Chapter 66

There was a fishing rod before his eyes.

He gripped the fishing rod and shook it gently, then stood up from his seat.

“What?”

The friend sitting beside him looked at him puzzled.

“It’s been a while.”

“What’s been a while? We saw each other three days ago.”

Drich grumbled, then whipped his head around. His fishing rod was shaking.

“It’s here, it’s here!”

He watched the delighted Drich, then took off his shirt. He also removed his shoes and set them aside.

“Quil, what are you doing?”

“Just wait.”

He jumped straight into the river. He exhaled the breath he’d been holding as he reached the riverbed.

He reached out toward the fish moving with its tail flicking busily. It was a quick one, but Quilbion’s hand was a bit quicker.

Thick as two adult forearms combined. It had solid flesh—there’d be quite a bit to eat.

“Catch.”

He came out of the water and threw the fish. Drich cheered while watching the fish flop on the ground.

“Hey, look at the size of this thing. We can eat for two days.”

“Go eat it with the kids.”

Drich lifted the fish.

“But weren’t you scared of going in the water? Even though you like fishing.”

“I was scared.”

“Was?”

Quilbion approached Drich and gripped his shoulder firmly.

“Live well, okay? Be good to your family. Gamble in moderation.”

“You’re saying things you’ve never said. Are you sick?”

“I am sick. My head. It hurts like hell.”

After sitting back down in the chair, he gulped down his breath. After going back and forth hundreds, thousands of times, he’d developed a knack for returning.

Hold your breath until you can’t endure anymore, when you really feel like you’re going to die.

Hold it once more.

“Hey, hey hey. What’s wrong with you?”

Drich approached and shook his body. In his gradually blurring vision, he could see Drich turning deathly pale.

“Hey! Breathe! Breathe! Quil, Quilbion!”

I’m not dying, you bastard.

So stop slapping my cheeks.

The world turned white, then regained its original colors.

Quilbion scratched his head and looked to the right. Winte was sitting there. Staring blankly while holding an empty coffee cup.

“You come and go with no warning whatsoever.”

“I know.”

His head throbbed. Even pressing firmly on his temples didn’t help much.

“What happens to me left in the crack?”

“Who knows? If it were a commonly recognized dimension, it would lose meaning the moment the observing subject disappears. It would remain only as a possibility.”

“Will the crack I go to be like that too?”

“I told you I don’t know.”

“At least try to find out.”

When he scolded him, Winte looked at him as if he were pathetic.

He straightened his stiff back.

“I need to prepare countermeasures.”

“Countermeasures?”

“If I get pulled away at an unwanted moment, the body left here will just be sitting here stupidly, and that’s dangerous.”

“Was there anything left here worth calling dangerous?”

Winte raised his finger and spun it in a circle.

“I need to prepare for when I go outside. Lord Winte, you said it yourself. That I’m also becoming an exceptional being.”

“When you leave, the nark you obtained within the surface realm will disappear. Probably. Your warped brain will also return to normal. Probably. So you won’t be pulled into the cracks anymore. Probably.”

“Probably, probably. You have a talent for messing with people, our dear Lord Winte.”

“First, you can’t be called a person, and I’m not messing with you. It’s a matter of probability.”

He snorted while snatching Winte’s coffee cup.

“Make it hot.”

“Yes, yes.”

“But why aren’t you asking?”

“Asking what? I’ve asked you all sorts of things.”

“The female form you saw. You must be curious about its identity.”

That woman.

Just briefly recalling her revived unpleasantness, disgust, and an inseparable terror.

“What would I do with that knowledge? I won’t see her again anyway.”

“Revenge, something like that—you’re not thinking about it?”

“Me? Why? I’m not a lunatic who charges at something that clearly looks fatal.”

“Really?”

“I know now. That’s like a natural disaster. A typhoon, earthquake, avalanche summoned by Twella—something like that. If your house gets swept away by heavy rain, do you curse at the sky and vow revenge? No one does that.”

Quilbion trudged down the stairs. For some reason, Winte followed behind.

If he’d known this would happen, he would’ve jumped down from the rooftop. Winte seemed determined to talk about that woman and brought up the topic again.

“What you saw is one of the first to become self-aware.”

“I said I don’t want to know.”

He shook his head while stepping down the stairs.

Even while brewing coffee after arriving on the first floor, Winte’s persistent gaze didn’t leave him.

Finally, he met his eyes and asked back,

“What, why? Whatever that woman is, it has nothing to do with me.”

“When erosion happens, those things will be at the vanguard.”

“Let them. It’s not happening tomorrow, and even you said you don’t know when it’ll happen.”

The dark brown coffee sloshed inside the cup. Perhaps because his attention was divided by responding, the aroma was disappointing. He should have put more force when pressing.

“Drink it. It’s a bit lacking, but it’s not my fault, so don’t complain.”

Winte received the cup.

“When you leave this place, will you warn the sentient beings outside?”

Laughter came out without resistance. Quilbion waved his hand while saying,

“Lord Winte. Did you forget what I was doing outside? I was a slave. A slave who spent more time looking at pigs than people. What would someone like that worry about others? I’ll have my hands full just taking care of myself.”

“Is that so?”

