WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 191: Possibility

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Inside a dim room.

The only thing illuminating the pitch-black space was a single ray of moonlight leaking through a small window.

...Where was I?

I approached the window and looked outside.

I was on the top floor of a tower so high that the ground was nowhere in sight.

I looked around the room again.

There were no bookshelves or other furniture. Only books piled high across the floor, like a small library.

In the patch of moonlight, an old book lay at my feet.

I picked it up and opened it.

After reading a little from the beginning, I realized it was a fairy tale.

“...”

As I turned the pages and read,

I suddenly turned my head.

A little girl was standing behind me.

She stared at me for a moment before asking,

“Who are you?”

* * *

“...Can’t you hear me? Hey!”

The Demon King’s voice snapped me back to my senses.

When I looked around, I was in the Reward Room.

“...What was I doing just now?”

“What? You were just standing there blankly.”

“For how long?”

“A few seconds. Is something wrong?”

The memory faded almost immediately, as though I had dreamed for only an instant.

Tilting my head, I looked down at my wrist.

I had cleared the Floor 17 Hidden Route.

Every item the Fighting Demon God had destroyed had been restored, including the Spirit Bracelet and Pankera’s Crown.

I had worried that items destroyed by divinity might not be restored even after clearing the floor, so this was a relief.

“Diul.”

Feeling relieved, I called Diul out.

Slither...

Diul wriggled out of the bracelet.

Diul’s appearance had changed quite a bit.

Diul had once been a small, fairy-like humanoid silhouette, but now had a completely human form.

‘Is it because Diul unleashed all their power?’

I was not sure whether to call it complete manifestation, but Diul had forced their power beyond its limits to save me during the battle against the Fighting Demon God.

Now, I could sense that Diul had returned to a stable state.

My greatly elevated rank must have affected Diul as well. This was Diul’s final form.

Diul fluttered around my head.

Instead of their usual bluntness, Diul looked me over awkwardly before asking,

‘Master... it is you, right?’

I grinned.

“Yeah, it’s me, Diul.”

‘Something feels strange. You seem like a different being.’

“It’s probably because I absorbed divinity.”

‘Divinity?’

Diul’s command of language was perfect now too.

Feeling more gratitude and guilt than I could express, I said,

“It’s thanks to you protecting me, Diul.”

If Diul had not risked everything at that moment...

If that futile struggle had not made the Fighting Demon God release me, even for a moment...

I might have died in their hands, and things might not have turned out this way.

Diul had always helped me greatly.

I was truly glad Diul had returned safely.

‘Hmph... You keep doing reckless things that get you killed. What choice did I have?’

After grumbling, Diul asked,

‘Did you defeat that scary monster?’

“Yeah. It’s all over.”

‘...That’s a relief. Master idiot. If you do that again, I’m never stepping in.’

Diul continued circling around me as though fascinated, then eventually returned to the bracelet.

I looked down at my palm.

The Sage’s Mark that had glowed there had disappeared again.

The mark itself was no longer important.

It had already completed me as a Vessel of Divinity.

“I can’t believe you became a god this way... This is absurd. What the Sage gave you was a Vessel of Divinity.”

The Demon King still sounded shaken.

I was just as surprised.

I had never imagined things would turn out this way.

The Demon King had said one had to be born with a Vessel of Divinity. How had the Sage given one to me?

Thinking back, it had seemed as though the Sage had used the Book of Omniscience as material to make something...

I did not know how far the Sage had foreseen, but thanks to the Sage, I had made it this far.

In my heart, I offered the Sage my deepest gratitude.

“I’m not complete yet.”

Having reached this point, I could tell.

I had not become a complete god.

Like the Fighting Demon God, I had become something like a demigod?

My divinity was of a far higher rank than the Fighting Demon God’s divinity, so I had been able to defeat them easily, but still.

The Time Stop Ability.

According to the Demon King, there was no fixed path to gaining divinity. Each person found their own way.

But I had possessed this ability from the first moment I could remember as a child, perhaps from the moment I was born into this world.

I had possessed only the tiniest fragment, so until now, I could stop time but could not move myself...

Then the Sage gave me a Vessel of Divinity, laying the foundation to contain a sufficient amount of divinity. The faith of countless people in me fulfilled another condition, and the God-Slaying Sword gave me divinity that I could absorb immediately.

Miraculously, I had broken through a wall I could never have crossed otherwise.

