Chapter 10
How much time had passed?
The night over Olympus was deep.
The palace, half-ruined by the war, had not a single window left intact. A cold night wind seeped in through the cracked walls, and the thin curtains swayed slowly, soaked in moonlight.
Still, it seemed Melisseus's three daughters had rushed to make the bedchamber presentable.
An oil lamp brimming with fragrant balm. A bed fitted with clean linen. And water and wine set at the headboard.
At the very least, it didn't feel like I was spending the night in the middle of a collapsed temple.
I lay on my back, staring up at the ceiling.
Gaia was right beside me.
Her golden hair, not a strand of it out of place just a short while ago, was spread wide across the pillow. Wrapped in a thin sheet, she propped her head on one arm while tracing a meaningless circle on my chest with her other hand.
She looked so utterly at ease it was hard to believe she was the primordial goddess who had designed an entire empire in the audience hall just hours before.
But I couldn't let my guard down.
This woman had, mere moments ago, unloaded crop rotation, transplanting methods, Byzantium, and the Suez Canal on me all at once.
And having heard all of that, I had accepted her as my First Wife.
How on earth did it come to this?
It had been three days since I opened my eyes. In three days, I had toppled my father and become the new king of the gods — and on top of that, I now shared a bed with the primordial earth itself.
If I told my old self back in the original world this story, he would never believe it.
No — he'd start looking up psychiatric hospitals first.
"Your Majesty."
Gaia called to me. It was her usual, dignified voice — only far lower and softer than it had been in the audience hall.
"What thoughts occupy you so deeply?"
"I was thinking about who exactly you are, sister."
At my answer, Gaia's fingers stopped.
"I am Gaia."
"I know that."
"Mother and wife of Uranus, and mother of the Titans and countless gods."
"I know that too."
I turned over to face her.
"I'm asking about what came before all of that."
Gaia's eyes narrowed.
I began drawing out, one by one, the names that had refused to leave my head.
"Constantinople."
Her eyebrows moved, just barely.
"Mare Nostrum."
The smile vanished.
"Crop rotation and transplanting methods. Puerperal fever. The Suez Canal."
And finally —
"SPQR."
Gaia's hand froze completely on my chest.
Moonlight gathered coldly in her blue eyes. The lazy warmth of moments ago vanished as if it had been a lie.
I cleared my throat.
"By any chance... do you know Gangnam Style?"
Gaia blinked.
"Or Gangnam Style, for that matter?"
"......"
"Do you understand what I'm saying?"
Silence hung in the air. Gaia stared at my face for a long moment.
Then she sat up.
"Please wait a moment, Your Majesty."
She drew her finger through the air beside the bed.
The earth rumbled low. A slender stream of soil rose from the cracked stone floor and spread thin and flat in midair. Soon mountains, rivers, and seas carved themselves into it, completing a map.
This time, it wasn't the Mediterranean.
An island north of the Atlantic. The familiar British Isles.
"What do you see?"
"Britain."
"Precisely?"
I studied the map. The island was not a single nation.
"England."
The south lit up.
"Scotland."
The north lit up.
"Wales and Ireland."
The remaining two regions lit up in turn.
Gaia exhaled slowly.
"So it was before the United Kingdom."
"That's right."
"Which century?"
"When I first became king, it was the 16th century."
When I first became king.
Not the kind of thing an ordinary person could say.
"Sister..."
I corrected myself.
"Who were you in your past life?"
Gaia gazed at the glowing map for a moment.
At last, she spoke.
"Eduardo."
It was a name I'd never heard before.
"In England I was called Edward VII, and in Iberia, Eduardo the First."
"Hold on a second."
Edward VII — wasn't he Queen Victoria's son?
"My mother was Mary I."
I froze on the spot.
"My father was Philip II of Spain."
"A son was born between Bloody Mary and Philip II?"
"He wouldn't exist in the original history."
Gaia smiled faintly.
"At first, I too didn't understand why I had been born there."
"Then in your past life you were also a possessor... no, a transmigrator?"
"I was a man who lived in the Republic of Korea."
"......"
"21st-century South Korea."
It was confirmed. The same era. The same country. A human struck by the same kind of accident, born as someone who existed in neither history nor myth.
The strength drained from my body.
"Ha."
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it.
"So there really were others."
"What do you mean, Your Majesty?"
"Besides me."
Gaia's eyes went wide.
"Your Majesty as well?"
"Yes."
