Chapter 108. Another Returnee.
Chapter 108. Another Returnee.
A few days passed after we brought Jia's parents back. Thanks to her father, the harvest time had noticeably shortened and the crop yield had gone up.
While I was out and about passing the time with nothing better to do, Terion came looking for me. He exchanged brief nods with the women who were with me, then spoke.
"You must have felt it too. The mana concentration on this planet is growing denser."
So I wasn't the only one who sensed it, apparently.
"What brought that up all of a sudden?"
"The full-scale erosion is underway. Gradually, the dimensions will merge into one."
"I'm not sure I follow. Could you explain it a little more clearly?"
"To cut to the conclusion, there shouldn't be any major trouble for Earth. When the two merge into one, your planet will simply grow larger than it was before, and here and there, cities from Titan will appear."
"You're saying there won't be any problems with the merging?"
"Hm... I lack eloquence, so I can't explain it very well, but to put it simply, you can think of it as a fusion rather than one dimension devouring another."
"In that case, Titan's..."
"Yes. Cities, buildings, races, divine authorities... there's a high probability that many things will cross over. And when that happens, your planet will undergo yet another great cataclysm."
Terion gave me all sorts of explanations, and the moment he finished talking, he went off to who knows where again. Actually, last time, I'd given him a small portion of my origin essence, and he said he was going to use it to create his own physical body. I'd tried asking him about it, but he just told me I'd find out naturally in time, so I still hadn't gotten an answer.
'Anyway, once the dimensions merge... that'll be a massive disadvantage for the people here...'
No matter how incomparably advanced the discipline of science had become, in the current situation the social infrastructure to utilize that technology at full capacity had been almost completely destroyed. Awakened ones had appeared, and in our village I was gradually teaching people a thing or two, but if you looked at history, Titan was a dimension that had handled mana for eons.
'If a continental war for colonial rule breaks out here again...'
While I was agonizing seriously by myself, Chaeyeon spoke to me.
"Sihu, what are you thinking about?"
"Mm... nothing much. It's just that if people start crossing over from that place, conflict will be inevitable. There are all kinds of differences—class systems, races, cultures."
"True... We're used to democracy, but over there, it'll be a monarchy..."
Even just looking at Earth right now, people were still divided into classes by wealth and split apart by skin color, calling someone else's culture primitive. If Titan and this place merged, how much worse would it get...
"Oppa, but isn't it strange how you're not all that worried yourself?"
"Me? Honestly, I don't really care. But everyone else won't be able to accept it."
I'd already lived an excruciatingly long time there and had felt it in my bones that above all else, brute force was valued the most. But ordinary survivors—people on the side of the weak, not the strong—I didn't know if they would be able to endure it.
"But there's actually something I've been wanting to ask you for a while now..."
"What kind of thing?"
"Is there any chance... there was another person from Earth besides you...?"
"Not that I know of..."
I'd lived with the thought that "Surely I'm not the only person from Earth here," and I'd even searched for others. I once spread rumors that anyone from Earth who came to find me directly would receive a tremendous treasure—rumors no true Earthling could possibly be ignorant of. But the only ones who showed up were those blinded by the treasure, spinning lies.
And when their hopes curdled into disappointment, none of them ever went back, of course.
"No, no... They could have lived quietly, you know."
"What do you mean?"
"Well... if they'd opened a shop or started a family, then they might never have crossed paths with you, since you were running a mercenary company."
"That does make sense."
In theory, you could sacrifice countless mages to create a dimensional transfer formation. Or maybe, like me, someone just fell out of the sky one day.
'Well... there's no way something that absurd would happen twice...'
Speak of the devil, as they say. By this point, I figured there was no one else who had returned from Titan like I had.
* * * * * * * *
The clock wound back a little. In a room of a certain house, a cluster of light spilled forth, and a man clad in light armor dropped down.
"Ugh... you bastards, if you were going to send me back, you could've done it a little more gently."
In order to return to Earth, he'd worked his ass off doing whatever the Pantheon had asked. Of course, they'd had a staggering amount of divine authority shaved off to send him back too.
"Well... they did spend their own divine authority to send me. Should I be grateful?"
Dust had piled up—a sign of just how long he'd been gone. To check for news and the date, he roughly dusted things off, turned on the computer, and connected to the internet.
"Huh? What the hell, why won't it connect?"
Looking at the monitor's bottom right corner, the connection hadn't been dropped. He plugged the cable back in, rebooted, but it still wouldn't connect.
"Goddammit... do you have any idea how much I paid for this..."
In a fit of rage, he threw a punch and smashed the computer tower, but he didn't care in the slightest. With his abilities, world domination was well within his grasp anyway.
"And while I'm at it, I'll bag myself some pretty girls."
Figuring he might as well take a look at Earth for the first time in ages, he stepped outside. As he walked down the villa's staircase, a constant sense of wrongness nagged at him. This was a bustling downtown district, a place where the sound of people's voices and car engines had never ceased.
And once he got outside, the smashed shop windows, wrecked cars, bloodstains on the streets, and corpses scattered about made it look like a war had broken out. And the most shocking thing of all...
