, the more neglected it is, the faster it expands."
"So if left unattended, its fate is to eventually consume the world, and me along with it."
She'd mentioned that situation before.
"But then, ta-da! Creator has appeared!"
She announced it enthusiastically, even drawing circles with both arms along with her cringey ad-libs.
Under normal circumstances he would've called it ridiculous, but as expected, a pretty girl was a cheat code.
When Mina did it, it just looked adorable, not cringey at all.
"With Creator giving me strength, the Virus's expansion speed and the rate at which my suppression power increases are now almost equal!"
"The Virus has realized that if things stay as they are, it's fated to be overtaken."
"So it sends things to try to somehow erode the mentality of Creator, the human from the highest dimension—to get rid of you and send you back to your original world."
"By carefully selecting scraps that can disappear with minimal issue."
"Because if it expends too much power, it risks being pushed back by me."
Hmm...
Mina may have her airheaded moments, but listening to this, she seemed to be working pretty hard.
It just wasn't something Hye-yong could easily see.
Though he figured that was only natural, since she'd be annihilated if she didn't work hard.
"Since I'm using almost all my power to suppress the Virus, I can't really do much except grant Creator new abilities, right?"
"Right."
"The Virus is in a similar situation. It can't do much either! So it throws out 'events that can definitely be resolved' as a sort of gambit!"
"What exactly do you mean?"
"First, I'll need to explain the world manipulation the Virus does."
World manipulation.
Literally, manipulating and altering the world.
Like destroying someone's inner world, or overlaying a pleasure murderer onto someone's personality.
"But that kind of thing is never easy. Even a created world has something called causality. You need the power to twist causality."
However, barely scraping together the scraps left over after expanding was not enough to generate the power to twist causality.
So the method adopted was to manipulate the world through 「stories」.
"Strictly speaking, the world I constructed is also fundamentally based on 「stories」."
"So the other side brings in 「stories」 to fight back with."
"In most stories, no matter the enemy, there's always a way to deal with them, right!? Like a weakness, or a rival."
It was true that enemies in most stories, no matter how strong, ultimately end up defeated.
Just as Mina said, a fatal weakness might be revealed, or a matching hero might appear to kill them.
"As the Virus, it picks from the internet data it has consumed."
"Stories that are at least usable, and have a clear solution."
"Using that as a pretext, the Virus gains justification."
"Justification to perform world manipulation powerful enough to subdue characters and erode their existence, even with little force."
"While praying that, with any luck, Creator will fail to find the clue to the solution and retreat."
Listening to Mina's explanation, he felt like he roughly understood the structure.
Justification for world manipulation.
If Hye-yong were to break it down in his own terms, it was like this:
This bastard has a clear disposal method, so it gets a free pass to be this strong!
That kind of feeling.
The Executioner was a device that, while it did massacre characters, would ultimately execute the murderer and kill it.
A device to provide justification for the murderer's power to move so swiftly and kill characters.
If he had never approached the Executioner from a different angle, only ever considering it an enemy and fighting unwinnable battles endlessly, he might have actually lost to the Virus by now.
'Huh, I guess that makes sense.'
The point was that even in an urgent situation, the answer definitely exists, so he had to find the clues somehow and hunt down the Virus's main body.
As long as he had a bit of sense, it wasn't particularly difficult.
At least, so far.
But his doubts weren't over yet.
If it was about bringing in stories, weren't there plenty of tragic ones?
For example, something like Cthulhu, which depicts an existence humanity can never defeat.
If it was world manipulation, couldn't it do something like that too?
Hye-yong asked Mina about this.
"No matter how much it manipulates the world, there are limits."
"I told you this world is also based on 「stories」, didn't I?"
"The novel written by the other Mina, not me, and the modpack Creator made based on that as the original work."
"There was a strict power balance in that too, right?"
"If settings about a godlike being that humans can never defeat weren't put in, then such a being will never appear."
"And even if such a setting existed, you'd probably need to draw almost all of the world's power just to manifest it?"
"Only if I'm completely consumed can a manipulation on the scale of world destruction occur."
Mina lightly balled her fist, made a slightly cheeky expression, and thumped her chest.
"But as long as I'm holding firm like this, no way!"
"Stories that lead to tragedy are also nothing to worry about, for the same reason."
"If there's no clear method to eliminate the manipulated existence, then that existence loses the justification for its strength."
Hye-yong summarized Mina's explanation along with his own deductions and voiced them.
"So, to summarize, it's this?"
"Manipulating the world while suppressed is harder than it looks."
"Even if it forces a manipulation, it can't create a being strong enough to eliminate me."
"So instead, it attacks by bringing in a story with a clear disposal method, granting justification, and creating a being strong enough to push me back and contaminate the world."
"Hoping that I'll be too stupid to find the answer to eliminate it."
