The Black Rift
The orcish stone axe wasn't all-powerful after all.
No matter how much mana he had wrapped around it for protection, mana couldn't turn something as hard as diamond. In the end, the axe gradually accumulated damage until it finally snapped with a loud crack.
Fortunately, the ground around him was littered with the corpses of orcs, along with the crude weapons they had dropped. Knowing from experience that he could make full use of surrounding objects before activating his automatic butchering skill, Tae-sung picked up the scattered weapons from the floor and continued fighting.
Even so, whenever he glanced back toward the rift, he noticed minor injuries piling up on his body due to momentary lapses in concentration. Even though he had tried to dodge, rusty blades still grazed and tore his skin. Spears that he thought he had kept at the perfect distance still managed to stab into his side by just a few centimeters.
These small wounds healed on their own without issue, but he always worried about tetanus during fights against orcs. Of course, he had never actually contracted it, so perhaps that healed too.
“It feels like it's been quite a while.”
If there had been a quest, he wouldn't have worried at all. The remaining time would have been clearly displayed, and he could have returned accordingly. Without it, the situation felt inconvenient. No, more than inconvenient, it left him with an uneasy feeling.
It was then that he sensed something strange coming from the rift.
“Has it begun?”
Tae-sung quickly deflected an orc charging at him to the side and struck the back of its neck with the edge of his hand. Without even looking back, he turned and sprinted toward the rift.
At first, it had been right behind him, close enough to touch. But as he gradually shifted position to avoid the piles of orc corpses on the ground, the distance had grown to nearly ten meters. He needed to hurry.
Of course, ten meters was a distance he could cover in roughly one breath if he ran with everything he had. Yet even after three or four full breaths had passed, Kang Tae-sung still hadn't reached the rift.
He stopped a few meters short, staring at it with a deep frown.
The sound of orcs rushing up behind him, their heavy footsteps and ragged breathing, reached his ears, but he paid them no attention. He simply glared at the rift, brow furrowed.
“……”
A rift?
Tae-sung was staring at it. Or more precisely, at another rift that was slightly protruding from within the first one.
The sight of yet another shimmering distortion nestled inside the already torn space was incredibly bizarre. The space within it was endlessly tangled, and beyond that lay nothing but darkness.
The reason he couldn't approach recklessly was that the rift's current state felt wrong. An ominous premonition warned him that jumping in would lead to something terrible.
But…
“……”
When that second rift slowly slipped out toward this side, the original rift that Tae-sung needed to return through began to shrink at a rapid pace. No, it looked like it was being sucked into the current rift and shrinking.
Staring at the pitch-black rift that was absorbing the other, Tae-sung knew he couldn't afford to stop. He dashed forward and leaped toward the remaining sliver of the original rift.
There's still time.
Yes. There was still enough space for a body like his to slip through. Even calculating the rate at which it was shrinking, the gap was still manageable. However, the pitch-black rift that had entered this world and was currently devouring the other one would not allow it.
“Ugh!”
The suction force was terrifying.
Tae-sung, who had been floating in the air and on the verge of vanishing beyond the rift, was helplessly dragged in. Since he couldn't swim through the air, his desperate struggles were useless. He was inexorably pulled into the pitch-black rift.
Damn it!
When something unintended happened, it was only natural for more unintended events to follow. And most of the time, they tended to move in the absolute worst direction. Knowing this all too well, Tae-sung cursed inwardly and drew up the mana inside his body.
He released it through both hands. It was nothing more than simple mana expenditure, but he knew it could generate significant reverse thrust.
But he was already inside the rift.
Even if he flew backward, it was still the same place.
“……”
All he could see was infinite darkness.
All he could feel was his own sense of existence. His physical senses had vanished as if they had never been there. He couldn't tell if he still had hands or legs. Sight, hearing, smell—none of them registered at all.
How much time had passed?
In that space of darkness, where it could have been a mere moment or an eternity, Tae-sung endured solely through his sense of self and thoughts of his family.
……
And then he recalled the voice he had heard—no, felt—just before being sucked into the black rift. Right before he was devoured by it, there had definitely been a voice. It had said, Found you.
It might have been a hallucination. But there was no way he would hallucinate something like that in that situation. Still, what had it found?
Me?
Why me?
As Tae-sung began to ponder that question, his vision suddenly seemed to return for a brief instant. Or perhaps it had always been there, but there had simply been nothing but darkness to see. Now, it caught sight of something.
Because it had flashed by and vanished in an instant, he couldn't even be sure if he had truly seen it or simply imagined it. But Tae-sung thought what he had glimpsed was the universe.
