WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ I Returned as a God ◈

Chapter 59: Three in the Morning, Four at Night (2)

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I shook my head slightly.

Breaking a taboo doesn't kill you.

It just means you become an existence outside causality the moment you break it.

"So do you have a taboo too?"

"Every Transcendent has a taboo."

Transcendent meant exactly what it sounded like, someone who'd obtained transcendent power.

Depending on circumstances, a single Transcendent could do the work of a thousand Hunters, or wield enough power to wipe out an entire nation.

Of course, that kind of power doesn't just get handed to anyone.

In exchange for transcendent power, a Transcendent gets saddled with a "taboo."

Great power comes with a price.

And the first price a Transcendent has to pay is exactly that, a taboo.

"So an incursion entity is a being that's broken its taboo? Then why'd you say breaking a taboo means death?"

Meanwhile, I had a vague sense of why he'd said that.

Every Transcendent who was S-Rank Hunter caliber, Park Siyu included, served a god of their own.

"It's because of incursion."

"Incursion?"

"Right. Taboos aren't something only Transcendents like you carry."

I didn't know who Park Siyu's god was, but it was clear the god trusted me quite a bit.

That's a god who's got to know plenty about me too.

Sharp as ever, he caught the meaning right away.

Though he did look a little startled.

"You're saying gods have taboos too."

"Exactly. You know the saying, one muddy loach can cloud up a whole river?"

The relationship between a god and their follower might start out hierarchical, but past a certain point it shifts into something closer to a partnership than a chain of command.

A follower's incursion affects the god too.

Same as how humans treat life as the highest value and pay the price of sacrifice to preserve it.

A god does what it must do to protect its own existence, that's all.

"When a follower turns into an incursion entity, it affects the god one way or another. That's what incursion means."

"So in the end, breaking a taboo gets you killed by the god you served, before you even become an incursion entity."

Correct.

Park Siyu pushed his chair back and crossed one leg over his thigh.

A guy like him would've caught on by now.

When a Transcendent breaks a taboo, the resulting thought corrupts the god too, through incursion.

Gods have taboos too. So what about the reverse?

"Not impossible in the slightest."

"So this whole thing..."

"Too early to say for certain that it's the work of a god who broke its taboo and that god's follower, but I can't rule out the possibility either."

"Every Hunter who got manipulated served a different god. You're saying all of them broke their taboos?"

"That's ridiculous, no. What matters more, I think, is what happened in between."

Hunters had been approached with offers, better guilds, recommendations to switch gods, in exchange for planting a glass-shard-like item inside a boss monster's body somewhere in a dungeon.

"If that glass shard acted as a medium to corrupt the monster, that's plausible enough."

The result was the boss undergoing incursion, difficulty spiking, and most of the teams whose Hunters had taken the offer failing their dungeon expeditions.

Since these were low-difficulty dungeons, either a dungeon break happened, or a second attempt got launched.

"In the first case, the dungeon gets destroyed by the rift, so no trace is left behind. In the second case..."

"The clear goes through fine, but most of the time it ends up a bossless dungeon."

Not every dungeon failure was caused by incursion, so a second clear attempt didn't automatically mean the dungeon had gone through incursion.

"Rare, but there are cases where incursion happened and the team still cleared it thanks to sheer team strength."

The Hunters who made it out alive in those cases got reported as irregulars, mutations, that kind of thing.

"So let's say that shard was the medium for creating an incursion entity. You think there's a reason they only handed it to specific Hunters?"

"An incursion entity is a negation of existence."

That negation carried two meanings at once, wrongness and the opposite of affirmation.

Hunters who weren't Transcendents didn't have taboos.

"But there's still something to negate."

"The god they serve. Or a negation of themselves, is that it?"

"Basically, it's the condition needed to even use a medium capable of triggering incursion."

Exactly ten minutes later, the office door opened and Jeong Choa's face peeked out.

Catching my eye, Choa opened the door and stepped out.

Flitting around the treatment room, she looked exactly like a butterfly.

"I've got a favor to ask."

"I'm listening."

This guy.

I hand him solid intel and this is how he draws the line?

Felt a little hurt, honestly, but I did my best not to show it.

Not that there was much to show, since it wasn't even that big a favor.

"While I'm in the dungeon, keep an eye on Eunyoung-noona for me."

"The woman Hunter you brought in? Seems like she's been out hunting dungeons pretty hard lately, something going on?"

"Nothing. Nothing's going on, I just want you to keep an eye on her. You can do that much, right?"

Yu Jihan knew Eunyoung-noona existed.

No matter who he was, if he laid a hand on her, I wasn't going to let it slide.

Not that I think anything that serious is actually going to happen.

Still, no harm in being careful.

"Got it. I'll keep watch."

Having Park Siyu's word on it put me at ease, at least a little.

Park Siyu handed over an emergency phone.

A bit old, but it looked usable enough.

"No pointless calls, and hand it back once you're out of the dungeon."

"Eunyoung-noona and Choi Suhyun should be fine, right?"

"That's fine. I also went ahead and booked a hotel."

Already?

Between the phone and this, he worked fast.

Guess he's just the impatient type.

The hotel Park Siyu mentioned was a five-star place five minutes from the guild.

I checked the location on the phone and got up from my seat.

"Do you know what 'impossible, can't happen' means?"

"No idea."

He'd left out the subject entirely, there was no way I could follow that.

I tilted my head, and Park Siyu waved it off, saying it was nothing.

"Never mind. I'll call you tomorrow."

"Oh, right, Choa-ssi's arm is fine, isn't it?"

