Chapter 25 - Episode 4. The 1% World (5)
Chapter 25: Episode 4. The 1% World (5)
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It was not Meikal himself who flew into a rage at Jaehwan's words, but the craftsmen around them.
"How dare you spout such nonsense!"
Meikal, on the other hand, looked as though he was seriously pondering what Jaehwan had said.
"What exactly do you mean by that?"
"..."
"You cannot mean I should die now that I am old."
Jaehwan watched Meikal for a moment before speaking.
"Use your skill again."
"What?"
"I said, use your skill again."
After a brief hesitation, Meikal obediently got to his feet and did as Jaehwan said.
He picked up his hammer and chisel, then struck Garnak's horn.
Once, twice, three times.
Just as Meikal was about to keep mechanically striking the horn, Jaehwan stopped him.
"What did you see just now?"
"...What?"
"I'm asking what you saw while using the skill."
Jaehwan shook his head at Meikal's confused expression.
"Try again. Watch carefully this time."
Meikal used his skill once more. The message, ‘Skill has failed,’ kept ringing in his ears. Refusing to yield to it, he stared intently at the point where the skill took effect.
What did he see there?
Nothing in particular.
No, to be exact, he saw the hammer and chisel.
"Of course. That is what you would see."
"...Are you making fun of me?"
Meikal nearly threw his hammer at Jaehwan.
"Do you know the principle by which that hammer and chisel shape the horn?"
Meikal hesitated before answering.
"Through the power of the 「Crafting」 skill..."
Jaehwan shook his head.
"I should have asked differently from the start. Let me ask again."
Meeting Meikal's eyes, Jaehwan chose words that were exactly suited to him.
"Do you know the principle by which the 「Crafting」 skill works?"
Meikal's expression stiffened.
"Young man, do you even know what you are saying?"
His voice was half furious and half incredulous.
"The principle behind the 「Crafting」 skill?"
There were first skills that became the source of all other skills.
Skills that stood at the origin of countless skills.
The Dream Demon's 「Crafting」 was one of those first skills.
The first skills were like particles, if one compared them to matter. No one had created them. They had existed from the beginning. Like fire or water among the elements, they had always been there. To those who lived in the Great Realm, that was what the first skills were.
How could a human explain the origin of the world?
And even if they could, what would be the point?
Jaehwan nodded.
"I see. You kept using the skill without even knowing exactly what you were doing."
That struck Meikal's pride. He spoke through clenched teeth.
"...You enhance the hammer and chisel with spiritual power, then finely control that power to carve away the horn. That is probably how the skill works."
"Really? If the principle is that simple, why can no one else use 「Crafting」?"
"That is..."
It was because they had simply never learned 「Crafting」...
Meikal was about to say that, but stopped.
It made no sense if he thought about it for even a moment. If the skill truly worked by such a simple principle, there was no reason someone who had not learned it could not use it.
"You do not really know what that skill is. Yet you are still using it."
At that moment, Meikal hated the man before him.
No one knew the principle behind 「Crafting」 in the first place.
Then why did this man make him feel so humiliated just because he did not know it?
"You speak as though you know the principle."
"I do. More precisely, I only learned it a moment ago."
"What did you say?"
Without a word, Jaehwan ran his hand along the grain of the horn. Its surface rippled as if responding to his touch.
The next moment, Meikal doubted his own eyes. Something like magic was unfolding before him.
"H-How are you using 「Crafting」...!"
The horn slowly split beneath Jaehwan's fingertips.
Slowly, then more slowly.
Along the white dried veins, the horn trembled as though it could feel Jaehwan's touch, gradually breaking apart.
Meikal's mind reeled.
His knees weakened without him noticing. Jealousy and despair mixed together in a pitiful mess.
"Who are you? What kind of blessing did you receive to possess such talent?"
"It is not talent."
"Then what is it...?"
"Look carefully again. Tell me what you see."
Meikal looked at Jaehwan's fingertips once more. The particles of the horn touching them crumbled away neatly, as if something were eating into them.
"...Are the particles being broken down?"
Jaehwan shook his head.
Meikal focused again.
"It will not be easy. Your world has become that much firmer because of all the effort you put into it."
Jaehwan was right.
Even as he watched Jaehwan's fingertips, Meikal did not fully believe him. The hope that what he saw was some elaborate trick veiled his eyes.
His distrust of youth.
His stubborn attachment to all the years he had accumulated.
What had been forged through hundreds of billions of scrapes, temperings, and hammer blows was not his work, but his warped pride.
"If you have worked that hard for so long, should you not have realized it by now?"
Garnak's horn crumbled with a soft crack beneath Jaehwan's fingertips.
"If it still does not work after all that effort, what is wrong is not you. It is this world."
"Th-That..."
Meikal could not understand Jaehwan's words.
How could he blame the world?
For the first time, Meikal remembered when he had first learned 「Crafting」. He remembered his younger self, when the backs of the Dream Demons who had walked this path before him were vividly imprinted in his eyes.
Young Meikal had always been anxious.
He believed that if he worked hard enough, he could someday become like those Dream Demons. Yet doubt remained in his heart.
Could he surpass them by training in exactly the same way they did?
But young Meikal had no answer to that doubt.
So he worked.
He used his skills again and again until his body wore down.
He worked until he could no longer think, then worked some more.
By immersing himself in the fulfillment brought by excessive effort, he forgot his first doubts.
It was easy enough to forget. As his proficiency increased, the skill's effects improved. Its success rate improved as well.
