Chapter 212

When Carneth opened his eyes, the face before him was one he had missed with a longing sharp enough to hurt. It was his wife, Livine Tirund, the woman who had been far more than he deserved throughout his seemingly endless life.

“Do you love me?”

She had always asked that question when she wanted to see him flustered. With a playful crescent smile in her eyes, she would step closer and ask as though it had just occurred to her. Each time, he had responded the same way, pressing his lips together and saying nothing.

“You do love me, don’t you?”

When he stayed silent, her smile would only deepen. As if she already knew the answer, she would ask again, and then again, before laughing softly and reassuring him that there was no need to worry because she already knew just how much he loved her.

Only now did he realize how many times he had regretted never answering her properly. He had promised himself again and again that he would say it next time, and he wondered how many times he had made that vow without ever following through.

“I love you.”

Carneth finally spoke the words he had never once managed to say, directing them toward the woman smiling in front of him.

“What?” Her eyes widened, as though she couldn’t quite believe what she had heard. The confusion on her face made it clear that she was trying to decide whether she had misheard him. “Is this a dream?”

Carneth shook his head. The dream was his.

“G-Grand Duke...”

He pulled Livine into his arms, and the warmth he felt for the first time in what seemed like an eternity filled him with happiness that immediately twisted into something unbearably painful.

Within that gentle, cruel illusion, Carneth lived through his life once more. This time, whenever Livine asked him the question, he gave her the same answer without hesitation.

“Grand Duke, you do love me, don’t you?” She looked at him with eyes filled not with mischief, but with earnest expectation.

“I love you.”

Each time he answered, Livine smiled with those familiar crescent-shaped eyes, expressing her happiness so naturally that it felt as though it should have lasted forever. Time passed in what felt like a single breath. Karin was born, then learned to walk. Before he knew it, illness came for his wife.

“Do not cry.”

Although Carneth never cried, Livine always told him the same thing. He wanted to save her. But even inside this illusion, there was nothing he could do.

“Do you... love me...?” Livine asked again as she stood at the very edge of her life.

“I love you. I always have, I do now, and I always will. Even after a thousand years pass, nothing will change.”

“That is a relief.”

Livine gently stroked Karin’s hair while her child slept against her stomach.

“When Karin grows up, she probably will not remember me, so you must tell her only good things about me.”

Carneth couldn’t bring himself to answer.

“I am a terrible mother for leaving so early, but tell her that I loved her very much. Please do that so she does not come to hate me.”

Tears finally spilled down Carneth’s face as Livine said, “Please take care of Karin. I am sorry. And I love you.”

With that, Livine left. And tragic as it was, time continued to move forward, and Karin grew taller. One day, she approached him while holding a dead bird in her small hands.

“Father, the bird is not moving. Please heal it.”

He had lived through this moment before, and back then, he had answered her without hesitation. “Life that has ended cannot be restored. That is the order and the law of this world.”

Karin had cried then, just as he remembered. Now, however, Carneth reached out and gently took the lifeless bird from her hands.

“I am sorry, but it looks like this bird has to leave us now.”

Karin stayed silent, her lips trembling as she fought back tears.

“Even so, the bird’s soul will fly far away and reach your mother, so you do not need to be too sad.”

“To Mother?” Karin’s eyes widened at the thought. “Then will this bird be able to tell her what I want to say?”

“Of course it will.”

“That is a relief.”

Karin ran back to her room and returned with a letter clutched tightly in her hands. Carneth buried the bird with Livine, the letter placed alongside it in the earth.

“I am glad I can tell Mother that I am doing well,” Karin said quietly. “I worried every day that she might still be worried about me.”

“There is nothing to worry about,” Carneth replied. “Mommy is always watching over you.”

From that day on, Carneth tried in earnest to be a proper father. When the same illness that had taken Livine eventually came for Karin as well, he stayed by her side this time instead of turning away. Neither magic nor divine miracles borrowed from the gods were able to change the outcome.

Just as before, the illness led them to the same end. Karin lay as if asleep, unmoving and pale, surrounded by a familiar Magic Circle. The world around Carneth drained of color until everything faded into gray.

“If you wish, you can do it all again.” A figure formed from blood rose before him and urged, “I can turn everything back. This time, neither your wife nor your daughter will leave your side. If you desire it, you can taste that happiness again and again.”

The voice tempting him belonged to none other than the Grand Duke himself. The moment he saw it, Carneth understood that this was a vision shaped by his own desire. The will of an Archmage was powerful enough to imprison even himself.

“You can be trapped in eternal happiness. If you wish, it is an easy happiness to obtain.”

It was a temptation Carneth had already faced once before, when he had seen Livine again. “In the end, it is nothing but an illusion.”

“You could even forget that it is an illusion. Turning this place into your own reality without realizing it would be easy for you, or rather, for us.”

Carneth Tirund, the Grand Duke, slowly shook his head. The temptation was difficult to cast aside, but this was a question he had already answered long ago. “The promise I made is still valid.”

It would remain so forever. From the moment he nodded in response to her request to take care of Karin, his resolve had never once wavered.

Color returned to the gray world. As Carneth looked down at the sleeping Karin, he invoked his magic. He had regretted this choice countless times, but standing at this moment again made one thing painfully clear to him. No matter how great the sin, he would commit it again and again if it meant saving his daughter. The world that had once been filled with happiness shattered.