No, it was definitely the universe. Countless stars twinkled, and within them were familiar planets.
But it was already gone, and darkness returned once more.
What followed were fragments of past memories that began rising unbidden. Without any particular theme or regard for the flow of time, scenes from the distant past and recent events flickered through his mind one after another.
Don't make me laugh.
Was he seeing his life flash before his eyes?
He wasn't going to die. At least not in a place like this.
Tae-sung thrashed even more violently, as if in a final act of defiance.
But in a situation where he couldn't even feel his own body, no amount of struggling changed anything.
Boom—!
Suddenly, a tremendous sound rang out, powerful enough to completely scatter the sense of self he had been clinging to. It was an incomprehensible noise—like something shattering, breaking apart, or being crushed. It echoed loudly, near and far, everywhere at once.
After that, infinite darkness returned once again.
He couldn't tell if time was flowing or standing still.
Then, at some point, a sound reached his ears. No, it wasn't exactly a sound. It felt more like a thought or emotion resonating directly in his mind.
[Do not lose this time]
That single voice filled his mind completely.
For a moment, the voice felt like his own. Using it and the awakening of his own spirit as kindling, Tae-sung ignited the fading sense of self that had been slowly disappearing.
The darkness began to shatter little by little.
The physical senses that had been completely absent slowly returned.
* * *
“……”
When he came to and opened his eyes, Tae-sung found his entire field of vision filled with a system window. It covered his sight completely, as if it absolutely had to be shown to him.
A critical error has occurred. Executing data rollback.
Rollback…?
Wondering what kind of nonsense this was, Tae-sung waved his hand to dismiss the window.
But instead of his vision clearing, another notification popup appeared.
User data and server time do not match.
Duplicate user data detected.
Would you like to overwrite the data?
“No.”
That is not a valid command.
Overwrite? Overwrite what?
He naturally didn't want to, so he tried to ignore it. But the window that had already appeared could not be removed by any means. It was like a spyware program that only allowed acceptance. The notifications proceeded with nothing but announcements and confirmations.
Even if he tried to ignore it, a problem arose.
The semi-transparent notification window filling his entire field of vision made it impossible to properly understand where he was or what the current situation was. To make matters worse, beyond what seemed to be a bed, he couldn't move forward, as if blocked by something solid.
No matter what he tried, nothing changed.
In the end, it seemed the only option was to accept the system's request.
The moment he accepted the overwrite, his vision suddenly went black. Once again, he lost consciousness and fell into a state of sensory deprivation. Just moments ago he had been sitting on what felt like a bed, but now he couldn't tell if he was sitting or lying down.
In that state, an enormous amount of memories and information from a vast span of time suddenly flooded into his mind. Strangely, it didn't feel foreign at all. It was because these were clearly memories of things he had done himself.
Though the sudden influx of so much information made him dizzy and gave him the feeling that his head was overheating, it eventually cut off cleanly. Only then could he properly understand where he was.
“……”
Kang Tae-sung slowly opened his eyes.
He irritably swiped away the notification that data application was complete. What filled his vision was a familiar ceiling—one that should not have been there.
He rose from the bed and stepped out to the side. Leaving the large room, he walked down the corridor. The marble floor rang sharply each time his combat boots, fitted with ice picks, touched down.
Worried that he might scratch the marble, Tae-sung paused, removed both ice picks, stored them away, and continued walking.
When he finally arrived, a young soldier with a slightly nervous face spent a long time listing unnecessary titles before granting him permission to enter. Tae-sung approached the king with an expressionless face. Anyone who knew him would have been able to tell just how confused he was right now.
“That is an outfit I have not seen before.”
The first words the king spoke as he looked down at him were followed by the Saintess standing beside him, who was also staring at him with a strange look in her eyes.
“You have taken poison.”
“One cannot deceive the eyes of a friend. I ate a little. It wasn't because I wanted to… Anyway, have you made up your mind?”
Tae-sung looked back and forth between the king, who was answering him, and the Saintess, who continued to gaze at him from the side. He realized that events had progressed in the way he least wanted.
Time… had been turned back.
Yet the expression on his face still made it difficult to read any emotion. It was almost as if his body had returned to that time as well; there was almost no change in his expression. The smiles he had regained after reuniting with his family had vanished once more.
“I must return.”
But Tae-sung spoke the same words as before.
He was not dead yet. All he had to do was return in time.
However, the moment he met the Saintess's gaze, he remembered how she had looked at him in the past. Back then, she had also worn eyes that seemed somehow sad, just like now.
At the time, he had simply thought she was sad because she didn't want to send him away.
That was probably still true now. But… there was something more. He could feel it.