It was an honest world where effort brought results. In such a world, Meikal could not doubt his path even once.
And so, he finally reached this place.
A place where all light had left his efforts, where he could no longer see any path ahead. Having arrived there, Meikal now understood.
Only the young could blame the world.
"...You say this world is wrong?"
Meikal spoke in a heavy voice.
"What do you expect me to do about it?"
A voice steeped in 150 years of effort and resentment.
It was the voice of someone who had endured every one of those years.
"Are you telling me to fight this world?"
Jaehwan silently watched Meikal.
He looked into the eyes of an old man who had been betrayed by his world, yet could not abandon it.
How long did they remain that way?
"...You are old, but you can still fight."
Meikal's pupils shook.
"Look carefully again. Do not rely on the System. Use your own eyes."
Meikal stood blankly for a moment before he finally understood.
Jaehwan was telling him to throw away every year of his life. To forget it all.
To deny the life he had lived.
It was unbearably painful.
Yet Meikal wanted to know what sort of world he would see through that denial. Perhaps that curiosity was the last bit of youth still left in old Meikal's heart.
For the first time in his life, Meikal forgot his skill.
He struggled to free himself from the solid shackles that had become one with his soul over the passing years. It was not easy, but he did not close his eyes. He opened them wide and watched Jaehwan's fingertips.
He tried to see something his years had missed.
Like a hammer striking, Jaehwan's fingertips moved toward the horn.
Clang.
Once again.
Clang.
And once more.
Clang.
With every sound, Meikal felt some part of his soul breaking away. Countless pieces of common sense that had hardened in his mind through sheer habit began to unravel.
How much time passed?
Somewhere, he heard something crack.
As if an enormous pane of glass were shattering, something began breaking apart from its edges.
A certain truth was raising its head.
Fear suddenly crossed Meikal's face. Was this really all right? What if he was about to see something he should never see?
Without realizing it, Meikal squeezed his eyes shut.
Silence descended upon the world. In that overwhelming stillness, something slowly approached him. A dreadful loneliness swept over him.
He understood now.
The world he had lived in until this moment had just been destroyed.
Fear and curiosity tangled together as Meikal realized he had stepped into a new world. He forced his eyes open.
Garnak's horn was looking at him.
It was no longer a horn.
A monster as tall as the ramparts of a respectable fortress, its massive body covered in hideous teeth and spikes. It looked like a huge mass of hatred.
Meikal faced the monster, his jaw trembling.
Had he been facing something like that all this time?
Had he really been using his pathetic skill on something like that?
He looked around.
Where the craftsmen should have been standing, there were corpses instead. A foul stench rose from the shriveled bodies, little more than bones. Maggots poured from where their eyes should have been.
Meikal felt as though he might lose his mind at any moment.
And there was Jaehwan.
Bare-bodied, holding a chisel and hammer.
A man stood against the monster without any skill.
When the monster attacked Jaehwan, Jaehwan tore into it without restraint. The monster let out terrible screams. Blood spattered from its body, and bodily fluids streamed down it.
Even so, it did not seem to be suffering.
It was enjoying itself instead, as though it had not faced an opponent like this in a long time.
The corpses around them heaved and screamed.
Cheers that might have been for Jaehwan, or might have been for the monster.
At the center of that confusion and madness, Meikal's mind grew hazy and his body trembled.
Had this man always lived while seeing a world like this?
A world without skills, stats, or levels.
A world with nothing to conceal anything, infinitely naked, yet free from every deception.
Even through the nausea that threatened to overwhelm him, Meikal felt a terrifying ecstasy.
This was the world after the fall.
How could a world like this exist?
How could that man live in such a world without going mad?
For a moment, Jaehwan and Meikal's eyes met.
In this world, Jaehwan looked like an ordinary person. He was neither a hero nor a savior. He was a common young man.
The only difference was that he had the courage not to give up on this world.
Only then did Meikal understand Jaehwan's madness. He understood his loneliness and sorrow.
And because he understood all of it, Meikal realized that no one could ever understand this man.
Garnak's horn looked at Meikal with cold eyes.
"You cannot come here."
The fear of not being permitted by the world.
Meikal staggered backward, his legs shaking. There was nowhere left to retreat.
The monster approached with its enormous jaws open. Its mouth was packed with the corpses of the dead.
The next moment, Meikal saw his own reflection in the monster's huge pupil.
How, how could anyone live in a world like this...
That was Meikal's final thought before the monster devoured him.
More precisely, it almost was.
Crack.
Jaehwan pried open the monster's jaws and pulled Meikal out, frowning. Wiping sweat from his forehead, he said,
"Are you going to snap out of it?"
"Gasp..."
"Did you forget we are refining something? Help properly."
As Jaehwan scolded him, Meikal faced the monster once again through his dizziness.
Jaehwan's hand rested on his shoulder.
For the first time in a long while, old Meikal found his courage.
The courage to face the world without a skill. The courage to step onto a path he had never walked. The courage to return to the road he could have taken long ago, but had never dared to.
Then skin began to grow over Meikal's hands.
Veins formed deep beneath his flesh, and blood pulsed through them. His heart pounded, his vision cleared, and Meikal felt strength overflowing through his entire body.
It felt like the day he had first held a hammer in his youth.
Meikal charged at the monster.
His hammer moved toward Garnak's horn.
* * *
Two days later.
Jaehwan's scabbard was finally complete.
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