197. Original Sin
“They say that if you do this, it will open… Why not!”
Does that bookkeeper know? Perhaps he is the last member of the White Rabbit clan in this tower. Except for the party of warriors, there is no sign of life in this small world anymore.
Whether or not he knew that, the last bookkeeper groped for an empty wall and hit his head repeatedly. As if then, as if by magic, a door would appear before his eyes.
To Choco, that pitiful appearance was nothing but stupidity. Choco, approaching the young bookkeeper, grabbed him by the collar and threw him.
“Oops!”
“Don’t you fight?”
The bookkeeper wriggled to his feet after floundering in the air and landing on his face. Looking at the man’s face mixed with blood, tears and dirt, Choco quietly asked a question.
“What?”
“Aren’t you fighting? Aren’t you going to mess with me?”
People look at beasts and say they have no intelligence, but even the young among them do not forget the smell of the blood of the enemy who hurt their mother and family.
Even if they didn’t even have teeth yet, if they were in a situation where they couldn’t escape, they would open their wriggling mouths and attack. To leave even one line of scar on a predator.
Choco also expected resistance from the weak from this man. Just like she used to be.
“How can I defeat a monster like you…”
But her man had lost all her will to fight, and she was hesitantly retreating, even crawling on all fours, without losing her will to survive.
“I am your enemy. Aren’t you going to avenge your family?”
“My family, too, kuh. You’d rather have me live…”
“It’s pitiful.”
Choco, losing interest, clenched her two dainty hands into fists. Just as she was about to pop her bookkeeper’s head off her head as she was, his bite made her choco stop.
“When I saw you, you guys are much more pathetic.”
Choco was intrigued because she did not think that someone who was so desperate in front of her life would provoke herself in her role. As she shut her mouth in her silence, her bookskeeper spasmodically sighed at her.
“You know that with just power, anything can be done. Goddamn things, they know how to break something, but they don’t even know how to build something themselves.”
Choco tilted her head at the words that did not fit her context, but soon realized the situation when she saw the book keeper’s face. He opened her eyes wide, but they were unfocused.
Could it be the shock of banging her head against the wall too much? Or the fear that a higher predator is after you? Horror and shock that all blood relatives were annihilated in one day?
I don’t know what caused it, but even one of them was enough to drive the opponent completely insane.
“There are so many valuable things in the world. How many beautiful things, how many values to be respected, how many beliefs to be understood, how many favors to be returned…”
The bookkeeper was already talking in a half-delirious state. Even though it seemed plausible, Choco’s interest quickly cooled at the sound, which had neither context nor nutritive value to her.
As she took a step closer, still with her fists still undone, the bookkeeper suddenly let her cry out and bent her back.
“O sun! Moon! Star! All the shining ones who have made their place in the heavens!”
No one responded to that desperate cry. No wonder. This place is inside the Four Seasons Tower. A place where the eyes of the gods cannot reach.
Choco remembered that Muffin had been silent without saying anything even in the trap of the Dark Church. Are you really new? It’s such a distant story that I can’t even feel it.
“Save us! Punish those foolish people who turned their backs on the radiance of that god, and protect the truly important values!”
Only one saint who did not believe in God was the only person listening to that prayer or that cry. Choco recalls her memories. The sea of stars she walked with Muffin.
Perhaps, it really seems like God is right. Her dagger, which had been sleeping silently in her own arms, suddenly felt heavy. Not because of pressure, but because of other emotions.
How enjoyable it would be if God were on a journey with you. Moreover, if it is a journey against other gods, even more so. How rugged and how mighty the enemies would stand in the way.
Maybe we can hunt down the Shinsoo they’ve been selling so persistently. The fact that Shinsoo was her ancestor was not the slightest consideration for Choco.
“Please extend a single hand to us who have silently followed your Word for hundreds of years of silence and indifference!”
······I suddenly felt bad. The hair color of these book keepers was silver. The same color as her mother, a horse that will surely jump over and hunt someday.
“Please! At least once!”
