Chapter 3
Chapter 3
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Translator: penny
Chapter: 3
Chapter Title: The Sudden Appearance of the Black Woman
-----------------------------------------------------------------
A black-clad woman appeared out of nowhere.
She tore apart a knight-captain level mercenary and turned to Sein.
“Sein Demorus.”
His name, and a surname that wasn’t his.
“Demo…rus?”
But his shock at the unmistakable surname was short-lived.
“That is your true identity.”
At that moment.
Rumble!
It felt like lightning crashing in his mind.
“You truly had no idea….”
The woman started to say something to him.
But she soon had to shut her mouth.
A creepy grin.
Snow-white hair and sky-blue eyes.
The expression on that mysteriously alluring face was.
“…Finally.”
Madness.
“Finally!”
Sein screamed.
He knew.
That it was a secret he had to keep forever.
He knew.
That it was a secret he could never reveal.
But this was the moment he had endured this wretched life for, clinging on desperately.
“I’ve been waiting.”
Sein rose to his feet.
Late at night, the alley was filled with brilliant moonlight.
But that was the world’s light.
The world as seen through Sein’s eyes was.
----------
[Warning: You cannot leave this area until the tutorial ends.]
[Warning: You cannot leave this area until the tutorial ends.]
----------
Nothing but blood-red hues and yellow bands.
Sein had.
“This insane world is finally coming to an end!”
Endured it all in a world painted entirely red.
But no longer.
“…….”
The woman, with her eyes narrowed thinly, had no idea.
What she had just done.
Sein’s red world slowly began to regain its true colors.
“I don’t know who you are, but I thank you madly.”
Sein murmured in a quiet voice.
“I’ll make sure to repay this debt.”
“…No way.”
That was the last voice from the woman that Sein heard.
When he blinked and looked again.
“Finally… it’s here.”
A pitch-black world.
No, he realized he had fallen into a space like the universe, judging by the twinkling starlight in the distance.
Even so, Sein didn’t panic.
As he had said, this moment was what he had been dying to experience.
[Your life has been confirmed.]
This space was no unknown realm; for players like him, it was….
[Your… 4th life has been confirmed.]
Like home.
“Finally… the Kaleidoscope.”
The Kaleidoscope—that was the name of this space.
*
*
*
Three lives, a free world where you could do anything.
Yet a world with no end.
Humans have an instinct to conquer the peak, no matter who they are.
This place.
-Sanctuary.
Sanctuary was no different.
Hundreds of millions of gamers wanted to conquer Sanctuary, and over hundreds of billions of challenges were attempted.
But no one ever saw the end.
After long years, however, a player finally reached it.
It was a glorious moment.
A historic moment.
If not for the ugly truth.
-I did it. I finally did it.
Sanctuary’s first clear.
The player who achieved it was….
-Kuhahaha! I did it! No matter how, I finally did it!!!
Not normal—a cheat player.
It was by chance.
To the one who had poured his entire life into it but couldn’t reach Sanctuary’s end, drowning in despair.
To Sein, who had lost all will to live, the gift offered was.
[Would you like to play the cheat version?]
Absurdly sweet.
Sanctuary, which had never been breached even once.
It was obviously a scam, but at the edge of despair, he chose it.
-Whatever, who cares.
That changed his life.
[ID: BIRDMAN]
ID Birdman.
Real name.
-Are you crazy? It was real?
Kim Sein.
He successfully obtained Sanctuary’s cheat version and finally reached its end.
But at that end, there was no glory like Kim Sein had imagined.
-What is this?
Sanctuary, which he had played for over a decade without ever tiring of, but the price for using an illicit method was too hollow.
No joy, no sorrow.
Sein’s world.
-What… is this.
Crumpled that day.
The empire’s downfall—the ending of Sanctuary that Sein had dragged out with his own hands—brought him utter emptiness.
And then, out of nowhere.
[Sanctuary is collapsing.]
[Irregular access detected.]
[Initiating security measures.]
A world dyed scarlet.
-Log out!
He tried to flee in panic, but it was too late.
[Contingency activated.]
He couldn’t log out, and absurdly, Sein was trapped inside the game.
Three lives granted.
And then the end.
But for Sein, who had ended it irregularly, there was a penalty.
[Your 4th life begins.]
A fourth life that Sanctuary should never have allowed.
*
*
*
“Ha… You had no idea, huh.”
Floating with his body outstretched in the dark cosmos, Sein muttered to himself.
