Asilien's Monster Mutation...
As the monster mutation ran its course, another powerful curse had been set upon Asilien's heart—the Curse of Explosion.
What made it so vicious was that no one could ever dispel it, and that it was guaranteed to kill whoever it had been planted in. From the moment the curse took root, that person was already dead. And it did not stop there. It detonated in a tremendous explosion, hardening the flesh until the shrapnel tore outward with vastly greater force.
It was a cult curse so costly in points and materials that they almost never used it, but this time they had received special permission from their superiors. They had been waiting for it with high expectations.
"……."
Astonishingly, nothing happened at all.
"What are you doing?"
Yujun was the one who broke the silence.
"No…… what is this?"
The most bewildered of them all, of course, was Deir.
"You weren't ready?"
Deir turned on a subordinate.
"Th-that's…… the Curse of Explosion seems to have vanished."
"What? And you're only telling me now?"
"I only just realized it myself. If it fails to trigger, it's a misfire, and we can usually try again a few times—but there's no response at all."
"……So that bastard stopped the mutation and erased the curse too? In that short a time? I thought even an elixir was useless."
"That's certainly what I was told…… but I'm sorry. This is my failure."
"The curse on Asilien was the Curse of Explosion, wasn't it? You're sure?"
"You saw it yourself, Branch Head."
"I asked because I can't believe it. The mutation is unknown territory even for us, so I'll grant you that—but you said the curse could never be undone."
"Everyone in the cult still believes that. Even now……."
Their shock spread to the other Demon God Worshippers. The operation they had prepared had failed to land. Every card in their hands had been spent. Their fear of Shin Yujun had already run deep, and now their one and only gambit had been rendered void. It would have been stranger if any hope remained among them.
"Time to pay for what you've done."
The barrier had sealed off every path of escape, and the fate of the Demon God Worshippers was all too plain.
Shhk!
Having cut down the last of the Demon God Worshippers aside from the Branch Head, Yujun turned toward Paranet.
"Want to kill this one yourself?"
"No. Better, I think, that Asilien kill him with her own hand than that I do it."
"Ah. Right."
Asilien had come through alive, so it was cleaner to let her settle the grudge herself. The trouble was that her condition was far from normal.
"Will you be all right?"
When Yujun asked, Asilien offered a faint smile and nodded.
"I still have enough strength left to kill a Demon God Worshipper who can't do a thing."
Her forearms had wasted away until they were painful to look at. She had fought without rest against the energy trying to mutate her body, and that endless struggle was what had left her so gaunt. Even so, it was because she had held on that they had been able to restore her safely. Aftereffects lingered, and she would not be able to bring much power to bear for the moment, but that too was only temporary.
Asilien stood before Deir, who clung to the edge of death. She shaped a single sharp ice lance and hurled it straight at him.
Thuk!
It took him through the throat, and so Deir's life ended.
"Master. My thanks. I believed in you, yet I never imagined you would manage it so swiftly."
"Turns out there's nothing magic can't do. You just can't die. As long as you don't die."
"Then perhaps you might make me an alchemist again as well?"
"You're already a dead body."
"……I did not die. I merely became undead."
"Walking around in a corpse is being dead. Later, when all of this is over…… if we kill the Demon God, or stop his descent, I'll think about putting you back the way you were."
"No. I shall simply remain undead."
"And why's that now?"
"Because I am happy enough as I am. I do not think returning to that form would make me so very much happier."
"They say the undead come to hate change. Turns out that was true."
"There was such a saying?"
"I made it up just now. Sounds plausible, doesn't it?"
"I believed you for a moment. But Master—how on earth did you heal her? From what that Branch Head whelp said earlier, it was something that absolutely could not be stopped……."
"I reversed it."
"Pardon?"
"I reversed time to the state before Asilien was injected with the curse and the mutation energy."
"……Time……?"
Asilien was even more startled by Yujun's words. She herself had been wondering how she had been healed. And he had reversed time?
"Is that something possible within the domain of magic?"
"Yes. It's quite limited, but the result turned out well. If I'd been even a little later, it would have been a disaster……."
The reversal of time was not perfect. Even he had no way to resolve the aftereffects that remained. Even so, simply erasing a monster mutation and a powerful curse was nothing short of a miracle.
Yenil, exceptional both in magical skill and in insight, was so dumbfounded she could not close her mouth.
"He touched time……."
The shock she felt was bound to be greater than anyone else's. She was a mage summoned out of the past, and the Demon God Worshippers had been the ones to call her forth, but that was a matter of an entirely different order. Strictly speaking, they had not used time at all. They had merely offered up an enormous quantity of sacrifices and borrowed the Demon God's power. Even that power could not control or steer time. All it had done was reach into the past and freeze Yenil's body.
A mere player, doing what even the Demon God cannot……?
Of course, she did not know the Demon God's true strength, and leaping to such a conclusion was premature.
Are all humans like that? Looking at his companions, it doesn't seem so…….
