Negotiation
[What have you done?]
“What are you doing?”
[What about Nebulus?]
“Who are you?”
[I’m a nightmare. Livid, the demon of nightmares.]
Leon looked at the woman who introduced herself like that.
“Is it surprising?”
[what?]
“The nightmare takes the form of a woman.”
It may be Leon’s prejudice, but Leon was arbitrarily imagining that his nightmare would be in the form of a fat demon.
He thought that he would be as terrible as he could be as he was in charge of the stinky field of nightmares that confuses the minds of intelligent beings.
But if you think about it, it might be appropriate for the Demon God of Nightmare to take the form of a woman.
Because he was the only one among the masterminds who created demons, demons who worshiped power, who dealt with the non-violent ability to play with the mind rather than the power itself.
There must also be an image of a nightmare, in the sense of playing with a dream.
[I will ask you again. What about Nebulus?]
“He is dead.”
[… that makes no sense.]
“You know best that he is dead, right? Isn’t that why you came to me at this time?”
It has been over 10 minutes since Leon ascended to the new realm using the immortal demon king as a medium.
Even the gods of the new realm cannot read the future of Leon, but even so, 10 minutes is enough time to understand that Leon has disappeared from the human realm.
Nevertheless, the reason why he did not come to Leon immediately was because there was a limit to what Leon could do even if he came to the new realm anyway.
God cannot kill.
But Leon dies.
If those two fight together, of course immortality will survive,
Leon fought against the immortal demon, and I must have given up because I was exhausted.
But, unexpectedly, Leon did not get tired.
Rather, the immortality that never died, precisely the presence of Nebulus had disappeared.
is god dead?
It was an unprecedented situation from the beginning until now.
As soon as Nebulus’s presence was lost, there was an emergency in the new realm, especially for the demons who were hostile to Leon.
It’s dangerous to be alone
So, so many demons gathered together and flocked to Leon.
[How the hell?]
Livid frowned, doubting the truth, and was soon able to grasp the situation.
He felt a divine deity from the demon, Berseria, who was hiding his presence far away from Leon.
[The adversary of truth. Did she absorb the soul of Nebulus using the spirit fragments of the demon that make up her soul?]
At those words, the other demons also rolled their eyes and glared at Berseria.
You must kill Berseria immediately.
No, Berseria, who had already inherited the place of immortality, became a god.
Berseria was literally immortal.
Then, at least, before the other demons are absorbed by her, Berseria must be neutralized.
Seeing them like that, Leon moved as if blocking their sight and scattered his presence.
“Isn’t that child you have to deal with?”
[There is no reason why we should deal with you. Why the hell are you doing this? Have you talked to Nebulus?]
“He told me stories of little nutritional value.”
[No nutritional value?]
“When I said that I came to protect my world because it threatened my world, I was told that it was the role of the gods. They also talked about the nuance that my existence could cause an unprecedented cataclysm in the divine realm and was dangerous, or they insisted that I have an awareness as a god.”
[Did you kill immortality and Nebulus even after hearing that story?]
Leon shrugged.
“You said I came to protect my world. What should I negotiate with a guy who imposes duties on me and doesn’t even mention my purpose?”
[You mean you killed a god just because of that world!]
Again.
The inhabitants of this world, the new realm, considered the lower-dimensional world too trivially.
After all, from their point of view, a world was nothing more or less than dust flying in the air.
Literally, each of those worlds is made up of atoms in four-dimensional space-time, so the lower-dimensional world doesn’t matter.
It is as if we do not value the life of microorganisms when we claim that the lives of all living things are equal.
In the new realm, a world made up of 3D + time axis is literally infinitely spread out.
There are only a few of those that Leon cherishes, and there are only a few worlds where the history of 10 years since Leon learned the proper magic was recorded.
From the point of view of the demons, they cleaned according to the role they were given, but they looked like crazy people who killed people because the dust they owned had disappeared.
Even the demons, through regular cleaning, paradoxically create the possibility that the bacteria can live with their free will.
“Nevertheless, that world is my world. This is the world I was born and lived in, and the world I have to protect.”
[···Then do this.]
It was only then that Livid made a proposal that Leon might be terrified of.
[We demons will not put a finger on your world.]
“Huh?”
It was a pretty interesting proposal.
[Nebulus’s death is unfortunate, but if you go away like this, our demons will never again touch your world, the world you live in.]
“What about Berseria?”
[I guarantee her safety.]
Leon shrugged his chin and guessed the true meaning of Livid.
It’s such a sweet story.
But that made me even more suspicious.
Of course, from the point of view of the demons, the world occupied by Leon is only a fraction of the infinite world.
For the demon gods, they could protect their own safety just by leaving a very small part of the world unattended.
