Chapter 242 - Episode 31. Big Brother (7)
Chapter 242: Episode 31. Big Brother (7)
──────
It seemed the Driver, having succeeded in ascension, had died here.
Had the Driver found the answer to the universe they sought?
Jaehwan could not know.
After staring at the Driver’s face for a while, Jaehwan turned his gaze toward the other tanks. He passed them one by one, studying each soul as though trying to etch them into his memory.
His steps stopped again when he came face-to-face with a tank several times larger than the others.
This is...
The soul inside was clad head to toe in iron armor.
Jaehwan had never seen this soul before, yet he knew who it was. His intuition became certainty when he saw the nameplate written in the corner.
Deus, the God of Machines.
One of the Three Ancient Gods. Deus, the destroyer of Plausibility, was there.
Why is Deus here?
In that instant, Jaehwan’s thoughts leaped toward a hypothesis. It was a thought only Jaehwan, who had crossed cosmic lengths of time, could have conceived.
Could it be?
Perhaps the concept known as 《Big Brother》 was something entirely different from what the gods of the 《Abyss》 or the Cultivators of the 《Great Realm》 believed it to be. Perhaps even the Three Ancient Gods, who believed they had invented it, did not truly know what 《Big Brother》 was.
In other words, perhaps 《Big Brother》 was...
Jaehwan’s thoughts broke apart when a voice suddenly rang out.
[Congratulations on clearing the tutorial.]
The voice struck through the pure white space.
Jaehwan turned toward its source.
[Though that would be a particularly tasteless joke.]
The owner of the voice was not inside a tank.
Other than the small horns protruding above the temples and the tiny wings attached to the shoulder blades, the figure looked almost human.
Jaehwan had already met a species with a similar air.
A Dream Demon.
Jaehwan recognized the Dream Demon at once. How could he not? Of all the Dream Demons in this world, this was the one Jaehwan knew best.
He had destroyed the Tower this being created and emerged into this world. He had reached this place with the diary it left behind. Every step of Jaehwan’s journey had carried this being’s shadow.
“Mulack Armelt.”
The legendary Master who had vanished nine hundred years ago, Mulack Armelt, stood before him.
* * *
[You took much longer than expected. According to the first schedule, you should have reached this place sixteen times faster.]
Mulack Armelt. One of the thirteen 「Masters」, and the creator of the Tower of Nightmares, 〈Fortress of Regret〉.
“You...”
Jaehwan could not take his eyes off Mulack’s face.
He had read the records Mulack left in the Tower and imagined the ‘end of the world.’ He had read the 『Record of the Abyss』 Mulack wrote and made it all the way here. In that sense, Mulack had created the Jaehwan standing here now.
As though understanding Jaehwan’s feelings, Mulack smiled.
[You must have many questions. I know.]
“Are you Big Brother?”
[Big Brother.]
As if hearing those words for the first time in ages, Mulack slowly blinked.
[I see. You followed those words all the way here. Then... that is very strange.]
Mulack tilted his head at an odd angle. His deep, unreadable eyes questioned Jaehwan.
[Why are you still curious about that? You must have passed through the ‘Fall of Time’ to reach this place.]
“I asked whether you are 《Big Brother》.”
[Well, obtaining understanding beyond existence does not mean you come to know everything.]
Mulack turned his back to Jaehwan and began pacing around the white passage.
[To answer your question, yes. Big Brother. That was certainly a name I used recently.]
Jaehwan’s expression hardened slightly.
“What does that mean?”
[I have many names. Big Brother, Invisible Hand, God of Gods, First One... Jaehwan-nim, you know that now too, do you not?]
He had no idea why Mulack kept saying that he knew, but Mulack seemed ready to explain something. Jaehwan decided to remain silent for now.
[The name 《Big Brother》 was created two hundred and ten thousand years ago. But I had existed long before that.]
Mulack’s gaze shifted toward the edge of the passage. There stood the tank Jaehwan had examined moments earlier.
The tank holding Deus, one of the Three Ancient Gods.
Mulack extended a pale hand and placed it against the tank’s surface. The next moment, Deus’s eyes snapped open.
Light burst from the brilliant white lenses. Before Jaehwan could even reach for Dokbul in alarm, something like music began to flow from somewhere.
Something was being projected into the air.
Then voices rang out.
“That power is dangerous. It is not something we can control.”
It was not Deus’s voice.
Jaehwan had heard an extremely similar voice in the forest of the Mad God.
La-Hamad.
But the being on the screen was not La-Hamad.
Then that being had to be...
“No. We must use it. Only we are qualified to wield that power.”
When Catastrophe’s voice followed, Jaehwan became certain the voice he had just heard belonged to Gestalt.
He understood the nature of the scene unfolding before him.
“Let us begin.”
With Deus’s voice as the last, the World Force of the Three Ancient Gods gathered into the screen.
Jaehwan watched the immense flood of expanding World Force within it.
