WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Hydrogen B

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 130: The Slanted Ceiling and the Mountain of Smiling Corpses - 2

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It was a simple conclusion.

They were the first to reach the bottom of the Abyss, and this sight was evidence no one could have fabricated.

In other words, the Sanctum had murdered the woman who had been an Earth Mother ascetic and was called the Great Master.

The military state's history and the Immortals' folk tales were both wrong.

Tyr's story had been closest to the truth.

Was time, after all, what distorted history most severely?

Or perhaps the Sanctum's influence had reached every source the military state consulted when compiling its history books.

Jiseon looked hollowed out and enraged, like a volcano sleeping deep beneath the earth with all its resentment bottled within. She trudged forward, then abruptly stopped.

With a gentle smile, she looked at the figure blocking her path.

"Yes. I knew this would happen. That fleeting presence I sensed from the moment I saw you... The scent of those who live without keeping their feet on the ground. Only that dreadful breed, who seek to justify every sin just because they can see the future, gives off such a scent."

Naturally, the person standing in Jiseon's way was the regressor.

The regressor faced Jiseon with her blue and red eyes gleaming. Jiseon's faint smile grew even kinder.

"Even after hearing this secret history, do you still intend to stop me, boy?"

Facing Jiseon with grim resolve, the regressor swallowed, seemingly nervous in a way unlike her, then asked,

"...I'll ask you one thing."

"What is it?"

"If we take her 'relic' from here and return to the surface."

At the summit of the mountain of corpses, the woman carefully held a jet-black staff in her hands.

Pointing at it, the regressor asked Jiseon again.

"What will you do first?"

Jiseon did not ask what the staff was or how the regressor had recognized it.

She simply nodded as if she understood.

"Isn't it obvious?"

As if stating a self-evident truth, Jiseon smiled wider.

"I will hold the Sanctum accountable for its sin."

It was a calm declaration. When it came to religion, the Sanctum was the powerful organization that ruled the world in both name and fact, a group that held every secret history and mystery in its hands.

The regressor asked again in response to Jiseon's declaration of war.

"That happened in the past."

"It is a matter of the present."

"A lot of people will die."

"Not as many as they killed."

"You'll die too."

"I'm not afraid."

The regressor knew that would not be enough to persuade Jiseon. Instead, she asked a different question.

"What if that leads to an even greater tragedy?"

Jiseon snorted. Rather than giving her something to agonize over, the regressor's question only seemed to strengthen her resolve.

"...That precious future of yours again. You speak as though you saw it with your own eyes. How strange. A man shouldn't be able to become the Holy Maiden."

"Someone must have told you," Jiseon muttered, without asking anything further. She treated the words "a greater tragedy" as if they were not worth considering at all.

The regressor spoke desperately.

"In just a few years, something that threatens the world will appear."

"Is that so?"

"Even if the Sanctum falls, even if an age of the Church of the Earth Mother and vampires comes, they'll appear. No, they'll come into the world even faster, and far stronger than before."

"So it seems."

It was an indifferent reply. Growing more urgent, the regressor confessed something she had kept tightly hidden because she feared people would panic.

"The King of Sin. A judge who wields the Demon God's power and passes judgment on humanity's sins. Neither the Sanctum's Holy Maiden, the Arcane Federation's Demon King, nor the Sword Saint who protects the Empire could withstand even one move against him. He's so powerful that all humanity working together couldn't defeat him."

"The Demon God. A name the Sanctum is fond of."

"He is born from every evil in the world. If someone as renowned and respected as you wages war against the Sanctum, if you strike the Sanctum alone and die gloriously, that alone will become the spark of war. The world will be swept up in conflict, sins will bloom within it, and people who throw the world into chaos will emerge from that turmoil. And among them..."

The King of Sin would be born.

Bearing every despair and vice humanity had committed.

The regressor was about to speak of the terrible disaster to come.

"So what?"

"...What?"

That single line left her stupidly asking in return. Jiseon looked at the baffled regressor with a clear, resolute expression.

"I asked, so what?"

Squelch.

