The Exit Section - Third -
The angel spoke in her usual professional tone.
“Since you’ve decided to advance from the exit section, I’ll award you double the points.”
As always, the angel presented three trait cards.
Grand Memorial: When a person dies and receives a proper funeral, the Politics and Culture stats actually increase.
Monetary Economy: When currency is established and economic activity occurs, credit rating rises slightly.
Near-Death Experience: Exploration of the Great Boundary becomes slightly easier. With the proper procedures, it can even be performed consciously.
To be honest, I was disappointed. None of the three traits felt satisfying.
“Is this everything you can show me?”
“Hmm… Even if you say that, these are all Excellent-rank traits.”
“Why the hell are you showing me Excellent-rank traits? I already have two Mythic ones.”
“If you ask why… Across all levels and rounds, ranks are set as follows: 1–5 is Common, 6–10 is Excellent, 11–15 is Extraordinary, 16–20 is Heroic, 21–25 is Epic, and 26–30 is Legendary.”
“…If you remove the rare intervals that always give free traits and exclude multiples of four, there aren’t any decent reward sections left, are there?”
“That’s true. After all, once you finish Round 30, you’re the winner, so no traits are provided then either.”
Now that I thought about it, something felt off. Why were they selling Mythic traits at the price of the current round plus four levels instead of at the price for Round 31? Not that I was complaining… They could have just let people buy the traits from that section at the appropriate point cost.
Maybe it was for game balance. There was a strange sense that they were deliberately trying to make it ‘fun.’
Anyway, I chose Near-Death Experience. The other two were trash, and this was the only one I could actually make use of.
I turned my thoughts to the game itself.
I hadn’t joined as an ecology expert. I was here as a gamer. From what I could tell, the other participants were specialists in certain academic fields, successful executives, or national leaders—people like that.
I wasn’t even a real ecology expert. More of an amateur, really. Sure, I’d gone to university for it, but I never pursued a doctorate. I’d scraped together information as an amateur ecologist, bought knowledge from others (or received it in exchange for points), and somehow made it all the way to Round 9.
And now I’d reached the exit section. Roughly one-third of the game was behind me. There was still a long way to go… but I still felt a strange sense of accomplishment.
It was something I’d almost never experienced before.
“……”
“Is something wrong?”
I needed to split off another clone. One that would handle dry, emotionless information-gathering in the community, and another that would carry the pathetic scraps of my humanity.
I’d dump all the psychological conflict and agony onto the human-nature clone. I let out a deep sigh, took a slow breath… though of course a divine mental entity couldn’t actually do either. Still, I set my mind that way.
Then, without thinking, I opened my mouth.
“Hey, Angel. Can I quit the game right now?”
“…Pardon?”
“I got the trait and double the points. Does that mean I can’t?”
“Hmm~ No, that’s not the case. If you return the points and pay back an amount equal to the value of the newly acquired trait, you’re free to leave. It would be about 300,000 points, so the loss isn’t insignificant.”
So I could still quit if I wanted to.
“Why do you ask? You’ve been charging forward like an unstoppable force until now… Is this because of your conscience? Did you suddenly feel guilty about annihilating all those players you defeated…? You really are a contradictory person.”
“It’s similar, but the opposite.”
“Sorry?”
“I’m starting to suspect that even if I lose this game, my soul won’t actually be destroyed.”
The angel fell silent.
It was like a half-finished game that didn’t have the proper animation for a certain action, so the character suddenly shifted posture mid-motion.
“What makes you think that?”
“Look, I can accept that the reward system is honest because of that Mihun guy. You people will probably give the real reward to the winner, right? Mihun said that if he wins, he’ll ascend to become an immortal or whatever.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Unless this is some unimaginably elaborate scam, since Mihun is the player who provided the stage for this game, the reward structure itself is probably all genuine… But what I’m doubting right now isn’t the reward system.”
“Then what is it?”
The penalty.
Why did this game claim that losing meant your soul would be destroyed?
At first, I thought it was obvious. It was a game about creating gods—of course losing would mean your soul could be wiped out.
I mean… it’s common, right? In subculture, web novels, webtoons, Japanese manga—any genre that deals with brutal battle royale games.
But now that I was actually inside the game, the scale was just too massive. There were a billion participating players. Each world was hundreds of times larger than Earth. If you factored in mythic traits like World Shaping, it could easily be thousands of times bigger.
On top of that, the organizers could freely manipulate time, and the participant called Mihun could manipulate time and destroy galaxies. He’d even negotiated with the organizers to reach a higher realm through this game…
They talked about competing over the lives (fate? I still didn’t fully understand what that meant) of a billion beings. All sorts of grand claims.
In that case, the soul of a single human being held no value at all.
“That’s not true.”
No, it really had no value. The organizers were far too omnipotent.
A person is born after a man and woman spend one night together and nine months pass…
So a soul is just the result of sperm and egg combining. What value could that possibly have? On Earth, women discard half a soul once a month, and men discard hundreds of millions with a single porn video.
Biologically speaking, souls couldn’t possibly exist. Even if they tried to explain it with things like the astral realm or whatever, I had zero interest. Honestly, it all just felt like fantasy setting fluff.
At this point, the organizers’ lies and the truths they were hiding… it all started to feel suspicious.
In short, the whole “soul destruction” thing—wasn’t it just a lie meant to make people focus on the game?
In other words, was the “me” here really the soul of the “me” on Earth? Or was I just a copied personality, like the clones I controlled, sent here to participate in the game?