In any case, the root of this divinity was not power I had gained by doing something.

What exactly was this divinity that I had possessed all along?

That much, I still did not know.

“Didn’t you notice sooner, Demon King?”

It was one thing that I had not realized it myself.

But how deeply had it been hidden for even the Demon King, who shared my soul, not to notice?

“How would I know? It made no sense for the power to control time not to be divine power, so I had roughly guessed. But I had never directly felt its presence.”

The Demon King continued,

“There is one thing I know. The divinity you possess is likely that of a higher god of an incomparably lofty rank. It should have been impossible for someone who had only just awakened divinity to defeat the Fighting Demon God like that. Unless it was the divinity of an exceptionally high-ranking god...”

I nodded and looked into empty space.

“I think the Tower has probably figured it out by now too.”

If it had not known until now, watching the Fighting Demon God’s final moments must have made it certain what my ability was.

I had openly moved while stopping time.

It was not particularly important.

Now that my divinity had begun to awaken in earnest, it had been inevitable.

I took out the Scale of Life from Subspace.

[Special Item: Broken Scale of Life]

Offers the user’s lifespan in exchange for an equivalent reward. You may offer a minimum of 1% and a maximum of 99% of your current remaining lifespan. Once used, the scale will break, and the user’s remaining lifespan will be

Remaining Lifespan: $#!$#&#!@$@?^%

When I checked the information, the lifespan that had originally had more than 200 days remaining was displayed strangely.

I did not need to check it like this to know.

I had finally overcome the Scale of Life's lifespan limit.

I had not become a complete god, but I had reached a rank high enough to escape the fate of mortality.

At least one urgent problem had been dealt with. For now...

I turned my attention to the clear reward.

The God-Slaying Sword lay on the floor before me.

Had it really been given to me intact as a reward?

[Item: God-Slaying Sword Ryuon]

An ancient divine artifact that killed Fighting Demon God Bahel by piercing Bahel's heart. @#?!#$ once more beheaded Fighting Demon God Bahel with this sword and caused Bahel to vanish#$?#@!#$^%@...

When I checked the information, part of the text was garbled.

The fact that it recorded my killing the Fighting Demon God in the item description suggested that I had somehow affected the Tower’s system.

Still, it was not bad.

A divine artifact was an item capable of holding a god’s power.

Using the God-Slaying Sword would make it far easier to infuse divinity into my attacks than with my other weapons.

Just as I had pierced the Fighting Demon God’s heart and cut off their head with it.

I put the God-Slaying Sword into Subspace.

[Would you like to exit the Tower?]

I left the Tower.

The moment I did, I saw my family’s faces.

“...Seo-hyeon!”

My mother, father, and younger sibling greeted me with deep relief.

For some reason, the three of them also looked somewhat dazed.

“An unprecedented incident has occurred in which all humanity on Earth experienced a strange sensation at precisely the same moment. This unexplained phenomenon is currently presumed to be related to Person123...”

I glanced at the news playing on the living room television.

It seemed the whole world was in an uproar.

Everyone else must have felt the sense of oneness I experienced when I awakened as a god.

“What on earth happened, Seo-hyeon? Just now, the rest of the family too...”

My father asked me.

Scratching my head, I said,

“Don’t be too shocked. Just listen.”

“Y-Yeah?”

There was no need to hide it, so I told them the truth.

“I somehow became a god.”

* * *

I explained things well enough for my family to roughly understand.

After clearing the Floor 17 Hidden Route, I had become some sort of god or transcendent being.

And because of that, my lifespan problem had been completely resolved. I no longer needed to enter the Tower every week.

“Is that really true...?!”

My family was overjoyed. They could not even hide their tears.

The fact that my lifespan problem was resolved mattered far more to them than the absurd claim that I had become a god.

“You’ve suffered, Seo-hyeon. You’ve really suffered...”

My father and mother repeated those words over and over.

We had only overcome one great hurdle. It was not all over yet.

But for now, I simply shared their joy.

I knew how much my family had worried because of me.

After wiping their reddened eyes, my younger sibling seemed to have calmed down enough to ask teasingly,

“So you really became a god, Oppa? People kept calling you a god, and now it really became true?”

“Something like that.”

In truth, it had been thanks to people’s faith in me.

If even one condition had not been fulfilled, I would not have been able to become a god.