Nevertheless, the reason Leon had no choice but to doubt her was the fact that if they had resigned in this way, it would not have happened that Leon would return like this in the first place.
The ‘Transcendent’ who brought Leon back.
If his purpose is to make Leon correct the shape of the world, the demons must be hostile to Leon.
‘for a moment. It’s only a small part…’
not.
Leon was wrong.
“Does my world mean that I will not touch the possibilities of that world, that is, other parallel worlds differentiated from my world?”
[What? You don’t even know what that means!]
[After acknowledging your divine nature and granting permission to some worlds, your greed is endless!]
The new world was undergoing a crustal shift due to Leon.
However, Leon’s influence was at most 10 years of history.
There was no way that was enough to cause such a disaster that would destroy the peace of the new world.
The problem was the world of Leon, the worlds that were differentiated from the history that Leon had newly engraved.
The history that began to differentiate innumerable from the moment Leon returned began to engulf the existing worlds and replace the material of the new world.
Even if the shape of the world changed due to one person named Leon, it had changed too much.
It was not just a mere ten-year history.
Even at this moment when Leon left the human world and reached the new realm, and in the history after that, the world will continue to erupt, devour the new realm, and cause a tectonic shift.
So, how do the demons do it?
Immediately after Leon accepts the negotiation with them, they will gradually erase the eruption from the realm beyond the reach of Leon’s consciousness, reducing it to a single world where all possibilities are lost.
To a world where Leon was so meaningless, uninteresting, and despised as a goldfish in a fishbowl floundering in the illusion of free will.
“What I want is not the world. They want the free will of the people living in that world, the infinite possibilities.”
If Leon wishes, it will be possible to decorate that single world and build the most perfect world closest to Leon’s utopia.
However, Leon had no interest in art since the days of Lee Won-hyung.
A world where everyone makes no mistakes, makes no mistakes, and repeats only the right choices is a world that is only beautiful on the outside.
It is a work of art.
However, what Leon considered truly beautiful was the will of those people who made an effort not to make a mistake and took a strenuous step with all their might in order not to make a mistake again, even if they made a mistake.
was a free will.
However, there is no such thing in the world where everything is perfectly carried out according to Leon’s will.
No matter how utopia it is, no matter how beautiful the world is, Leon cannot regard that world as beautiful.
[You are well aware that your demands are excessive on your own, right?]
Leo also laughed at Livid’s sharp eyes.
“At the end of the day, we were fighting over an agreement we could never compromise on.”
As long as Leon is alive, Leon’s world will change all future history.
In the end, the whole world will be dyed with Leon’s color.
Leon hoped for all these possibilities, and the fact that demon gods could not touch that world meant a kind of job loss.
loss of worth as a god.
To avoid such a reality, there was only one path the demons could choose.
Leon’s death.
Depriving Leon’s color from the world and restoring the original world.
[It’s silly. If I had been satisfied with just having one world in my hands, I wouldn’t have died like this.]
“Am I going to die?”
[I admit that your powers are good enough to kill Nebulus, but do you think it’s possible to deal with all of us alone?]
“then?”
[Not only foolish, but also arrogant.]
“I don’t know if you, who are arrogant by default, understand the meaning of arrogance.”
Black lightning erupted from Leon’s whole body.
The demons resisted the terrifying lightning by demonstrating their respective powers.
However, if there was even a single possibility that Leon’s lightning would pierce his heart, Leon’s lightning was able to manifest that possibility as the only truth through Gungnir.
Of the dozens of demons, three hearts were pierced by Leon’s lightning and lost consciousness.
Leon, using the lightning that pierced his heart, threw their spirit bodies at Berseria and shouted.
“Arrogance is the perception of those who have misunderstood their own worth. It’s not worth giving you control over the world!”
When Leon bounced off his body like lightning and ran away, Livid responded to Leon like that.
[In that case, you are also arrogant. do you know The fact that your consciousness itself is made up of my power?]
At that moment, the power of Livid, the Demon God of Nightmare, was manifested.
Leon defined the power of nightmares this way:
It is the ability to amplify negative memories and experiences such as sadness and pain by distorting the electrical signals of nerve cells that make up human memories and experiences.
But it wasn’t.
The realm controlled by the Nightmare Demon was ‘consciousness’ itself.
All selves in which living things could perceive themselves as themselves began as nightmares.
As if the first emotion of a fetus expelled from its mother’s womb is displeasure and dissatisfaction with the world.
The nightmare is to acquire a self that can recognize itself by affirming all self and denying everything other than oneself.
[With the power of nightmares, I will deprive you of your ego.]
In an instant, Leon’s consciousness pinged and cut off.