The old man was truly a strange person.
No, to be honest, I’m not even sure whether that old man is actually human.
If I were to explain the reason simply, I could sum it all up by saying my intuition tells me so…
But honestly, if I said he wasn’t human based on intuition alone, no one would believe me, myself included.
I began organizing the grounds for my judgment in my head.
1. The old man does not sleep.
Whether you’re a Sword Master or a Bow Master.
I’ve heard rumors that once you reach the realm of a superhuman, you can perfectly control your biological functions.
They say that once you reach that level, you can finely regulate every single cell in your body.
The reason poison doesn’t work on them, and the reason their natural healing ability is higher than others’, is supposedly because they can place their bodies completely under their own control.
2. The old man does not eat or go to the bathroom…
Let’s skip this one.
The same explanation as number 1 would probably apply.
In any case, the most important point was number 3.
3. His already faint presence has grown even fainter.
This is something I need to go over in a bit more detail.
Above, I said, “They can place their bodies completely under their own control,”
so one might think, Then wouldn’t his presence growing fainter just be an extension of that? But that’s not it at all.
When Masters conceal their presence, they either make themselves impossible to see, or make themselves seem like ordinary people without aura.
But this old man is clearly visible before my eyes.
The aura he possesses is faint, but I can definitely sense it.
And yet the old man’s presence had weakened to a bizarre degree compared to when I first saw him.
And another important point is that it isn’t his aura or signs of life that are faint, but his presence.
There’s a difference in nuance between the words.
To explain the difference… having no signs of presence feels a bit like, “I didn’t know he was there?” But having a faint presence makes me think, “Is this person about to die? Is he perhaps a ghost?”
I feel like I’ve been doing a lot of monologues lately, thinking things through and sorting them out on my own…
But I think it can’t be helped, since it feels like a sudden storm has crashed down upon my ordinary, relatively regular life.
I need to sort out my current situation and thoughts in order to plan for the future.
Right,
I’d briefly forgotten, but there was one more reason I thought the old man wasn’t human.
“Now he’s not even pretending to slash the air with his hand anymore;;;;;;;”
Rumors are usually bound to be exaggerated.
Most of the heroic tales you occasionally hear in taverns turn out, when you look into them, to have been nothing much at all.
For example, there was once an herbalist who ran into a wolf-type magical beast while gathering medicinal herbs in the forest.
Naturally, the herbalist had no combat ability.
If he’d had enough skill to kill a wolf-type magical beast, he probably would have applied to the knight order, become a village guard, or been in charge of the village’s security.
The herbalist fled desperately.
Thanks to the leg muscles he’d developed from climbing all sorts of mountains to gather herbs, he was confident in one thing and one thing only: running away.
But it seemed the herbalist’s judgment wasn’t quite so outstanding.
He didn’t head down the mountain.
Running to a nearby village and asking for help would have given him the highest chance of survival,
but because the situation was unfolding far too urgently, the herbalist ended up heading toward a cliff.
After reaching the dead end and looking down the cliff, the herbalist thought,
“I’m fucked. This is it for me.”
Not long after, the wolf-type magical beast, which hadn’t fallen far behind him, lunged to devour him.
Terrified, the herbalist flinched and curled up.
He was thinking of his loved ones one by one as he imagined the gruesome future awaiting him,
but even after ten seconds passed, nothing happened to him.
And then, a moment later.
— Thud!!!!!!!
From below the cliff came the sound of something crashing hard into the ground.
Thinking, No way, the herbalist ran down beneath the cliff to check what had fallen,
and what had fallen there and died was, indeed, the wolf-type magical beast that had tried to eat him.
The herbalist took part of the wolf’s corpse and returned to the village.
Then, as if he had been the one who hunted the wolf, he chattered on about this and that, puffing his chest out as much as he could.
All while having long since forgotten that he had nearly died.
A few days passed,
and the fact that he had killed a wolf-type magical beast came to be accepted by the villagers as almost certain truth.
Until our mercenary band arrived at that village.
“When I told him to pierce wolf hide with the hoe he uses to dig up herbs, he couldn’t even do that. And when I personally went and inspected the intact corpse? The cause of death wasn’t being cut by something sharp, but a massive impact.”
At the words of Uncle Edam, who had been taking wolf-hunting commissions for twenty years, the herbalist broke into a cold sweat and backed away.
“I-I was wrong. Please forgive me just this once.”
The reason we pressed the herbalist like that wasn’t simply because we wanted to expose his words as lies.
If he’d just been bragging after exaggerating a little, we would have closed our eyes and let it pass.
But since he mistook us for ordinary outsiders and tried to scam us with, “Special herbs sold by a skilled herbalist who can even kill wolves,” and so on, he had to pay the price for deceiving us.
And while we were at it, we also saved the villagers who genuinely believed that herbalist was selling special herbs.
