Chapter 813

Fwoosh.

Everything sharpened and slowed.

Dirt and sand flew up beneath his staggering feet. His eyes widened. Blood surged from his chest.

And then…

“What the fuck are you?”

As the words left my mouth, time returned to normal.

I could see Yamamoto Genji—or rather, the bastard wearing his face—grinning.

The Prophet.

A moment ago, his eyes had been wide with pain. Now they gleamed with joy and surprise I couldn’t understand.

He’s happy? Now?

I pushed the question aside and swung my dagger again.

The Prophet staggered, clutching his bleeding chest. The moment his hand closed around the hilt at his waist, a slash leaped from my dagger and flashed through the darkness ahead of him.

Shhk.

A faint line appeared across The Prophet’s wrist with a chilling cut.

His right hand, which had half-drawn the sword, lost its strength and fell away from his body.

Thud. Splatter!

Blood sprayed onto the ground. Red blood, no different from any human’s. That only made it harder to believe what I was seeing, even as I charged him.

Whoosh. Crack!

I brought my heel down on his leg with the force of a thousand geun.¹ The flesh of his calf burst, and the bones beneath it shattered.

The Prophet dropped to one knee, his balance gone. He reached for me with his remaining hand, but this time I didn’t have to move.

“Stop.”

A deep voice rang out. The wind died, and the air trembled.

I couldn’t see the force that caught The Prophet’s wrist before his hand reached me, but I could feel the Grand Mage’s powerful mana surrounding us.

Crack.

His hand stopped dead in midair. Bones ground out of place, and his brow twisted. Then his body began to rise, as if an invisible giant had seized him and lifted him off the ground.

Whistle—thud, thud, thud!

Something pure white shot toward him like a beam of light and pierced his limbs.

The long, sharp bone shards sliced through flesh and bone like tofu, pinning his body—which had been floating in the air—deep into the cliff.

Crunch!

The solid rock, which might have stood there for hundreds or even thousands of years, held him fast.

Overpowered in an instant after my surprise attack, The Prophet coughed up a mouthful of blood.

“Cough. Heh heh.”

Pain was the same for everyone.

But The Prophet laughed, curling his bloodstained lips as if he couldn’t feel a thing.

“Good. First, I’ll give you credit. Very well done.”

Wham!

A blow to the face snapped his head back. His skull struck the cliff with a boom, and he shook his head.

“It’s been a while since I felt my head ring. Having fun is one thing, but let’s not overdo it.”

“……!”

I stifled a groan.

I’d already cut off his hand and crushed his knee. My first strike had driven straight toward his heart, too. He’d pulled away at the last moment, but the tremendous Scorching Yang Qi carried by my dagger had been enough to ravage his insides.

An ordinary human would be dead by now.

But The Prophet wasn’t an ordinary human. That impossible vitality couldn’t belong to one.

And unlike Michael Silbert, who had been practically half-human and half-demon, then died in the form of a monster while bleeding monster’s blood, The Prophet was still shedding red human blood.

“……Jin.”

“What… what the hell is that thing?”

Magic Johnson and the Skeleton King stared at the incomprehensible being, their gazes trembling. The Prophet laughed, his voice thick with blood.

“No one can answer that. That’s the kind of being I am.”

No. He was wrong.

I steadied my ragged breathing. My eyes gave off a faint glow and burned as if they were on fire.

This was the price of briefly taking in a power beyond humanity. It was also a gift the System had given one foolish human—and the only key to this enormous puzzle.

The Truthful Eye.

I’d received the special Item as a Reward for completing Unknown Death, the Quest that began with Siegfried Bassmann’s death. I’d only glanced at its details before, but the moment I found a clue, I’d recalled them.

System

Item Window

Truthful Eye

Type: Single-Use Item
Grade: Special
Restriction: Jin Taekyung
Description: In the distant past, a god who would become part of myth offered up an eye to drink from the spring of wisdom. In exchange for one eye, he gained infinite wisdom, while the eye that sank to the bottom of the spring gained the power to pierce even the truths of other worlds.

Effect: Can be applied to a single target only.

Looking back, the System had always shown me the way.

At first, I hadn’t known what the consumable Item called the Truthful Eye was for. I hadn’t known what the hologram only I could see was trying to tell me.

But now I did.

A few hours ago, I’d found my one clue. Before that, the System had already handed me the key to understanding it.

A key that could be used on only one target—and therefore had to be used with even greater care.

And now I held the power to see through every truth.

Fwoooosh.

Heat flooded my eyes. My vision turned white.

But the divine power within them pushed through the pain and reached out.

Toward Yamamoto Genji. Toward the pope of the fanatics who had built a temple in this desert.

Toward the unknown being who had spent more than thirty years sowing the seeds of catastrophe in this land under the name Muninn—and now meant to bring them to flower himself.

