Chapter 1676 - 1676: Epilogue 29 - The End of the Beginning (2)

"What's wrong?"

My father's voice finally pulled me back from my thoughts, forcing me to focus on him again instead of getting completely lost in everything that had been running through my head.

"Didn't you ever think that... I might have actually betrayed you?" I asked him, watching his reaction carefully while waiting to see whether my words would finally make him understand what I had been trying to tell him.

"You did?" he asked, almost sounding genuinely surprised by what I had just said.

Almost.

That was clearly his attempt at making himself look surprised, and I knew him well enough to notice the difference immediately. In fact, there was a good chance that he already knew I had decided to betray him long before I ever admitted it directly to his face.

"Do you really think I would believe something like that?" he continued, his expression remaining strangely calm. "My own daughter, who has always been loyal to me, even going as far as building the means for me to travel to another world... I don't think you have the gall to actually betray me."

"You don't think I'm capable of doing that?" I asked him, unable to completely hide the disbelief in my voice as I stared back at him.

"Even if there is only a small possibility that what you're doing right now is actually your betrayal, why would you betray me?" he asked, still speaking as though the possibility itself was something that didn't make any sense to him.

I lowered my eyes toward the floor because there wasn't much else I could do while he continued refusing to accept what I had already told him.

He still didn't believe that I had betrayed him.

"You still don't understand?" I finally asked with a tired sigh. "I don't think you're ever going to understand, because you've always been like this for as long as I can remember."

"Then explain it to me in a way that I can actually understand," he replied, his voice remaining surprisingly calm despite how heated our conversation had become. "Tell me the reason you decided to betray me, because clearly I'm missing something that you believe should be completely obvious."

I sighed again, feeling the frustration slowly building inside me as I tried to figure out how I could possibly explain something that seemed so simple from my perspective.

Why did I even have to make him understand?

The answer seemed painfully obvious to me, and I was almost certain that even if I explained everything in the simplest possible way, he still wouldn't truly understand what I was trying to say.

"I woke up," I finally told him, choosing those words because I didn't know how else to begin explaining everything that had changed inside me.

"You woke up?" he repeated, sounding genuinely confused about what I meant by those words.

"I woke up and realized that your plan is something I can't support," I said, carefully choosing my words because I knew that anything I said could easily become another argument. "I believe... that just like our own world, this world deserves the chance to survive."

After I said that, my father released a quiet sigh of his own, almost as though he had already heard an answer that disappointed him.

"This world deserves to survive... huh?" he said slowly, letting the words linger for a moment. "So that's your reasoning?"

His voice remained strangely detached, almost as though there was supposed to be some emotion hiding underneath it, yet at the same time, it felt like something important was missing entirely from the way he spoke.

"You're trying to betray me over that kind of reasoning?" he asked, sounding more confused than angry about the decision I had made.

"I'm not trying to betray you," I replied, finally growing tired of repeating myself. "I already did, so why haven't you realized that yet?"

"You really believe you can betray me?" he asked, as though the very idea itself was still impossible for him to accept.

"I'm telling you that I already did," I said again, making sure there was absolutely no room for him to misunderstand what I was saying this time.

He refused to back down at all, even though I had already told him over and over again that I had betrayed him and that my decision had already been made.

He didn't seem interested in hearing me out, and honestly, it was starting to feel like he wasn't even having this conversation with me anymore.

It was almost as though I wasn't even on his mind, as if he were speaking to some version of me that existed only inside his own expectations rather than the person actually standing in front of him.

"You don't understand anything," he said with another quiet sigh, his expression remaining difficult for me to read. "No, you really don't understand anything about what I'm trying to accomplish."

"I may not understand everything you're trying to accomplish," I replied, "but I'm certainly not the one pretending that I don't understand you while you're deliberately refusing to understand me."

"No, you don't understand this at all," he said, his voice becoming slightly firmer. "I have to save our world, and that's why I'm doing all of this in the first place."

"I know you've said that before, and I know you genuinely want to save our world," I answered, keeping my voice steady despite the frustration that was continuing to grow inside me. "But save it from what exactly? What are you actually trying to protect our world from? Do you really expect me to understand your actions when you won't even tell me what kind of danger our world is supposedly facing?"

I felt like this was the first time I had ever had such a heated conversation with my father, and even saying that to myself felt strange because I had spent so much of my life simply accepting his decisions without questioning them.

The man who had always seemed impossibly tall to me when I was a child now stood in front of me as someone I barely recognized as my father anymore.

Something had changed him somewhere along the way, and I couldn't figure out exactly when it had happened or what could possibly have caused such a drastic change in the person I had once looked up to.

Whatever it was, I knew one thing for certain, because this version of him was nothing like the father I remembered from my childhood.