WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 575

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When I Grow Up, I'll Be the Demon God

Click, click, click, click. The gear-work wheelchair rolled smoothly down the wooden corridor. Small steps caught in the teeth and climbed over, and whenever the incline shifted, the gears adjusted automatically to keep it level. Far too many functions for something called a simple wheelchair.

I steered the wheelchair someone had gifted me and muttered to myself.

"These gears..."

"It must be him. Gwapyeong, Maximilien."

The regressor's face soured.

Six Generals of the military state, Gwapyeong Maximilien.

And senior officer of the Lords of All Creation, the secret society. The King of Gears.

The regressor dredged up an old memory and clicked her tongue.

"The Lords of All Creation... tch. And wouldn't you know, we happen to be right next to the Tree of Corruption. Puts me in a terrible mood."

"Were you ever in a good mood?"

"What did you say?"

The regressor shot me a sharp look. She had downed a whole bowl of spirit medicine, so she must have recovered some energy. Medicine works best when you actually need it.

"Well, what can you do. Someone who got kidnapped has every right to be in a bad mood. But, Mr. Shei. Why are you going on your own?"

"What? What are you talking about? You're pushing me. How am I supposed to go anywhere on my own when my arms don't work?"

"I'm not pushing the wheelchair right now."

"Huh? But I'm moving."

That's right. I wasn't pushing, and yet there she went.

I stared blankly at the retreating wheelchair, then startled and scrambled after it. The wheelchair was moving by itself, with no power source at all.

"Mr. Shei! Slow down! Rush for one second and your life might be the thing that ends up going first!"

"I'm not doing anything!"

The wheelchair carrying the regressor rounded curves on its own and found its own path through the halls. I hurried after her. Chasing the rolling chair around a corner and through a doorway, I came out into a wide room.

[Eek! You're here!]

Waiting for us was a single parrot with red feathers.

"Welcome, welcome! I've been expecting you!"

And just as anticipated, there was Maximilien, Six Generals of the military state, Gwapyeong. He could freely manipulate any gear within range, and he had drawn the regressor's gear-work wheelchair to him. Now he turned it this way and that, looking it over.

"You're here too! I heard you lost an arm, but you've reattached it? What a waste! If you had come to me, I could have fitted you with a gear prosthetic far sturdier, far more systematic, and far more sustainable than that!"

"Gwa... pyeong...!"

"How about it? Even now, wouldn't you like to have it removed and replaced? I'll teach you how to use it myself! Once you get used to it, it'll be far tougher than that arm of yours!"

Gwapyeong swept back his cloak and produced a gear-toothed saw. The sharp blade spun with a terrifying whirr. In the department of doing exactly as he pleased, Maximilien was at least the equal of Nevida, if not worse. With genuine sincerity, Gwapyeong moved to carve out the regressor's arm.

The saw looked ready to bite into the regressor's shoulder at any moment. I shoved my hand in front of it without thinking.

"Hey. Do you know how much work I put into fixing that? Don't go cutting things without permission."

Fwip. Blood sprayed from the hand caught in the blade. For a moment it scattered bright red, then every drop came flowing back into my palm at once, and at the same time the blade snagged on something invisible and stopped dead.

Innate arcane theft. I had stolen Maximilien's innate arcane and halted the blade's rotation. Maximilien watched the frozen saw and smiled as if he had expected exactly this.

"King of Humanity. It's been a while. This is our first meeting since you and Curator Historia tore my body apart, yes?"

"If not for Nevida, that would have been our last meeting. What a shame."

"Thanks to that, I had to replace a great deal more of my body with gears. Quite a lot of trouble it caused!"

"Didn't you want to replace your human body with gears? Looks like things went according to your wish."

My cool reply made Maximilien tilt his head.

"My wish? I wanted to change the King of Humanity."

"The King of Humanity is the representative of humans. Change you and eventually you can change humanity, and that would come about through my own transformation. But change me, and humans don't change. What you were doing was no different from falsifying a graph."

"Ha ha ha ha! Is that how it works? Ah, I suppose I understand well enough!"

Whether he was broad-minded or simply mad was hard to say. Maximilien laughed it off cheerfully, then pointed a gear at me and said:

"So then, what about this? They say a Demon God now dwells in you. Any interest in testing out some gears while you're at it? I ask out of pure curiosity!"

"No."

"Won't accept gears? You're strict with me."

"And it's not possible. A Demon God already dwells in my body."

I brushed Maximilien aside coldly and put my hand on the regressor's wheelchair. Maximilien's innate arcane, Gear Maiden, controlled every gear within range. Put another way, it could not control anything that wasn't a gear. I gripped one of the gears hard and let go. The lump of metal that had once been a gear transformed into cards and clattered to the floor.

"Oh. What was that?"

