In the previous iterations, BY enjoyed drugs.
Fortunately, this was different. Inside the packet was a dry black petal of flower. The Wyvernip petal that dried even after being placed inside a conservation device was neatly folded inside.
Of course, there was no way it would be a drug.
This was the 7th iteration after all.
…Such needless thoughts kept popping up and my mind was constantly heading towards our connection. I had to change my line of thought.
It was not important whether she grew up normally or not. The important part was that she had now left Earth, and that I had now earned freedom.
I threw the petal into the dimensional rubbish bin.
Aside from that, there weren’t many valuables, which was obvious because she would have taken them all.
It took a few hours to clean up Kaeul’s room.
Like that, I slowly emptied myself of Kaeul.
.
.
.
There was actually a room that I was reluctant to go into.
It was Yeorum’s room.
The reason for that being that I didn’t really want to know about her secret private life. This too was a portion of the emotions that I earned from living a daily life.
Back when I first met her, I wasn’t interested in whatever debaucherous thing Yeorum did behind my back.
Wasn’t everything fine as long as she did not die, and as long as she was given a chance to fight? That was what I had been thinking and to be frank, it was not much different from how one could consider the environment for an animal being kept at a zoo.
After starting to think of Yeorum as a person, I began respecting her privacy. Because of that, I decided to turn away from those various? things? that would be inside her room.
It’s not like I could burn the whole room down…
Anyway, I walked into the room. Her room was unexpectedly clean. In fact, it was closer to being empty.
There was nothing like a pencil case, an exercise book or a pen on the tabletop. The only things scattered around were comic books and they were either related to sports or action. It was nothing strange because the kids all enjoyed watching movies, dramas and animations.
Picking them up one by one, I threw them into the bin.
There weren’t that many clothes inside the wardrobe either. A training top, several t-shirts, shorts and a few training outfits were the only clothes inside and Yeorum did not even have a single skirt.
Something that weighed on my mind was that 30% of her clothes were in tatters. Clothes that were ripped during her training appeared to have been thrown into this wardrobe after cursorily cleansing them with magic.
When I opened a different drawer,
My body halted for a bit.
It was because toys that I really didn’t want to know about, were inside the drawer. There were handcuffs and whips and the ones beneath them were even more obscene.
She’s gathered quite a lot of them…
Closing the drawer, I tossed the whole thing into the bin.
The other wardrobe on the other side of the room had no clothes and was instead filled with weapons. From bows to guns, there were all sorts of weapons including six types of swords.
She had the Dream Eater and an onion core with 10 lifted seals, so that should be enough for her weapons after going back.
In truth, it didn’t really matter at this point whether she died or not. Even if she did die, it had nothing to do with me.
Thinking like that pushed down the sense of crisis that had been soaring all the way to my chin. My heart was put at ease just like what happened when I started considering Gyeoul and Kaeul as strangers.
Suddenly, the time I entered Tranquil Sea with Yeorum floated back up in my mind. That training where she said ‘Fishy Yeorum~’ and whatnot.
After passing the last phase – it was when we were crouching down smoking together.
At the depths of the ocean, she said she saw an illusion of her youngest unni tempting her to give up on everything. While confessing that, she asked,
– What did… you see?
The illusion there made an existence powerless by showing an illusion that went completely against one’s intention.
Back then, Yu Jitae saw the baby dragons.
– Us? Was I there as well?
– Yeah. You were.
– How was she?
– She had long hair.
– What? I hate long hair. ‘Cuz it’s annoying.
– It went all the way down to the waist.
– Tch tch. They should stop acting at this point. Their script’s trash and their research is trash. Not the right way to approach acting.
– Is that so.
– And what did I say? Did I like, swing around a sword saying I’ll leave home?
I didn’t reply back then.
Inside the illusion, Yeorum was on her knees grabbing my legs. Crying her eyes out, she was begging.
‘I don’t want you to die…’
‘Let’s live together, okay…?’
‘Please…’
I got rid of all the weapons.
Her room was cleaned up in an instant.
It would be great if memories could be discarded as easily as this.
Since that was impossible, there was no choice but to slowly remove them.
.
.
.
Lastly, I went into Bom’s room.
Bom’s room was especially dark because the curtains were exceptional at screening the sunlight. I flicked the switch but the light didn’t turn on because the breaker was still down.
Therefore, I used my sloppy magic to float a marble of light which brightened up her room like a lightbulb. Even though there was no need to brighten up the room, it was a daily habit.
A room spoke about the person’s personality.
Bom’s room was clean and tidy as if everything was aligned with a ruler. Even the books on the bookshelves were in an ascending order.
Opening the wardrobe, I found all sorts of clothes from dresses to one pieces, fleece jackets, suits and the off-shoulder dress she liked wearing… All the clothes were in a descending order following their colours and seasons.
But the one that was more eye-catching than those various pieces of clothing was the old t-shirt that had an extremely outstretched neck. It was the one Bom wore at home all the time.
Looking back, Bom was a really unique type of person.
She was calm yet emotional, easygoing yet harsh, and her gazes were usually warm but at times were uncannily cold.
The room was like a representation of her personality. It was calm and tidy but seeing it made you wonder whether this really was a room with a living person or not. It felt as if it was a room for a machine.
It was interesting. Even though she was the one I shared the most experiences with, she was still the most incomprehensible hatchling.
