WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS
Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Returned as a God ◈
Chapter 102: The World Point (3)
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A yellow sports car tore down the highway.
Choa switched lanes like she was playing a racing game.
She didn't look like she had any intention of slowing down.
"Please!! Slow down! Just ease off a little!"
"Siyu told me to bring you back quick."
"That doesn't mean speeding. I'll drive, seriously. Let's switch at the next rest stop."
Choa lowered her red sunglasses with one hand and scrunched her brow.
"Rookie driver."
"Who's a rookie driver!"
The moment I shouted, the speedometer shot past 200 kilometers an hour.
My hair whipped around and my head spun.
I glanced at a speed camera and said, "You keep driving like this, you're gonna rack up huge fines. What are you gonna do about the fines?"
"Siyu's covering it, so it's fine."
If Choa was saying that outright, Park Siyu was basically an accomplice.
I gave up trying to stop her and leaned back against the seat.
Choa fixed her sunglasses and pointed at the back seat.
"There's an elixir in the bag."
The moment I stepped out of the tower, a flood of missed calls hit me, along with a call from Choa.
She said she'd come pick me up, and I asked her to bring an elixir along.
It had been a rushed request, honestly. I hadn't expected her to actually bring one.
I opened the bag and there it was.
"Drink it in moderation."
"Sure, sure."
I popped the cap and gulped it down like water.
"Ugh, tastes awful."
Between the potions in the tower and this elixir, it seemed like none of them came in a flavor worth drinking.
Normally I'd have recovered some stamina in the space between layers before leaving the tower, but this time there really hadn't been time.
"Hey, about Layer 11..."
"Sorry. I'm a little busy."
"Huh?"
"The culprit's Rizu. Handle the rest yourself. I've got nothing else to tell you about this layer. I'm out!"
"Wai, wait a second... Hey! Who's Rizu!! You son of a..."
Right before I rushed out of the tower, I could've sworn I heard some language I really shouldn't have.
Even so, seriously?
You don't talk to your own god like that!
That personality of his is starting to look more and more like... mine.
No, wait.
Yu Jihan the Transcendent was still Yu Jihan.
If anything, it was probably more accurate to say he was just returning to his original personality.
I really had nothing else to tell him. What did he expect?
I cleared Layer 11 with content that hadn't exactly been normal.
Normally the layer should've ended right after killing Rizu.
He'll figure it out.
The important part was, I'd already given him the spoiler.
The rest was on Yu Jihan to handle.
It was starting to feel like I was just neglecting him, but that was probably just my imagination.
Sorry about that.
I'll make it up to you after the raid's over!
"By the way, what's the raid boss?"
At my question, Choa let out a blatant sigh.
She had her sunglasses on so I couldn't read her eyes, but she was clearly frowning.
I'd asked a few times before this, but Park Siyu kept saying he'd tell me when the time came.
To be fair, it wasn't entirely his fault. I was the one who hadn't come out of the tower until today.
I honestly hadn't expected to be stuck in there that long myself.
"Yeongno."
"Yeongno?"
"Yeah. A creature that failed to become a dragon."
Yeongno, huh.
I'd never seen this monster before, so I had no idea what to expect.
Right now we were headed for Yukbaeksan, a mountain in Samcheok, Gangwon-do.
Boss raids generally ran on an unspoken rule of taking place somewhere with as few people around as possible.
Drop a boss monster in the middle of Seoul and try to hunt it there. It was obvious what would happen.
Well, not that it was even possible.
I didn't know who'd made the rule, but whatever this "administrator" was, it seemed pretty meticulous about it.
There were conditions in place, apparently, like requiring the number of people within a certain range to stay under a set limit before a boss could even be summoned.
"The reason for the raid is the merit points, right?"
The cumulative merit points on the line for this boss raid were close to ten million.
"Not exactly."
"What do you mean?"
"The item."
If it was an item dropped from killing a boss, there was a good chance it'd be worth something.
"Yeongno's special."
"Special how?"
"The Dragon Orb Yeongno carries grants wishes."
"Wishes?"
Choa nodded, though my reaction to that wasn't exactly enthusiastic.
"So you're saying whoever holds the Dragon Orb gets whatever they want?"
"That's how it's been passed down."
Despite the insane speed she was driving at, Choa's voice stayed perfectly calm.
An item that grants wishes.
"You don't actually believe something that ridiculous, do you?"
"Why not?"
"There's no such thing in this world as an item that grants wishes."
"There could be."
"No. There isn't."
I couldn't budge on this one point, whatever else I might concede.
A wish was an incredibly abstract concept, and what people wanted varied completely from person to person.
If it was purely a physical wish, maybe something could grant it. But anything beyond that became an entirely different story.
"Monsters don't exist in this world."
"That's what everyone said a hundred years ago. But look at now. There are Awakened, there are monsters, there are gods."
Her logic ran along the lines that since gods existed, it wasn't strange for something like a wish-granting item to exist too.
It wasn't exactly nonsensical logic either. This world had far more things I didn't understand than things I did.