This time, I answered.
"I also lived in 21st-century Korea."
For the first time, calculation and composure both drained from Gaia's expression.
"Then Gangnam Style—"
"I know it."
"Kimchi too?"
"I know it."
"Military service?"
"Served honorably."
"Ah."
Gaia let out a very, very long sigh. The primordial earth looked at me, for the first time, with eyes of genuine pity.
"You have suffered much."
"You, meanwhile, conquered Europe in your past life, I hear."
"Compared to that, military service is—"
"Do not compare them."
"Understood."
A brief stillness passed between us.
Then, without either of us needing to go first, we both laughed.
It was the first time since arriving in this world.
Someone who understood me without explanation. Someone before whom the future I spoke of would be treated neither as prophecy nor madness.
Only now did Gaia look a little different to me.
The earth itself. Not the mother of Uranus. Not the grandmother of countless gods.
Just one person who had fallen into a strange world far earlier than I had, and somehow survived.
"Keep going, please, Gaia."
For the first time, I abandoned the honorific sister.
Gaia noticed. The smile at the corner of her mouth grew a little softer.
"Of course, darling."
Your Majesty disappeared too.
We gazed at each other for a moment — not as king and queen, but as two people who had lost the same homeland.
Gaia's story began in London.
She had been the only child Mary I bore after turning forty.
"The moment I was born, my mother blessed me to become king of England and Flanders."
But Philip II did not trust his son. He didn't come to England until a full year after the birth, held the child once, and did not linger long with Mary either. In the war with France, he even surrendered Calais — England's last territory on the continent.
"Still, my mother loved my father."
Gaia's voice lowered.
"She endured, yearning for him alone."
Mary I survived until her son was seven years old. Then she died of pneumonia.
Before his mother's coffin, the boy king crowned himself alone.
"What about Elizabeth I?"
At my question, Gaia's expression went cold.
"In that world, she never became queen."
Mary's half-sister Elizabeth raised a rebellion against her young nephew. Not just once. She rebelled while Mary lived; after Mary burned only her henchmen at the stake and Elizabeth was granted the mercy of house arrest, she raised her armies again the moment Mary died.
"So I put her on the pyre."
"Even knowing she would have been a great ruler?"
"It was because I knew that I feared her all the more."
Gaia offered no excuse.
"If I had not killed her, she would have killed me someday. A throne is not something two people can share."
Her hand covered London on the map.
"So I resolved myself. I would become a greater king than Elizabeth."
A mad conclusion. But I could already guess what that conclusion had produced.
"I annexed Scotland and brought Ireland to its knees. To the regions that supported me, I granted their own parliaments and bound them all into one kingdom."
The four pieces of the British Isles merged into one.
"My father, honoring his promise to my mother, left the Low Countries to me."
The Low Countries across the sea stained the same color on the map.
"Doesn't that alone already outpace the British Empire?"
"That was merely the beginning, darling."
Gaia's finger slid down the Iberian Peninsula.
Spain. Portugal. And the colonies and trade routes both nations held in their grasp.
"You don't mean—"
"I took them all."
"How?"
"A suitable mixture of war, marriage, inheritance, companies and debt, and a touch of intimidation."
"A touch?"
"The records of the victors generally say 'a touch.'"
Not an elegant thing to admit.
Now I understood why this woman had tried to solve every problem that day through marriage and fiefs.
It was what she'd been doing since her past life.
"So you became king of six kingdoms?"
"Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, and Naples. Becoming king of those six kingdoms was my goal."
Six crowns rose above the map. But the crown of France, unlike the other five, remained unlit.
"At first, I thought that would be enough."
"At first?"
"Human greed has no end, it turns out."
Gaia admitted it flatly.
"I never did conquer France in the end — I settled for marrying my daughter to Louis XIII — but everything else I brought to its knees. And I became addicted to power."
A golden eagle rose over Germany.
"Leveraging my bloodline as son of Philip II and grandson of Charles V, I demanded nothing less than the throne of the Holy Roman Empire."
"The princes actually accepted that?"
"I made them accept it."
An answer that could not have been more like her.
"And so I became Emperor of the New Holy Roman Empire, and at the last, I launched a crusade."
The map shifted east. The Balkans. Anatolia. And the Bosporus Strait. A vast city rose on the spot where Byzantium had stood in the daytime.
Constantinople.
"I toppled the Ottomans and reclaimed Constantinople."
"......"