A thick veil hid him, one even Qi Sense couldn’t penetrate. But the eye of the old god called Odin saw through it all.

Pierced it. Revealed what lay beneath.

Flash!

The instant a distant, blinding light flooded my vision, countless bells thrashed inside my mind.

System notifications I’d never heard before and holographic windows I’d never seen raced in every direction, to the ends of the earth and above the clouds.

Ding. Ding. Ding. Diiiiing!

One sound swallowed another. The translucent holographic windows multiplied from one to five, from five to dozens, then to a hundred.

They were a wave. A mountain.

“Ah…!”

A gasp escaped me. Cold ran down my spine at the sight before me.

Hundreds. Perhaps thousands.

More holographic windows than I could count burst forth like fireworks. They all came from one being—the beginning and center of everything.

The Prophet.

I could hardly breathe. These weren’t merely pieces of information. They were the countless lives he had devoured, the gravestones they had left behind.

Gravestones bearing nothing but names and levels.

And the Truthful Eye within me saw through the identity of the gravedigger who had built this vast cemetery of the dead. It stripped away the thick veil around him and revealed the truth.

Ding.

One final bell rang in my ears. The last piece of the puzzle fell into place.

This is…

At last, I understood what The Prophet truly was. How this cursed monster had hidden his identity for more than thirty years while doing everything he’d done.

Right. Now I get it.

I stared at The Prophet, still smiling. Then, with the breath I’d been holding, I spat out a single word.

“Doppelganger.”

I saw his reaction clearly.

“……!”

The corners of his mouth, which had been curved like a half-moon, stiffened. The holographic window hovering above his head shone with a particularly gloomy light.

System

Level 170 “The Final Abyss” Doppelganger

Doppelganger.

A harbinger of ill fortune, a being spoken of like a superstition.

Countless monsters of old myth had torn through the pages of legend and leaped into reality. Yet a doppelganger had never once appeared. Humanity had come to believe there were none among the enemies they had defeated, or those they had yet to face.

Not even in the horrifying Demon Realm. A doppelganger was nothing but an illusion born of fear, a mere superstition.

They were wrong.

The doppelganger had been there from the beginning. Everyone had mistaken its failure to reveal itself for its absence.

At least Jin Taekyung knew that better than anyone. He even knew when this incomprehensible being, which had devoured countless lives, had first slipped into their world.

“Michael Silbert. The Great Battle of Paris.”

His voice came out abruptly, hard as the cliff rock on either side of them. The monster’s smile, frozen for a moment, eased back into place.

“That’s right. On the very day you humans call Christmas, I met him and became part of this world.”

December 25, 2020.

The great battle that made a page in history—and made the name Michael Silbert known to all humanity.

As one layer of that day’s truth peeled away, Jin Taekyung swallowed hard. The Skeleton King clenched his teeth, while Magic Johnson stared at The Prophet—or rather, the doppelganger—in disbelief.

“That can’t be. The one that attacked Paris at the time was definitely…”

“A Dragon. More precisely, a hatchling less than three hundred years old. It was born a Dragon, so arrogance was in its nature. And it let its guard down, as young ones do. Of course, it was unexpected that a human would kill it, even so.”

The doppelganger had cut Johnson off. He went on.

“In the end, they were simply unlucky. The young Dragon, and the humans who miraculously survived their encounter with it.”

The Grand Mage, who had lived through the Great Cataclysm firsthand, couldn’t hold back a groan.

“……It was a lie, then. Michael Silbert made all of it up.”

“Well, not all of it. A Dragon did attack Paris. And Michael did survive alone.”

The doppelganger grinned.

“I knew the moment I saw him. Unlike the others, Michael was quick to understand his position. Before I’d killed even half of them, he was on his knees, begging me to spare him. He said he’d do anything if I let him live.”

“……!”

“An interesting offer. I accepted. Then he killed the remaining humans himself.”

Jin Taekyung suddenly remembered a line from the conversation he’d had with Michael Silbert just before the man met his end.

I was struggling to survive, too!

He’d sounded as though he were spitting blood.

He’d been telling the truth. Michael Silbert had struggled to survive. His desire to live was greater than anyone’s, and he still had ambitions to fulfill.

And so a human and a monster had joined forces.

But it wasn’t a shackle. It was a contract. Two monsters who differed in appearance but shared the same nature had made a deal to achieve their own goals.

But…

“What for?”

“What?”

“I asked what it was for. What was your real reason for wanting to live among people in this world?”

Jin Taekyung ground out the words. After a moment’s silence, the doppelganger smiled.

“Well, I don’t think now’s the time to wait for my answer.”

And at that moment—

Rumble.

A tremor swept through the canyon from far away.