Chapter 111

Chapter 111

It was the Taoist who cut off Juyun’s words and interrupted. He sprang up from his seat and thrust his face close to mine. Setting aside my surprise at the sudden approach, I quietly watched what he was doing. Considering their actions so far, they didn’t seem to have any intention of harming me.

“That seed is skilled at interfering with the ‘path,’ you see. He slightly twisted the route you were traveling on, leading you to some remote corner that even the system doesn’t recognize.”

“…A remote corner…?”

“An abandoned dungeon.”

Thud, thud. Following the Taoist, Juyun also approached me. He lightly flicked the Taoist’s mask with his fingertip, who had cut into the conversation out of nowhere, and continued speaking.

“Or, I could describe it as a space like the remnants of an… entirely cleared, sudden dungeon.”

“A sudden dungeon…”

“Well, that’s not the important thing.”

The Taoist, having fixed his mask that had been tilted to the side by Juyun, abruptly spoke up.

“I’ll get to the point, ‘Adjuster.’ From now on, I will hide you from the system’s view.”

“What do you mean all of a sudden—”

“Just hear me out. Then you will be free from the constraints of the Administrator, the system, time, and space, and you’ll be able to walk the path you were originally meant to take.”

“……”

He asked me to listen, so I was listening, but honestly, I couldn’t understand a single thing he was saying. Was it because his alias was ‘The Taoist’? His words seemed awfully difficult.

“It will be hard for you to understand at this stage.”

Suddenly, Juyun held out his hand to me. It looked like he was asking for my hand, so after a brief exchange of glances with Avan, I held out my hand to him. Juyun gave me that characteristic smile of his once more.

“However… after you experience it firsthand, you’ll understand immediately. What we’re saying, what we’re trying to do, and…”

Juyun’s hand, with its cool, water-like temperature, grasped mine. He turned my hand over so my palm faced up, then placed something on it.

“…about yourself as well.”

“……!”

With those words, light burst forth from the object placed on my hand. I hurriedly reached out to grab Juyun, but he lightly stepped back, evading my grasp.

“W-Wait a minute, what on earth is that—”

“Your gardener will handle the rest.”

Jingle, jingle. The sound of bells rang out. The Taoist, who had already stepped back a pace from me just like Juyun, was shaking a rod-like object with several bells attached to it, muttering incomprehensible words.

“O heavens, blind the eyes of man.”

“I wish you a pleasant journey.”

With those final words, the light bursting from the object he had given me completely consumed my vision.

It was raining.

“……”

A drizzly rain was falling. It wasn’t pouring like a waterfall, nor was it falling like a fine mist, but it was a truly damp, drizzly rain.

“…Hey, Avan.”

“Yes, Master.”

Standing on a street where a drizzly rain was falling without a single umbrella, I took shelter under the corner of a building, blankly watching people with umbrellas pass by as I spoke.

“Do you understand what the hell is going on?”

“It seems we are in a situation where, right after Juyun used some strange trick, we suddenly find ourselves facing a rainy cityscape.”

“Aha… is that so? But that cityscape looks a bit strange…”

With unfocused eyes, I looked around at the scenery once more. Let’s see. The place I was standing right now was where the café I used to visit often was. Over there to the right was the convenience store with that notoriously unfriendly part-timer. And across the crosswalk over there was the bakery I used to frequent during lunch hours.

Of course, that’s ‘used to be.’ There was nothing in the scenery I was seeing now that matched what I remembered.

According to my memory, where the café should have been was some random meat restaurant, and where the convenience store of a certain brand should have been on the right was a convenience store of a different brand. Furthermore, the bakery across the crosswalk was the same bakery I knew, but it looked much shabbier and smaller compared to the image in my memory.

Come to think of it, I heard that bakery had been remodeled about two years ago.

Could it be that it looked like that before the remodel?

“No matter how much I think about it, this… I’ve never seen it myself, but… it looks like the way things were before the ‘Monster Parade’ broke out.”

“Hmm… my guess is the same, Master. Looking at the appearance of the restaurants here, including this barbecue place, and the streets, I’d estimate it’s roughly six to seven years ago.”

