Chapter 243

The power contained in the Key did more than just protect him. It also gave Do-Jin the ability to run freely through the Void. Because the space had no real distinction between up and down, he could walk or sprint in any direction he wanted. Still, the direction he needed to go, the “forward” that actually mattered, was already decided.

Fuck, it’s almost been eight hours already.

Wherever Sion Grace’s traces remained, that was his path. But even after running along it for nearly eight hours straight, all he could see was her fading trail and endless darkness. The seventy-two hours he had been given had already dropped into the sixties. In just a few more hours, it would fall into the fifties.

Are you trying to dry me out and kill me? Please, something show up already.

As if his desperation had finally reached something, a tiny shard of glass appeared far in the distance, beyond the trail Sion had left behind. Do-Jin sprinted toward it at full speed. Each time his foot struck the surface that was not quite a floor, the glass-like object swelled larger in his vision.

What had looked like a speck of dust turned into a massive landmass spreading out beneath his feet. It looked, for lack of a better comparison, like a gigantic glass box containing an entire world inside it.

“A fragment that broke off...” Do-Jin muttered under his breath.

It seemed to have been torn from some world, whether by a localized disaster or complete annihilation. The cause varied, but every piece shared the same ending. They were lost things, cast into the sea of the Void after some incomprehensible catastrophe.

My runaway master’s trail bends downward here. Do-Jin lowered his gaze.

The new path was daunting, but it was better than running endlessly through pure darkness with nothing to anchor him. He angled downward and kept going. Soon, he felt something tug at him. The massive fragment’s gravity was pulling him in.

***

Back when neither Sion nor Grace was her name, her memories began in a forest. She had no recollection of what she had been before that. Perhaps it was not merely the beginning of her memory, but the beginning of her existence itself.

When she awakened, her appearance was more wretched than that of a newborn fawn. Several dragonfly-like wings clung to her black fur like soaked cloth, and her long, emaciated body glistened with something like slime.

“Ugh.”

The first sound she made was an unpleasant tangle of telepathy and voice. She frowned at the repulsive sound of it and forced herself upright. Maybe it was because of the slime coating her body, but everything that touched her skin felt cold.

She walked for an unknown length of time before a field of flowers opened up within the forest. Back then, she had not even known what a flower field was, but looking back, it had been a truly beautiful place. That was where she met Anne.

“You are...?” Anne had been staring up at the sky when she sensed a presence and turned around.

What greeted her was a black-furred beast with multiple wings like dragonfly wings, seeming to be woven from a blend of jewels and silk. Her eyes shimmered with many kinds of mana, each one flickering like a gemstone.

As Anne approached it, the beast bared her teeth in warning.

“I have lived many lives, but I don’t think I have ever seen something as fascinating as you.”

Those few words from Anne seemed to have granted the beast language. With language came intellect, enough to form a question.

“‘Many lives?’”

“You understand me?” Anne extended her hand. “Do you want to come with me?”

The beast followed her without thinking. She had nothing else she wanted to do, and nothing else she could do.

“Sion. I think Sion would be a good name for you. Oh, and my name is Anne.”

The name she received while walking beside her became her eternal name.

“I’m sorry. If this was a previous life that I had, I could have given you something much better. This time, I’m just a wandering knight,” Anne said as she shared some bread so tough and hard that it barely had any taste.

***

It seemed that Anne was a reincarnator.

“Sion. I told you not to go near places where other people live, did I not?”

“Sigh... Sion, I told you to be careful when you cough. What are we going to do if you blow all our food away?”

“Sion, what happened? Why did your fur turn all colorful? Undo your transformation.”

Following her as she wandered the world as a knight, Sion heard and learned many things. However, the first ending arrived quickly and without warning.

“I’m sorry. I thought this body would last a little longer,” Anne said, coughing up blood.

A human body was far too fragile to withstand the bloated soul of a reincarnator.

“If I’m lucky, will I see you again? No... By then, you probably will not even recognize me. What am I saying?”

Up until then, Sion hadn’t possessed anything that could be called emotion. She didn’t even have the concept of emotion. She had simply followed along because she didn’t know what else to do. However, when Sion encountered loss for the first time, something she had only understood as an abstract idea, she gained her first real emotion on the eve of Anne’s death.

“I will... wait,” Sion murmured.

No matter how long it took, Anne would be reborn again. And all Sion had to do was wait. Anne’s eyes widened in shock. It was the first time Sion had ever spoken.

It took about thirty years before they met again. The Anne she found that time died after doing nothing more than babbling like an infant. By the time Sion tracked her down, the villagers were already dead from a plague, and Anne was the only one still alive.

After that, Sion waited another eighteen years. While she waited, she learned how to take the forms of ordinary creatures like birds, dogs, and cats.

They lived as a family, but just like every other time, Anne was the one who left first. The waiting dragged on endlessly, and the reunions were always painfully short. Sion obtained magic so that her reincarnating friend could live longer. Even so, she couldn’t stop the deaths that came again and again at short intervals. The cycle of reincarnation that bound Anne existed outside the reach of Sion’s magic.

“Should I die too?”

Sion made up her mind. Whenever Anne died, Sion would enter a deathlike state. Whenever Anne was born again, Sion would open her eyes.

“Don’t follow me into death,” Anne reprimanded her.

“I’m not dying.”

“But still.”

After repeating it several times, Anne finally realized what Sion was doing. What did it matter if dynasties rose and fell while Sion lay half-dead between lives? The mistake was that Sion couldn’t answer when Anne asked what had happened in the world while she had been gone.