“There are plenty of capable people outside. You’ve heard of war machines, right? They say giant lumps of metal walk on two feet. Goblins would become less than neighborhood dogs in front of those metal chunks. And what about the great mages?”

Designer, goblins, erosion, the structure of the world and so on.

When he heard it, he nodded along. It was his only entertainment, after all. The stories Winte conveyed were all so mythical that they were good to listen to absently, like hearing fairy tales.

Countless fairy tales starting with once upon a time in the distant past, disconnected from reality.

But what reaction should he show if someone whispers that those fairy tales are real and something he must handle?

Quilbion snorted again.

“When I escape from this godforsaken place, I’m going to forget everything and live. Things about Lord Winte, things about goblins—I’ll cleanly erase everything from my head.”

Should he keep the years of chatting with illusions, forgetting even himself and time while tearing goblins apart, etched deep in his heart?

Absolutely not.

It was wiser to dismiss it as a dream, a terrible nightmare at that, and forget it while living.

Confronting that woman?

Why would I?

“Sorcery, or power, enough to escape from here. Once I obtain just that, I can give up everything else. A body that doesn’t age? A body that heals in a few days even when completely smashed? I don’t need any of it.”

Not here, but there.

He’d spent countless long hours in the cracks.

Meetings only become blessings when paired with partings.

A world with partings removed is no different from hell. If there’s a beginning, there must also be an end.

That’s how people can live without going mad.

“People should die when it’s time to die. That’s the natural order, the principle. The reason the Designer gave us limited lives. Living long means you won’t see anything good.”

“When I first met you, you were a monkey, but now you’ve become a philosopher.”

“I haven’t lived as long as you, Lord Winte, but there probably isn’t a human who’s lived longer than me. Ah, since it came up, let me ask one thing.”

Quilbion brought up a fact he’d been deliberately ignoring.

“How much time has passed?”

“Time? By Human Tribe standards?”

“Yes. I can’t get a sense of how many years have passed since I was dragged here. I think it’s been about 25 years, but even that’s uncertain.”

He’d stopped making tally marks in each dormitory room long ago. He had to calculate the time spent pulled into the cracks too, and that was impossible.

“Is the village I lived in still there? Even if the employer’s dead, his daughter should be alive.”

“What would you do if she’s alive?”

“Just see her face. I don’t even have any hard feelings left. Actually, it’s cute. Compared to what I experienced in the cracks, what she showed was just petty pranks.”

He’d experienced war countless times in the cracks.

Sometimes as a soldier of the victorious nation, sometimes as a general of the defeated nation. Eating meals beside corpses was everyday life.

No, war was still better.

Because it was something he could handle himself.

The cruelty of having to just watch his family suffer harm was pain that couldn’t be expressed in words.

Of course, even that pain had dulled now.

He still smiled when happy and cried when sad, but the Quilbion in the cracks had completely lost his proactivity.

He merely shared various emotions through relationships formed there.

It used to be different.

Even after realizing that place wasn’t real, Quilbion had devoted himself to life within the cracks.

Serving, loving, sometimes cruelly killing others.

He focused on living. It was a world that would vanish upon waking, that he’d never encounter again, but he never lived carelessly for even a moment.

However, Quilbion confirmed once again through the years that human willpower isn’t infinite.

It was from that time that he began returning immediately upon recognizing the crack.

Meetings are certainly pleasant things.

But partings are even more joyful.

If he could forget everything, that would truly be a gift from god, a blessing.

“If she’s dead, I should find her grave, spit once, and leave a flower. She did give me lots of tasty things.”

Winte smiled faintly. Winte’s smile was a rare phenomenon you could see maybe once a year.

“130 years.”

“……What?”

“130 years have passed since you came to this place.”

“Stop bullshitting, seriously. Even though I lived in a daze, it wasn’t that long.”

“I’ve said it every time, but I don’t feel the necessity of lies. If you don’t want to accept it, you don’t have to believe it. I’ve merely conveyed the truth—how you interpret that truth is your freedom.”

Winte vanished from before his eyes.

He seemed to have gone up to the rooftop.

Quilbion stared blankly down at his coffee cup.

130 years.

There was an old woman in the village famous for her age, and she was definitely 83.

Just how long is 130 years?

It was so staggering he couldn’t even grasp it.

Quilbion set down the cup and headed to the mirror. Whether by Winte’s magic or sorcery or some unknown power, the dormitory’s interior facilities maintained their unchanged appearance.

The mirror with a corner torn off was still clean.

He stood before the mirror after a long time.

There was a man with strange hair color in front of him. Like fish scales, in sunlight it seemed to glisten silver, but when he moved slightly, even receiving light it looked like deep, dim gray.

He lifted his flowing hair.

A face without a single wrinkle welcomed him.

“130 years.”

The man in the mirror spoke the absurd years.

“They’re all dead then, every last one.”

The employer who beat him well but also paid well, the employer’s daughter who smiled with her eyes while making him do petty things, the friends born in the alley who hung out together.

Ah.

Even his family whose faces were now hazy.

It meant not a single one remained—all of them were sleeping beneath the ground without exception.

Was it sad, was it depressing in stark solitude, or perhaps…

Quilbion stared quietly at the man in the mirror.

“Should I make a new name?”

The terribly worn man merely shrugged his shoulders once.

Just that much regret.

That was all.