***

When Tirund regained consciousness, the first thing he did was check his own condition. He quickly realized that his body wasn’t responding, and that realization brought a bitter calm rather than panic. His limbs refused to move, and the magical circuits woven through his body were so badly damaged that even trying to force them would have been pointless.

As an Archmage, he immediately understood the cause. These were side effects produced when the curse was forcibly separated, and in this state, regaining full mobility would take an absurd amount of time, something he didn’t have enough of.

Instead, the Archmage expanded his consciousness. As his awareness stretched outward, he found Do-Jin’s eye. It was a magic eye formed from his own true blood, functioning both as a magical organ and a circuit.

The Grand Duke immediately attempted to connect to it. He failed several times, but persistence paid off. Eventually, he reached the point where he could transmit his will to Do-Jin, and in the process, he gained a clear picture of the situation unfolding outside.

If that thing wasn’t erased completely, the vampires would never wake from their suspended state. Unable to act directly, the Grand Duke chose the next best option and assisted Do-Jin indirectly. By transferring a portion of his consciousness into the magic eye and lending his magical calculations, he drastically altered the battlefield.

The effect was immediate and overwhelming. Do-Jin’s casting speed skyrocketed, mana efficiency surged to absurd heights, and the burden on his Magic Circuits dropped to the point that it barely felt real.

Do-Jin let out something close to a yelp when a Tier 6 spell completed and fired with almost no delay at all. “What the hell?”

He quickly figured out what was happening and adapted just as fast. Casting speed, output, mana efficiency, and even circuit occupancy were boosted to unthinkable levels. This wasn’t even in the same universe as Transcendence. It was on a level only a true Archmage could achieve, even through nothing more than indirect interference.

With the help of this Archmage vampire, Do-Jin began unleashing spells without restraint. At that point, he stopped feeling like a person and started functioning like a living artillery platform.

“GRAAAAAAH!”

The curse’s manifestation was hammered into the ground by the sheer spike in damage output.

“I’m carving a path, so stay back!”

With that much firepower, the absence of a tank was no longer a death sentence. From opening a path to destroying cores and securing an escape route, Do-Jin handled everything on his own.

Even so, mana wasn’t infinite. Despite the massive efficiency boost, the cost still piled up, and he burned through Transcendence and even Limited Reversion, abilities he had been hoarding until the last possible moment.

The curse was still moving. Soso collapsed without a word. Prolonged mana exhaustion combined with accumulated damage had finally caught up to her, and she died where she stood. Not long after, Tanto fell as well. Without a healer, expecting a close-range damage dealer to survive for long was never realistic.

“Haa, this’ll work out,” Do-Jin muttered. “There’s only one left.”

Their sacrifices hadn’t been meaningless. Do-Jin stood alone now, but only one heart remained inside the enemy.

He checked his remaining mana. It was far from comfortable, but it wasn’t hopeless either. He began casting. He had already forced this thing down multiple times, and his calculations hadn’t changed. When the curse’s manifestation staggered again, the result was exactly what he expected.

“GRAAAAAAH!”

The moment the collapse animation started, Do-Jin was already moving.

With a single burst of psychokinetic propulsion, he vaulted over swarms of enemies, burned through anything that tried to block his path, and pushed straight through. A metallic click rang out as his gauntlet clenched. The Destruction Rune he had saved to the very end embedded itself into the formation, and the final black heart detonated.

[All cores possessed by the curse’s manifestation have been destroyed.]

It was done. He had done everything that could be done. Do-Jin gathered what little mana he had left and prepared to disengage.

[The curse’s manifestation splits into nine separate entities.]

A system message appeared, bleak as it was blunt. Do-Jin frowned and thought, completely unfiltered, that the universe could really stand to stop being such a pain in the ass. He had tried not to think it, because tempting fate was always a bad idea, but something about this fight had been screaming that it wouldn’t end cleanly. Even so, Do-Jin didn’t despair yet.

Just before that, at the exact moment the final core detonated, the consciousness of Tirund that had been residing within the magic eye vanished.

At this point, I did more than just hang on.

A heavy thud reverberated through the space. The pressure that followed felt like gravity intensifying all at once, but Do-Jin immediately realized that it wasn’t gravity at all. It was the surrounding mana being forcibly brought under someone’s dominion, collapsing inward as though the world itself had decided who it belonged to.

Just then, a familiar black fog rolled in. This was the same sensation he had felt before, the unmistakable prelude to being forcibly relocated. By the time his vision cleared, Do-Jin was already far away from the curse’s manifestation, standing in a place that was unmistakably safe.

“Well done. You held out.”

The voice reached him clearly, cutting through distance and lingering noise without distortion. The speaker had chosen to use his actual voice, and the sincerity in it was impossible to miss.

Do-Jin finally released the breath he had been holding deep in his chest and collapsed where he stood. At that point, even if someone tried to beat him to death, he doubted he could have moved.

My part’s over.

More precisely, the user’s time ended here. From the moment Do-Jin first met Karin, the fate of the vampires had begun to shift, little by little, away from its original course. Even so, all he had done was nudge it in a different direction.

Bringing that story to its true end was the responsibility of the one who had started it. Do-Jin looked up at the inverted sky and saw a man gazing down upon the consequences of his own past. From here on, this was the Archmage’s time.