WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ I Returned as a God ◈

Chapter 50: The Eerie Tall House in the Fog (2)

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I followed Carter deeper into the Mist Forest.

After about ten minutes of walking, a small cabin appeared in the middle of the dense woods.

"That's the small house?"

The house, or something close to one, was way less impressive than I'd expected.

If this was really what I was supposed to investigate, that felt way too anticlimactic.

"No, this is my house."

Of course. There was no way that thing was actually the small house. Randolph Carter waved for me to follow him inside.

The house was completely ordinary. Just right for someone living alone.

Carter brought out tea. We sat facing each other at a table in the middle of the room.

"Just hand this to the being beyond that fog."

Carter held out a sealed letter.

Something felt off about a hundred-year request that amounted to nothing more than delivering a letter.

Sure enough, Carter had more to add.

There was a reason this request had stayed unsolved for a hundred years.

"Most people can't even find that being, let alone reach it."

"So it's a letter meant for someone who can't deliver it. That about right?"

"Yes. I met that being once, in the past. To be more accurate, I should say it helped me."

"So that being lives in the Mist Forest. Why can't you just go yourself?"

Carter clearly knew the fog well.

If he was going to bother sending random strangers, wouldn't it just be simpler to go himself? Especially if the place was practically right there.

Carter shook his head.

"I'm not permitted to enter that place. Because I've already met it once."

So the rule was, once you meet it, you never get to meet it again?

Whatever the reason, it was a pretty simple story either way.

"You could die. If you turn back now, I won't stop you."

"Doesn't matter to me."

"The death I'm talking about is true extinction. Not the same as bodily death."

"You're the client here, right? Why so weirdly concerned? There's only one thing you need to wait for. Whether I come back or not."

I stood up, took Randolph Carter's letter, and stepped outside.

Walking out with all that confidence was fine and all, except I had no idea which direction the house even was.

Sure enough, Carter came outside after me. He pointed in the exact same direction I'd come from.

"That's the way back."

"It's not a direction, it's a current. By the way, your sensitivity to mana seems pretty high. Better not use it carelessly. This is beyond something you can handle."

I had no idea what Carter meant by "current," but a man who'd lived here this long wasn't likely to point me the wrong way.

"Be right back."

I waved with false confidence and threw myself into the fog.

After walking about five minutes, I looked around.

"What the hell is this..."

Fog filled every direction.

Calling it a "mist forest" felt wrong. This was just fog, plain and simple.

The fog was so thick that if I lowered my hand below eye level, I couldn't even see it.

I could feel something under my feet, but that was all I had to go on.

I had no idea if the path I was walking counted as a forest at all.

A cliff could've appeared right under my feet and it wouldn't have surprised me.

That was how distorted the inside of the fog was.

How long had I been walking?

Right around when I started feeling worn down, the fog shuddered.

An ugly scream and a shrieking cry rang through my head.

Beast sounds, human sounds, sounds from something whose nature I couldn't place, all tangled together in a grotesque mess.

It was closing in on me.

I drew my sword and went on guard.

Something burst up through the ground.

Every sense in my body was already dialed to max, so I managed to jump up just in time.

An unidentified black shape grazed past my leg.

I thought I'd jumped pretty high, but the fog was so thick I couldn't even judge the height.

There was another problem. I couldn't see the landing point at all.

That was a pretty serious issue.

"My leg..."

It wasn't an injury, that much I knew, but my leg wouldn't respond.

The leg had turned black, like it had been petrified.

Not good.

That happened from just a graze.

If I went down to the ground in this state, no telling what might happen to me.

I had to change tactics.

The sound of wind cutting through fog reached my ears.

I aimed Wind Fang at the ground and kicked up a gust.

The fog didn't budge an inch, not even close to clearing.

I grabbed the object flying toward me through the fog.

I'd sensed something coming, but it had appeared practically right in my face, and a second's delay could've been fatal.

Wait, this...

What I'd grabbed turned out to be a monster's leg.

Two horns, a long tail running down to the body, and skin cracked like a snake's, horns included.

A little over two meters in size, and it didn't seem to have eyes anywhere on it.

If I had to compare it to something, a gargoyle came closest, but even that didn't quite fit. The feeling was different.

I'd been ready to drive my sword into its back if things got bad, but thankfully the thing seemed to have no interest in me at all.

It flapped its wings and tore through the fog at speed.

Even in a space that was nothing but fog, I could tell it was flying somewhere with purpose.

I figured I'd hitch a ride a little longer, when something snapped clean off.

Did I drop something? I looked down, and my face went white.

"My leg!!"

What had fallen was my own leg. No feeling in it at all, so I hadn't even noticed it was gone.

It just grazed me!

Not even a real injury, just a graze, that's all it was!

