Chapter 191: Possibility

The room was dim.

The only light in the pitch-black space was a single beam of moonlight filtering through a small window.

...Where am I?

I walked over to the window and looked down outside.

It was the top floor of a tower so impossibly high that the ground was nowhere in sight.

I looked around the room again.

There wasn't a single bookshelf or any other piece of furniture. Books were piled all over the floor, enough to make the room look like a small library.

There was one spot bathed in moonlight.

I lowered my gaze and saw an old book lying at my feet.

I picked it up and opened it.

After reading a little of the first few pages, I realized it was a children's storybook.

“...”

I had been turning the pages one by one, reading the story.

Then I suddenly turned my head.

A girl was standing behind me before I knew it.

The girl gazed steadily at me and asked,

“Who?”

*

- ...Can't you hear me?! Hey!

The Demon King's voice snapped me back to my senses.

When I looked around, I was in the Reward Room.

“...What was I just doing?”

- What? You were just standing there, completely out of it.

“How long?”

- A few seconds or so. Is something wrong?

As though I'd dreamed for only an instant, the memory quickly grew hazy.

I tilted my head, then looked down at my wrist first.

The Floor 17 hidden route clear had been successful.

All the items the War Demon God had destroyed had been fully restored. That included Bandiul's Bracelet and Pankera's Crown.

I'd worried that because they'd been destroyed by Divinity, they might not be restored even after the clear. Thankfully, that wasn't the case.

“Diul.”

Relieved, I called Diul out.

Sss...

Diul slowly wriggled out of the bracelet.

Diul looked... quite different.

What had once been a human-shaped silhouette like a tiny fairy was now completely human in form.

‘Was it because Diul had unleashed all that power?’

Maybe this was what you'd call Full Manifestation. During the battle with the War Demon God, Diul had squeezed out power beyond the limit to save me.

I could feel that Diul had settled back into a stable state now.

The drastic rise in my own level of existence must have affected Diul as well. This was Diul's final form.

Diul flitted around my head.

Diul looked me over with an awkwardness that was unlike the usual brusque attitude, then asked,

‘You're... my master, right?’

I grinned.

“It's me, Diul.”

‘You're strange. It feels like you've become a different being.’

“It's probably because I absorbed Divinity.”

‘Divinity?’

And now Diul could speak perfectly, too.

Filled with deep gratitude and guilt, I said,

“It's all thanks to you protecting me, Diul.”

I kept thinking about what would have happened if Diul hadn't stepped in at that moment and put everything on the line for me.

Even if that desperate struggle had been futile, it had made the War Demon God let go of me, if only for a moment...

Without that, I might have died right there in the War Demon God's hands, and none of this might have happened.

Diul had always been such a huge help to me.

I was truly relieved that Diul had made it back safely.

‘Hmph... You're always doing reckless things like you're trying to get yourself killed. What else am I supposed to do?!’

After grumbling, Diul asked,

‘Did you defeat that scary monster?’

“Yeah. It's all over.”

‘...That's a relief. Stupid Master. If you ever do that again, I'm never stepping in to help you.’

Diul continued circling around me as if fascinated, then eventually went back into the bracelet.

I looked down at my palm.

The Sage's Mark that had been glowing there was gone once again.

The mark itself no longer mattered much.

After all, it had already completed me as a Vessel capable of holding Divinity.

- Hah, to think you'd end up becoming a god like this... Absurd. So what the Sage gave you was a Vessel for Divinity.

The Demon King still sounded shaken.

I was just as stunned.

I'd never imagined things would turn out this way.

The Demon King had said that a Vessel for Divinity had to be something you were born with, so how had the Sage managed to give me one?

Looking back, it had seemed like the Sage used the Book of Omniscience as material to create something...

I had no idea how far ahead the Sage had foreseen, but thanks to the Sage, I'd made it this far.

I offered the Sage my heartfelt thanks in my mind as well.

I said to the Demon King,

“I'm not complete yet.”

Now that I'd reached this point, I could tell.

I still hadn't become a complete god.

Maybe I was something like a demigod, similar to the War Demon God.

My Divinity was vastly higher in rank than his, though, which was why I'd been able to defeat him so easily.

My Time Stop Ability.

According to the Demon King, there was no fixed path to obtaining Divinity. Everyone reached it in their own way.

But I'd possessed this ability for as far back as I could remember, perhaps from the very moment I was born into this world.

I'd only possessed the tiniest speck of it, which was why until now, whenever I stopped time, I hadn't been able to move either...

Once the Sage gave me the Vessel, I had the foundation to hold enough Divinity; the Faith of countless people in me fulfilled another condition; and thanks to the God-Slaying Sword, there was even Divinity right in front of me that I could absorb.