Clap clap clap!
Mina beamed and applauded repeatedly.
"That's exactly it! Creator, you're so smart!!"
Hye-yong didn't mind other compliments, but being called smart didn't make him feel good at all.
Because he knew all too well that he wasn't particularly smart.
Now that he knew the truth of the situation, he was also a little scared.
What if he's too stupid to find the answer?
That thought kept creeping in.
But he had to do it.
Because he was the only special existence who could deal with the Virus.
It seemed like most of his questions had been answered by now, but Hye-yong still had a few left.
—So it sends things to try to somehow erode the mentality of Creator, the human from the highest dimension, to get rid of you and send you back to your original world.
Human from the highest dimension.
"Get rid of you and send you back to your original world"—that part of what Mina said had nagged at him the most.
"You, you've been saying things like 'human from the highest dimension' for a while now... what does that mean?"
"Ah!! I hadn't explained that to you!!"
Mina explained that "human from the highest dimension" literally meant a human from the highest dimension.
This world, meaning the entire universe, was made up of dimensions with their own ranks.
The higher the concentration of 「miracles」 that Mina had mentioned before, the higher the dimension.
The miracle of the primordial explosion.
The miracle of cosmic dust gathering to form a star, that star becoming a sun, and Earth being situated in an orbit around it exactly suitable for life to exist.
From the miraculous moment of the first lifeform's birth, the repetition of miraculous evolution.
Every single element that made up the planet Earth where Hye-yong lived was a miracle itself.
It was born without the intervention of any god.
No powerful god could arbitrarily do things like annihilate the existence of Earth.
A noble dimension that simply comes into being naturally and fades away naturally.
That was the dimension where the current Earth existed, and Hye-yong was a human of that highest dimension.
On the other hand, this world where Hye-yong currently stood was constructed by Mina.
A world created by a god, a world a god could toy with at will.
Manipulated entirely by the will of a single being.
The humans living in it were also nothing more than spirits of the universe granted personality and physical form.
Therefore, the concentration of miracles was low.
Therefore, it was a lower dimension.
A precarious state, where it could be shaken by an existence like the Virus and face destruction.
That was the current reality of the world Hye-yong loved.
"Wait, so I'm the highest-dimensional existence you talked about?"
"Right?"
"If no powerful existence can arbitrarily annihilate a highest-dimensional existence... then I can't die here?"
"If you die here, the bind that keeps you here, the link that ties you, simply disappears. You won't die; you'll just return to your original world."
What the fuck?
I can't die?
In an instant, he felt like an idiot for all the times he'd been scared shitless of kicking the bucket.
"What the hell, fuck. I didn't need to worry so much."
At those words, Mina's face crumpled and she answered in a sad voice.
"Hing... but if Creator dies here, I'll lose any way to call Creator back here ever again. I'll wither away and die. Hing, hiiing......."
......But still, dying would suck ass.
He was living a life of total enjoyment here. The thought of waking up in his original world with nothing to show for it made him feel like dying might actually be the better outcome.
Of course, Hye-yong was still young and earned decent money.
But he absolutely did not want to give up this world, where he could endlessly tangle bodies with this vigorous body and cute, lovely female classmates, where the food was delicious, and where he never had to think about realistic futures.
"Hey. So what's happening with my original body?"
"While Creator is staying here, time in the highest dimension becomes practically frozen."
"Time... stops?"
Seeing Hye-yong's dumbfounded expression, Mina immediately launched into her explanation.
"It's like... 1,000 years here feels similar to 1 second in the highest dimension?"
"In terms of the flow of time, this lower dimension is overwhelmingly faster, so it feels like almost no time passes at all in the highest dimension."
"Even if you live a full life here, not even a single second will have passed in Creator's original world."
"The higher the concentration of miracles, the closer the speed of time flow becomes to the highest dimension."
"Hehe, I was born not that long ago, so the rank of the dimension I can construct is a bit on the low side."
Whoa, shit.
This felt like what it meant to learn the truth of the world.
It was a feeling of his mind going hazy, like his field of view was widening and pulling him out of the world for a moment.
"Then... if I don't die here, and save the world... can I keep living in this world? Until I die of old age?"
Mina responded with overwhelming positivity.
"Of course!! Once we deal with the Virus, you can do anything, anything at all!! You can enjoy yourself to your heart's content and then return to your original world whenever you want!!"
At those words, his motivation to eliminate the Virus surged, filling him to the top of his head.
'This is the answer I was hoping for......!!'
Yes.
A reward for saving the world had to be at least this good, didn't it?
'So what if it's a lower dimension? As long as I'm having the time of my fucking life, that's all that matters.'
Hye-yong wanted to save the world and reap an immense reward of pleasure.
A happy life where he could do whatever he wanted, without a single worry or concern!