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Chapter 211

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The Opposite VIII

13

No matter how much an "rooftop" might be a place for love confessions and heartfelt punches in subcultures, it was still an awkward place to have a relaxed conversation with a Saintess.

The setting was just off. Even though time had stopped, the world below was still a hellscape.

"Let\'s go somewhere else to talk."

"Sure, sounds good."

"But can\'t you unfreeze time for the others?"

"It\'s difficult."

The Saintess shook her head.

"I have to hold someone\'s hand to bring them along in the stopped world."

Now that she mentioned it, she was still holding my hand tightly.

But just as I thought that maybe we could bring one more person by holding hands in a chain, she added,

"Unless someone has an aura as highly trained as yours, they can\'t endure it. They need to be strong enough to overcome the concept of \'time\' itself."

"Yeah, I suppose that\'s true."

The frozen world was like a vacuum in space. Ordinary people, or even somewhat trained Awakened, would find it hard just to make a sound.

"And because of that, I can do little tricks like this."

Tap. The Saintess let go of my hand.

I saw, in slow motion, her palm gradually pulling away from the back of my hand, the gap between them only 0.1 cm.

Immediately, I found myself standing not on the rooftop of the National Road Management HQ, but in the lobby on the first floor.

"……?"

"I just stopped time."

The Saintess\'s face was expressionless.

However, having achieved a Guinness record in the "Saintess\'s Expression Interpretation Championship," I could detect even the faintest aura hidden in her facial muscles.

This person… should I say she\'s excited?

She was slightly exhilarated.

"Wait a moment, Saintess."

"The World."

She let go of my hand again.

The next moment, I was standing in the middle of the Babel Tower Plaza.

"……."

"Ta-da."

The Saintess said "ta-da" in a flat tone. So, she must have been the one who picked me up and carried me here while time was stopped, straining as she did so.

"…Saintess."

"Yes?"

"You seem to be in a really good mood."

"Yes. It\'s been 2,000 years since I\'ve talked with someone."

"I also spent about 212 years alone after being screwed over by \'The Admin of All-Play,\' so I understand how you feel…."

It was when Sim Aryeon had visited me and said, "I really like the cafe mocha the guild master makes."

At that time, I hugged her tightly and cried like a child.

In other words, 200 years of solitude was enough to turn me, Doctor Jang, into a mere low-level regressor who that graveyard villain could easily target.

And the person before me had just endured ten times that, all alone…!

In other words, the Saintess was currently a fragile Saintess.

As soon as I finished making this judgment and interpretation, I picked her up in a light \'princess carry\' while still holding her hand.

"Oh."

"You\'ve done well, Saintess."

"……."

"And thank you. If you hadn\'t stopped time, I would\'ve honestly given up on this subjugation. I might have been trapped in an endless hell of repeating time as a regressor."

What I needed most during those 200 years of isolation was human warmth.

Wasn\'t that why I instinctively hugged Aryeon when I reunited with her?

People can only understand others by reflecting on their own experiences, so I could also guess what the Saintess needed most right now.

"……."

Thankfully, my guess wasn\'t wrong.

The Saintess silently entrusted her body to my arm.

Her water-colored hair, a little longer than it was \'2,000 years ago,\' leaned towards me.

"I know a good café nearby. Shall we go there?"

"…No. Just walking around like this is fine."

"Oh. That sounds good. Let\'s do that."

Step, step.

A posture that might look quite embarrassing to others. But whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, the world was entirely frozen, except for the two of us.

No one could take an interest in us.

The people trapped in the tortures of the boiling hell and the flaming hell were petrified in various poses, some trying to flee, others screaming.

We walked through the petrified crowd.

"I was actually a bit worried."

The Saintess, nestled in my arms, moved her lips.

"Worried?"

"Yes, because I\'m now an anomaly."

The voice that slipped from her lips still carried the dryness of someone who had been petrified for a long time.

"I\'ve even become something that could be classified as an alien god. And you, Doctor Jang, are usually hostile to anomalies. So, I was worried."

"I see. You thought I might immediately react by saying, \'What an insolent anomaly!\' and try to subjugate you?"

"Yes. Just as a possibility."

I laughed.

"If you ever witness Doctor Jang reacting like that, make sure to subjugate them immediately because they’re a doppelgänger."

No matter how important it is to drive out the void from the world, it could never be more precious than the people around me.

If I prioritized the former over the latter and turned into an \'anomaly subjugation machine,\' the person known as Doctor Jang would also become just another anomaly. He must be subjugated without fail.

Of course, the temperature of the Saintess\'s body, resting in my arms, was already far from human.

It was as cool as a shadow.

Probably around 15°C.

But it was still warm for a body that had endured 2,000 winters.

"……."

At that moment, something curious happened.

Sssss-.

The Saintess\'s aura climbed up my arm, inching forward.

As is well known, the Saintess\'s aura was colorless and transparent, so outwardly, nothing seemed to change. The Saintess was merely quietly resting in my arms.

"Your aura has certainly become incredibly adept."

Admiring her in my mind, I raised my dark aura, carefully wrapping it around the transparent aura that had touched my arm.

"......"

Hesitant.