“That’s quite the bold imagination.”
“Is it really that bold?”
“No. Fifteen percent of the current participants are thinking exactly the same thing as you, Lord Biin.”
Just as I thought. Given how omnipotent the organizers seemed, it was impossible not to have those doubts.
The only difference was that because Mihun existed, I believed the rewards were real, and therefore assumed the penalties were fake.
Many of the remaining players who didn’t know about Mihun probably still believed the rewards were genuine. Mihun wasn’t the type to hide his identity, but he also wasn’t the type to broadcast it everywhere.
“However, as you know, the organizers can only answer that the rewards will be properly distributed and that defeat will result in soul annihilation.”
I knew that. That was the official line, of course.
But what I was struggling with right now was something else entirely.
I couldn’t say it out loud.
“Wait a moment, Lord Biin. Are you saying… you’re dissatisfied because you think your soul won’t be destroyed even if you lose the game?”
I didn’t mean for you to say it for me.
“Um… Lord Biin? I want to make sure I understand this clearly—are you a suicide seeker?”
I didn’t have the courage. I had too many lingering attachments.
But the desire to die had always been there. I hadn’t grown up in a particularly good environment.
“Ugh… Lord Biin. Then does that mean the reason you killed every opponent you’ve met so far was… because you wanted to make yourself into a bad person? Like, playing the Demon King, acting like ‘I’m a villain, so please kill me’?”
Well… I really do hate humans, but maybe half of it was that.
“Which one is it?”
“How can a person’s heart be split so neatly? It’s all complicated.”
Yeah. It was complicated.
When I earned hundreds of billions from coins, I was genuinely overjoyed. At the same time, since it was money earned by scamming others, my conscience had stung.
When my mother who had abandoned me came back, I was truly happy. Then I found out she wanted to borrow money and wanted to kill her.
When I hid away in the countryside because I didn’t want to lend her money, I thought it served her right. At the same time, my conscience stung for abandoning my mother.
I hate humans.
But I want to like them.
I like the living creature called Homo sapiens.
It’s just their ecology that fills me with nothing but disgust.
I hate myself enough to want to die.
But I don’t have the courage to actually die.
I’m sick of life and want to die.
But the game is too fun, and the food I eat when I’m hungry tastes too good.
I want to become a Demon King who has completely abandoned his humanity.
Because only then can I stop this contradictory, garbage self-loathing and contempt.
All the villains in the world affirm themselves. If I become a piece-of-shit demon, maybe I can affirm this garbage version of myself too?
“So what you’re saying is, even though you annihilate every opponent who stands against you, you secretly hope they aren’t actually annihilated. You’re hoping the organizers are lying to you.”
Embarrassingly enough.
If I were just a shameless scumbag with no sense of shame, I’d probably get less hate.
Like you said, if I do terrible things and then say ‘Actually, deep down my conscience is tormenting me,’ does that earn me sympathy? No, that’s just garbage that deserves to be killed.
I don’t want to become that kind of ugly trash, but walking the path of the Demon King is truly difficult.
So today, once again, I drowned in self-loathing. Meanwhile, my other clones were enjoying the changes and growth of the ecosystem, craving and raging at Yogur-tosoth, properly expressing human emotions.
While the human-nature clone—me—pathetically wallowed in self-loathing, all the other clones could thoroughly act as Demon Kings, crushing enemies, annihilating them in the next world collision, and steeling themselves to cleanly accept their own annihilation in the event of defeat.
“Lord Biin. I’ll say it again—the organizers’ answer remains consistent.”
“Of course it does. I have no intention of quitting the game anyway. Even if I’m being deceived, so what? I’m just having fun with it, so that’s enough…”
The game was fun. One of the reasons I hadn’t killed myself was because the game you people made—The Fantasy World Creator—was too entertaining, and the current competition was just too exciting.
In the end, I was here as a gamer. Gamers could choose the evil alignment option simply because they hadn’t picked it before, and they could freely kill people inside the game.
I was just like that. I was simply using the rules of the game to gain as much advantage as possible.
“In that sense, what I’m about to say now comes not from the organizers, but from me, the angel.”
“…? What is it? Criticism? Or are you going to comfort me again by saying I’m pitiful? What?”
But the angel gave an answer that was neither.
“Lord Biin. Try becoming a better existence.”
“……”
“I’m not criticizing your goal of becoming a Demon King who has abandoned all humanity. Truly. Because people are free to pursue whatever they wish.
But right now, Lord Biin, you aren’t walking toward becoming a Demon King. You’re simply running away from both humanity and yourself. That isn’t becoming a Demon King, nor can it be called pursuing anything.”
I couldn’t say a word.
“If winning the game, truly becoming a Demon King who has cast off all humanity, and then ultimately falling into self-loathing and committing suicide ends up being no different, then is there really any need to win?
I sincerely hope you win, Lord Biin. After you win, completely abandon your humanity, annihilate every other player—what exactly do you want to do next?
I believe that once you realize that, you will become even stronger.”
The angel gave me that advice.
As the human-nature clone, I couldn’t help but ponder it.
It wasn’t about ‘how’ to live, but ‘what kind’ of life to live… wasn’t that it?
Was being a Demon King a means of ‘how’ to live, or was it the directional goal of ‘what kind’ of life?
Did I even truly understand what a Demon King was?
The human-nature clone agonized over it.
I left him to wrestle with it on his own and naturally shifted my consciousness to the community-handling clone.
Since it looked like things were turning into a faction war, the Meteor Cartel was going to get very busy in many ways.