NOVEL NEXT Chapter 211
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The Antagonist VIII
No matter how important rooftops are in subculture—be they for love letters or dramatic confrontations—this wasn’t the best place to have a relaxing conversation with the Saintess. The backdrop was just too grim. Even though time had stopped, the hellish landscape below spiraled outward into the distance.
“Let’s go somewhere else to talk.”
“Yes, let’s.”
“But is there no way to unfreeze the others from Time Stop?”
The Saintess shook her head. “That would be difficult. I need to be physically holding their hand to move them through the frozen world.”
Now that she mentioned it, she was still holding my hand tightly. But then, I wondered—couldn’t we just use the ‘walking hand-in-hand’ method to bring at least one more person along?
Before I could say anything, she added, “Unless they have a level of aura mastery like yours, it would be hard for them to survive. They would need to overcome the concept of ‘time’ itself.”“Hmm. That makes sense.”
It was like surviving in the vacuum of space. For a regular person—or even a fairly trained Awakener—it would be nearly impossible to do something as simple as speaking.
“That’s why I can pull off little tricks like this.”
The Saintess let go of my hand. In my vision, her palm slowly drifted away, as if moving in slow motion, floating just 0.1 centimeters above my hand.
Clap.
And then, suddenly, I found myself standing in the first-floor lobby of the National Road Management Corps headquarters.
“......?”
“I just stopped time.”
Her face remained expressionless. But as the self-proclaimed Guinness World Record Holder for Interpreting the Saintess’s Expressions, I could detect the subtle air hidden beneath that cold exterior.
This woman... was having fun. She was feeling a bit elated.
“Wait a second, Saintess.”
“The World.”
Again, she let go of my hand. The next moment, I was standing in the middle of Babel Tower Plaza.
“......”
“Ta-da.”
She said it in the most emotionless tone imaginable. Which meant she was probably the one who had carried me here while time was stopped.
“...Saintess.”
“Yes?”
“You’re in a really good mood, aren’t you?”
“Yes. It’s been 2,000 years since I last talked to someone.”
“Yeah, I was alone for about 212 years after the Infinite Metagame screwed me over, so I can understand how it feels...”
It was the round when Ah-ryeon found me and said, “I love the café mocha you make, Guild Leader.” I had hugged her like a child and cried.
Those 200 years of solitude had broken me, turning me into a pathetic regressor who could be beaten by that weirdo. This person in front of me had survived ten times that length of solitude...
In short, the Saintess was now in a “hyper-weakened” state.
Realizing this, I immediately scooped her up into a princess carry.
“Oh.”
“You’ve been through a lot. Thank you, Saintess.”
“......”
“If you hadn’t stopped time, I honestly would have given up on this mission. I might have ended up as a regressor trapped in an eternal hell of repeating time.”
During my 200-year isolation, the thing I needed most was human warmth. That was probably why I hugged Ah-ryeon so instinctively when I saw her. People understand others by reflecting on their own experiences, so I had a good idea of what the Saintess might want right now.
“......”
Fortunately, my guess wasn’t wrong.
The Saintess quietly rested in my arms. Her sea-colored hair, which had grown slightly longer in her 2,000 years, swayed gently toward me.
“I know a good café nearby. Why don’t we head there?”
“...No. Just walking around like this is fine.”
“Oh. Alright, let’s do that, then.”
Step. Step.
We moved through the stillness of the world. The princess-carry pose we were in looked a bit ridiculous, but luckily, no one was around to see it.
Everyone else in the world was frozen in place, their breaths held. The people who had been trapped in the torment of the Mountain of Knives Hell and Boiling Oil Hell were frozen in mid-scream, their poses like sculptures.
We walked past those petrified figures.
“To be honest, I was a bit worried,” the Saintess said, finally breaking the silence.
“Worried?”
“Yes. I’m a monster now.” Her voice, though calm, carried a dryness that had lingered in her for a long time. “I’ve become a monster powerful enough to be classified as an Outer God. And you, Undertaker, you’re nearly always hostile to monsters. So...”
“Ah, I see. You were worried I’d take one look at you and go, ‘this damn monster,’ and try to kill you?”
“Yes. I considered it a possibility.”
I laughed. “If you ever see me react that way, kill me immediately. That would be a doppelganger.”
No matter how important it was to rid the world of anomalies, it would never take precedence over the people around me. If I ever turned into some kind of monster-hunting machine who put that above everything else, then I’d be no different from a monster myself. I’d deserve to be hunted down.
Of course, the Saintess’s body temperature was already far from human. It was as cold as a shadow. Probably around 15°C. But for someone who had spent 2,000 winters alone, she possessed a warmth that still awed me.
“......”
Then something curious happened.
Shhhk.
The Saintess’s aura crawled up my arm, inching its way up toward me. Her aura was colorless and transparent, so outwardly, nothing changed. She remained still in my arms, quietly resting against me.
‘Her aura control has become incredibly refined.’