Her foot stepped onto a corpse. The bodies had gone through something like coagulation and sedimentation over a thousand years, becoming as hard as packed earth. They supported her weight without a tremor.

"If they committed persecution to prevent tragedy, that means they must have been confident they could endure the resistance as well. If they could not suppress even the struggle to survive, move onward, and find the strength to defeat the coming disaster, they should never have done it in the first place. There was no place for us in the future they envisioned."

Even if that were not the case, Jiseon would not have fallen.

She was The Unfallen. One who continued walking without falling.

No one could stop her simply by standing in her way.

"That's not what I mean! Instead of fighting each other, we need to work together to overcome the crisis...!"

"If they sent a Grand Warrior to stop me, that means they must be confident they can do so."

"No! I don't particularly intend to stop you! If you take the Earth Sword, Jizan, but promise not to use its power, I'm willing to yield that...!"

The instant she heard that, Jiseon's face twisted like that of a fiend as she shouted.

"Yield it to me?!"

Veins rose in her neck. A sound like rock being crushed came from her clenched fist. When she flung her hand aside, the five rings clattered with a harsh metallic sound.

Jiseon shouted as if vomiting out her heart.

"That belongs to us! This is our land, our grave! What right does some Grand Warrior of the Sanctum have to yield the Great Master's relic to us?!"

Rumble.

Her roar struck the mountain of corpses and the tilted Tantalus, spreading through the Abyss. It was so thunderous that the corpses beneath our feet seemed to shift.

"Don't arrogantly act as though the future belongs to you! Even if you obtained that relic in a future without me! That would not give you the right to it!"

Crunch.

Jiseon clenched her fist and pulled her arm back. Her muscles swelled, and the five rings became one, wrapping her right arm without a gap.

Having steeled both body and mind, Jiseon glared at the regressor with terrifying force and shouted.

"Draw your sword, Grand Warrior! I will move forward! I will take the relic buried in that ancient grave and hold the Sanctum accountable for its sin! I am the Earth Mother's apostle, and the cry of those who die with the Earth Mother's name on their lips! If you wish to bury this question in the earth, kill me and bury me in the Abyss!"

The persuasion had failed. The regressor of this cycle had not been able to stop her either.

It was a familiar sense of defeat. The regressor bit her lip and lowered her head. Then her eyes met mine, where I stood down the slope.

'If someone else had tried to persuade her instead of me. Yes. If it had been that guy, would something have changed?'

No chance.

I was only someone who granted wishes. There was no way I could stop The Unfallen's fierce gale.

Besides, even I hadn't known. I knew how much resentment and longing she carried inside her, but I had never expected such violent hatred to emerge.

I was a mind reader, not a prophet.

The regressor sighed and spoke slowly, as though all her strength had left her.

"The future was never mine. It was always my enemy. It always tried to screw me over in the most absurd ways."

She raised a hand and gripped her sword. Skywarbler, the sword of the sky that had always been with her.

She released the lock on the compressed space she had saved for this day alone, taking the surging power into her hand.

"I'll correct one thing. I'm not some Grand Warrior of the Sanctum. I've never prayed to a god in my life, and no god has ever granted me anything. Unless fighting and cursing each other counts."

'The first time, I was relieved to be alive again. The second time, I was happy to gain a strange ability. By the third, I was excited. I thought I had become someone special. But this specialness wasn't a blessing. It was a curse. For an ordinary person like me... it was far too much....'

After that brief self-mocking thought, the regressor raised her sword again.

The vast Abyss shook.

Wind swept between the tilted ceiling and the mountain of corpses. It was as though the Abyss had reclaimed its sky and summoned the wind again.

Woooooo.

The wind's cry flowed across the corpses, wailing mournfully. It soon converged at a single point and was drawn into the regressor's sword.

Wrapping her sword in overwhelming power, the regressor shouted.

"Fuck! Even so! We still have to stop the world from ending!"

The regressor kicked off the floor of corpses, and Jiseon slowly drew her right foot back. The ground packed firm behind her foot, supporting her body solidly.

The invisible sword and the five rings collided.

Footnotes:

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