While wandering the market, Yenil had gathered a great deal of information about the Continent and Heaven. What fascinated her most was humanity itself. Their potential was said to be limitless and their growth astonishingly fast—a race that everyone watched with wary eyes. In truth, in less than five years, more than a few humans had seized major positions across the Continent. Human influence within the Tower of Infinity would only grow with each passing day. And standing at the very front of them was Shin Yujun, right before her.
This man must simply possess an overwhelmingly exceptional talent, even among humans.
What shocked her even more was that Shin Yujun was better with a sword than with magic. He went around saying so himself, and Yenil, who had watched him fight from up close, knew it was no lie.
After turning it over for a long while, Yenil cautiously approached Yujun and spoke.
"Could you teach me as well, later?"
"Teach you what?"
"That…… reversing time."
"Even if I taught you, you wouldn't understand."
"Why?"
"It's less that it's difficult and more that the concept is different."
In truth he did not particularly want to teach her, but he was not lying to Yenil either. What he would be explaining belonged to a plane of concept unlike anything she knew. Even if she followed the explanation, she could not use time reversal unless she grasped it for herself. And even Yujun could not use it perfectly.
I got lucky.
He could not restore a perfectly sound state. The feat had been accomplished through one of the traits he possessed: Touch of Healing (SSS+). Time reversal was certainly a theory he had been turning over, but mana alone made it impossible to put into practice. Combined with Touch of Healing, however, he had succeeded in reversing Asilien's body. He had not even used the trait on purpose. It was possible only because it carried an effect akin to a passive skill. Luck, he had to admit, had played its part.
Touch of Healing really is quietly good at everything.
Mixed with Chaos, it could be turned to offense, and it had even contributed greatly to undoing a curse that an elixir could not dispel. Honestly, there was almost no trait that offered this kind of return.
This thing is outstanding on its own, completely independent of my stats.
Its grade was high, but he had a feeling the effect would not have fallen off much even if the grade had been lower.
So now, as long as they aren't dead, I can save just about anyone?
If not for the Demon God, he could have lived in grand style on the Continent, playing physician and healer.
There really wouldn't be a better life than that.
Loafing about, healing the occasional ailing player, and raking in money by the hundreds of millions while he was at it. And whenever he got bored, sparring with players known for being strong. Yujun, spreading the wings of that happy daydream, opened his eyes wide.
Why am I not even thinking about going back to Earth?
Had some part of him, without his noticing, already settled into not wanting to return? Honestly, if he went back to Earth with power like this, what could he even do? Play the clown, or become a celebrity. That would be about the size of it. Would that be happier than living in the Tower of Infinity, where the strong devoured the weak and only the strong survived? More than anything, if he returned still possessing a player's abilities, he suspected a great many enemies would come after him. And if those abilities vanished the moment he went back, that would be even worse.
For now, all of it was meaningless speculation. None of it was possible until he dealt with the Demon God and the Demon God Worshippers first.
"Asilien. How did you end up captured?"
Yujun asked how she had become a hostage.
"The Demon God Worshippers had suspected me for a long time. But because they wanted to use me—sitting where I was as the Number One Great Merchant—they pretended not to know for as long as they could. I was naive. I took their strength too lightly. In the end I met a miserable end. No—I nearly did. You saved me, Shin Yujun. Thank you. And Paranet. Thank you, too."
At her thanks, Paranet bowed his head.
"Was there a reason it absolutely had to be you as the host?"
"Yes. For one thing my level is high, and perhaps because I've drunk every kind of spiritual elixir for decades, they said my body was the finest possible vessel for a host."
"And the money? They didn't take the money?"
The points in Asilien's inventory had to be astronomical. It would have made perfect sense for the Demon God Worshippers to go after that fortune. Seeing the alarm on Yujun's face, Asilien laughed and shook her head.
"They didn't seem greedy for my points. They were fixated solely on making a host. Or perhaps they meant to recover the points after I had become one."
"Once you became a host, they could probably control you as they pleased."
"I imagine so. They certainly said it wouldn't be long before they obtained control."
"They didn't do anything else to you?"
"No. They injected me with some strange energy…… and planted the curse. That was all. Beyond that, they showed me no interest whatsoever. They chatted about cult matters as if it didn't matter whether I was there or not."
"Was it important information?"
"Important…… not quite. It was idle talk, just as it sounds. But as it happened, they talked mostly about you, Shin Yujun."
"About me?"
"How you made them tremble, how the odds of dying on this operation were high—they were simply terrified of you. It showed so plainly that I could tell exactly what most of the Demon God Worshippers thought of you."
"Aside from that, was there anything about how they meant to deal with me?"
"No. They said there was no way to deal with you. So it seemed they had a little distrust of their superiors as well."
A satisfied smile spread across Yujun's face. He had never imagined it could feel this good to become an object of terror to the Demon God Worshippers.
I'll have to apply myself even harder from now on, for the sake of my Demon God Worshipper friends.