Every moment had been tense, but here, he didn’t need to be.
The absolute safe zone—the Kaleidoscope was a kind of mental world.
“I thought lives were just handed out, not that I’d have to live them.”
Lives granted at Sanctuary’s start.
And past lives.
Every starting point was around age eighteen.
Because it was a game, that’s all.
What he had taken for granted became a horrific hell when it turned real.
Trapped in Sanctuary for cheating, player Kim Sein had to live as the alleyway Sein.
[Tutorial]
A prison under that name.
Sanctuary’s boasted reincarnation system didn’t even function, and the safety nets that existed because it was a game vanished completely.
Days he had to endure just to survive.
Yet there was a reason Sein could hold on.
“If I hadn’t played for nearly a decade, I’d have died long ago.”
Before the cheat play, throughout the years playing Sanctuary.
Sein had lived countless lives.
Sometimes as a farmer, sometimes a miner, sometimes a blacksmith.
Sometimes even a hero.
In those lives, he had countless masters and received their teachings.
Back then.
“I thought it was just flavor text.”
Mana this, meditation that, footwork whatever.
Things that activated under skill names—he hadn’t put much stock in them.
But when Sanctuary became reality, they were treasures of experience.
Memories recalled for survival activated like skills, even if they weren’t.
Skills used like habits had seeped into his body as habits.
“That’s how I survived.”
Sein rose.
This space was the Kaleidoscope.
And that meant the tutorial was finally over.
The starting point for all players.
[Your 4th life has been confirmed.]
He had confirmed a fourth life that shouldn’t exist.
[You are…]
Now, the real beginning.
[The Heir of the Underworld.]
With that, the distant twinkling starlight rushed toward him.
Boom!
A deafening roar like the sky collapsing.
Kablooey!
Something plummeting from there appeared before Sein’s eyes.
This was it.
The moment he had waited for so long.
“The Stone of Reincarnation. It’s been forever.”
Three colorless red stones.
Each one held the lives he had passed through.
The three lives from his final play that let him clear Sanctuary.
And that was precisely.
‘My cheat.’
Sein’s cheat key.
Lives in Sanctuary were entirely random.
Like slamming real life into a game system, gamers raved but lamented it.
They wished for one thing.
A wish like in reality.
-If only…
A dream anyone would want.
-If only I could choose my life.
The ability to choose what to be born as and what life to live.
That was Sein’s true cheat.
And the three past lives.
Ones he had dreamed of and yearned for over more than a decade of play.
Vmmm!
Sein chose the third stone.
The moment his hand touched the glowing red stone.
Fwoosh—!
The lightless red stone began pulsing like a heart.
What appeared next was.
[Would you like to activate the past life?]
A single question for Sein.
The moment he had waited so long for, and his predetermined answer.
“Yes.”
The strongest life, the one where he had finally seen the ending.
[Activating the past life of the Empire’s Crown Prince.]
He chose to start as the Empire’s Crown Prince.
*
*
*
“…As expected.”
A faint voice reached him.
“…It’s right.”
Sein slowly regained hazy sensation and woke.
“In this backwater, huh.”
With the voice now clear.
“……!”
Sein’s eyes shot wide.
Grip!
Something powerfully bound his arms and legs.
Strength that seemed useless to struggle against.
Sein realized what it was.
‘Bone Spider’s legs.’
Legs of the upper undead, the Bone Spider.
And its owner was.
“You’re awake.”
The black-clad woman who had saved him.
In the world now fully restored to color, the woman he faced fully radiated even greater beauty than before.
Under the brilliant moonlight.
Grip.
Sein hung suspended in midair, bound by her.
“…Your tastes are a bit too extreme, aren’t they?”
That was the first thing Sein said upon opening his eyes.
“You’re cracking jokes?”
The woman spoke to him in disbelief.
“You’re not planning to kill me, right?”
“…Why do you think that?”
Though time had passed in the Kaleidoscope, Sein remembered the prior situation.
The woman had clearly said it.
“I am your matter, and you gave me the surname, after all.”
Sein Demorus.
“Demorus.”
The surname he had been given, the starting point of his fourth life.
“You came to fetch me, the one who will become Demorus’s heir.”
It was the world ruined by Sein.
A name no one in Sanctuary—no, Dark Sanctuary—could be unaware of.
“You wouldn’t plan to kill a candidate for Demorus’s heir, would you?”
Demorus.
They were one of the underworld factions that divided the world into three.