"Imperator of the New Roman Empire and Basileus of the New Eastern Roman Empire. I bound the five patriarchates — Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch — together once more, and I rebuilt SPQR."
"So that's why."
Informal speech slipped out of me. Gaia didn't call it out.
"Why the moment you saw Byzantium and Scutarion, you wanted to found the capital first."
"Because I'd done it before."
"The Suez too?"
"I completed it in my past life."
"And the puerperal fever?"
This time, Gaia couldn't answer right away.
"I lost my first wife — Maria of Austria, who was also my cousin."
On the map, the figure of a woman appeared and faded away.
"She gave birth to a stillborn child and did not survive four days."
So that was why Gaia's voice had been so unshakably firm when she spoke of puerperal fever in the audience hall.
And it wasn't a policy meant to show off future knowledge. She had simply wanted to save, this time, the person she had failed to save before.
"My second wife was Irish. As I succeeded, she watched her homeland vanish, and she tried to take my life."
"Did you kill her?"
"I confined her to the Tower of London. But she attempted an escape and fell to her death."
...Did she fall of her own will, or did an assassin sent by Gaia push her?
No. Never mind. The woman beside me now was Gaia, not the woman she had been.
Gaia's gaze lowered.
"I fought with my daughter as well."
"......"
"She was the child most like me. Hungry for the throne of England, I married her off to Henry IV of France."
...That was the king who said 'Paris is well worth a Mass'?
"And yet — after Henry IV was assassinated, she became regent for her son Louis XIII and seized control of France."
"And she tried to overthrow you. And you broke her."
Very short words. But what lay hidden behind them was not something I needed to ask.
"The crowns kept growing, but the family kept shrinking."
"My eldest son — idealistic, unlike me — openly rebelled when I claimed the imperial throne, declaring 'this is madness.'"
"And my second daughter — the half-sister of the daughter I mentioned — was a twice-married widow of an ordinary salon. I sent her to marry her nephew and my grandson, Louis XIII."
"Then, while I devoured the rest of Europe, I sponsored the Huguenots and the regional powers inside France to weaken it — and she sent me letters wailing, 'Your Majesty, how can you be so cruel?'"
...For a moment, I felt sorry for those people. At least I chose to marry Gaia. They were born with no chance to choose and simply found out their father — a man, back then — was Gaia!
As if she'd read my mind, Gaia gave a wry smile.
"In the end, no one in Europe remained to stand against me."
"Louis XIII and Richelieu barely managed to claim the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Ottoman remnants who fled into the Anatolian interior became a breakwater for both sides — squeezed between Persia and the crusader lords of Bavaria, Saxony, and Hanover, whom I had appointed as vassal princes there."
"Saxony took the Ankara-Konya plateau, Hanover took the Kayseri-Sivas axis, Bavaria took the region around Eskişehir and Kütahya, and Persia — under the then-Shahanshah, Abbas I — marched all the way to Baghdad under the pretext of a Mesopotamian campaign."
"So I made peace with Persia as well. We negotiated in Jerusalem, and settled on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers as the border — that is, the borders of the old Roman Empire."
"To be precise, I recognized Persia's claim to Mesopotamia and its suzerainty over Armenia and Azerbaijan, and in exchange Syria went to the New Roman Empire."
...Hey, could you stop saying things that would make Leonidas, Pericles, and Alexander weep?
"With no one able to stop me, I could not stop myself."
"Setting aside my eldest son — who finally reconciled with me only after I entered Constantinople and became Imperator of the New Roman Empire, the son of my second wife—"
"—in order to stably pass down the East, the New Eastern Roman Empire, to my youngest son by my third wife from Brandenburg — that is, Prussia—"
"—I burned Venice, weighed down with the sins of the Fourth Crusade."
"Only then did the Greeks, who had still watched my peace with Persia with suspicion, acknowledge me, my third wife, and my youngest son."
...
She lay on her deathbed in Constantinople only in old age.
After receiving the report that the Suez Canal had opened. Leaving behind the empire she had built and a son still young.
She closed her eyes to pneumonia.
And when she opened them again —
She was the earth.
"So you married Uranus?"
Gaia nodded.
"At first, I tried to follow the order of this world."
"And the result was Tartarus."
"Twice."
Uranus imprisoned his children. Gaia gave Cronus a sickle to bring him down. But Cronus did exactly the same thing.
In her past life, she had protected the crown and lost her family. In this life, she had tried to protect her family and was betrayed by her husband and her son.
