Reviving the Knights of the Round Table
"You really made a thousand characters?"
"I didn't raise all of them, but…"
"And a ninety-nine percent survival rate among them? As far as I know, no one's ever broken fifty. Hell, people who even hit forty are few and far between."
Pangenia's tutorial was infamous for its brutal difficulty. Situations that shifted without warning. Backgrounds where survival seemed outright impossible. In Pangenia, clearing even a forty percent survival rate earned you the title of "god."
And yet—ninety-nine percent?
Unprecedented. Unparalleled. If anything, Phantom's legend had been underrated.
In the early days after Pangenia opened, there had been something called a "survival run." The goal, of course, was to clear Main Quest 1: Survival.
Survival runs are about the main quest rewards. The harsher the survival conditions, the bigger the payout when you clear them. But most people only managed survival rates around twenty percent.
Which meant Park Hyunmyung had deliberately run survival runs—then raised only the characters with the best rewards into fully developed builds.
The problem was the survival rate itself.
If you spam characters carelessly and tank your survival rate, you get cursed with a reduced SP acquisition rate.
That was why everyone eventually quit doing survival runs. Soul Point acquisition was one of the most critical systems in Pangenia—and the lower your survival rate, the less SP you received when other characters died. The Survival quest was already punishing enough. The further you pushed it, the lower your rate inevitably fell, so most people simply stopped trying.
But over ninety-nine percent?
A low survival rate brought a curse. A high one, however, attached a bonus multiplier—and the more attempts you made, the higher your success rate climbed, the stronger that bonus grew.
So Hudson asked.
"Um… roughly how high was your SP bonus multiplier…?"
"Around two hundred fifty percent?"
"Cough!"
A bonus coefficient no one had ever heard of. And though it never appeared on the status window, the SP bonus still applied even now. The same actions yielded SP faster, and in greater volume.
No wonder his growth rate was absurd.
It was only one reason among many, but at last it made perfect sense.
Hudson pressed on.
"Hyunmyung-nim, did you also receive SP when you became Randolph? I was given a lump sum of everything I'd accumulated from surviving until then."
"I did receive some."
"How much, if I may ask…?"
Hudson thought back to the SP he himself had received. Right after his final character died and he was possessed, he'd opened his status window and found a stockpile waiting—the combined SP of every character he'd ever raised, delivered all at once. Roughly fifteen hundred. Not particularly high, not particularly low. Enough, at least, to survive.
Which only made him more curious. If that was what he'd gotten, how much had Wilhelm's death alone been worth? And if the man had created and kept alive nearly a thousand characters—how many points had piled up over all that time? The number defied imagination.
Then Park Hyunmyung spoke.
"Roughly 1.6 million."
"…"
I will revive the Knights of the Round Table.
For a moment, Hudson could only doubt his own ears.
From the past to the present, he had handled countless streams of information. To survive as a merchant in this world, you had to keep your eyes and ears open with desperate intensity. Thorough investigation was mandatory; weighing the value and veracity of every scrap of intel was critical work. And when it came to handling information, Hudson was first-class. He had poured particular heat and diligence into everything related to Players—which was precisely why the number he'd just heard felt so utterly unreal.
And for good reason.
Not sixteen thousand. Not even a hundred sixty thousand. 1.6 million?
…1.6 million!
With a little over a thousand SP, Hudson had obtained the Unique class Great Merchant. He'd followed the optimal path based on the guides Phantom himself had posted on the homepage, but most class acquisitions settled out around that range. Even rankers had started with initial SP holdings that barely scraped ten thousand. No matter how mindlessly you ran survival runs, there was a hard ceiling on what you could accumulate at the start.
According to Hudson's research, the player with the highest initial SP had been Gracia.
Gracia was said to have eighty thousand.
Even he had only eighty thousand. Randolph had begun with twenty times that amount. Just imagining it made Hudson's head swim.
What can you even do with 1.6 million SP?
Soul Points were tied to talents and skills. They could awaken a class—or unlock Hidden Traits. Reaching the level of a Master required only about ten thousand SP. With 1.6 million, you could do literally anything you wanted. He was the Mansour of Soul Points, plain and simple.
And not every use for SP has been discovered yet.