Anyway,
I threw the flowerpot into the bin, and took the books out of the bookshelves. The cosmetics, accessories, her favourite laptop, the stationery that were neatly arranged inside the drawers as well as chocolates – I tossed everything.
Then, I opened a different drawer and was met with a weird scenery.
There was a large mirror at the front after opening the doors, and both of the doors had a mirror, each showing a reflection of my left and my right at the same time.
It was like a room of mirrors.
Well, a human had one focal point but a dragon could focus on three places at once, so it was nothing strange in that sense.
I pulled the mirrors out.
Vacantly emptying the room, I smelled her subtle fragrance being emitted from the clothes. It was a soothing scent like that of the forest.
It was different from how the other baby dragons did not really give off any body odour, and was also strange because it was a smell I did not sense in the previous iterations.
Continuing that line of thought, I needlessly remembered the thing that happened with Bom the other night.
Seriously, it was strange.
Why did I feel something like a romantic feeling towards her,
And what made me feel a burning passion urging me to crave her body…?
While discarding them one by one, my hands were forced to a stop.
In one of the drawers towards the bottom was one that was sealed shut. It didn’t open even when I tried to pull it out, and didn’t have a lock either. It simply refused to open.
Focusing on it, I discovered an exquisitely crafted structure of mana sealing the drawer. It was remarkable even in my eyes.
Bom appeared to have made it.
What was lying inside that she sealed it with so much care?
For a moment, I hesitated.
Should I respect her privacy or should I just open it.
In the end, I decided to open the drawer.
We had an intercourse already anyway, and that lowered my resistance against opening it.
When I ripped the drawer out, the magic formula buzzed as it tried to burn the thing that was inside it. I flicked my hand and removed the spark.
The thing inside looked like a thick diary.
[?]
There was a single heart drawn on the outside. It seemed to have been written with an erasable pen and there were faint traces of several pen lines that were removed time after time. Looking closely, it read ‘Ahjussi Observation Diary’, and there were some geometrical figures next to it.
Wondering what she wrote inside, I opened it.
…
So she was writing something like this…
I skimmed through them without reading in detail because this too was one that incited the sense of crisis. After skimming through all the pages to the back page, I found something strange.
“What’s–”
There were long lines of black pens. They were written irregularly and were crossing the lines of the paper. At a glance, they looked like letters but also looked like shapes.
However, they weren’t recognised as letters and my [Fallen Babel (S)] that had reached max proficiency couldn’t interpret them either.
This must be when Bom found out the secrets about me.
Her mind would have been shaken a lot.
In any case, that was the last piece of trash.
I decided to empty myself of Bom.
.
.
.
After cleaning the house, I rested for a bit by leaning on the sofa and continuing a trail of random thoughts.
Then I lifted my body.
Wasting any more time will only make me continue thinking more and more about the kids.
Now, it was about time.
.
.
.
There was one thing I lied about to Bom.
I wanted true freedom. This was something that could not be achieved by simply ending my life.
Cancelling the blessings on my body and killing myself was a sloppy way of doing things because that would not let me escape the line of Providence. An existence cannot go against death in general, but that wasn’t really the case after reaching the level of a transcendent authority. Occasionally, it was possible to go against death and wretchedly enough, that meant there was always a possibility of me being brought back to life.
In other words, I had to be ‘completely’ deviated from the line of Providence and deviating from Providence meant a complete annihilation as an existence.
A complete death was only made complete by being erased from everyone’s memories.
Thus, I will now disappear,
And there will be nothing left behind that can remember me.
That was the true freedom I had in my mind.
It’s something I should feel sorry about to the baby dragons, but what else can I do?
I have already done enough.
They were gone. They will now live happily in their own world. They were now complete strangers to me, and were simply one of the millions of existences that had passed by.
Although my feelings reflected back to my connection with the kids, my rationality was different. They were still the kids of garbage, and were the last shackles that were restricting me even at this point. And I hated all types of shackles.
There was freedom.
At last it was in front of my eyes.
The freedom I had desired so desperately was finally in front of me.
The device that will drive me to freedom was already prepared. In fact, all the preparations had been finished a long time ago.
[Shallows of the Abyss (S)]
This unique alternate dimension was similar to an ocean. I have been tossing trash inside the whole time but it didn’t matter because this place was so wide that I would never see them again anyway.
However, going down the depths in a certain direction would allow me to face the [Lords of the Abyss] – the fundamental concepts of evil forming the world.
On the other hand, it was also possible to go above the shallows and poke one’s head out of the surface of the ocean. In that place was my device for suicide that I had earned after killing the ‘Monarch of the Highest Heavens’, [Gaum].
It was the tool I used to kill one of the sovereigns, the ‘Immortal’, [Shin], and was also the weapon I used to threaten the chairman of the Association, Chaliovan Greenrain, around 2 years ago.
I walked into the Shallows of the Abyss as the white hands carried me and headed above. Going higher and higher, I was met with a place that resembled the meeting place of water and air.
Waiting for me there was one of the Level 6 artifacts that only sovereigns could lay their hands on.
Above the tall heavens was a mechanical device going hundreds of metres in height. Black pillars were densely packed around it. And at the very top was a golden sword aura that was crafted with an astonishingly large amount of mana.
It had been activated beforehand.
The golden sword aura was suppressing the world. A mere object was giving off a vicious aura trying to oppress me.
This object was the device invented by the sovereign, Gaum, to kill existences that were otherwise unkillable.
[Guillotine of the Highest Heavens]
At the same time, it was the tool that would guide me to freedom.