Chương 61: Chapter 26 Part 3

Ryu walked over to the window, the heavy travel pack shifting on his back. He unlatched the brass lock and pulled the heavy glass panes open. The mechanical owl clicked mechanically, its glowing blue gemstone eyes whirring as it extended a brass talon. Clutched in its grip was a tightly rolled, pristine parchment newspaper. Ryu reached into his pocket, retrieved a silver Imperial coin, and placed it into the slot on the owl's back.

The construct released the paper, clicked twice in acknowledgment, and launched itself back into the sky, disappearing toward the next dormitory. Ryu stood alone by the open window. The morning sun was just beginning to crest the horizon, casting a warm, golden glow over the immaculate, sprawling grounds of the Zenith Academy. It was a beautiful morning. It made him sick to his stomach. His palms were sweating. He looked down at the rolled parchment in his hands.

He could feel his heart hammering against his ribs, a cold knot of dread twisting in his gut. He was about to read the final, mundane news of a world that was entirely oblivious to its own impending execution. He mentally braced himself, fortifying his mind against the horror. With a quick, sharp motion, Ryu unrolled the newspaper. He didn't read the text immediately.

He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, took a deep breath, and then forced his ash-grey eyes open to scan the massive, bold black ink dominating the front page. He expected the words to confirm the Cult's movements. He expected the confirmation of doom. Instead, he read the following words: MIRACLE IN ZARETH! KING ALDOUS FULLY RECOVERED! Ryu stopped breathing. His eyes locked onto the massive, bolded font. He read the words again. And then a third time. His brain simply refused to process the syntax.

It was like looking at a math equation where two plus two equaled an apple. It fundamentally defied the laws of his reality. In a shocking turn of events, the smaller text beneath the headline read, the ailing monarch of the Zareth Kingdom has made a miraculous, overnight recovery. Royal physicians confirm the King is in perfect health and has formally resumed his duties on the throne. Rumors of a dark curse have been thoroughly dispelled.

"What?" Ryu whispered, his voice cracking, entirely devoid of his usual veteran stoicism.

"That... that's impossible. He was supposed to be completely bedridden. He was supposed to be assassinated in his bed while the dragon burned the city." A sickening wave of vertigo washed over him. He staggered backward, his knees going weak, his calves hitting the solid edge of his bed. He frantically checked the date printed at the top of the parchment. It was correct. Today's date.

His eyes wildly scanned down the page, his heart rate skyrocketing into a frantic, panicked rhythm as the headlines became increasingly, impossibly absurd. TRAITOR TO THE CROWN: DUKE MORVANT EXECUTED! Following a swift, brutal raid by the Royal Vanguard on the Blackwater Docks, the Iron-Tooth Syndicate has been completely eradicated. Duke Valerius Morvant was found guilty of high treason and harboring dangerous religious extremists. He was hanged at dawn.

"No, no, no," Ryu stammered aloud, his hands shaking so violently he nearly tore the thick parchment in half.

"Morvant was supposed to lead the civil war! He was the main financial backer for the Cult in the upper rings!" If Morvant was dead, the egg was never smuggled. If the syndicate was eradicated, the Cult's vanguard force was gone. Ryu flipped the heavy page, his breath coming in short, ragged gasps. He frantically, desperately searched the dense columns of text for any mention of the dragon. The dragon had to have attacked. You couldn't just stop an Ancient Gold Dragon.

It was a primordial force of nature, a fixed, unyielding point in continental history! His eyes darted across trade reports, academy tournament brackets, and noble gossip, until they finally snagged on a small, almost casually written column tucked near the back of the political section. DRAGON SIGHTING PACIFIED BY UNNAMED HERO. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it Reports from the Silverleaf Plains confirm an Ancient Gold Dragon briefly threatened the capital.

However, sources within the Royal Guard state that a 'special guest' of the Crown engaged the beast, resolving the conflict without a single civilian casualty. The dragon has since returned to the peaks peacefully, and the Crown Prince promises a golden age of stability. Pacified. Without a single civilian casualty. The newspaper slipped from Ryu's trembling, numb fingers. It hit the polished hardwood floor with a soft, dismissive thud, fluttering open to display the impossible headlines to the empty room.

Ryu stared blankly at the stone wall of his dormitory. His brain completely and utterly short-circuited. The highly analytical, compartmentalized mind of the Sword Saint simply ceased to function. The original timeline hadn't just been altered. It hadn't just shifted slightly to the left due to a minor butterfly effect. It had been completely, utterly, and casually derailed.

The apocalyptic tragedy that had defined his entire past life, the horrific, bloody event that had caused the deaths of millions, eventually forged the United Nation Coalition, and started a ten-year war of attrition against demons, had been resolved off-screen. In a single weekend.