The World Force possessed by the Three Gods was resonating.
The Three God War.
There was no doubt. This was the memory of the ‘true Three God War’ that he had seen and heard in the 『Record of the Abyss』.
Perhaps because World Force resources had been more abundant then than in the present-day 《Abyss》, the World Force of the Three Gods tore through all of space and time, creating rifts.
It was dozens of times greater than the World Force released when Jaehwan and Maiad clashed.
It was as though the entire upper reaches of the 《Tree of Illusion》 had combined their strength. Beyond the resonating Sanctuaries, a reality beyond Unique Worlds was being summoned. A world of incomparably greater scale than the 「Lone World」 Maiad had attempted was arriving.
The 「Lone World」 the Three Ancient Gods longed for, and the name of salvation that would end all wars.
《System》.
Jaehwan watched the scene in silence.
If he could, he would have asked the Three Gods of that era whether it had truly been the best choice.
But he could not demand an answer for sins committed hundreds of thousands of years ago.
A storm of light raged on the screen, and the gathered World Force became a pillar of light that pierced through the sky of the 《Abyss》.
It was the light of creation that opened a new world.
The Three Gods must have trembled as they watched that light. They must have been awed by the magnitude of their achievement and thrilled by what was to come.
But they did not know something was crawling down from the heavens beyond the pierced sky. They did not know that the ‘something’ they had brought down would turn all their plans to dust.
Jaehwan saw it.
He saw ‘it’ descending through the pillar of light that pierced the heavens.
A black, sticky energy that looked like darkness itself.
By the time the Three Gods noticed something was wrong, it was already too late. The darkness completely swallowed the prototype Deus Ex Machina at the center of the light.
That is...!
Jaehwan stared at the familiar darkness.
It was exactly the same darkness he had experienced in the previous space.
“Deus, what is happening? Wake up!”
Catastrophe and Gestalt shouted, followed by terrible screams layered atop one another. It was a horrifying cry, as though a single person were screaming out hundreds of millions of years’ worth of agony at once.
Then an explosion began, shaking heaven and earth. It was not a physical explosion so much as a metaphysical one.
Jaehwan had seen such explosions several times in the space of darkness.
It was something like a Big Bang of thought. A single explosion beyond space and time, where the laws and truths of the universe were born.
Jaehwan did not know the true nature of that explosion. The voice inside him had blocked his approach. Without that voice, Jaehwan too would have been swept into the explosion and ended up like Deus.
After some time, the darkness retreated from the screen and the explosion subsided.
Catastrophe’s voice rang out.
“Deus?”
Deus walked out from within the half-destroyed 「Deus Ex Machina」. A transcendent current flowed from his lenses.
Was this how the eyes of someone who had seen a universe’s history from beginning to end would look?
At last, Deus opened his mouth.
“It was all meaningless.”
“What?”
Catastrophe and Gestalt looked at Deus in confusion.
Deus raised his mechanical arm toward the empty air. Then, as his hand slowly fell...
Gestalt’s body was torn in two.
An enraged Catastrophe charged forward. It was a battle without explanation.
Without saying a word, Deus attacked the other two Three Ancient Gods, and one-sided violence followed.
The other two could not stand against Deus, who had been reborn into a new state of being. As Jaehwan watched Gestalt torn apart in misery and Catastrophe, battered and driven out of the 《Abyss》, he recalled what La-Hamad had once told him.
‘The Three God War was not a war among the Three Ancient Gods.’
La-Hamad had definitely said that.
On the most superficial level, those words were wrong. This war had clearly been a war among the Three Gods.
Yet in a deeper sense, they were right.
That is not Deus.
The ‘Deus’ who had evolved into something new within the darkness had become an entirely different being.
As if he had become something beyond space and time.
Something that had transcended ‘existence.’
He no longer thought within the realm of existence, nor did he try to understand anything.
After finishing his work, Deus flew into the sky of the 《Abyss》 and vanished.
That was the end of the recording.
Deus’s eyes, which had been projecting the screen in light, slowly closed again.
Mulack’s voice rang out.
[What did you think?]
“...”
[This must be the first time you have watched another being undergo ‘Transcendence,’ Jaehwan-nim. What do you think, compared to when you underwent ‘Transcendence’?]
Jaehwan could not properly understand Mulack’s words.
[Deus was one of the lucky ones. Thanks to that World Force Big Bang, he did not have to climb the ‘Fall of Time’ as I did, as you did. Though in the end, the pain endured by his soul form was likely much the same...]
Too many thoughts were mixing together in Jaehwan’s mind at once.
[Still, perhaps he was the luckiest one among us.]
Until now, Deus had been known in the history of the 《Abyss》 as a ‘dead god.’
A god said to have been completely annihilated in the Three God War. That was Deus.
But now Jaehwan realized that this ‘annihilation’ was nothing like the soul extinction he knew.
Deus had died.
And he had become 《Big Brother》.
Footnotes:
Chapter discussion