After telling my family I needed some rest, I went into my room.

“Hmm...”

After awakening as a god,

I could see things that had been invisible before.

What should I call it? Causality?

That seemed like the most fitting term.

Even sitting on the bed in my room, I could clearly sense the flow of causality surrounding the world.

And at its center, I could also sense the Tower’s presence most intensely.

Yes, I could see it clearly now.

The Tower was also a god that possessed divinity.

Its divinity was...

Aside from the sense that it was of a high rank, it was murky and indistinct like an abyss. It was difficult to describe.

It spread in every direction as though it had taken root throughout Earth.

I considered what the Tower’s true nature might be.

Divinity was the power to twist causality.

Put more simply, it was the power to break the laws of the world and create miracles.

In my case, that power was related to time.

Considering the overwhelming strength the Fighting Demon God had displayed, their power had probably been focused on destruction.

...Then what was the Tower?

I had a vague guess.

The Tower’s divinity was overwhelming enough to devour even gods like the Fighting Demon God.

For all I knew, it had devoured countless other gods too.

Yet even the Tower had failed to kill me, despite my having been no more than dust compared to a god, and I had survived to this very moment.

That allowed for an inference.

The Tower had to provide everyone with a fair chance.

The problem was that those chances were absurdly unfair, but Nightmare difficulty itself had never once been impossible to clear.

Should I say it imposed inequality equally on everyone, regardless of strength?

Compared to the inhabitants of other fantasy worlds, I had been nothing more than an ordinary human from Earth. That was why I too had been able to climb the Tower.

It was powerful enough to destroy and devour countless worlds, yet it was constrained to give even an ant a chance.

That was probably related to the essence of its divinity.

Looking at the current flow of causality, I could sense that the Tower had overextended itself greatly.

It must have been the price of arbitrarily raising the clear difficulty to kill me.

The Tower had made several proposals before, but using a god this time must have been devastating even for it.

It had been willing to pay that price to finish me for certain, but it had ultimately failed.

Thankfully, it had only laid the finest stepping stone for me instead.

This was probably the moment when the Tower’s influence had been at its weakest since it first appeared.

‘Should I try it?’

There was something I wanted to test.

No, something I had to test.

I had absorbed all the divinity in the God-Slaying Sword, as well as part of the Fighting Demon God’s divinity.

How much could my current power affect the Tower?

I focused my entire mind.

Then I unleashed my divinity with all my strength.

As I extended my divinity against the Tower’s divinity stretching across Earth...

Rumble...

The ground began to tremble faintly.

Just like the day the Tower had first appeared in the world.

I heard my family’s startled voices outside my room.

I looked at the window floating in the air.

Then...

[Easy]

Participants: 1,617,658

Time Limit: 37 years 323 days 17 hours 2 minutes 51 seconds

Floor Reached: Floor 46

[Normal]

Participants: 1,553,529

Time Limit: 23 years 323 days 17 hours 2 minutes 51 seconds

Floor Reached: Floor 32

[Hard]

Participants: 1,580,394

Time Limit: 10 years 323 days 17 hours 2 minutes 51 seconds

Floor Reached: Floor 19

[Nightmare]

Participants: 1,573,605

Time Limit: 9 years 323 days 17 hours 2 minutes 51 seconds

Floor Reached: Floor 18

The time limits for every difficulty had stopped.

The time limits leading humanity toward extinction.

They were no longer ticking down.

“...!!”

I did not even have time to be surprised before I had to endure the crushing pressure that came rushing in.

The Tower’s divinity was immense and vast.

I used every last bit of my divinity to try to suppress it, but it was hopeless.

All I could do was barely hold my ground without being pushed back.

Soon, I had completely exhausted my divinity and was left utterly drained.

Only a few dozen seconds.

No matter how weakened the Tower had become, that was my limit.

When I checked the difficulty window, the time limits were flowing normally again.

“Ha.”

Even so, I could not help laughing.

“...Huh.”

The Demon King let out a low exclamation too.

If I pushed back the Tower’s divinity with my own, the time limits stopped as well.

It was only natural. This entire system operated on the Tower’s power.

For now, my divinity was far too lacking. Stopping it for a few dozen seconds was all I could manage...

But I had confirmed the possibility.

It felt as though the probability that had converged endlessly toward zero had finally risen to around one percent.

The Tower was no longer an unbeatable disaster.

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