CH 180

My revenge was done, so I didn’t try to pester Cory in anyway. I thought everything would be over if I let go of the reins, but…..

[Hel Fuli Batonte]

Cory DuBois, with an expression that befitted a doll more than a person, raised his hand and drew a magic circle as he activated the spell. The area of the circle was so wide that he poured every single drop of his magic into the circle. Blood poured out of Cory’s mouth and nose, but he didn’t even seem to care.

Rain began to pour down from the sky. The rain, however, was covered in fire for some strange reason. I didn’t know what it was made of, but anyone who was hit by the rain began to melt instead of burn. Cory was the same.

Cory blankly stared as I stayed unaffected slightly longer than humans, then slowly raised his hand again. He killed me before he died. I was still weak and lacking my heart, so I died a clean, quick death. I felt a bit anxious at Cory and how he killed everyone and himself, but I didn’t care too much.

And then, I was back in the past.

After that, I was so elated to know that Blanchielle’s soul was found that I kept thinking of ways to get Blanchielle back to her original state. I had completely given up on revenge, so now destruction wasn’t going to happen. That was what I thought. It was easy to get Blanchielle back. All I needed to do was find another body that could contain her white magic and place her soul in it.

The two of us were the only dragons here, so I needed to get a dragon’s egg from a foreign continent to bring her back.

I was so, so excited to think that I could return to my peaceful daily life from now on. But……

“Crazy bastards! Those crazy sons of bitches! Those insane, damned monsters!”

Hestia, who I thought I would never have to see again, climbed up the mountain, saying a litany of things that were a bit different from before. Then, she found and entered my lair. Hestia hopped excitedly as soon as she found me and gave me a short greeting. She planted her forehead onto the ground as she bowed before she raised her head and started cursing everyone and everything she could.

“O, might dragon! Nutjobs are ruining this world. The world below this mountain is all aflame! Please escape! No, please stop them! I’ve heard that all of this was started by you, the mighty Noirelle. I don’t know why you changed your mind in the middle, but! If you have changed your mind, please stop them!”

When I gave up on my revenge, a bunch of kids who popped out of nowhere were making sure they were going according to plan. I left my lair and looked down the mountain at her words. Just as she said, the world was covered in flames and it was absolute chaos down there. When I looked to see who had caused it all, it was the four that I had killed over and over again.

Innocent people had been swept up in the fight between me and the humans, and they must’ve been completely sick and tired of it all–everything was a mess.

I tousled my hair angrily as I scowled. Even after that, the unwanted destruction of the empire continued. I was just about to bring Blanchielle back to life when everything faded to black and I was back at the start of it all. Thanks to that, I had become quite desperate.

I tried, time and again, to make them stop. But because I could do nothing but store power at the beginning of it all, I couldn’t do much. Even still, I tried my best.

First, the royal family had to stay safe. But the one that destroyed the royal family was always the royal prince, Hylli Orde Ianess. He brutally murdered the emperor and empress, then became the bloody emperor before bringing the empire to collapse. So I yanked out his soul and threw it somewhere else. But it was all for naught. Everything was undone as soon as the DuBois magic circle began to move.

I tried to decrease the monsters’ strength to make sure they would kill less people, but it was no use. They made sure to kill whomever they pleased.

I tried to take back and shut down everything I had prepared for before. I shut down Augran Academy and buried the first emperor’s body in the ground. But Yvnes always made sure to fill in any blanks that I emptied to ensure that my plan went smoothly and brought the humans closer to destruction.

Okay, putting all of the others aside, the world was going to implode if Swanhaden existed on this earth. He, who was twisted beyond return, made so many people lose their sanity thanks to his merciless massacres and torture, and those who suffered under him caused even more chaos.

“Euaaaaaaaagh!”

“Kyaaaaaaaaaaagh!”

Hestia and I were in despair. Hestia, who had smelled destruction in the air, had climbed up the mountain once more to ask for my help. She gave me a detailed explanation of how they had brought the empire to its knees and cursed them, and I grabbed my hair and screamed at the situation. She also screamed in misery.

“What else am I supposed to do?!”

I was sick of it all. I felt like I was gasping for air. When I banged my head on the floor, Hestia told me that she felt compelled to do the same and stopped me and helped me up.

I felt like I had to tell someone about all of this, so I explained the entire situation to Hestia. Hestia didn’t tell me that I was speaking nonsense and solemnly listened to my words before her eyes grew round.

When she learned that she had climbed up this mountain before, she looked intrigued as she scratched her chin, muttering to herself.

“I feel like this entire situation is too twisted. Like if I move a bit to the left, the person next to me trips to the right, and if I move to the right, the person in front of me trips, you know?”

Hestia said this without putting too much thought behind it, but for me, someone who had tried time and again to stop this process, her words made me feel like I discovered an oasis in the desert.

It felt like everything was tangled. If someone unrelated to this entire ordeal, a third person, came and snipped the tangles threads of it all, I felt like the ending could change. Of course, this was just one theory, and I wasn’t too sure if it was going to do anything, but I had to try something.

The world returned to the beginning. This time, as soon as I regained enough power, I spent all of my power looking for a suitable soul.

I made a crack in the air and looked through the river of souls and waited until the empire was destroyed once more.