I ignored Maximilien's curious stare and turned to the parrot.

"I wasn't told there would be an uninvited guest, great witch."

[Neither was I! Eek! This one made a huge fuss insisting he absolutely had to see you! Useless as ever!]

The parrot scattered its feathers and shot a displeased look at Maximilien. Maximilien answered without missing a beat.

"What does it matter? We're both failures. No need to be so cold to each other."

[Eek? Failures?]

"Are we not both castaways who failed to reach the Demon God? We should pool our heads together and find some way to get there. Why try to monopolize your chance to speak with the King of Humanity alone?"

[Eek eek! I'm nothing like you! My contribution to creating the Root Tree was considerable!]

"If that were truly the case, you would have become the Demon God. But the one who actually became the Demon God was the Progenitor, was it not?"

The moment Maximilien casually mentioned Tyr, a strange blood scent drifted through the room. The parrot's neck creaked as it leveled a fierce glare at Maximilien.

[Don't... mention Tyrkanzyaka... in front of me....]

"An emotional response is unbecoming. The Progenitor is simply a being who became a Demon God recently. Naturally we should analyze the case, yes?"

Something flashed between the parrot's snapping, fury-spitting beak. It wasn't my imagination. Something crept slowly upward from deep inside the parrot's throat. It was a pale, slender finger. A jutting index finger seized the beak and wrenched it open. The beak gaped as if it might tear apart.

Through that gap came a white, slender finger, pointing straight at Maximilien.

[Shut up!]

And where that finger pointed, Maximilien's chest caved inward by exactly one knuckle's depth. Blood shot spiraled in a helix above his heart.

Heart destruction. Dark magic, and not just any dark magic, the advanced kind I couldn't even begin to imagine. Dark magic in its nature is close to a curse and struggles to exert direct physical force, but the darkest and most powerful dark magic is force in itself. An absurd, accursed power drove straight through Maximilien's heart.

Too lethal a blow to call a warning.

But the fundamental principle of dark magic is sameness, and Maximilien's body had already departed far from the ordinary.

Clatter. Dozens of tiny gears fell from the front of Maximilien's jacket. Maximilien furrowed his brow.

"What is the meaning of this? Stop that. I only just had it repaired."

A significant portion of his body had been replaced with gears, so he walked away from a lethal dark magic strike without serious harm. There was an impact, but nothing more. The gears still beat in their steady rhythm.

An irritated voice came from the parrot.

[You've replaced your heart with gears now, too? Is there any part of your body left that's still human?]

"I haven't replaced my heart. I have only replaced the function the heart performs with gears."

[That's the same thing.]

"It is not. I focused purely on the functional aspect of the human body. You, who trust in the Root Tree as some blind watchmaker, may find that unsatisfying. But in the end, everything that goes into this has been touched by the hand of a repairman, has it not?"

The fallen gears spun upright and rolled back to Maximilien's feet. He pressed the scattered parts back into his body.

"You are a great witch, so your knowledge of the Root Tree must be considerable, but I too have seen and learned much during my time with the Lords of All Creation. In the end, I know just how sloppy and careless a blind watchmaker the Root Tree truly is, for all that it is the great principle that created humanity. The Root Tree did not create humans with intention. The human body carries countless limitations on top of being fragile and inefficient."

Having said that much, Maximilien looked at me.

"King of Humanity. Am I wrong?"

"No. You're right. This body wasn't made by any god's design."

Of course it wasn't. Maximilien is correct. Think about it properly for even a moment and you arrive at the same conclusion.

"Then why won't you accept the gears? I ask out of genuine curiosity."

Why? It's obvious. I pulled the regressor's wheelchair toward one side of the table and answered as I went.

"It's normal for the world not to go the way you want it to, Maximilien. That's exactly why you can't become a Demon God."

[Eek eek eek! Serves you right! Eek!]

The parrot doubled over laughing. A look of doubt crossed Maximilien's face.

"What do you mean?"

"Exactly what I said. The world doesn't bend to our convenience in the first place. The most efficient and rational method? That's a way of living in accordance with the world's laws, not a method for creating those laws. You're trying to reverse cause and effect and then reason from there."

A Demon God is a law of the world. Don't make the mistake of thinking of it the way you might think of a nation's legal code. Unlike nations, which are made by humans, of humans, and for humans, the world simply exists.

"Your problem is that you're trying to create a law that conforms to the rules. If your pride is in conforming well, you could just go on living that way, but you're trying to go in circles, and that's where the problem comes from."

I'm not a Demon God either. But among all those countless creatures, only humans have ever reached the Demon God, and thanks to that, I, who can wield the Demon God, at least understand conceptually what a Demon God is.

Haven't given a lecture in a while. I stood before one parrot and one gear-doll and began to explain.

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