The Saintess\'s transparent aura cautiously responded to the gestures of my dark one.

Instead of the human way of holding hands with five fingers, the countless branches of aura intertwined with mine like interlocked fingers.

Our bodies bloomed with the fusion of transparency and darkness.

Like a flower that blooms in silence, the Saintess quietly closed her eyes as she leaned into me.

"......"

"......"

There was warmth in the aura.

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It was comforting.

What we were imitating, with an aura technique that no ordinary awakened one could replicate, was ultimately the human way of exchanging warmth.

If so, the criteria that distinguish the strange from the human are not the internal body temperature of 36.5°C, nor the five fingers, but rather what one attempts to imitate with that warmth and those fingertips.

We silently affirmed each other\'s humanity like that for a while.

14

"When I lived in a world at a standstill, I pondered ways to invade Nut\'s domain."

At the old Baekje Hospital\'s café.

The Saintess sipped her coffee in the place where Old Scho always conversed with Madame Adele. It was the first time in a long while that I had made her coffee myself.

Well, it was just instant coffee from a golden packet mixed with hot water.

But since that was her favorite, there was no helping it. The pride of a barista crumbled in the face of modern food industry technology.

"Did you have any success?"

"Unfortunately, no."

The Saintess shook her head.

"The closest method was \'Kaleidoscope.\' By using the belief that those experiencing Kaleidoscope catch a glimpse of the afterlife, I pushed myself to the extreme brink of death."

"Oh, that\'s a good idea."

"Yes. ...But still, I was blocked by that glass barrier between life and death."

Glass.

The metaphor of a phenomenon where one can see the other side but cannot cross over.

If only I could punch through that glass and shatter it. But the barrier set up by the alien god far surpassed even the bulletproof glass of the U.S. President\'s limousine.

Looking back, when the 264th Fairy took me to the underworld, that was the perfect opportunity... But regretting what\'s already passed is useless.

"If you\'ve tried other methods, please tell me about them all."

"Yes."

We shared the records of the Saintess\'s failures over the past 2,000 years.

It would be a mistake to think that the Saintess was incompetent.

Because if you think about it the other way around, the alien god Nut couldn\'t interfere with the Saintess\'s [Time Stop] for over 2,000 years either.

The alien god was powerful enough to turn the world into hell in a single day.

But even such a deity couldn\'t touch a single finger on the time the Saintess had frozen.

This is generally how "territory disputes" between entities with the alien god-level danger played out.

"Actually, the Saintess\'s power and Nut\'s power are complete opposites."

The Saintess tilted her head.

"Really?"

"Yes. The world the Saintess has stopped is close to nothingness. Since time has stopped completely, no life can be born, and no suffering can be cultivated. There\'s no one to perceive anything."

And this \'nothingness\' is paradoxically the most opposed concept to \'hell.\'

"Hell or the afterlife is ultimately a projection of the belief that life continues in some form even after death. It’s endless existence."

"Ah, indeed."

"So Nut can\'t invade the Saintess\'s formless nothingness, and the Saintess can\'t invade Nut\'s form-filled existence. They are opposites."

"...You\'re saying that Nut and I are destined to remain in a perpetual stalemate."

"By yourself, yes."

I rested my chin on my hand.

"Glass. Glass. A way to shatter the glass. Entities related to glass..."

"Shouldn\'t we consider mirrors as well?"

The Saintess said.

"When you entered the underworld, you mentioned seeing your reflection in the glass, didn\'t you?"

"Yes. My appearance in the real world was reflected beneath my feet."

"Then I think it\'s closer to a \'mirror\' than \'glass.\' After all, the afterlife is a copy of this life. The \'underworld\' is a mirror image of our world."

"You\'re absolutely right. Hmm..."

The humans existing in this world were \'copied\' and \'pasted\' into Nut\'s domain.

And then Nut claimed that this copy was the real one, while we were merely souls suffering in hell.

As the Saintess said, it would be more accurate to say that the concept of a \'mirror\' is involved.

"Mirror. A mirror, then. So, a doppelgänger... No, a doppelgänger is a servant of the Endless. It\'s more related to the division and confusion of identity."

"Theseus\' ship?"

"Possibly. If I were to roughly list entities associated with the division and confusion of identity, it would include Theseus\' ship, the Uyuni Desert, the Embarrassing History Mosquito, the Potato Saintess..."

"Please exclude the last one."

What are you talking about? That might be the most important clue.

"In any case, they\'re loosely related, but there\'s no direct connection to entering Nut\'s domain... Ah."

At that moment.

As I searched through my past for clues, the mortician\'s brain found a keyword.

"――Mirror!"

I stood up abruptly, still holding hands with the Saintess.

"Yes?"

"Now that I think about it, there is an entity not only related to mirrors but also connected to both \'hell\' and \'this world\'!"

Why hadn\'t I thought of this earlier?

An entity that constantly chanted, \'This world is hell\' and \'Being born into this world itself is evil,\' like a mantra.

-Die right now.

The Magic Mirror. The entity from Snow White.

That mirror, always placed in the room of the psychopath Yoo Jiwon, was the clue that led to the night goddess Nut.

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