WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Hydrogen B

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 604: Even Regression Becomes a Bitch After ???? Times

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The Heaven-Reversing Boundary was created to defy Heaven.

Talent was something one was born with.

You were emotional, simple-minded, and rash. A child without talent like you should never have learned energy arts. The foundation of energy arts was distinguishing yourself from the world, then gathering your will within your body and unleashing it. It was clothing that did not suit you.

When others took ten steps, you would barely manage one. When others kicked off and ran, you would crawl on your belly like an infant.

Still, the Heaven-Reversing Boundary was fair even to someone as talentless as you. It was honest with everyone.

Regardless of Heaven-given talent, so long as you possessed a human body, you could achieve greatness by engraving experience and effort into that body.

Without will, through pure experience and sensation alone, it would control your body through the unconscious and make it move. If you mastered the Heaven-Reversing Boundary, you would become a powerhouse whose name shook the world.

...But to reach the truth through energy arts without will, for a dull talent who had chosen the second-best path to reach the summit, would require effort many times, tens of times, hundreds of times greater than anyone else's. An immense accumulation of experience and effort that could never fit within one human lifetime.

If you returned every time you died, perhaps... you might reach that realm.

I only hoped, Shei, that you never would.

I hoped your fragile body and heart would not be engraved with so many traces.

Before the endless cycle crushed you, I hoped you would save the world first.

...That was all I could hope for.

* * *

Even after killing Shei, Nevida felt no strong emotion. She had been quite sharp and impressive, but she was only one of many formidable foes Nevida had encountered throughout her life. She had not been exceptional enough to stand apart.

There was one thing that bothered her, though.

"Was she a Holy Maiden?"

Shei had made her feel as though she were facing a Holy Maiden.

Occasionally, a Holy Maiden specialized in battle would emerge, like the Steel Maiden, but Holy Maidens were not fundamentally combatants. Their authority lay in seeing the future and twisting its flow.

Politics, schemes, trickery, coincidence. The essence of a Holy Maiden was stealing "victory" through every possible means. The moment a Holy Maiden appeared, victory was already assured. Everything afterward was only pointless struggling, unrelated to the state of the battle.

Paradoxically, the only way to fight a Holy Maiden was to ignore all of that and resist anyway.

"..."

After considering it briefly, Nevida went to confirm Shei's death instead of returning to the Domain of the Lords. The threat of a Holy Maiden outweighed every other danger.

The traces were easy to find. Shei's body had left a path through the forest like a bulldozer had knocked down dozens of trees. Nevida lightly descended into it.

At the end of her gaze, a bloodied hand hung limply. It was Shei's hand. The rest of her body was hidden beneath rocks and logs. Still, the blood flowing from below indirectly showed how miserable her end had been.

She was certainly dead. Even the King of the Underworld would have ruled the same way. Nevida agreed. All that remained was to return and grind up every druid who had dared interfere with her liege's resurrection, then use them as fertilizer.

"Born from nature, returned to nature's embrace."

After offering the obligatory mourning of a druid, Nevida was about to leave. Then a small groan reached her ears.

"Ah."

It was far too clear and pure to be a dying cry. Startled by the utterly alien voice, Nevida turned around.

It was Shei.

She resembled Shei, and she stood in a place where no one but Shei could have appeared. So Nevida understood that being to be Shei.

"There you are. The bookmark I put in place."

In other words, she was far too different from Shei.

There was a toy called a thaumatrope. Different images were drawn on either side of a piece of paper, and when strings or rods attached to it were spun quickly, the afterimages of both pictures blended into one.

Shei looked like one of those images.

Her bleached-white hair glittered like light. It was impossible to tell whether it was long or short. A lively glow shone upon a face that looked detached from life and enlightened beyond it.

She seemed endlessly fleeting, as though she might disappear at any moment, yet Shei was clearly there.

She vanished, appeared, smiled, and cried. Shei was both of them, and nothing at all. Even Nevida, who had seen every kind of hardship, had never witnessed such an unknown phenomenon.

The one point where the two afterimages overlapped was Shei's gaze. With eyes shining in seven colors, Shei stared at the top of the Tree of Origin.

"Is Hughes still up there? He's waking the King of Humanity, right? There should still be some time left. Right? I can watch, can't I...?"

Her excited, yearning voice carried clear emotion.

There had been no sound or sign. Nevida looked at the boulder beneath which Shei had been crushed moments ago. The boulder remained as it had been, true to its nature. Only Shei had vanished from inside it.

"Had you been concealing your strength?"

Still looking upward, Shei answered.

"No. I concealed my memories."

"...Your memories?"

"Yeah. If energy arts can control the body, and memories remain as signals engraved into the brain, then that means you can block and hide part of your memories with energy arts. The Heaven-Reversing Boundary controls the unconscious, so while I'm using it, it also blocks the possibility that I might unconsciously recall those memories."

Nevida did not know it, but this was the realization of the Lightning Thief. Shei casually applied the realization of a Demon God who had gone to the Sanctum of their own accord, fearing that the truth they had discovered would be misused.

