The materialized Selene bore an uncanny resemblance to Cassian’s daughter, Ivelin.
No—more precisely, it was enough to make him certain that the woman before his eyes was the perfected form Ivelin would one day reach in the future.
Before the miracle beyond all common sense that was the founder’s incarnation,
the desperate fighting spirit he had wrung out of himself lost its momentum in an instant.
“How… could something like this…”
Cassian’s eyes trembled violently.
Selene, who had opened her eyes within the cluster of light, also seemed briefly surprised as she faced Cassian.
Soon, she cleared her throat once.
“Ahem.”
Then, as if trying to assume the dignity befitting a founder, she straightened her back and spoke.
“Yes. I am your ancestor, Selene von Estal.”
****
Cassian’s face turned deathly pale.
The first name engraved upon the heart of anyone who became the head of House Estal.
Selene von Estal.
Some academic circles dismissed her as a fictional myth rather than a real person.
But Cassian had never once doubted her existence.
After all, he was a scholar who had devoted his entire life to the belief that the clue to preventing his family’s destruction lay within this treasury.
“Cassian. Since childhood, you were brighter than anyone and fulfilled your duties well. So why, at the very end, are you trying to choose such a foolish path? I have been watching over you all along.”
The founder’s rebuke held affection so deep it made his chest ache.
“Could it be… are you truly, truly the founder?”
“Yes. Thanks to my teacher, who borrowed this child’s body, I have been able to stand before you, if only for a moment.”
At that instant, Cassian collapsed.
The arrogant sense of omnipotence he had gained just moments ago by breaking through the wall of the Seventh Tier scattered as emptily as a handful of dust.
Before a mythical being who had reached the peak of the Ninth Tier,
he was neither a duke who commanded the empire nor a great mage.
He was nothing more than a pitiful child who had lost his way and stumbled upon his roots.
“I was afraid…”
Cassian’s shoulders shook as he poured out the confession he had pressed deep into his heart for ten years.
“That cursed prophecy that said it would devour our family… I was afraid it would finally strangle my child. I only… wanted to sit at the same table with my family tomorrow morning, as we always did.”
Before he was a family head, Cassian was originally a scholar.
He was a man accustomed to analyzing and controlling phenomena he did not understand.
But before fate, no magical formula held any power.
The deeper one’s knowledge, the more keenly the terror of that unknown power pierced to the bone.
Selene slowly approached Cassian.
Then she gently stroked his head.
Into the basement where cold mana had been swirling, warmth like spring sunlight seeped in.
At that tender touch, the tears Cassian had been holding back burst from his eyes.
“Do not worry. You know this as well, do you not? My unique magic is future sight.”
Within Selene’s blue eyes, a deep radiance settled, as though they held a galaxy.
She gazed straight into Cassian’s eyes and whispered.
“I can already see it. The future in which you are smiling happily beneath the warm sunlight with Ivelin and your wife, Elisa.”
Cassian lifted his tear-soaked eyes and looked at her.
“So lay down that heavy burden now. Let this child, Rihan, go. You need not torment yourself and bind yourself any longer. Everything you sought to protect will never fall.”
“Ah… aah…”
Tears streamed endlessly down Cassian’s cheeks.
The weight of being family head.
The pressure of thinking that his family’s line might be severed in his generation.
The fear of the prophecy that had kept him from sleeping for ten years melted away like snow at a single word from the founder.
Cassian sobbed in Selene’s arms.
At last, as though the taut tension within him had slackened,
he lost consciousness in the founder’s embrace, as if sinking into a deep sleep.
Then Eleanor spoke.
“Rihan. Your body has reached its limit. If I occupy your flesh any longer, a permanent crack will form in the vessel of your soul.”
No sooner had she finished speaking than control returned to Rihan.
****
“Haa, hah…!”
The moment I came to my senses, vicious muscle pain and dizziness from mana depletion swept over me.
It felt like my brain cells had gone on strike en masse.
“Ugh. Uweeek—.”
Dry heaves burst out of me as if I were retching up an empty stomach.
My body was in an unspeakable state.
The tangy stench of iron filled my mouth.
At this rate, I was going to die.
‘Senior… this is okay, right…?’
[There should be no permanent problem. However, I overexerted myself as well…]
Eleanor’s voice was steeped in fatigue.
[It seems it will be a very long time before I can borrow your body again, so I leave the rest to you. Rihan.]
‘…Yes. You worked hard, Senior.’