Impressed, I summoned my own black aura and gently wrapped it around her transparent one as it made contact with my arm.
“......”
Her aura hesitated for a moment, then responded to my black aura, tentatively wrapping around it, like fingers intertwining in a delicate, cautious handshake. Together, transparent and black auras bloomed.
Just like how flowers bloom without making a sound, the Saintess closed her eyes as she nestled in my arms.
“......”
“......”
Aura had a warmth of its own.
What we were doing was, in essence, the same thing as humans exchanging body heat, using an aura technique that ordinary Awakeners couldn’t even dream of mastering.
Perhaps the difference between humans and monsters wasn’t a matter of internal temperature or the number of fingers we had. Maybe it came down to what we tried to imitate with those things.
For a while, we silently confirmed each other’s humanity through that warmth.
“While I was living in this frozen world, I thought about ways to infiltrate Nut’s domain.”
We were in the café at the old Baekje Hospital, where Old Man Scho often talked to Mrs. Adele.
The Saintess sipped her coffee. It was the first cup of coffee I had made for her in a long time.
It was just instant coffee, though, made by ripping open a golden packet and pouring hot water over it. But that was her favorite. My pride as a barista had long since crumbled in the face of modern food technology.
“Did you have any success?”
“Unfortunately, no,” she said with a shake of her head. “The closest I got was with the concept of ‘life flashing before your eyes.’ According to some stories, people who experience that can catch a glimpse of the afterlife. So I pushed myself to the brink of death to try it.”
“Oh, that’s a clever idea.”
“Yes... But in the end, I still couldn’t get past the glass barrier separating life and death.”
The glass. It was the metaphor for ‘something you can see through but can’t cross.’
I wished I could just punch through that glass, but the barrier Nut had constructed was far stronger than the bulletproof glass used for the U.S. president’s limousine.
Now that I thought about it, when Fairy No. 264 took me into the Inner World, that had been our best chance to break through...
But what’s done is done. Regretting the past wouldn’t help now.
“Tell me all the methods you tried.”
“Of course.”
We discussed the countless failed attempts the Saintess had made over the past 2,000 years.
Let me clarify—this wasn’t a sign of her incompetence. In fact, Nut hadn’t been able to interfere with the Saintess’s Time Stop in all that time either. The Outer God had the power to turn the world into hell in a single day, yet it couldn’t touch the frozen time that the Saintess had created.
When anomalies with the power of an Outer God clashed, their territorial battles played out in this way.
“Actually, your power and Nut’s are polar opposites.”
The Saintess tilted her head. “Really?”
“Yes. The world you freeze is, in a sense, ‘nothingness.’ Since time has stopped, there is no life, no pain, and no awareness.”
And paradoxically, that nothingness was the complete opposite of hell.
“Hell, or the afterlife, is where people’s souls continue to exist after death, a place of endless something,” I concluded.
“I see.”
“So, Nut can’t invade your realm of nothingness, just as you can’t invade her realm of something. You’re opposites.”
“...So, we’re in an eternal stalemate, doomed to fight forever.”
“If you’re on your own.” I rubbed my chin. “Glass. Glass. We need to break that glass. Anomalies related to glass....”
“Shouldn’t we also consider mirrors?” the Saintess suggested. “You said that when you entered the Inner World, you saw your real-world self reflected in the glass.”
“Yes. My image was projected below me, showing what I looked like in the real world.”
“Then it’s more like a ‘mirror’ than just ‘glass.’ After all, the afterlife is a copy of the living world.”
“That’s a good point. Hmm...”
The people of this world had been “copied and pasted” into Nut’s domain. Then Nut claimed that the copy was the real thing, while we on the other side were just the souls suffering in hell. So, yes, the concept of a “mirror” was more accurate than just “glass.”
“Mirrors. Mirrors, huh. That makes me think of doppelgangers... No, doppelgangers are part of the Hell of Infinite Time. It’s more about identity confusion, then.”
“The Ship of Theseus?”
“Possibly. If we list anomalies connected to identity confusion, we’ve got the Ship of Theseus, the Uyuni Desert, Cringe History Mosquito, and... Potato Saintess...”
“Please leave out the last one.”
What? Who knows, that might be the most important clue of all.
“In any case,” I acquiesced, “none of those seem directly connected to entering Nut’s domain... Oh.”
My mental database of anomalies had been combing through the past, and at that moment, it hit on a keyword.
“Mirrors!” I shot to my feet, still holding the Saintess’s hand.
“Yes?”
“There’s an anomaly related to mirrors, hell, and the living world! How could I have forgotten?”
How could I have missed it?
The anomaly that endlessly repeated the idea that this world is hell itself, thus, being born into such a world is a sin.
-Kill yourself.
The Magic Mirror, an anomaly born from the tale of Snow White.
That psychopath Yu Ji-won always had that mirror in her room. It was the perfect clue leading to the Goddess of the Night, Nut.
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