"Why the hell are there undead here..."
The undead spotted him and started sprinting toward him like mad, but running away from something like that would've hurt his pride.
"Ugh... filthy..."
He channeled mana into his fist and thrust it straight forward. His sleeve fluttered briefly, then his hair whipped up as an incredible burst of fist-wind shot ahead.
—Boom!
"Huh, wait a sec..."
He'd swung his fist intending to turn them into absolute dust, but the result was nothing like he'd expected. A sudden sense of wrongness made him swiftly duck back inside the house. After checking his physical condition multiple times.
"Where the fuck did my mana go...!"
He'd risen to divine authority himself. Was the aftereffect of dimensional transfer really that severe? Honestly, a few truckloads of undead should've meant nothing to him, but power was one of those things—you never realized just how helpless you were without it until it was gone.
"First, I need to get a handle on the situation here."
Nowadays, far fewer households still read newspapers, but he figured there had to be at least one place around. He scoured the villa he was staying in, along with the surrounding studio-apartment villages and shops, and grabbed every single newspaper he could find.
Maybe because he'd never been on good terms with reading, it took him a good two or three hours to go through all the newspapers.
"Wow... what the hell happened... This is truly, royally fucked..."
This completely blew apart his plan to live like a king on Earth with women draped around him. A king without any subjects or vassals to serve him was worse than nothing.
"Most people must be dead already...?"
The Seoul he was currently in had a large population, but a large population meant a proportionate number of zombies, and therefore a proportionate number of dead.
"Should I head down to the countryside...?"
In a world like this, money was meaningless. So the thing to do was to find places where people were hiding and go around bagging pretty women. But hunting for those places would be a grueling amount of hard labor.
"Haah... not being able to use the fruits of the twenty-first century is such a pain in the ass."
He wasn't the type to clutch his head and craft detailed plans. Overthinking just gave him a headache, so in the end he went outside with the thought of just diving in headfirst.
"Is Korea done for too?"
The thought crossed his mind, and he checked everywhere people might have gathered—the Blue House, the National Assembly, the Ministry of National Defense. Either everyone was dead or they'd all fled; there wasn't a single living soul anywhere. With a hollow feeling, he roughly plopped down on the street and lit a cigarette.
"Anyway, what those Pantheon bastards asked me to do... it was to find that 'Calamity' guy, wasn't it?"
As a condition for sending him back, they'd asked him to find the 'Calamity.' The description was someone with the same black hair as him, blue eyes, who always carried a sword, and most importantly, someone from the same dimension. Recalling the Pantheon's request, he let out a snort of laughter, flicked his cigarette ash, and stood up.
"Ah, whatever. I'm already back here—what are they going to do about it? Sure, they shaved off their divine authority to send me, but..."
He rationalized it away as fair payment for how they'd ordered him around and worked him like a dog. To be fair, the only reason they'd asked him was because he and this 'Calamity' were from the same dimension, so they'd had no one else. If the rumors going around and everything he'd heard from the Pantheon were all true...
"Well, we're talking about a straight-up broken, cheat-level character..."
Honestly, it all sounded like total bullshit. Rumors were bound to get exaggerated. He could admit that the mercenary band—Disaster—was the strongest in the world. Its members genuinely were monstrously powerful. But if the captain running it was also an Earthling, there was no way in hell he could be that strong.
"Those people over there grew up immersed in mana, but that guy was an Earthling who wouldn't have known mana from a hole in the ground... And like me, he must've been hit by the backlash of dimensional transfer."
As soon as he crossed over here, he'd learned the truth about what happened to Disaster after their captain vanished. He still didn't know exactly where he was, but that guy had definitely crossed over to Earth.
"If I run into him, should I just knock him upside the head and make him my underling?"
After that guy crossed over, he himself had spent a long, long time fighting bloody, teeth-gritting battles. And anyone capable of running a group like Disaster had to be a sharp bastard. Wandering around with these thoughts, he eventually walked into a fairly high-end residential complex.
"Oh... is this the rich neighborhood?"
As he moved along, crushing the skulls of the undead—no, he should call them zombies now—he heard a voice calling out to him from the second floor of a house in the distance.
'Now that's one very edible-looking bitch...'
His imagination made his lower half stir at once. Putting on a pleasant smile, he approached, vaulted over the wall in one leap, went up to the second floor, and offered her something to eat.
"Take your time eating."
"H-heuk... thank you..."
He watched the woman wolf down the food he'd given her, and the sight of her voluptuous body peeking through her rumpled, shabby clothes made him want to throw her down and take her right then and there. Once she'd polished off the food, they talked.
"Have you been living here all alone?"
"Yes... I can't get in touch with my family... h-hic..."
"Good..."
"...Excuse me?"
Right in front of her, shame be damned, he yanked his pants down.
"H-hiik...!"
"In a world like this, when someone gives you a full belly of food, I don't think I need to spell out what you're supposed to do in return, do I?"
Unable to hold himself back any longer at the sight of her terror-stricken face, he roughly tore her clothes to shreds.
'Heh heh... this kind of world might not be so bad after all, huh?'