"Am I crazy?" Ryu breathed, gripping the roots of his hair in a sudden, violent spike of sheer, mounting panic.

"Is my memory flawed? Am I going insane? Did I cross into a parallel dimension?!" He lunged for his mahogany desk, tearing open the heavy drawers. He hauled out his leather-bound journals, furiously flipping through the meticulously drawn, encrypted maps and timelines. He stared at his own handwriting, validating his own sanity. Every single strategy he had crafted for the last ninety days. Every desperate warning he had memorized.

Every meticulous, grueling plan he had forged to save the world relied entirely on the Zareth Kingdom falling. He had needed that massive, continent-spanning chaos to mask his own movements. He had needed the total destruction of the Royal Guard to scavenge those specific, world-class artifacts from the ruins to survive the coming years. Now, the Kingdom was perfectly unified. The King was radiantly healthy. And the Blood God Cult had been violently, surgically purged from the capital.

His future knowledge regarding the inciting incident of the apocalypse was completely, devastatingly worthless.

Ryu Jin-woo snatched a red-inked quill from his brass inkwell. His hand hovered violently over the open pages of his heavy leather journal, the sharp metal nib trembling just millimeters above the meticulously drawn timeline of the apocalypse. His initial, traumatized instinct was to drive the quill into the parchment and aggressively, violently cross out the entire first twenty pages of his life's work in a fit of sheer, unadulterated despair. He wanted to destroy the script that had just betrayed him.

His ash-grey eyes darted across the encrypted notes. He frantically retraced every single breath he had taken over the last ninety days. Did I cause this? he thought, his mind racing a hundred miles an hour. A butterfly effect. Did I accidentally change the board? He interrogated his own memory with the ruthlessness of a military tribunal. Had he spoken in his sleep? Had he sent a letter? Had an Imperial spy managed to breach his dormitory, crack his future-tech military cipher, and somehow warn the Zareth Kingdom?

No. It was physically impossible. He had been entirely locked inside this dormitory in a completely different empire for three months. He hadn't spoken a word to anyone outside of mundane academy pleasantries. He hadn't spent a single copper coin on couriers. He was a ghost. Which meant this incomprehensible derailment of fate was not a butterfly effect caused by his regression. It was an entirely external variable. Ryu slowly lowered the red quill, his hand still shaking.

He looked back down at the Continental Tribune lying on the floor. A 'special guest' of the Crown engaged the mythical beast, the article had read. Ryu cross-referenced that sentence with his encyclopedic knowledge of the continent's elite fighters. Who could possibly pacify an enraged Ancient Gold Dragon? The Sword Saint of this era was currently stationed hundreds of miles away at the eastern border, fending off barbarian raids.

The Archmages of the Ivory Tower possessed the raw firepower, but they lacked the physical mitigation; engaging a dragon would have resulted in massive, unavoidable civilian casualties, which the paper explicitly denied. The High Paladins lacked the aerial mobility. It wasn't anyone Ryu knew from his past life. It was an entity that simply had not existed in the original timeline.

"An Anomaly," Ryu whispered, the word tasting strange and heavy on his tongue. Someone, or something, possessed the unfathomable power to casually dismantle a fixed historical catastrophe and subdue a terrifying legendary entity without anyone even knowing their name. For a terrifying, breathless moment, Ryu felt a massive spike of pure terror. As a Regressor, his only true weapon was his omniscience. He knew when the dungeons would break. He knew where the traitors were hiding.

But this Anomaly had just violently shattered his crystal ball. He was flying blind. He squeezed his eyes shut, his chest heaving, preparing for the familiar, crushing weight of the apocalypse to press him back down into the dirt. But as the seconds ticked by, the crushing weight didn't come. The room was perfectly quiet. The morning sun continued to stream warmly through the tall glass windows, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air. Ryu opened his eyes and looked at the newspaper again.

His gaze locked onto a single, specific phrase in the column. Without a single civilian casualty. The words echoed in his mind. He read them again, the syntax finally penetrating the thick, impenetrable armor of his veteran paranoia. Without a single civilian casualty. Suddenly, the deafening, auditory hallucination of screams that had haunted Ryu's waking moments for the last three months completely stopped. The phantom stench of burning flesh evaporated from his nostrils.

He looked at the red circle drawn on his map. Two million people were waking up in Elyndria right now. The bakers were opening their shops. The children were walking the streets. The Royal family, the nobility, the civilians, the men and women who were supposed to be torn to pieces by The Golden Dragon, were simply drinking their morning coffee, completely unharmed. They didn't die.