"Still, there's no such thing as an item that grants wishes without a price."
"How can you be so sure?"
"Say there really was an item that granted wishes. Then it shouldn't be called something like Dragon Orb, it should be called Omniscience and Omnipotence. Even the god you follow isn't omniscient or omnipotent, so how could a mere item pull off something that all-powerful?"
"Isn't that blasphemy?"
"I'm fine with blasphemy."
"Even if Hangyeol-ssi's god is listening?"
"My god probably thinks the same."
Choa sped the car up at my casual laugh.
Anyone could see she was staging a protest out of anger, but I didn't take back a word of what I'd said.
Because that.
Was flatly correct.
There were things in this world you had to accept whether you wanted to or not.
Awakened, those granted power beyond ordinary humans, always wanted stronger power still.
The price for that power was Transcendence.
Becoming a Transcendent came with a taboo attached. The same went for gods.
Is that really all there is to it?
I'd bet money that a Transcendent's price wasn't just the taboo alone.
If what Choa said was true, the Dragon Orb that Yeongno carried was a divine artifact that surpassed even that.
No such thing exists.
What doesn't exist, doesn't exist.
Setting aside whether a wish-granting item was even real, I decided it was probably a good time to calm Choa down.
If she sped up any more, we were actually going to crash.
"If the Dragon Orb's real, what would you wish for, Choa-ssi?"
"You just said there's no such thing."
"There isn't. But whether the Dragon Orb can grant wishes and what you'd wish for if it could are two different things."
"There's no wish to make on an item that can't grant wishes."
She sounded thoroughly sulky.
Since I couldn't think of anything else to smooth things over with, I scratched my cheek and shut my mouth.
The car, which had been tearing along at a terrifying speed, slowly eased off.
A rest stop appeared not long after.
"Weren't we supposed to hurry?"
"Gas."
Choa pulled a card out of her pocket.
"Lunch."
"Anything you want to eat?"
"Banana milk and bread."
While Choa filled the tank, I went into the rest stop's convenience store and bought banana milk, bread, and a few things for myself.
I looked down at Choa in the driver's seat and asked, "Isn't driving tiring?"
"Saying that won't make me switch, so hurry up and get in."
Choa snatched the banana milk out of my hand and started the engine.
"Want some bread?"
"I'll eat it if you open it for me."
"Sure, sure. Got it."
I tore open the top of the bread bag from the convenience store to make it easy to eat and held it out to Choa.
Choa set down the banana milk and took a bite of the cream-filled bread, chewing away.
I popped open my own Choco Emong, bought from the same convenience store.
Choa finished off the whole piece of bread and handed the empty wrapper back to me.
"Hangyeol-ssi, why did you drink the elixir?"
"I had some personal stuff going on..."
Choa, sunglasses off now, pouted her lips.
I realized I hadn't understood her question correctly.
Her question wasn't about why I, who hadn't even gone into a dungeon, had drunk an elixir. It was about the act of drinking an elixir itself.
Why do people drink elixirs?
"Well, obviously..."
The words that came out casually caught in my throat.
An elixir was a healing potion.
The reason you drink a healing potion is obviously to heal wounds.
So why do wounds need healing?
Because leaving them alone leads to serious injury, and eventually death?
It didn't need to be that dramatic.
Because it hurts.
That's why people go to the hospital, and why hunters look for healers and potions.
So what happens if you can't feel pain at all?
Seeing my face go quiet mid-thought, Choa finished off the rest of her banana milk and smiled bitterly.
"You asked earlier what my wish was, right?"
"I did."
"That's my wish."
Someone might look at Choa's body and feel envious.
But being unable to feel pain was another kind of hell entirely, one ordinary people could never even imagine.
Choa's life was something an average person couldn't dare picture, couldn't even begin to grasp.
"Still, there's no such thing as an item that grants wishes."
That kind of item shouldn't exist.
Nothing about that had changed.
"Shouldn't you at least say something nice, even if it's empty, at a time like this?"
"This is exactly what an empty nice thing sounds like. If you're going to hold onto some ridiculous hope, you're better off facing reality sooner rather than later. But..."
"But?"
"That thing of yours, Choa-ssi, seems like something that might be possible without needing some grand item like that."
"You really think so?"
"Of course. There's no such thing as a wish-granting item, but there's no shortage of mysterious items out there."
Maybe one of those mysterious items out there was exactly the kind that could restore Choa's body to normal.
Choa's foot pressed down slowly.
Very gently, the speed climbed bit by bit.
She seemed to have calmed down.
Halfway up Yukbaeksan in Samcheok, Gangwon-do.
Ever since an A-Rank dungeon break leveled the mountain over twenty years ago, the mountain had been off-limits to ordinary people except for dungeon operations.
Yukbaeksan, along with a handful of other mountains, had come to serve as raid grounds like this from time to time.
Today, more hunters than usual had gathered here.
Standing among hunters dressed in all kinds of gear, Park Siyu spotted me and Choa and sighed.
"One minute late."
Come on.
Cut me some slack on one minute!
Footnotes:
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