Choco wasn’t very smart. It’s not that she’s really dull-headed, although she’s more on the side of not even trying to roll her brain when it comes to things outside of a specific field.
There was one fact that she knew for sure. That is, whether she is a god sleeping in her arms now, or a god nailed to the heavens.
The fact was that none of them would save the domesticated animals of these centuries.
Choco’s fist, which struck her like a hammer, shattered her skull.
*
From noble mtl dot com
With the death of the last bookkeeper, the Library of the Four Seasons also began to collapse.
First, ‘books’ disappeared. The information that the bookkeepers had arranged by weaving the warp and weft in the form of pages was released arbitrarily and was mixed without even achieving a clear conclusion.
Then it was the season. The boundaries of the four seasons, which were clearly distinguished even while harmonizing together, collapsed, and the beasts and trees that made up the fairy-tale-like scenery were grotesquely twisted into unrecognizable shapes.
Collapse was already seething throughout this world. Except for the breezy plain where only Cream and I sit.
[It’s spectacular.]
“Yes.”
Choco, who had ‘hunted’ all the bookkeepers, returned to human form and sat next to us. Aries hadn’t said anything since the moment she entered the tower.
I sensed that she was not asleep, just quietly watching the situation. The collapse of the world had already reached its peak, and even the place where the last storyteller was located was quietly eroding.
[Hwiyu, aren’t we in danger too?]
I don’t know what the towers that make up this shell, the white pillars we saw outside, are, but it’s clear that they’re filthy and sturdy, like a holy sword. It wasn’t broken in the slightest by this muddy stream of thoughts.
Since the Four Seasons have collapsed, thoughts no longer gather in it, but at the same time, the flow of thoughts cannot go out and is spinning around in this pseudo-world. If we stay still like this, we too will be swept away.
Even I don’t have the skills to deal with a clouded and unstable thought of that scale alone. However, the attitude of Cream next to him was so relaxed that he did not feel threatened.
“The bookkeeper, I heard, even though he is dead.”
[Huh?]
“The tower is, still, left.”
If you think about it, the reason Cream came here was not only because she could avoid God’s gaze, but also because she could turn the story into reality thanks to her overflowing thoughts.
Emotions, actions, thoughts, background, causation at that moment. A space that makes it possible to ‘understand’ all of that. Although the bookkeepers who refine thoughts into stories are dead.
In terms of the ability to handle the mind, of course, we had to be much better.
“Yes, now, we can talk.”
A clumsy storyteller who couldn’t even connect a proper sentence went to school.
“Ask, give. You, curious, used to, girl.”
The self-righteous audience, busy recounting their own stories, responded.
[What the hell happened to us?]
The whole world was seething with evil thoughts. The boundary between reality and spirit became much blurrier than before, and Cream dipped his hand into the muddy stream without hesitation.
However, in the midst of such a huge flood of information, as if anyone was quickly swept away and lost her sense of self, she was not shaken in the slightest. No, rather, the muddy water began to turn her color.
[How did I lose?]
Hi-yah-yah-yah-yah!
[Why is the god of the stars who killed me helping us again?]
The white paint-like thing wasn’t inside the cream. What she once was, just like I am a demonic sword now, she is also a mere mortal.
Just as I was torn into five parts and scattered, she would have fallen again and again. Without any original strength or divine authority. Until she fell to heaven in the body of a sixteen-year-old girl.
Where do scattered things go?
[Why are you.]
Above the black stream, white sands floated sparkling. It resembled the Milky Way, resembled the universe, and resembled Cream’s pupils.
This dead world didn’t flow, it just stagnated. The memories of the age of mythology that had sunk to the bottom of the puddle, the past she had abandoned, finally answered the call.
The stories that Cream had sealed her memories with herself, she recalled, but she couldn’t utter with her own mouth at all. It started to draw a huge myth, mixed with the huge flood of thoughts caused by the collapse of the Tower of the Four Seasons.
[Are you so obsessed with me?]
The first verse of the book of Genesis begins like this.