Those things had allowed me to miraculously break through a wall I should never have been able to cross.

In any case, the root of this Divinity wasn't a power I'd gained by doing something.

What exactly was this Divinity I'd possessed all along?

That was something I still couldn't understand.

“Demon King, you really never noticed before?”

It was one thing for me not to have realized it myself.

But just how deeply had this been buried inside me for even the Demon King, who shared my soul, not to know about it?

- How would I know? Since controlling time made no sense unless it was a god's power, I'd vaguely suspected as much, but I'd never directly sensed its presence before.

The Demon King continued.

- Still, I can tell you one thing. The Divinity within you probably belongs to a Higher God of an unimaginably lofty rank. It made no sense for you to defeat the War Demon God like that immediately after awakening your Divinity. Not unless your Divinity belonged to a god of extraordinary rank...

I nodded and looked into empty space.

“The Tower has probably figured it out by now, too.”

That was assuming it hadn't known until now.

After watching the War Demon God's end, the Tower had probably realized exactly what my ability was. I'd openly moved around while stopping time.

It wasn't important.

Now that I'd truly awakened my Divinity, being discovered was inevitable anyway.

I took the Scales of Life out of Subspace.

[Special Item: Broken Scales of Life]

Offer the user's lifespan to obtain a reward of equal measure. Anywhere from a minimum of 1% up to a maximum of 99% of the current remaining lifespan may be offered. Once used, the Scales break, and the user's remaining lifespan is displayed. (This item has already been used.)

Remaining Lifespan: $#!$#&#!@$@?^%

When I checked the information, the lifespan that had originally shown more than two hundred days remaining was now displayed as incomprehensible symbols.

I didn't even need to check it like this to know.

I'd finally overcome the lifespan imposed by the Scales.

Although I hadn't become a complete god yet, I could feel that I'd reached a level of existence high enough to escape a mortal fate.

At least one immediate crisis was out of the way. For now...

I turned my attention to the clear reward.

The God-Slaying Sword lay on the floor in front of me.

Had they really given me the sword itself as the reward?

[Item: Ryuon, the God-Slaying Sword]

An ancient Divine Artifact that killed War Demon God Bahel by piercing his heart. @#?!#$ once again used this sword to sever War Demon God Bahel's neck and annihilat#$?#@!#$^%@...

When I checked the information, part of the text was strangely garbled.

Seeing that even my killing of the War Demon God had been engraved into the item description made it seem as though I'd somehow affected the Tower's system.

In any case, it wasn't bad.

A Divine Artifact was an object capable of holding a god's power.

Using the God-Slaying Sword would make it far easier to channel Divinity into an attack than using my other weapons.

After all, I'd used it to pierce the War Demon God's heart and cut off his head.

I put the God-Slaying Sword into Subspace.

[Would you like to exit the Tower?]

Then I exited the Tower.

The moment I came out, I saw my family's faces.

“...Seo-hyeon!”

My mother, father, and younger sister welcomed me with deep relief.

But all three of them also looked strangely bewildered.

- An unprecedented event has occurred in which all of humanity on Earth experienced the exact same strange sensation at precisely the same time. The cause of this unexplained phenomenon remains unknown, but it is currently believed to be related to Person123...

I glanced at the news playing on the living room TV.

Apparently, the whole world was in an uproar as well.

Everyone else must have felt the same sense of unity I'd experienced at the moment I awakened as a god.

“What in the world happened, Seo-hyeon? A little while ago, all of us suddenly...”

My father asked me.

I scratched my head and said,

“Everyone, don't be too shocked. Just hear me out.”

“H-Huh?”

There was no reason to hide it, so I told them the truth.

“Somehow, I ended up becoming a god.”

*

I explained it in a way my family could at least roughly understand.

I told them that at the end of the Floor 17 hidden route clear, I'd become something resembling a god or a Transcendent.

I also told them that because of it, my lifespan problem had been completely resolved, and I no longer needed to enter the Tower every week.

“Is that really true...?!”

My family was overjoyed. None of them could even hold back their tears.

More than the bizarre idea that I'd become a god, what mattered far more to my family was that my lifespan problem had been resolved.

“You've been through so much, Seo-hyeon. You really have...”

My mother and father repeated those words over and over.

I'd only just made it past one major hurdle, and it still wasn't all over.

But for the moment, I simply shared their joy.

I knew how much anguish my family had endured because of me all this time.

My younger sister wiped her reddened eyes and, once she'd calmed down a little, asked me teasingly,

“You really became a god? All that talk about people calling you a god actually became real?”

“More or less.”

It really had been thanks to that Faith from people.

If even one of the conditions had been missing, I wouldn't have been able to become a god.

I told my family I needed some rest, then went into my room.