According to Uncle Edam, the place where the herbalist had curled up was probably right at the edge of the cliff, so when the wolf-type magical beast jumped to pounce on him, it must have leapt a bit farther than expected for some reason.
In any case, by now it should be clear that rumors can be exaggerated in this way.
Rumors about Masters are the same.
They cut mountains, the sky split open and the universe was visible, and so on.
Most of it was all nonsense.
It’s true that they displayed tremendous might, but even so, it wasn’t to the same extent as the rumors.
Battles in which Masters participated were still fierce battles in their own right, and the victories they achieved were not purely hopeful triumphs, but precious victories bought with many lives.
But the sight I was looking at now was different.
“Even if I downplayed this, people wouldn’t believe me…”
As I said above, the old man no longer even pretended to move.
He merely walked forward.
But with each step, the monsters were crushed by the old man’s energy and burst apart one by one.
It was like walking across a sandy beach toward the sea, only for the seawater to split to either side.
Even the blood that sprayed out as the monsters exploded was blocked by the old man’s energy and evaporated into the sky.
And so, farther and farther north.
As he broke through the waves of monsters and headed deeper and deeper into the Demon Realm, the old man stopped before a certain stone monument.
Inviolable (不可侵).
The characters of the Easterners, whose exact origin was not recorded anywhere, were engraved on the stone monument.
— Tap.
The old man placed his hand on the stone monument,
— Wung. Wung. Wung.
and slowly injected aura into it.
Then,
the pure-white barrier formed around the stone monument became visible.
The old man continued injecting aura into the monument.
The monument began to tremble little by little from side to side,
— Crumble.
and in the end, dark-red aura melted a small hole into the barrier.
“Let’s go.”
“?”
The line the old man was about to say.
I stole it.
How many times do you think I’ve been caught by the same development so far, old man?
“……”
The old man looked at me for a moment as if he were dumbfounded, then silently passed beyond the barrier.
“Ah, shit, this feels like somewhere I shouldn’t go;;”
The Demon Realm, well.
There are people who go in and come back out very occasionally, right? It might be fine.
But a stone monument with suspicious-looking Eastern characters written on it at first glance?
A barrier?
And beyond it, a space with scenery that looked, at a glance, like the true Demon Realm had begun?
No one except an idiot would enter this.
………
Haha….
“It’s the same development as always.”
I took one step into the barrier.
“Ugh.”
Dense demonic energy seemed to press down on me from every direction.
“This is not a place permitted to you. Return to where you came from. Otherwise, you will not survive.”
It felt as if the space itself were whispering that to me.
But, well…
“So what?”
The old man in front of me right now.
I can’t imagine that monster losing to anyone at all.
An overwhelming majesty more exaggerated than any rumor of any Master I had ever heard.
This old man might be the strongest absolute being in this world.
“If something happens, he’ll protect me somehow. If I die, well, that’ll be a shame.”
If I think about it rationally, I honestly don’t really know why I went out of my way to cross this barrier.
I just followed him in, thinking, The old man must have crossed over to teach me the sword~
I’m not someone obsessed with strength, nor am I someone who worships it.
Even so,
if I follow this person, I might be able to gain power great enough to place the world beneath me.
With that power, I can surely protect the people around me, the things I want to protect.
Those two things alone were more than enough to make it worth risking my life.
“……”
From the old man’s expression, I got the feeling that he had known I would do this.
“Are you not afraid?”
When my connection with this old man first began,
the one asking questions and demanding answers had been me.
“Your life from this day on may be like this Demon Realm spread out before your eyes.”
But,
“The everyday life you took for granted. The things you wished to protect may have been nothing more than a dream.”
as we came close to the end of this companionship, our positions had changed.
“Even so, can you move forward toward tomorrow?”
Only today could I understand the old man’s empty eyes.
Endlessly despairing and agonizing,
regretting, barely finding a thread of hope only to have it taken away again.
They were the eyes of a person who had given up everything amid those long waves.
This old man might have looked like a monster on the outside.
No, he was a monster.
But even with such military might, he still had something to lose.
And that was the only proof that he was still human.
I do not know the life that old man has lived.
I do not know the path he has walked.
When we first met, the old man brought up the word fate to me.
Having reached a transcendent position, the old man may truly have seen my fate.
That may be why he is saying such things.
But,
“I will move forward. Toward tomorrow.”
So what am I supposed to do about it?
If it’s fate, then I have to walk it.
I have to struggle, resist, and walk it.
“Kk.”
The old man laughed.
“Kk-khahahahahahaha… Khahahahahahaha!!!!”
The old man burst into wild laughter.
“Is that so! Is that so!!”
The old man lifted his head and looked at me.
His eyes were no longer empty.
I was there.
I, who could be arrogant because I was ignorant, was there.
“Then watch closely! Watch without missing a single thing! For I shall burn brightly and vanish for your sake!”