WeTried Translations

Translator: ZEROSUGAR

Editor: Abstract

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◈ Regression is Too Much

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Chapter 312

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The regressor fights (31)

He had become aware of the regression, and he had grasped its conditions. A modern person might have rejoiced, thinking, a once-in-a-lifetime chance has come to me. Unfortunately, the Heavenly Demon was not a Korean weaned on stories of regression and possession.

Still, from the Heavenly Demon's perspective, there was a small mercy. The world he had lived in belonged to an era of space colonization, an over-technology setting. The living beings of that world had never stopped fantasizing about time either, and there had even been real attempts to develop the technology for it. Those attempts had ultimately failed, but the concept of regression was not entirely foreign to him.

The Heavenly Demon had lived his life obsessed with combat and had never once cared for popular culture while he was alive, but after being sealed in the sword, he traveled alongside Guntar and absorbed a wide range of knowledge along the way. Thanks to that, he was not thrown into total confusion by the situation. He also happened to be aware of a few clichés that might apply here.

...

When the Heavenly Demon's consciousness had resided in the sword, he used to say one thing to Guntar constantly. Think about what This Venerable One would do. Guntar's hand was never ruthless enough, and his skill in commanding a fight was sorely lacking. Whenever Guntar barely crawled out of a battle alive and clutched his head, asking himself how he should have won, that was what the Heavenly Demon always told him.

But now, the Heavenly Demon had begun asking himself a different question. What would Guntar have done. He had spent his entire life as the hunter who set the traps, yet now he was the rabbit caught in one. Racking his brain to figure out an opponent's intentions had always been his enemy's job, never his own. His usual way of thinking, crush everything beneath him, was doing him no good here. He needed to borrow Guntar's imaginative way of thinking instead.

And the original Guntar, in this position...

...I need to understand the conditions in more detail.

Guntar would have tried to use this regression. Would have taken it into his own hands, more actively.

Of course, the Heavenly Demon had absolutely no intention of actively wielding this regression himself. Whatever transcendent being had granted him this power surely had its own agenda, and the Heavenly Demon had no interest in playing along with it. His first priority was escaping the Tower. Getting revenge on the angels or slaughtering the climbers came second, if at all.

Even so, he had to admit that he needed to understand the conditions of this regression in more detail. If regression persisted even after he escaped the Tower, he would eventually need to adapt to it. Guntar would have carefully worked out under exactly what circumstances, under what conditions, and by what trigger the regression activated, then used that knowledge for himself. So the Heavenly Demon decided to do the same.

Move.

"...No."

The problem was that the body's owner refused to listen, in the most infuriating way possible. Which meant the Heavenly Demon's chances to take the lead were painfully rare. For someone used to crushing obstacles by sheer force, every moment of this was maddening, but he endured it, again and again.

Whenever he managed to briefly seize control, he ran what experiments he could, and from those scraps he was able to piece together some conclusions.

Self-inflicted injury did not trigger regression. Scratching his own arm with his nails in the room, cutting himself with a blade, even letting a tiny burst of mana rupture something inside his own body. None of it triggered regression.

But strangely, getting wounded during contact with outsiders did trigger it. The condition seemed to be regression upon being wounded by someone else.

...Unsettling.

The Heavenly Demon felt an unease that ran down to instinct. He could not tell whether it came from the sheer bizarreness of this situation, something he could not fully accept, or from his own refusal to accept being caught in a trap like this. Either way, he sensed that something was off. He just couldn't pin down the cause.

He kept running experiments regardless, and eventually uncovered a few rules.

First. The point of return was fixed. Regardless of when the wound occurred, the moment he returned to was always the same. It was not regression to "three days before the wound," but regression to "this specific point."

Second. The wound had to come from someone else. Already covered above, so he moved past it.

Third. There was no way to resist the regression. No matter what he tried.

Put plainly, in vulgar terms, it was a situation of being completely screwed. Of course, the Heavenly Demon focused less on the situation itself and more on the intentions of the transcendent being behind it.

They must have noticed that This Venerable One has regained consciousness.

The fact that his soul had been revived so easily in the first place was suspicious to begin with. The angels were not fools. There was no reason they would carelessly revive the soul of an absolute ruler who had once commanded an entire universe, and bring him back inside the Tower of all places. Even if such a mistake had somehow been made, an archangel could have appeared at any moment and erased him back into nothing.