“Hmm...”

After awakening as a god, my perception had changed.

I could now perceive things that had been invisible to me before.

What was I supposed to call this? Causality?

That seemed like the most fitting term.

Even sitting on the bed in my room, I could clearly feel the flow of Causality surrounding the world.

I could also sense the Tower's presence, the strongest thing at the very center of it all.

Yes. I could see it clearly now.

The Tower was also a god that possessed Divinity.

Its Divinity was... how could I put it?

Even setting aside how high-ranking it felt, it was murky and indistinct like an abyss. It was hard to describe.

It stretched out in every direction as if it had taken root throughout the entire Earth.

I tried to figure out the Tower's true nature.

Divinity was the power to twist Causality.

Put more intuitively, it was the power to break the laws of the world and bring about miracles.

In my case, that power took the form of an ability related to time.

Considering the overwhelming power the War Demon God had displayed, his Divinity had probably been focused on destruction.

...Then what about the Tower?

I had a vague idea.

The Tower's Divinity was overwhelming enough to devour even a god like the War Demon God.

There was no telling how many other gods it might have swallowed as well.

And yet even a Tower like that had ultimately failed to kill me, someone who had once been little more than dust compared to a god, and that was how we'd made it to this moment.

From that, there was one thing I could infer.

The Tower had to offer everyone a fair chance.

Even though those chances were insanely unfair, Nightmare Difficulty had never once been literally impossible to clear.

Maybe the right way to put it was that it imposed inequality equally on everyone, regardless of strength.

That was why even I, who had been no more than an ordinary Earthling compared with beings from other fantasy worlds, had been able to climb the Tower.

It was mighty enough to destroy and devour countless worlds, yet it was bound by a restriction that forced it to give even a mere ant a chance.

I suspected that restriction was probably tied to the fundamental nature of its Divinity.

In fact, looking at the current flow of Causality, I could feel that the Tower had badly overextended itself.

It was probably the price of arbitrarily raising the difficulty of the clear in order to kill me.

It had made several offers before, but bringing in even a god this time seemed to have dealt a severe blow to the Tower as well.

It must have been willing to pay that price to finish me off for good, but in the end, it failed.

Thankfully, all it had done instead was lay the perfect stepping stone for me.

It was probably fair to say that the Tower's influence was weaker now than at any point since it first appeared.

‘Should I try it?’

There was one thing I wanted to test.

No, there was one thing I had to test.

I had absorbed all the Divinity from the God-Slaying Sword and part of the War Demon God's Divinity as well.

How much could my current power do against the Tower?

I focused with everything I had.

Then I drew out my Divinity at full power.

I extended my own Divinity across the Earth in the same way, pitting it against the Tower's Divinity that stretched across the entire planet...

Rrrrrrumble-

The ground began to tremble faintly.

It was just like the day the Tower first appeared in the world.

I heard my family's startled voices from outside the room.

I looked at the window floating in front of me.

Then it happened.

[Easy]

Population: 1,617,658

Time Limit: 37 years 323 days 17 hours 2 minutes 51 seconds

Reached Floor: 46

[Normal]

Population: 1,553,529

Time Limit: 23 years 323 days 17 hours 2 minutes 51 seconds

Reached Floor: 32

[Hard]

Population: 1,580,394

Time Limit: 10 years 323 days 17 hours 2 minutes 51 seconds

Reached Floor: 19

[Nightmare]

Population: 1,573,605

Time Limit: 9 years 323 days 17 hours 2 minutes 51 seconds

Reached Floor: 18

The Time Limit for every Difficulty had stopped.

The countdowns toward humanity's destruction had frozen.

They were no longer ticking down.

“...!!”

I had no time to marvel at it before an overwhelming pressure crashed into me.

The Tower's Divinity was vast beyond measure.

I drew on every bit of my Divinity and tried to suppress the Tower's, but it was hopeless.

Barely holding my ground without being pushed back was all I could manage.

Before long, I'd exhausted every last bit of my Divinity and was completely spent.

It had lasted only a few dozen seconds.

Even as weakened as the Tower was, that was my limit.

When I checked the Difficulty window, the Time Limits were ticking down normally again.

“Ha.”

Even so, I couldn't help laughing.

- ...Well, now.

The Demon King also let out a quiet exclamation of amazement.

When I pushed back the Tower's Divinity with my own, the Time Limits stopped as well.

Everything in this system ran on the Tower's power, so it was only natural.

For now, I didn't have nearly enough Divinity, so all I could manage was stopping the Time Limits for a few dozen seconds...

But I'd confirmed that it was possible.

It felt like my chances, which had been effectively zero, had finally risen to around one percent.

The Tower was no longer an unbeatable calamity.

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