Only then did I understand why she had made the First Wife's position and the eldest son's succession the opening conditions of our bargain.
She had decided that love alone was not enough. She hadn't trusted promises either.
The queen's station. The heir's seat. Lands and offices. She had tried to nail every relationship into place with institutions so that no one could take them away easily.
"Gaia."
"Yes, darling."
"Don't decide things alone this time."
She looked at me.
"I admit that I need your grand designs."
"......"
"But if you move everyone around like pieces on a board and run to the end alone, the way you did in your past life, you'll lose your family again."
Gaia's expression hardened. I didn't back down.
"Tell me first. Have Metis review it, and ask the people involved."
"Then we might miss our chance."
"If we miss it, we find another."
"It isn't that simple."
"If a chance has to be bought with family's lives, it's better missed."
Gaia said nothing. I took her hand.
"I will not swallow Metis."
Her fingers flinched.
"And I won't destroy my children out of fear of them."
"Darling."
"So this time, you try trusting, too."
A long while later, Gaia clasped my hand in both of hers.
"I will try."
"Just try?"
"I have lived that way for an entire lifetime — twice."
She smiled, a little helplessly.
"Is it not too harsh to demand I fix everything in a single night?"
She wasn't wrong.
"In exchange, I will speak to you first."
"To Metis as well."
"That child is far too clever."
"That's exactly why we need her."
"I never imagined I'd have my husband stolen away by the Second Wife on my very first day."
"That's what happens when you keep trying to fief people out."
Gaia laughed softly.
"The original plan, in fact, was a little different."
Ominous.
"How so?"
"Adrasteia, Ida, and Amalthea are your nurses, so I would leave them at your side—"
"And then?"
"Me as First Wife."
That much was the same.
"Metis as Second Wife."
That too.
"And I intended to take Cyclopeia and Aphrodite as Third and Fourth Wives respectively."
I closed my eyes.
"And the rest?"
"I planned to grant them fiefs across the lands."
"Figures."
"Poseida to Egypt, Demeter to Sicily, Hestia to Rome. Hera to Crete, and Aides — I would arrange her a household at Chersonesus or Gibraltar."
"And you meant to bind all of it with marriages."
"It is the oldest instrument of diplomacy."
"Abolish it."
"Have I not already conceded a great deal?"
"Not a great deal — abolish all of it."
Gaia looked at me with a faintly regretful expression.
"You are greedier than I expected, darling."
"How do you arrive at that conclusion?"
"You mean you wish to keep them all at your side, do you not?"
"I mean I will send them wherever they themselves wish to go."
"That too is a king's greed."
I opened my mouth to argue, then closed it again. Perhaps she had a point.
I wanted to become a Zeus who did not abandon his family. That, too, was my greed — my ambition to build the world I wished for.
Still.
"At the very least, I will not kill my family for the sake of my greed."
Gaia's expression stopped for a moment.
Then she rested her forehead against my shoulder.
"I will choose to believe that."
Her voice was very small.
"In you — not in Your Majesty."
I slowly smoothed her tangled hair.
Counting both of her lives, she had lived far longer than I had. She had conquered Europe. Revived Rome. Become the earth itself.
And yet, just now, she looked like nothing more than a weary person.
"Gaia."
"Yes."
"Let's sleep now."
"There is one thing left I must tell you."
"What now — founding another country?"
"Something more important than a country."
Gaia took my hand and placed it on her lower abdomen.
I felt no change at all yet. But she was the earth — the goddess who would sense the moment a seed of life was sown and began to sprout before anyone else.
Gaia closed her eyes and listened inward for a moment. Then she smiled with certainty.
"A new life has taken root."
I froze.
"Already?"
"I am Gaia, darling."
Her hand folded over mine.
"A son would be nice."
The first condition — her eldest son acknowledged as heir — came back to me.
On her very first day as First Wife, Gaia was already with child.
Three days since I opened my eyes. A new king of the gods. A queen. And now, an heir.
This is moving way too fast, isn't it?
Gaia burrowed into my chest with a blissful face.
"I look forward to serving you, darling."
I couldn't answer. Dawn was breaking outside the window.
And Gaia added one more thing.
"If it is a son... I think we should make Cyclopeia and Aphrodite his First and Second Wives respectively."
...Did you actually hear a single word I said?
"...Gaia."
"Yes, darling."
"Let's just... sleep."
"Yes."