But the angels hadn't done that. They were watching him. What was their intention. The Heavenly Demon turned the question over and over, but no answer came.

"Jun-ho, has that thing come out yet?"

"No. I've got the CCTV feed linked to the device, but it's still inside the room."

Of course, the Heavenly Demon was being deceived. He was not the one holding the regression. The black-haired Asian man watching him was simply, quietly biting the inside of his own cheek until it bled.

But being deceived was hardly the Heavenly Demon's fault. It was already difficult to imagine that another regressor might exist at all, let alone recognize that this other regressor was feeding him false information on purpose to trick him.

If the Heavenly Demon had possessed a richer imagination, he might have guessed the truth: that some Asian regressor, the moment he woke, stormed straight into the Colosseum Management's territory, performed some secret ritual to secure an Elixir, drew their attention through it, then summoned an angel and swore he would resolve the "Heavenly Demon problem" (or, from the Colosseum Management's point of view, Guntar's madness), and in doing so won overwhelming support. He might have guessed that along the way, this regressor made full use of every trait that curried favor, starting with Curiosity. But in this particular direction, the Heavenly Demon's imagination fell short.

If the Heavenly Demon had secretly kidnapped someone else without Kim Jun-ho's knowledge and made that person wound him instead, regression would not have triggered, and he would have realized he was being deceived. But the Heavenly Demon never even recognized that he was being "deceived" in the first place, and the false personality that kept interfering at every turn would never have allowed him to act so freely anyway. To reclaim his true strength, the Heavenly Demon needed to fight, but without that strength restored, fighting without taking a single wound was simply impossible.

But every living thing learns. Evolves. Changes. Even a somewhat stubborn Heavenly Demon was not incapable of change.

Repeating the same action while expecting a different result is called madness. The Heavenly Demon had not yet gone mad, so naturally, he sought to change.

If things stayed as they were, nothing would change. He would simply repeat these same three days forever. Once three days passed, the beastmen would swarm him again, and he would regress once more.

...Should I unleash my power.

There was an option to accept some risk and unleash his mana the moment they came swarming. Since injuring himself did not seem to trigger regression, unleashing mana and slaughtering everyone would surely avoid it too.

But the reason he hesitated was that this "regression" power seemed connected to the angels from the start. Something capable of granting a power on this scale could only be an archangel, or something above that.

A god.

They were watching. No, they were certainly watching. Only a god, or something equivalent to one, could pull off trickery on this scale. He had no way to know their intentions, but one thing was certain: using his mana to wipe everyone out was not the right direction to take. On the surface, at least, this god seemed to lean toward some notion of good.

Then, was there no way to subdue everyone without taking a wound? If it was subjugation rather than killing, wouldn't even a god let that slide?

But this too seemed far from easy, because the ones who charged first were only the weakest of the bunch. As far as the Heavenly Demon could tell, the real threats hung back and watched from a distance, while the weaker ones rushed in first.

Above all, there was the one and only human, the Asian man. He looked like the strongest of the group, and if the Heavenly Demon had to fight everyone at once with that man mixed in, avoiding injury entirely would be next to impossible. Killing might be one thing, but subduing without using mana was not.

In conclusion, subjugation was out. Which meant... he had to avoid the fight altogether from the start.

...

Pride. Self-respect. Dignity. Self-Esteem.

The Heavenly Demon's self-love ran immense. Anyone who does not love themselves cannot grow strong beyond a certain point, because hatred eventually burns the body that carries it. The Heavenly Demon took pride in his own efforts and believed in himself. The very foundation that let him look down on the weak who refused to put in effort, without a shred of shame, was that belief in himself.

The Heavenly Demon believed he was the greatest under heaven. The greatest in the universe. The greatest across all ages. Because he believed it, he carried himself with pride wherever he went, whenever he stood. He had never once denied himself. That was the Heavenly Demon's way, and the reason he respected the strong. It was also the reason he had fallen into confusion after experiencing the power of a god.

But now. The Heavenly Demon bent, in order to create a variable. He attempted change.

Guntar.

"...What?"

Speak.

"Speak what, exactly."

You really are Guntar. So tell them to back off, now.

"..."

Tell them... that you are not the Heavenly Demon.

The Heavenly Demon, for the first time, denied that he was the Heavenly Demon.

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