Chương 109: The Mystery of the World

This word had always been associated in Lloyd's mind with oblivion, with the loss of memory, or with complete disappearance. Well, in some ways, he'd actually been right. Oblivion was a colossal world that devoured other universes. It earned that name because it literally erased the very individuality of any world it absorbed, stripping it of identity and turning it into a faceless part of its own mass.

It didn't expand constantly, but acted cyclically: roughly once every millennium, it swallowed one of the worlds, permanently annexing its territory and merging everything into a single whole. It was such an immense space that its own inhabitants hadn't even mapped half of it, and entire regions remained blank spots even on the most detailed maps Lloyd had ever come across. In this way, Oblivion had once fully absorbed a great many worlds, among them the worlds of elves and dwarves.

During its most recent cycle, though, for some unknown reason, it had only partially consumed the world of humans, leaving Earth torn right along the border with this monstrous, all-consuming existence, like a bite that had never quite been swallowed. Lloyd was still sitting there, his back pressed against the cold rock at the edge of the cliff, feeling the night chill gradually creeping in through the thin fabric of his hoodie, raising faint goosebumps across his skin.

The journal lay open on his knees, its pages trembling faintly with the occasional gust of wind rising up from the chasm below, and the stub of pencil hovered motionless over the very first page — the one he'd filled on his very first, most disoriented day in this world, when the letters had come out in uneven, shaky lines.

The dusk kept thickening around him, painting the forest behind him in an almost solid, impenetrable black, and from the chasm at his back drifted a cool, damp dampness, mingling with the nearly faded smell of rot still clinging to his clothes from the earlier fight — a smell growing weaker by the minute, dissolving into the clean, fresh air of the heights.

"Incredible — every single person on Earth knows about this, and I've only been living in this new world for a year, but it's honestly astonishing that I didn't know it until now." He lifted his eyes from the journal for a moment, gazing off toward the darkness thickening over the forest, to where individual trees could barely be made out anymore — just a solid, unified mass of shadow, occasionally lit by faint, distant flickers of unknown origin.

Struck, almost against his will, by how vast, how foreign, how still largely unknown this world was to him — the very world he now had to keep living in — he felt a faint, almost imperceptible chill settle somewhere beneath his ribs, not so much from the evening cold as from the sudden awareness of just how small his own place was within this vast, indifferent expanse. Suddenly a thought slipped into his mind, and he summoned the System.

A fairly familiar window appeared before him, glowing with a soft purple light that pushed back the gathering darkness in a small, almost homely circle. And at the top of the window sat a small icon shaped like an X, pulsing faintly, as if breathing with a life of its own. Lloyd scratched his chin, studying that painfully familiar icon so intently, as though hoping, for once, to notice something new in it.

"Who even are you, X? Are you really behind all of this? Or are you just a pawn in someone else's hands. Well, my guesses won't get me anywhere anyway." Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. He lowered his gaze a little, to where his full stat sheet was laid out, glowing steadily with that same cool light amid the gathering dusk, casting pale, lavender-tinted reflections across his face and knees. True Name: Soul Boy. Level: 1. Race: Human. Class: Support.

Skills: [Soul Collector], [Hand of the Forgotten King]. Relics: [Fire Bomb], [Player's License], [Time Chronometer]. Guide: [Mippo]. Lloyd looked over the Relics section, his gaze lingering on the three short names lined up neatly, one beneath the other.

"So, I've already got three Relics. Although..." He focused on one of the relics, and a new window opened in front of him, unfurling in the air with a faint, barely audible crackle, like someone unseen striking a match right next to his ear. Relic: Time Chronometer. Type: White. Level: I. Description: This magical clock unerringly adjusts to any distorted time within the Kingdom of Lethe, no matter where you find yourself. But this time is cursed.

Its relentless count doesn't lead to a new day — it leads straight to your Oblivion. Echo: — Lloyd studied the relic's type more closely, his brows drawing together slightly as he stared at the short word on the screen, as though trying to read something more into it than what was actually written there.

"White. Well, from what I understand, that means relics with no set type. This one, that one — nothing about either really stands out. That's probably why Mippo never bothered explaining this type to me."

He glanced down at his chronometer, which had rematerialized in his free hand out of those familiar white sparks, glinting dully in the near-total darkness that had settled over the forest, its hands continuing their steady, relentless march, as if time here flowed far more mercilessly than anywhere else he'd ever been.

"Still, one of these things saves my sanity every single day." He closed his eyes for a moment, thinking back to those first, hardest days in this world, when time had seemed to flow all wrong — stretching out into infinity, filling every minute with a thick, syrupy dread, then suddenly compressing into short, jagged bursts, leaving behind nothing but hazy, fragmented memories, scraps of images, faces, and sounds he had never quite managed to piece back together.

Suddenly Lloyd sensed something — a barely perceptible shift in the air around him, a faint vibration rolling in from somewhere deep in the forest behind him — and he immediately closed all the windows, recalling his relics, dissolving them back into their familiar sparks, which flared for an instant and then went out.

"Guess it's time to head out." He rose to his feet, brushing the grass and dirt from his knees, feeling the stiff, faintly unpleasant prickle of muscles gone numb from sitting too long, and turned toward the source of that barely noticeable tremor in the air.

A floating island was slowly drifting toward him — an enormous chunk of stone and soil torn free from the earth, its edges dotted with sparse, twisted trees whose roots clung to the very rim of the drifting platform, as if terrified of falling into the darkening void below.

Its underside vanished into billowing clouds of thick fog, glowing faintly from within with pulsing shades of blue and violet, and the island itself drifted slowly but inexorably across the darkening sky toward the cliff's edge, slicing through the air with a low, barely audible hum that resonated as a dull vibration somewhere deep in Lloyd's chest, almost matching the frantic pounding of his own heart.

He watched the massive shape draw closer, feeling a strange mix of exhaustion and wary curiosity stir in his chest — a feeling he still hadn't quite gotten used to, even after this one single year, so thoroughly packed with events.