With no choice left, Sion began to live properly. She blended into human society without standing out and established a place for herself. It was around this time that she took on a human form and began living not only as Sion, but as Sion Grace.

She also began counting her age from that point forward, from whichever life it had been. Anne began burning through her short lives in brilliant fashion.

“Sion, you need to learn how to treat other humans kindly too, not just me.”

From the moment Sion entered the realm of an Archmage, her support allowed Anne’s reincarnator status to become a tremendous talent instead of a curse. Anne lived as an adventurer, as a noble, and sometimes even as a hero.

“Thank you, Sion. I thought I was cursed. But I wasn’t. Is there anyone in the world happier than I am? I save people across repeated lives. I see their smiles. And then, when I’m reborn again, you wait for me.”

While they stayed together, Sion’s domain naturally expanded as well. She couldn’t simply abandon the things they had built together, and being bound to them was how her world grew larger over time.

Anne would sometimes live as a man, and other times as a woman. The one constant in her life was Sion, and Sion believed that would last forever. That belief held until the day she discovered the dungeon that had formed where the Dimensional Barrier had torn open.

“At this rate, we have no idea how far this will spiral out of control.”

Sion desperately tried to seal the widening tear with magic. However, something on the other side refused to allow it and continued forcing the gap open.

“Let me do it.” Anne took up her spear, looking ready to charge straight into the widening Rift.

“No. That place is beyond this world. It does not end with death. If anyone goes, then I should—”

“Sion, you have only lived once.”

Then what about you, who have watched all the lives I lived burn out so quickly? Sion thought, but didn’t have time to stop her.

The depth of Anne’s martial skill, honed across countless lives, had already surpassed that of any sword saint of her era. On top of that, Sion had bridged the gap between Anne’s bloated soul and her fragile body. With power that burned as brilliantly as her short lives, Anne became a streak of light and tore through the boundary separating this world from the beyond.

“NOOOOO...!”

The Void was a place where neither death nor rebirth existed. It was a world that offered only one ending, complete erasure after endless decay. It was a final farewell so absolute that even death couldn’t grant it.

From that day on, Sion lived obsessed with space and dimensions. She scoured every dungeon that was even remotely similar or tangentially related to dimensional phenomena. She would find her. She wouldn’t give up. Even if it took an eternity, she would reach her no matter what.

Then, a long, dragging tremor cut off the end of her extended recollection.

“An illusion... hypnosis, no, this was closer to true illusioncraft?”

Under normal circumstances, it would have been a prison designed to trap its target forever within a perfectly recreated past. However, it was a crude trick when used against an Archmage.

“Did I burn so much power earlier that I’m getting caught by something this pathetic?”

Sion stirred the wind. The rising current wrapped around her body before dispersing, and her tattered clothing was restored to pristine condition.

All around her lay the corpses of countless demonic beasts. Each one was, quite literally, as massive as a mountain.

The recollection she had just experienced had been conjured by the Magic Eye of the largest and most powerful among them, the one whose death had been postponed until the very end.

“She isn’t here.”

Sion looked over the desolate world she had reduced to scorched ruin. The person she sought was nowhere to be found here. All that remained were the scraps of a world that had already collapsed into nothing.

“I chose the right direction. If I keep moving forward, I will reach her.”

No matter how long it took, she would reach her. Sion prepared to leave the land beneath her feet without a trace of regret. As something crossed her mind, she turned back for only a moment before facing forward again and continued on in silence.

***

Warped space finally spat Do-Jin out, and the moment his feet hit the ground, ruins spread out before him. Collapsed mountain ranges stretched out ahead of him. Clean, artificial cut lines split their sides like something massive had sliced straight through the land. Demonic beasts almost as large as those mountains lay nearby, severed the same way and discarded like broken toys.

“This is fucking insane.”

Cuts were not the only cause of death here. Do-Jin spotted beasts that something had crushed flat, others that something had shattered into fragments, and still more that something had twisted until their bodies broke apart from the inside.

Countless corpses covered the ground, stacked so densely that counting them was pointless. Every single one had died violently, and none of them had gone easily. The trail left behind was truly brutal, aggressive, and unapologetically destructive.

“She was definitely here.”

Do-Jin forced his pounding heart to slow down and pushed his focus forward. His master, Sion Grace, had undeniably passed through this place. She was gone now, and that meant he had to keep tracking her. The question that immediately followed was how the hell he was supposed to leave this place. Did he really have to burn the Key already?

A message answered that thought before he could finish it, the timing absolutely befuddling.

[The field is resetting.]

[Warning: The field level far exceeds the difficulty of the active quest.]

[Field level adjustment in progress.]

“What the fuck?”

Do-Jin had entered this place prepared for a fight, but total destruction had made him lower his guard. Nothing around him had looked capable of moving anymore. That assumption lasted about two seconds.

Scaled-down monsters began forming right in front of him, their levels and sizes forcibly compressed into something manageable. Compared to the originals that had once tried to block Sion Grace, these things were weak as shit. They were cheap knockoffs, stripped-down versions that barely deserved the name.

Still, from the perspective of a disciple, every single one of them promised a miserable, exhausting fight.

“Goddamn it...” Do-Jin muttered under his breath. “Nothing ever goes the easy way, huh?”

The monsters answered him with a roar, loud enough to drown out his frustration as they charged in, fully committed to ruining his day.