I felt like I needed to find a suitable soul before the next turn, so I was focusing on souls from other worlds as I looked.

When you held up a soul, their circular, fire-like shape soon shifted to a faint image of their past life. The soul I had fished up this time was of a five year old child. But I felt like they were too young to handle all of this, so I put it back in the river. When I put my hand back in and yanked out another soul, it was a murderer. I placed the soul back in the river.

I did this over and over and over and found a few suitable people, but none of them were satisfactory enough. They were all lacking, just a bit.

Then, a hand suddenly appeared behind my back and entered the river of souls. I was shocked that I didn’t even realize there was someone else, shocked again that they had put their hands in the river of souls, which was only possible for dragons, and shocked again that the person in question was Swanhaden. I thought Hestia was the only person who climbed up the mountain, but Swanhaden, all of a sudden? He was supposed to be down there, having a blast as he murdered monsters and people left and right.

Swanhaden didn’t seem too different than he usually did. He still had eyes with zero sanity and nicks and scars everywhere on his body. His cruel, dangerous aura. If I had to find one thing that was different, it was that he looked slightly tired. Or maybe sleeply.

Swanhaden dragged out a soul without hesitation. That soul was one that I had filtered out before. They had lived such a difficult life that I felt like they wouldn’t be open to helping me. They were someone who only cared for the people around them, so I thought they didn’t fit the situation too well.

When the soul exited the river of souls, the faint image of their past life appeared.

“……”

Swanhaden just held the soul in his arms as he stared at it. He held the soul tightly with crazed eyes, as if he was moments away from crushing it.

The expression on his face was one that I had never seen before. Something that looked a bit difficult? Maybe at a loss? Then, his lips began to curl upwards as he still held her in his arms and he burst out into maniacal laughter. The mania behind it was a bit chilling. Did he finally go insane?

I felt like the soul was about to crack, so I snatched it away from him. Unplanned destruction of souls were so damaging that they could destroy an entire dimension. I calmed my beating heart and stared at the soul he had chosen. They were from a dimension called Earth. She must’ve been a child from the East–her eyes and hair were black.

“Put her inside Shuraina.”

He still had a creepy smile on his face, even after I snatched the soul away from him.

Blanchielle had told me that my smile was terrifying. But he was worse than me.

Anyway, what’d he say. Put the soul inside Shuraina?

“I told you something useful, so kill me with black magic now.”

He said as he smiled. How much did he know about this? I didn’t know. His jewel eyes, looking exactly like Blanchielle’s, stared at me without a single care. Swanhaden wanted me to kill him immediately, but I didn’t kill him.

When I didn’t kill him, Swanhaden shifted his body and tried to kill me, so I had to stretch my hand out towards him. Swanhaden didn’t react as he stared at the hand in front of him–he just had a gleeful smile on his face.

It was the same smile I had seen on his face whenever I had killed him, drenched in fury. Swanhaden always had that expression on his face he died.

He had to look like Blanchielle but suffer so much. My heart ached slightly, so I killed him painlessly. I laid him on the ground and placed the soul from earlier in his lifeless arms. I had seen some kind of twisted affection behind those eyes of his earlier. It had been twisted, but it was the first positive emotion I had seen from him. They didn’t have anything in common, but it felt like he knew the soul well.

Swanhaden, who was still breathing slightly, stared at the soul in his arms and curled his arms inwards to hold it closer to him. He held the soul so tightly that it almost cracked, but he died before it could get crushed. And so, he died again.

The earth began to rumble once more, and everything went back to the beginning.

Now I knew what I needed to do. Before I made that soul reincarnate into this world, I needed them to know about the situation. So I did some research to learn about the soul. The soul’s name was Han Ye-an, and she had a few younger siblings and she was working her entire life. I wondered how I could tell her about this world as inconspicuously as I could, then learned that her one hobby was reading romance novels.

I figured that it’d be best to tell her about this world through a romance novel. I stared at Hestia, who had climbed up the mountain again, and told her the situation, again, even if she would forget it.

Hestia was always willing to help me, so she told me that she would write the book herself. She looked miserable as she paired herself and the nutjobs together, but she wrote the novel without complaint.

She needed to explain the world’s situation so she needed to make it as tragic, as plot-based as possible.

“The person who’s going to prevent the destruction of the empire is Shuraina?”

Hestia didn’t seem to like this too much. She must’ve had a very bad relationship with Shuraina. but even as Hestia complained, she wrote the novel well.

And with that, the preparations were over. Honestly, it was pretty much a bet. I had no idea what the conclusions would be. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how she would remember her past life and how she would change those insane, destructive bastards.

Would she cut their hands and feet off and suppress them? She was from another world, would she have some kind of elaborate plan and stop them in one single blow? Maybe she’d tie them up and make sure they couldn’t do anything. I didn’t know. I just made it happen and was waiting to see the results. Although I needed to check in here and there to see.

I sat outside the lair, where everything was in plain sight.

The sky began to turn red, following the sun as it began to hide behind the clouds. I could hear the screams from up here. The earth began to look like the color of the sky. I carelessly stared at the scene in front of me as I bit my lip.

The magic circle began to turn counterclockwise again. The earth began to rattle.