“……”

And now he’s pinning it down to the exact year. This is nothing new, but every time I see this side of Avan, I can’t help but be thrown off. I mean, sure, I had some idea when his first voluntary action after being summoned through the ‘Gardener’s Scissors of Life’ was gathering information, but still.

“Well, thanks for being so thorough. But… according to you, this is the past, right?”

I looked around at my surroundings. The rain was still drizzling, and people were crossing the street with umbrellas. Their faces were full of worries, expectations, and fears about today and tomorrow.

It was a slice of an utterly, painfully ordinary daily life. At least, the kind I’d thought would go on forever until the Monster Parade broke out five years ago.

“…I see two possibilities. Either this is truly the past, or it’s a simulation recreating a scene from the past.”

“The latter would be more realistic, but…”

Considering what Juyun and the Taoist said before sending me here, the former seemed more likely. I bit my lower lip gently and recalled the Taoist’s words again.

—You will be able to break free from the constraints of the Administrator, the system, time, and space, and walk the path you were meant to walk.

‘Could it be that Juyun and the Taoist actually have skills that can break the constraints of time… or space?’

If that were really the case, there’s no way those two would be stuck at just 4th and 7th in the S-Rank rankings. Even just having a spatial skill was enough to grant at least a B-Rank status. There’s no way someone with both spatial and temporal skills would be stuck at 4th and 7th.

So in the end, there were two main possibilities I could think of.

One was that the Taoist’s ‘ability to interfere with paths’ had intervened with the system and sent me to the past. But in my opinion, this was unlikely. The system was a massive power that could even influence the laws of physics of the world. An individual Awakened manipulating that system on a whim? No matter how I thought about it, it was impossible.

So the remaining possibility was the opposite: that Juyun and the Taoist had used their ‘ability to interfere with paths’ to block the system’s interference with me.

“The Taoist… said it. ‘The path you were meant to walk.’”

It was utterly incomprehensible and logically impossible, but if his words were true, then the story was simple.

In other words, my return to this point in the past was a ‘predetermined’ flow for some reason, and the system had been blocking it all along. And Juyun and the Taoist made it so the system couldn’t block that flow… that’s the story.

Of course, I still had no idea what the Taoist meant by ‘the path you were meant to walk.’

‘Then… what am I supposed to do?’

Something so important that I had to be moved to the past 6-7 years ago, which Juyun said was ‘part of clearing the quest,’ and the Taoist said I had to ‘follow the flow of causality’ and do it no matter what…

Just as something flickered through my mind and vanished, a familiar blue window suddenly appeared before my eyes.

[Tutorial 3. The Strong Prey on the Weak]

The quest window I’d seen every time Nostalgia appeared and gave me a tutorial was now right in front of me. And that wasn’t all. The object Juyun had handed me, whose purpose and reason I didn’t know and had just been holding, suddenly floated up into the air.

‘Ah.’

The pointed end of the blue stone Juyun had given me spun around for a while before starting to point somewhere. I glanced at Avan. Even seeing the stone suddenly acting like a compass, Avan showed no particular surprise and just met my gaze calmly.

“It seems that wherever this stone is pointing is where we need to go.”

Avan pressed the stone with his fingertip as he spoke. I nodded, looking at the blue stone floating above my palm, swaying toward a specific direction. I still had no idea what was going on or how things were unfolding, but one thing was clear.

I had to do whatever Juyun and the Taoist had spoken of… and whatever the system, which wasn’t working properly and only showed the quest title, was telling me to do, in order to return to my ‘present.’

I swallowed dryly, then carefully grasped the blue stone still floating in the air.

“Let’s go, Avan.”

* * *

The blue stone in my hand kept guiding us toward the outskirts of the city. Avan and I followed the stone’s direction as we moved outward, and along the way, I swiped two umbrellas that had been carelessly discarded against a storefront wall.

Ideally, I would have liked to stop by a convenience store and buy new umbrellas, but since I’d gotten into the habit of carrying only my credit card and phone, I had no currency or cards usable at this point.

Avan stared at the old umbrella in my hand as if it were the most wretched thing in the world and muttered something like, “How dare I let Master hold such a shoddy object… My sin is deep!” but I completely ignored him. Sure, it was a bit rusty and worn, but it was still an umbrella perfectly capable of fulfilling its purpose of keeping the rain off.