But losing a whole leg over that was way, way too much.

"Ha. Unbelievable."

Thankfully, or not, there was zero sensation from the leg that had been cleanly torn off.

Can I get the leg back?

Even standing there missing a leg, I stayed calm enough to assess the situation.

Clearing Layer 4 and messing with the system might do it.

The thing seemed to have reached somewhere, because it suddenly stopped moving. Then it shook its body hard.

I'd barely been holding on as it was, and my hand let go before I even registered it.

"Hey! If you're gonna drop me, at least warn me first!"

I wasn't petty enough to just let that slide, so I fired off a skill upward on principle.

A straight line of light shot out toward its leg, but the distance was too far to do any real damage.

I had bigger problems.

"Unbelievable."

I was about to slam into the ground, and I had no way of telling how high up I even was.

Should've skipped the little grudge move and focused on staying alive.

I fired the same skill at the ground, again and again, without stopping.

A massive gust of wind whipped up around me.

The fog pushed back bit by bit, and the ground came into faint view.

The moment my one leg touched down, I face-planted straight into the dirt.

If only I'd lost the leg from an injury and just couldn't use it, that'd be one thing.

Phantom limb, I guess you'd call it. My brain kept insisting I still had a leg even though I didn't, and that was the whole problem.

I drove the sword into the ground and dragged myself up.

There was some giant ladder standing there.

The skill had scattered the fog enough that I got a brief look upward.

That bastard.

I'd wondered why he suddenly shook me off, and there it was. He'd gone inside the house.

Should've clung on with both arms if I'd known.

And what was that, small house?

Where exactly did that thing look small?

It was already swallowed back up by the fog, but that was not a small house.

Sure, it was tall.

I swung my sword toward the sound.

Black tentacles crawled up out of the ground carved open by my skill.

Not just tentacles. The ground itself started to ripple, then took on a single shape.

One tentacle shot toward me at speed. My sword tip passed straight through the end of it.

Same as Randolph.

I gave up on attacking and dropped my body to dodge instead.

"How am I even supposed to beat this??"

I fired skills wildly at the clumped mass of tentacles.

The mass split in half, dodging my attack in an instant.

So skill damage does work on it?

If only I had one good leg to work with.

Might be better to just make a run for that mystery house.

I threw out a few Moonlight Slashes to hold it back, then grabbed the ladder.

With no working legs, I had to climb almost entirely on arm strength.

Right when I figured I could make it up, an attack came flying in from the side.

A cone-shaped tentacle punched straight through my body. The hand gripping the ladder froze solid instantly, and my body dropped.

Part of the hand from the mass that had attacked me first had vanished.

It had teleported through space to attack.

Damn it...

My body wouldn't move.

This was a genuinely fatal wound.

Think.

Why hadn't I felt anything when my leg got cut off?

And with an injury this severe, something should've hurt, at the very least.

But there was nothing. No sensation at all.

My head, meanwhile, was still working fine.

I'm not dead yet.

The fact that I was still thinking was the proof.

Randolph Carter could touch me, but I couldn't touch Randolph Carter.

These things were the same.

They could touch me, but I couldn't touch them.

Still, there was one thing I knew, one way I could actually reach them.

Skills powered by mana.

My body hardened like stone, then crumbled apart.

I'd already been unable to move so much as a finger for a while now.

The pieces breaking off my body turned to ash and vanished.

More precisely, they merged into the fog.

This fog was made up of the bodies of everyone who'd vanished exactly like that.

The instant my body disappeared completely, a massive storm rose through the fog.

The retreating tentacles and the grotesquely shaped ghouls all stopped moving at once.

I touched down lightly on the ground.

I no longer looked anything like the baby-faced early-twenties Kang Hangyeol.

I picked up the sword that had fallen to the ground.

At first I'd suspected those things might be incursion entities born from broken taboos.

But those weren't incursion entities. They were ghouls.

Ghoul, in other words, meant "a monster that devours reality."

Reality here meant anything that wasn't mana.

Muel carried the divine spark, but strictly speaking, they weren't gods.

Having lost their bodies, they couldn't manifest themselves anymore. What did dying even mean? It wasn't the death of the body.

Losing your thought, your consciousness, that was it.

That was true death.

The Muel had lost their bodies. Looking only at the body, they were dead, but they hadn't realized they'd died at all.

Muel carried the divine spark, but they weren't "god" itself.

And Kang Hangyeol's body had been destroyed too. But there was a fundamental difference between me and the countless vanished Muel.

The "I" existing inside Kang Hangyeol wasn't someone who'd inherited the divine spark.

"Too bad there's no mirror."

It'd been a while since I'd seen my own face. Wouldn't hurt to take a look, would it?

Footnotes:

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