At this point, Eleanor had done more than enough.
It was a shame to lose my joker card, but surviving against Cassian was already a miracle.
Before me, Cassian lay unconscious in Selene’s arms.
A monster who had actually broken through the wall of the Seventh Tier.
He had awakened far earlier than in the original story, and even more powerfully at that.
Even I couldn’t gauge what kind of ripples this butterfly effect would bring in the future.
‘The Seventh Tier… At this point, he’s basically impossible to catch, isn’t he?’
I wondered if it was really okay for the power balance in a romance fantasy to collapse this much, but what could I do?
It had already happened.
In any case, the most important thing was that we had put out the immediate fire.
“Phew…”
Just as I regulated my breathing and tried to force my upper body upright,
the Eleanor doll on my shoulder reached out a faintly trembling hand toward Selene.
[…Are you going?]
Her gaze, from a distance her fingertips could not reach, followed only her disciple.
Selene wore a bitter expression.
Then she smiled mischievously, as she usually did, and looked down at her own body.
“I think so, Master. My role ends here.”
[…]
“It’s all right. Don’t be too sad. Waiting a thousand years was more than worth it.”
What was she talking about?
Going? Going where?
Flustered, I forced my way through the heavy air between them and cut in.
“No, wait a second. Where are you going? We only just introduced ourselves.”
Selene looked at me and smiled gently.
Golden motes of light were scattering from her body like grains of sand.
“Everything that comes into being in this world is bound to disappear someday. From the moment the seal was released, I was destined to return. A thousand years was too long for a remnant thought to endure.”
Selene continued lightly, as if she were someone I would see again tomorrow.
“Hehe, Junior! You don’t have to worry! I’m far too old now. I want to rest, too.”
“…”
It was a lie.
Because Selene’s eyes looked terribly sad.
She was a disciple who had waited in a dark treasury for a thousand years, longing only for her master’s voice.
And now, after finally hearing that voice and reaching out her hand,
she had to return to nothingness again.
“No, what kind of ending is that? Weren’t we supposed to be having a happy ending? If you suddenly just leave like this, what are the people left behind supposed to do?”
I couldn’t accept it ending like this.
“You told me to clean the treasury, didn’t you? You told me to tell you stories. Was all of that a lie?”
I asked Eleanor desperately.
‘Senior, can’t you do something?’
[…So long as my main body’s power is not intact, I cannot resist the flow of causality forever.]
“…”
The Eleanor doll looked especially small.
Even she, who was always so arrogant, had lowered her head.
She, too, was accepting it.
This unavoidable farewell.
The disintegration that had begun at Selene’s toes gradually started climbing upward.
She looked at me and offered her final farewell.
“Rihan, I’m truly glad to have gained a junior like you. Master is blessed with good disciples. Perhaps you’ll be able to climb to a realm higher than mine—maybe even higher than Master’s. Please… take good care of our master.”
The sight of Eleanor in silence was far too pitiful.
A reunion after a thousand years of waiting, ending in mere minutes?
If a romance fantasy serialized this kind of development, it would be the perfect way to get marked by readers and shot down.
‘I won’t let you go that easily. Absolutely not.’
I was a guy who had received a lot.
I’d received a ring, and I’d received a bracelet too.
My conscience wouldn’t allow me to close my mouth after receiving only kindness.
More than anything, watching a bad ending unfold right before my eyes wasn’t to my taste.
If I, a supporting character, wanted to be happy to the very end in this harsh world,
then at the very least, I had to make sure the people by my side were happy.
‘…I just have to fix her in place.’
The sensation from when Eleanor had borrowed my body moments ago and used the Ring of Word Spirit still lingered at my fingertips.
The Ring of Word Spirit was a tool that interfered not with phenomena, but with concepts.
All I had to do was rewrite the definition of a remnant thought that should disappear into a fixed image that would not disappear.
Whether I would succeed was unknown.
As Eleanor had said, my soul might burn away.
Even without punching numbers into a calculator, I knew this wasn’t a realm that a mere researcher who had only glimpsed it over someone’s shoulder could handle.
But that much was enough.
In physics, impossibility is nothing more than a word that does not exist until the proof is complete.
‘Fuck it. Let’s give it a shot.’
I reached my trembling hand toward Selene.
Squeezing my emptied mana circuits dry, I infused mana into the Ring of Word Spirit.
My heart pounded as if it would burst, and the pattern on the ring blazed red.