"If I take an impact strong enough to break the Heaven-Reversing Boundary, like just now, they come back like a life flashing before my eyes."

If the Heaven-Reversing Boundary broke from an impact powerful enough to kill her instantly, Shei's consciousness, trapped inside it, awakened. Like being born after shattering a hard shell.

Nevida looked at the transformed Shei and asked, "Why did you do that?"

Memories were accumulated experience. Why block them? Nevida could not understand. Shei had no duty to explain, but she answered with a bright smile, as if she had been waiting for that question.

"Because Hughes can read thoughts."

She spoke casually of the fact that even her thoughts could be invaded, smiling as though she was happy about it.

"...What?"

"You know something? Hughes always helps me. No matter when, where, or how we meet. The fastest way is to enter the Abyss, but even if I don't, Hughes always ends up helping me. Even if I don't say anything or want anything. He reads what I want!"

Shei did not seem to care about Nevida's reaction at all. In a dreamy voice like a girl in love, Shei chirped happily. Then her face suddenly darkened, and she murmured.

"With just one exception... when I know about his mind-reading."

It was sudden, but it was new information as well. Nevida asked, "Does my liege understand the hearts of people?"

"Yeah. Hughes reads wishes. Then he asks whether that wish is worth sacrificing your life and killing everyone around you to achieve. Hughes hates wishes that disregard life, but he respects them. So he gives you a chance to fulfill that wish until the very end, and if you still give up on living, he fulfills it and brings it to completion. On the other hand, he recognizes wishes that save others for what they are."

No matter how buried beneath lies and deception, no matter how swept up in endless monologues, only cold results untouched by emotion revealed the direction of a wish. In regressions repeated tens, hundreds of times, Shei had eventually realized it.

"He's not barbaric. Hughes is merciful. He gives everyone a chance to fulfill their wish. Whether they're good or evil. Maybe... that itself is barbaric."

Perhaps Shei had been too slow to realize it. Perhaps he had hidden it well. Maybe impartial mercy toward everyone had little to do with goodness. Not enough to prevent the world's destruction.

After pouring out the emotions hidden inside her shell, Shei gave a quiet sigh.

"Maybe that's why. When I know my thoughts are being read, when I entrust my wish to Hughes and cling to him... Hughes always leaves me in the end. I had no choice but to hide my memories. Otherwise, he'd leave me eventually."

It was difficult for Nevida, who had none of that information, to sympathize with her words. Still, Nevida understood one clear truth in this situation.

"You really are a Holy Maiden."

Only Holy Maidens spoke incomprehensible words based on foresight others could not share. And if Shei was a Holy Maiden, she was Nevida's enemy. The druid who had lived since ancient times knew that simplicity was the wisest way to think.

Shei watched Nevida prepare for battle and let the words slip out.

"Maybe. But I don't think that's important. Hughes is what matters. Even memories that repeat meaninglessly, that don't accumulate no matter how hard I try, that vanish so fleetingly... when I'm with him, they eventually connect. The memories piled up only within me build up inside him too, through my heart."

Nevida, who had lost her king and wandered for thousands of years, was likely in a similar position to Shei. Perhaps hers was worse. Nevida's king could not laugh and chatter like Shei's king.

Shei felt a little sympathy for Nevida. And she was certain Nevida would understand her as well.

"I'll get him back. The one person who can share my journey."

Shei stretched out her hand.

Then, as if that were natural, her hand was already inside the small World Tree. Passing through dense leaves and branches, she grasped Jizan trapped within.

'Passed through?'

Even that was not accurate. To Nevida's senses, Shei's hand seemed to have appeared at Jizan without going through the process of reaching it.

Nevida responded by swinging the small World Tree. Within a fraction of a second, bushes swollen from drinking spiritual energy exploded over Shei.

"Ouch."

Driven back by the green explosion, Shei stumbled and lost her balance. But she had already achieved her goal. Jizan, which had been sealed within the roots of the small World Tree, was now safely in her hand.

It was an alien power. It was likely connected to the faint flickering that appeared over Shei's entire body. Nevida observed Shei closely and said, "An ability that passes through matter."

"A little... different. Stair Step. It limits the world's smallest unit of movement, then moves by walking between those units like stairs."

"What?"

"We think the world is a slope, not stairs. If you can take one step, you can take half a step, then half of that, and half of that half... You think you can keep dividing a step without end. But that's wrong."

Tap, tap, tap. Shei's movements broke apart and resumed several times. Just as she said, she moved unnaturally, as though climbing stairs or catching on invisible steps.

"The world is actually countless stairs. Seen through a giant's eyes, hundreds of millions, trillions of steps look like a slope. But all of us live upon stairs. I only skipped up a few of them."

"What a needlessly complicated power."

"It's fine. I don't really understand it either. It is a Demon God that a genius born like a miracle happened to discover amid countless cycles of reincarnation, and it does not exist at this point in time. There is no guarantee it will be discovered again, either."