Rumors circulated in the shadows. That SP was as important as the Golden Rule itself. That the further you progressed, the more applications for SP opened up. They were only rumors for now—but Hudson found them highly credible. There still wasn't a proper, reliable source of SP acquisition. At best you could scrape a handful from special quests or dungeons. Either humanity simply hadn't found the real sources yet, or they hadn't been updated into the system. The moment they were discovered—or the moment an update dropped—the number of ways to spend SP would explode.
Which meant that at this stage of the game, no one should have even a hundred sixty thousand SP, let alone 1.6 million.
…That should have been normal.
The scarier thought is that this might not even be everything.
Nearly a thousand characters run through survival runs, raised, and brought to the peak. 1.6 million? Against the miracles he'd performed, the number almost felt small. SP wasn't short for Skill Point—it stood for Soul Point. Exactly as the name suggested, it was a numerical measure of a soul's worth. Which meant acquiring 1.6 million Soul Points might not have been the whole of it. There was no way it was merely twenty times Gracia's haul. He must have obtained something beyond that—something greater still.
What, though?
Hudson couldn't even begin to imagine.
"…So what you're saying is that Park Hyunmyung-nim 'saved' nearly a thousand people?"
At that moment, Saintess Seia—who had remained silent throughout—suddenly spoke. They had understood barely half of the conversation, but the earlier exchanges seemed to be settling into a coherent picture.
Park Hyunmyung had played Pangenia with the sensibility of a gamer—and in the process, he had kept countless people alive who would otherwise have died. Judging by Hudson's reaction, a ninety-nine percent survival rate was a genuinely impossible figure. Which meant that to those people, Park Hyunmyung had been nothing less than a savior—assuming the contracts with the Blue Bird had been their own choice.
Hudson nodded vigorously.
"…That's correct, Saintess. A thousand is just a number—but it's a feat no other Player could even dream of. If it had been me, I couldn't have properly saved a hundred out of a thousand."
"Meaning everyone began under circumstances that difficult…"
"Yes. The beginning is always hard. Not once has anyone survived under easy conditions. You face a situation where death is more or less certain—pure, extreme terror. Problems no ordinary reason can solve. Hyunmyung-nim solved them as if he were playing a game. However…"
Hudson looked at Park Hyunmyung. There was still a piece he didn't understand.
"What is the 'Blue Bird'?"
He asked about the Blue Bird—and about the contracts. Even Hudson, who had investigated Players from every possible angle, was hearing this for the first time.
"…An entity that calls itself the Operator. The one that triggers Divine Illness in the face of death. Isabella here, Isaac, Valte—all of them have met it."
"And they made a 'contract' upon meeting it?"
When he asked again, Isabella answered.
"I can speak to that."
She alone, among everyone present, had recovered all of her memories. Perhaps among all those afflicted with Divine Illness, she alone carried them intact. Through God's Island—and through the Gate of Truth—she had seen.
Isabella drew a deep breath and continued.
"…I was a clone of the Dercian family of the Empire. Destined to be replaced at any moment. While I was anticipating my own death, a Blue Bird flew to my window."
"…!"
"It asked me: even if you forget everything, even if you lose everything—if there remains a chance to grant a single wish, wouldn't you want to try?"
"And you said you would?"
"Yes. I said I would try. The problem was that I truly lost my memories. The memory of meeting the Blue Bird. The memory of being controlled under Divine Illness. All of it."
"How did you recover those memories?"
Isabella glanced sideways at Park Hyunmyung. Then she smiled, small and quiet.
"They returned when I resolved myself to die."
She had thrown herself forward, ready to die, to save Park Hyunmyung. That was what had brought every memory flooding back—even the precious ones tied to Sonora. Memories she would never forget again. Memories she must never forget.
Isabella finished.
"Every person in this world afflicted with Divine Illness—myself included—chose it themselves. To change their fate. To keep living, by any means. So we cannot call the ones who moved us 'sinners,' and we must not. In the end, we chose it ourselves."
Whatever the outcome, you bore responsibility for your own choices. Easy to understand. Hard to accept—especially for Isaac.
"…So I've been aiming my rage in the wrong direction?"
"I'm saying there's no reason for rage at all, Isaac."
"I… damn it. I need time to sort this out. I can't accept it right this second."
