Chapter 116: Supremes
There were countless questions Evan wanted to ask, but the more he listened to Seraphine’s explanations, the less he knew what to think about the situation.
At some point, he wasn’t even sure whether he wanted to know more...
Or less.
Seraphine, who stood beside him, said nothing else, patiently waiting for him to process everything he had just heard.
"So... the Abyss is a consequence of humanity’s use of mana. The Abyss has never actually been defeated, we’ve lost every single time. Then why are we still alive?"
"And these cycles you and that guy mentioned... what exactly are they?" Evan asked, voicing the last question he still couldn’t understand.
He assumed the cycles referred to the Mana Apocalypse, but how could there have been more than one Mana Apocalypse?
And why would there be?
What happened after each one?
It was obvious there was still something missing.
Looking at the current reality he had ended up in, he had a rough idea, but he wasn’t sure whether such a thing was even possible.
And if it was...
How?
The reality they were standing in now was the same world where everything had begun.
Had it died?
If it had, then how was it still here?
Or rather...
How was the version of the world in which he had technically been reborn still able to exist?
Shouldn’t the Abyss have erased every trace of mana?
Then how could both life and mana still exist?
Hearing the question, Seraphine didn’t answer immediately.
Instead, she looked off into the distance, as though she were staring far beyond what the eye could see.
Only after what felt like an entire minute did she finally speak.
"Do you know why this strange ice is formed from the Laws of Space and Time?" she asked.
It was a question Evan truly had no answer to.
As far as he understood, after the Abyss had finished with the world...
This was all that remained.
But then again, she had also said that this place was what had preserved the world until now.
Something he simply couldn’t understand.
What exactly was this place?
A parallel reality?
If the world he had been reincarnated into was the very same one that kept losing against the Abyss, then how could this version still exist?
Had only a fragment of reality been preserved inside a separate dimension?
Thinking about it, even his System Storage was a separate dimension.
It wasn’t unreasonable to believe that beings of such unimaginable power could accomplish something on an entirely different scale.
"Not really. Why?" Evan replied.
"You see, when the Abyss finally consumed Earth, very little remained. Nearly every living being was wiped out, and the planet itself was corrupted beyond any hope of recovery. In the end, this world became inhabited only by the Gods of the Abyss... and by us," she said.
"Us?" Evan repeated, no longer sure he was following.
"Me... and one other person. The first Divine being of the human race."
As she spoke, however, her expression froze for the briefest of moments.
A faint frown appeared on her face before vanishing just as quickly.
Evan noticed it immediately and was about to ask whether she was alright, but she continued before he had the chance.
"Unlike me, he never gave up. By then I had already reached the Demi-God Rank, which allowed me to survive indefinitely even without nourishment. But I wasn’t strong enough to confront the Gods of the Abyss... and truthfully, I no longer had a reason to."
"I had spent decades fighting. Fighting for people who were already gone. Continuing to resist... for what?"
"But unlike me, he refused to surrender."
"He was the one who kept the Gods of the Abyss at bay while searching for a way to fix everything."
"You see, unlike an ordinary Awakened, his ability was rather unique. He possessed an exceptionally high affinity for two elements, Space and Time. According to his theory, if he could elevate his control over them far enough, he might be able to reverse time itself and return to the past."
"Bring everyone back."
"Return to the point where none of this had ever happened."
"But we soon discovered that the universe doesn’t allow time to move backward."
"It only moves forward."
A complicated expression appeared on her face as she spoke.
’Only forward...?’ Evan thought, unable to understand where she was going with all of this.
"The Abyss had already reached a point where we could no longer push it back, so we needed to find another way to stop it. A way to seal it, so that the same tragedy would never repeat itself again and again."
"And he succeeded... at least partially."
"He found not only a way to give this world a chance to survive"
"...but also a way to limit the Abyss’s influence."
She turned to look at Evan.
"Do you know why I told you this place is even worse than that city?" she asked.
The moment he heard those words, Evan couldn’t help but feel a terrible premonition rising in his chest.
Seeing the expression on his face, Seraphine smiled.
There was a trace of bitterness in that smile.
"It’s because this dimension is where all of the Gods of the Abyss have been sealed."
She said it with such calmness that it hardly seemed like she had just dropped a bombshell out of nowhere.
"W-Wait..." Evan stammered, his voice trembling slightly. "Are you telling me... there are Abyss Gods in this place?"
"Yes."
"They’re all here."
"Somewhere."
"Imprisoned."
"Waiting for even the slightest opportunity to escape this dimension."
She smiled again, seemingly enjoying Evan’s utter disbelief.
"You see, that madman decided to manipulate both space and time."
"He separated the reality of that era from the flow of time itself, allowing a new reality to flourish once again."
"The old reality, this one, was sealed away within the layers of space."
"Meanwhile, the world in the new reality was able to repopulate once more."
"Life returned."
"But not new life."
"The very same souls from the old world began their journey through the cycle of reincarnation once again."
Ecco la traduzione del finale:
"They were born into the new world..."
"...without ever realizing they had already lived through its end."
"Again."
"And again."
"And again."
Her gaze met Evan’s.
"Until the fifth cycle began. The current one. The one you were born into."
She let the words settle before continuing.
"The world can no longer bear the weight of all those layered realities pressing against its fabric. Even separated into their own folds of space, they exert an influence on the world they originated from, and with the world’s current strength, it cannot survive another cycle."
The complicated expression she had worn earlier seemed to dissolve into nothing, as though it had never been there at all.
"It was clear from the beginning that this approach could never work indefinitely. We knew there was a limit. And yet we chose to move forward with this plan anyway, all of it simply to buy time."
"Enough time to find a way to surpass the rank of a god."
Evan heard those words and found himself stunned once again.
At this point he had lost count of how many times that had happened today, but this last statement was without question one of the most absurd things he had ever heard.
’Surpass the rank of a god?’
A God, by definition, was the being at the absolute apex of existence. What in the world could possibly lie beyond that?
As if she had read his thoughts, which, given how many times she had managed to do exactly that today, was beginning to feel less and less surprising, she continued.
"We once believed, as most do, that the pinnacle of the evolution path was divinity, To reach godhood over a law, a concept, or perhaps several concepts at once. But when we examined the energy of the Abyss, we discovered that what we had always assumed to be the absolute ceiling was, in reality, nothing more than a restriction imposed by the universe on the creatures of its various worlds."
She tilted her head slightly.
"There is no true limit. We are simply... programmed, in a sense, to never surpass a certain threshold. At least not through conventional means."
She said it with that serene smile of hers, the kind that under normal circumstances might have been reassuring, but at this particular moment struck Evan as something closer to diabolical.
’I really don’t like where this is going,’ he thought, already sensing that his own situation was tied to all of this in far more ways than he could have ever imagined.
"One divinity is not enough.Two or three, even working in unison, would still fall short. Why? Because they are separate individuals. What is needed is something that can unite the various Divinity in a way to find a certain harmony between the different fragments of godhood, to merge them in such a way that something greater emerges from the whole."
She paused.
"Have you ever wondered why they are called fragments of divinity?"
"It is because they are, quite literally, fragments of something superior. Something that is not limited to a single concept, but is instead the sum of many, many fragments of divinity, unified."
"We call such beings Supremes."