Jeong Choa had her arm propped on the chair, rocking her body back and forth.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yeah? Okay then, never mind."

I said I'd be in touch again, waved, and left the treatment room.

Silence settled over the treatment room after Kang Hangyeol left.

Park Siyu got up and picked the black tea bag off the floor.

Jeong Choa spun her chair in a full circle while still seated.

"I didn't say anything."

"I didn't say anything either."

"You suspected."

Choa's expression twisted into something odd.

She poked her red lips out and got down from the chair.

Choa rolled up her sleeve.

Her wrist was swollen.

The exact spot matched where Hangyeol had been injured.

She poked at her own broken arm with her left hand, completely unbothered.

Congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis meant she couldn't feel any pain inflicted on her body.

A rare genetic disorder called CIPA.

Park Siyu set the box of black tea bags on the shelf.

"He's sharp."

"Kang Hangyeol?"

"Yeah. Good instincts, decent sense too, I think. Cute, above all. And weird."

"Weird how?"

"Don't know, but he's weird."

Choa kept repeating the same word.

Park Siyu didn't disagree that Kang Hangyeol was weird.

Weird was weird, sure, but he wanted to hear exactly how he was weird.

Judging by Choa's reaction, weird seemed to be about all she actually knew.

Choa's ability, really, wasn't "recovery" so much as "transference," pulling the other person's wound onto herself.

"But he definitely got hurt fighting some guy."

"The Kim Yuhan one?"

Choa nodded again.

"Leave it be."

"Hm, I don't know the details, but it looked like a purely personal grudge."

"At least he's not lying about that much."

Choa's skill went beyond just pulling wounds over, it let her read the memories tangled up in them.

Hangyeol's injuries had been minor besides the broken arm, so she couldn't glimpse much, but comparing what she'd read against everything else, it was clear Hangyeol hadn't been lying.

"You're sure it was really Kim Yuhan he fought?"

"Want to see?"

Choa held her palm out to Siyu.

He recoiled at the sight, backing away.

"Are you trying to kill me?"

"A broken arm doesn't hurt as much as you'd think."

Siyu pulled out his phone and showed her a photo.

The photo was of Kim Yuhan, the one Choi Suhyun had sent over.

Choa pointed at the phone screen.

"Yeah, that's the face."

"That settles it, then."

"Ugh, boring."

Choa turned and plopped back down into the chair.

[Moving to the space between 5 and 6.]

Layer 5 had been escort duty for a merchant caravan run by some noble.

Compared to everything before it, the difficulty wasn't exactly low.

The monsters were monsters, sure, but the ones who kept ambushing us in between were the real headache.

The reason was simple.

This caravan wasn't just some ordinary caravan.

This world had a race called Muel, descendants who carried the divine spark.

Muel with mana were first-class citizens.

Among Muel, those with high-tier abilities became nobility.

Non-Muel were sorted by the environment they lived in and who they served.

Those who worked under nobles or held city residency rights were second-class citizens. Everyone else, ordinary citizens, counted as third-class.

And then there was fourth-class.

They didn't even need a number assigned to them. Fourth-class citizens were basically slaves.

And Layer 5's mission, "Escort the Noble Caravan," turned out to be escorting a fourth-class citizen bound for some noble's estate.

Even knowing the system was forcing this on me.

It wasn't exactly a layer that sat easy with me.

Having gotten badly burned by the Lia assassination business last time, I told Jihan everything this time around, including the Muel and the fourth-class citizen the caravan was escorting.

After hearing me out completely, Jihan crossed his arms and stayed quiet.

A long silence settled over the wide classroom.

No matter how I look at it, this is a dead ringer for the guy outside the tower. But something's off.

Both of us needed time to think this through.

Ever since I'd found out Kim Yuhan was Yu Jihan, I'd been wrestling with whether to keep dragging this guy along or not.

Someone who came from the future?

Did that mean future-me does something to earn this guy's grudge?

That was its own kind of headache.

But leaving him behind now, knowing nothing about it, wasn't an option either.

I don't even know what I supposedly did wrong.

Even with a control method in hand, dragging along a tiger cub knowing full well it'll grow into a tiger someday felt wrong somehow.

Wait. Control method?

I checked Yu Jihan's status window.

This kid wasn't the Yu Jihan outside the tower yet.

The only reason Kang Hangyeol's body had survived the Yu Jihan outside the tower was the Covenant Oath.

Yu Jihan's growth rate had been abnormal.

Unlike the Transcendent Yu Jihan, the one standing in front of me now was still a clueless kid.

Which meant this was the only window I had left to control him.

The problem was how to trick Yu Jihan into binding himself to the Covenant Oath.

"Hey, hey!"

[My ears are gonna fall off. What?]

"When someone talks to you, answer. Drives me crazy not knowing where you even are half the time."

Jihan sighed and scratched the back of his neck.

Bringing up the Oath out of nowhere would probably put him on guard, so for now I decided to keep the conversation flowing as naturally as I could.

Come to think of it, his expression had gone sour ever since I'd brought up the Muel and the fourth-class citizen.

Less like discomfort, more like he was disgusted by something.

Fair enough, guarding a slave caravan wasn't going to feel good no matter how much the system forced it on him.

Anyone born in the 21st century would have a hard time swallowing it, and that was just the truth.

[Relax your face. Does it really bother you that much?]

"It's not that."

[Then what is it?]

"Those Central Guild bastards. Wondered where they got the idea for this whole class system. Turns out it's this."

[1] lit. "one loach can muddy an entire pond," a Korean proverb meaning one bad actor spoils things for the whole group.

Footnotes:

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