Isaac forced his anger down and packed it away. Isabella wouldn't speak empty words—and if that man was Randolph, then he was Isaac's benefactor. Even if his appearance had changed. You didn't pour rage onto a man you would spend a lifetime repaying.
Isaac exhaled hard against the contradiction of it all. If only his memories would return, he could face this properly. But the most important piece of all refused to surface, and it was driving him half mad.
"Doesn't something about this feel off, though? Why did the Blue Bird bother erasing their memories?"
Hudson tilted his head. He organized his thoughts, stroked his chin, and spoke.
"The Blue Bird creates bodies capable of possession, and the Two Goddesses use the Golden Rule so that we can possess them. The Blue Bird is essentially a designer… and every Player has already been possessed. So the Blue Bird no longer needs to make contracts, does it? Why is it still in hiding?"
"Erasing everyone's memories probably means it doesn't want its identity exposed."
Isabella answered, but Hudson still looked unconvinced.
"The problem is that by erasing those memories, the people with Divine Illness treat us Players as 'sinners' and rage against us. If the goal was to save the world, shouldn't it have arranged for us to help each other?"
"…That part is strange, I'll grant you."
"The way fragments of memory about the one who controlled you surface only after you devour a star and transcend—that's strange too. Isn't that basically telling you: now that you're strong, go find them and kill them?"
"That's a leap—"
"Isabella. Isaac. Didn't both of you resent him?"
"…"
He was right. Hudson's words weren't wrong. When they had transcended—when they had learned Park Hyunmyung's face and name—they had felt nothing but resentment and fury.
Hudson reached his conclusion.
"The Two Goddesses are on humanity's side. But the Blue Bird doesn't seem to be solely on humanity's side. I sense a different purpose."
"What purpose would it gain by pitting us against each other and making us fight?"
Every action had a purpose. But the Blue Bird's operating principle refused to come into focus—what benefit it stood to gain from all of this.
While everyone was turning it over, a deep voice cut through.
"A perfected being."
"Hyunmyung-nim. A perfected being…?"
"Ruin—or something equivalent to it. That's what the Blue Bird intends to create."
There was no other answer. Like Ant King Fermon. Kill and be killed, over and over, until the last one remaining is complete. Force endless evolution until perfection is reached. Nothing less would have warranted a design this meticulous—so meticulous that even the Two Goddesses never noticed.
"Everyone is moving with a purpose. We need a purpose of our own."
In the silence that followed, I spoke the word aloud.
Now that everything was out in the open, it was time to move in earnest. Every gaze in the room locked onto me at once. I put weight into my voice.
"I will revive the Knights of the Round Table."
"…Excuse me?"
Hudson's face went blank with shock. Everyone—Hudson included—stared at me in open astonishment.
But I wasn't finished.
"Furthermore, I appoint every one of you gathered here as Knights of the Round Table."
"E-excuse me…?!"
There was no reason to hesitate. It was time to start moving in earnest. Time to declare to the world that the Knights of the Round Table had returned.
I smiled and turned my head.
"And Serengeti."
"…Speak, my lord."
Serengeti fixed me with an intense gaze. Of everyone present, she should have found this the hardest to process—and yet she had already shifted her bearing as if she understood everything. She had already regarded Randolph as Wilhelm, so in a way it was only natural.
I nodded and said,
"You have something to tell me about the Knights of the Round Table, don't you?"
A woman who had achieved overwhelming Honor in the World Tree's trial—who had claimed the Honor of the Knights of the Round Table alongside her own—would know something. She had to.
And then—
"Yes. There is a secret history I must deliver."
Serengeti answered at once.
A secret history. A hidden tale. And it was every bit as staggering as the truth I had just revealed—
"They are all alive. Here, in the World Tree's dungeon."
…No. It was more shocking still.
At last, every preparation was complete. The party for the Forgotten Dungeon of Honor had been assembled.
I walked slowly into view before the World Tree, where the party members I had chosen were gathered. Some of them knew me. Most did not. Sovereigns of their races. Superhumans who had proven themselves. One and all, they watched me with startled or openly suspicious eyes.
So I spoke to them, unhurried.
"Well met. I am Hyun—Druid of the Golden Rule."