A Demon God was a principle of the world that could only be discovered when a historic genius, driven by mad obsession, encountered a miraculous opportunity.

Even among countless regressions and futures, Shei had discovered only a few new Demon Gods. Yet she did not feel that was insufficient. Even those few were more than she could handle.

"I only ingrained them in this body."

No matter how hard Shei tried, studied, and learned, she could not reproduce a Demon God. The seat of a Demon God was strict, and it would not make room for a dull talent like Shei.

But when using scissors, did one think about levers? When drawing water from a well, did one consider pulleys? There was no need to understand the principle just to use a tool.

And through sensation alone, Shei engraved countless traces into her body and learned the Demon Gods.

It was too lowly, incompetent, and foolish to call a principle. It was a principle like a blank sheet of paper, without any ability at all.

Still, after countless regressions, Shei had reached the truth.

The Infinite One. The other extreme the Heaven-Reversing Boundary reached through regression.

A principle that engraved Demon Gods not into the mind, but into the body.

Nevida, who had tried to seize Shei, realized there was no hope of doing so and changed her plan.

"Then I'll crush you whole."

There had to be limits to passing through matter. Nevida extended roots beneath her feet and linked herself to the Tree of Origin. Root touched root, crossed, and coiled together as Nevida became one with the Tree of Origin.

Making a familiar out of plants that could neither move nor sense was dangerous and useless.

But Nevida was a Demon God, and the Tree of Origin possessed the spiritual energy of the World Tree. There was no limit to the Tree of Origin, whose branches and leaves could become every plant species that existed.

The ground rose. Roots like a hidden sea emerged from beneath the earth. The roots became legs and planted themselves upon the ground, while the branches became arms and clenched powerful fists.

The Tree of Origin rose like a giant from Genesis.

"Root Colossus."

Did colossus mean a great beast, or a great tree?

No longer even a tree, the Tree of Origin roared and raised its branches high. A storm rose from that movement alone, sweeping away the surrounding trees all at once.

The giant from Genesis seemed ready to stomp its foot. This could no longer be called an attack. It was simply power comparable to a calamity.

Drawing back its branches with all its strength to gather force, the Tree of Origin fell toward Shei with all its weight behind it.

A branch of overwhelming mass descended. The displaced air exerted tremendous pressure. Feeling atmospheric pressure that crushed even space, Shei smiled as if she missed it.

"...It's been a while since I've seen this too."

Muttering, Shei recalled the principle engraved into her body once more.

The realization of a Demon God who, in a future now gone, had wandered the distant void beyond the sky and explored the truth. A miracle and calamity so simple yet powerful that it could only be reproduced indirectly by colliding the relics of Heaven and Earth.

The flickering intensified. The Heaven-Reversing Boundary reproduced the principle recorded in Shei's body. Holding Skywarbler and Jizan in either hand, Shei joined them together.

Jizan, condensed mass. Skywarbler, compressed space. Two relics symbolizing the earth and sky.

Shei had always layered Skywarbler over Jizan. The sky was blue only when it covered the earth, and the earth was peaceful only when it held the sky. Like this planet full of life, the two transformed in endless ways and created every manner of mysterious phenomenon.

But to kill someone, the reverse was better.

Even the countless stars floating in the universe met their end. A star at the end of its life expanded greatly one final time and let out a dying cry, then gradually contracted and died.

Condensation. Compression. Contraction. It grew smaller, burrowed inward, and even the structure of matter collapsed. The Earth Mother's relic faithfully followed a star's end.

Black Dwarf Sword.

A black sword, so small and slight.

The end of an entire realm unfolded in Shei's hand. The degenerated Jizan was no longer a sword or club. It converged and collapsed into a one-dimensional line, reaching the limit of destruction, too small even to deserve being called a skewer or a needle.

Wind revolved around it. Air particles drawn solely by its gravity collided and bore into one another, throwing off sparks. The ionized air shone as it created an electromagnetic storm.

Even as the surroundings flashed with light and noise, the eye of that storm remained black and quiet.

"It's a sword I can't use for long. The planet will be in danger. Let's stake everything and end this quickly."

Nevida swung the Root Colossus. A huge strike tore through the air, twisting the earth as it came down. It was a mythical blow, as though a giant from Genesis was expressing rage toward the Earth Mother.

Standing against a force that seemed visible from the other side of the continent was a thin line difficult to see even from nearby. The difference in size was so great that saying it faced the World Tree did not even seem possible.

If size and weight mattered, why would it be called a principle?

Shei stepped forward with her right foot and braced her back foot. Even the earth seemed unable to bear the weight. Her foot dug into the ground, crushing and melting it. Anchored firmly in ground turned to stone, Shei gripped the Black Dwarf Sword.

On the surface of a dying star, its final exhalation burned white-hot. Shei seized that power and swung it.

Heaven, Earth, and Cosmos.

Nova.

A tidal wave of corona that should only appear on a star's surface swept across the land.

Footnotes:

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